Sola Scriptura?

 Martin Luther, in response to corruption in the Holy Roman Catholic Church in his time, coined his guiding principle of sola scriptura—only scripture—and not tradition as a means of discerning God’s will and truth. However, as NT Wright and others have pointed out, not even scripture shows we should use scripture as the sole guiding influence. God’s authority is greater than scriptural authority. “All authority under heaven and earth has been given to…” scripture? No, Christ. Other examples…

• God violates His own later handed-down law by punishing a murderer—Cain—not with an execution but banishment.
• The prophet Micaiah in 1 Kings 22 shows that prophets were deceived by relying only on scripture to determine if the king should attack a city.
• In the wilderness, Christ could have relied on Satan’s quoting of scripture as an authoritative plan of action, but Christ knew greater principles that countermanded those scriptural promises.
• Many people like to quote scripture that shows only a mustard seed of faith is needed to accomplish healing and therefore, when healing is absent, the fault lies with our faith…and yet the Author of our faith, Christ, prayed for a different outcome in the Garden of Gethsemane and the outcome didn’t change. Was this a case of a son praying for bread and a cruel father giving him a stone to eat? (Matthew 7.9)

In the age of literacy, for the last hundred years, I believe we’ve relied more on our ears than our spiritual ears to discern the will of God. We’ve stopped being living sacrifices and transformed from our worldly reliance on our own skills in order to know the will of God (Romans 12.1-3).