"Just What the Bible Says"

The discerning reader will have inferred from the title that this essay is the second in a series. If you’d like to read Part I, go here:

In the summer of 2005, I was 28 years old, married, and the father of two young children, with a third on the way. I was in graduate school at The Ohio State University, and a faithful member of a small, nondenominational Protestant church. I occasionally taught classes at the church and was beginning to be thought of as one of the leaders of the younger adults who were part of the community. It was therefore unsurprising when several people asked me if I would be open to serving the church as a deacon (an elected office and part of the congregation’s leadership team).

I was honored by this suggestion and would have been pleased to be nominated to serve. I was aware, however, that deacons in our church were expected to affirm without qualification the entirety of our church’s doctrinal statement. It was a substantial document covering every major topic in systematic theology. To the best of my recollection, there was nothing in the document with which I was sure I disagreed, but there was kind of a lot that I couldn’t straightforwardly affirm: I simply hadn’t thought enough about some of the topics to be comfortable endorsing—or giving the impression that I endorsed—everything the church officially professed. I decided to decline the nomination to be a candidate for the deacon board.

As I reflected on this situation, it struck me as rather odd. I had earned my masters degree at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, and while my principal focus had been philosophy, I’d taken the required sequence of four courses in systematic theology along the way. So, I knew a thing or two about the various topics and the different schools of thought associated with each. I was aware that there were plenty of intelligent, faithful Christians who had thought quite a lot about the topics spelled out in my church’s doctrinal statement and had come to different conclusions. It began to bother me that there were Christians I admired—some of my own mentors, even—who would not be eligible to serve as deacons at my church. Indeed, given their explicit and conscious dissent from some aspects of the doctrinal statement, they couldn’t even have been voting members of the congregation.

Years earlier, I had come across a well-known statement about how Christians should think about differences of theological opinion, and I’d taken it to heart: In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity. It’s a nice sentiment. Indeed, I think it’s basically correct. In the wake of the deacon board thing, however, it began to strike me as problematic. What are “the essentials”? What am I, as a Christian, obliged to believe, and where do I have liberty to come to my own conclusions about matters of faith?

Around that same time—2005 or so, if memory serves—I’d been asked to lead a series on Christian apologetics for the kids in the youth group. In the materials I’d prepared for them, I mentioned that the doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture (i.e., the assertion that the Bible is entirely free of errors) is a matter of “intramural” debate among Christians. My point was that if you’re talking to someone who doesn’t even believe in God, it’s almost certainly futile to get into discussions about whether or not the Bible contains errors. People who convert to Christianity from atheism, even if they do eventually come to affirm the inerrancy of Scripture, never start there. Typically, they first become persuaded that God exists, then they begin to see Jesus as a uniquely important religious figure, then they accept the message of the Gospel, and then, sometime later, they embrace the idea that the Bible is without error. And, of course, some people never take that final step. Nonetheless, they’re still Christians. This struck me as an utterly obvious and uncontroversial point. It still does. But it earned a harsh rebuke from some leaders in the church, for whom the inerrancy of Scripture absolutely is an essential doctrine of the faith.1

On another occasion, it came to light that I believed (as I still believe!) that the Earth is several billion years old. It is not merely a few thousand years old, as a particular reading of the book of Genesis implies. One of the deacons of our church invited me out for a beer because he “wanted to hear more about this.” I thought he was interested in a friendly conversation—after all, I was keenly aware that intelligent, faithful Christians disagreed with each other about the age of the Earth, and I naively assumed that my friend was genuinely curious to learn more. It was a rather unpleasant surprise when it turned out that the real reason he’d invited me to Buffalo Wild Wings was to rebuke me of my heresy and get me to repent. Once again, it turned out, I had rejected an essential doctrine of the faith. The deacon—whom I still consider a friend, by the way—bought the beers, at least, so that was nice. Some chicken wings, too.

You see where this is going. Examples could be multiplied, but I suspect the point has been made. If there really are essential doctrines of the faith—particular claims that, as a Christian, I am bound to accept—what are they? And who has the authority to decide?

Some people respond to these questions by declaring that doctrine simply doesn’t matter, that, in effect, there is nothing a Christian is obliged to believe: true Christianity is simply a matter of loving people and, presumably, taking some kind of pro-Jesus stance. For a short time, I was very attracted to this approach myself, but it pretty quickly became apparent that it’s a dead end. Even setting aside various biblical exhortations concerning truth and sound doctrine, and even if we ignore the fact that Christians since the very beginning have found it important to articulate the content of the faith, it’s simply not possible to refrain from taking a stand on some belief or other. For example, what do we mean when we say that we are required to love one another? Does it mean to affirm every choice another person makes? To do what we can to ensure that everyone gets what he or she wants? To will that which is genuinely good for others, whether they want it or not, or whether they agree that it is good? If someone has an understanding of love fundamentally different from ours, can that person function as a full-fledged member of our community? And so on. We will inevitably draw some kind of line somewhere. We must. It’s just a matter of where, and why.

Eventually, I became convinced that the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura (the idea that the Bible alone is our authority in all matters of faith and practice), which I had taken to be an obvious and fundamental Christian commitment, was itself the source of the problem. Or more precisely: I became persuaded that if sola scriptura is true, then there simply is no way to know what I am required to believe as a Christian. There is no way to know which doctrines count as “essentials” and which count as “non-essentials,” no way to determine where our mandate is unity and where our mandate is liberty.

Now, I realize that my above examples of biblical inerrancy and the age of the earth might strike some readers as rather quirky examples of putatively “essential” Christian beliefs. So consider a topic where the theological stakes are as high as they possibly can be: the divinity of Christ. I once attended a debate on this topic between an Evangelical Christian and a Jehovah’s Witness. Both of them really knew their stuff, and both of them seemed to be committed to fidelity to the Bible. They disagreed, however, on the fundamental question of Christology. The Evangelical argued, along with the mainstream Christian tradition, that Scripture teaches that Jesus Christ is the Incarnate Word, the second person of the divine Trinity, eternal and uncreated. The Jehovah’s Witness argued, from Scripture, that Jesus is uniquely great among God’s creatures, but that he is nonetheless one of those creatures: the “Son of God,” yes, but not God. I don’t remember all the details of the arguments each made, but while my own faith wasn’t badly shaken by the experience, it would be disingenuous to say that I thought the Evangelical clearly won the debate that night. In its wake, I would have been hard-pressed to insist that every intelligent and open-minded reader of the Bible must inevitably come to the conclusion that it teaches the divinity of Jesus Christ. Today, having acquired a somewhat more sophisticated understanding of the issues, I am extremely confident that the orthodox position is also the teaching of Scripture, but even now I would be reluctant to say that every fair-minded reader of the text will inevitably infer from its pages that Christ is divine. And yet, surely the divinity of Christ counts as an “essential” doctrine of the faith, if anything does.

One more anecdote: Several years after completing my PhD, I was living in Montgomery, Alabama. I went out to lunch one day with a Protestant pastor whom I’d started to get to know through our kids’ shared extracurricular activities.

During our conversation, I asked the pastor, “So, how would you characterize your theology? Are you a Calvinist, or an Arminian, or…?” He replied, “Man… I’m not into labels. I’m not a this or a that. I’m just preaching what the Bible says.” Now, I was not interested in getting into a theological disputation over lunch with this guy. I just nodded politely and the conversation moved along. Internally, however, I was vexed. To be totally candid, I actually already had a pretty decent idea what theological camp my friend belonged to. I was just curious how he would characterize it. But… “I’m just preaching what the Bible says”? At this point in my life, I’d moved around a bit, and my wife and I had been members of numerous churches whose pastors also saw themselves as just preaching what the Bible says. And yet I knew that this fellow in Alabama disagreed in important ways with my pastor back in Ohio, who disagreed in important ways with my pastor in Illinois, who disagreed in important ways with all three of our different pastors in California, each of whom, by the way, disagreed in important ways with the other two. None of them, I suspect, could have served on the staff of most of the other churches we’d been part of. Their disagreements were not trivial! Whether each of them would have been comfortable saying that these particular disagreements were about “essential” matters or not, I cannot say, but the disagreements were serious enough that they could not be in full communion with each other. They were members of different denominations—or of different nondenominational churches—for a reason. Each one was committed to the doctrine of sola scriputra. Each one saw himself as just preaching what the Bible says. And each one saw most of the others as being sufficiently wrong about what the Bible says that they couldn’t function together as one church.

There’s some irony here, insofar as one of the things that the Bible really is quite clear on is the importance of unity within the Church. Relevant passages include Jesus’ high priestly prayer in John 17 and numerous statements from the Apostle Paul: 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 16, Titus 3, and perhaps most straightforwardly, 1 Corinthians 1:

Now I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same purpose. For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters. What I mean is that each of you says, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Apollos,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Christ.” Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

To be clear, St. Paul was here writing to Christians who lived in a predenominational age. He was not thinking in terms of Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians when he spoke of divisions within the Church. And furthermore, his admonition here is applicable to any Christian communion, the Roman Catholic Church included. By no means am I implying that Catholics are free of the kinds of divisions Paul laments in this passage.

What I am saying is that the divine intention for the Christian Church was for it to be unified. And if this is what God intended, then God must have provided some mechanism whereby which such unity could be maintained. The authentic Church must be constituted in such a way that it is meaningfully and undeniably one Church. I’ll say more about a distinctively Catholic take on unity in part V of this series, and I’ll mention in passing that I wrote about it indirectly a few months back, shortly after the election of Pope Leo, whose episcopal motto is “In the One, We Are One.” (You know: if you just can’t wait for part V, I mean.)

In illo Uno unum

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May 18, 2025

Not long ago, I found myself at Mass with a person whom I don’t really like.

At the moment, however, my focus is on the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. To summarize the main points of this essay, one problem with this doctrine, and the first one to emerge in my own thinking, is that it cannot be used to establish the boundaries of orthodoxy; it cannot tell us which doctrines of the faith are essential and which are not. Or more precisely, it cannot tell us what we are required to believe as Christians. To affirm sola scriptura is to affirm that the Bible alone is our authority in matters of faith, but Christians who embrace sola scriptura cannot agree among themselves about what it is that the Bible actually teaches.

A second, closely related, problem is that this disagreement leads to disunity within Christianity. Adherents of sola scriptura themselves acknowledge that the sundry theological topics on which they disagree really are quite important.2 This is why there are so many Protestant denominations. If sola scriptura was an adequate foundation for Christian unity, we wouldn’t have more than one kind of Protestant church; faithful Christians would disagree with each other only about non-essential matters of the faith, and therefore schism would never be justified. Whatever one may wish to say on behalf of the Protestant Reformation, unity of this sort is clearly not its legacy. Schismatism seems to be baked into the DNA of Protestantism. It is the inevitable consequence of embracing the doctrine of sola scriptura.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but coming to appreciate the seriousness of these twin problems of disagreement and disunity would prove to be my first real step toward Catholicism. As noted above, to say this is not to deny the existence of the many unfortunate divisions that exist within the Roman Catholic communion. It is to say, however, that there are sources of unity that go deeper than mere sameness of belief, and I eventually became persuaded that those sources of unity were what God intended for us all along. I’ll say more about them later.

Next time: More wrestling with sola Scriptura and some thoughts about sex

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