What do you think sola scriptura actually means?

That question is more revealing than it first appears. For many Christians today, sola scriptura is taken to mean that Scripture is the only authority for Christian faith and practice, and that tradition has little or no role. It sounds clean. It feels empowering. It places the Bible directly in the hands of the individual believer.

But that understanding, while common, is not what the Reformers meant.

There is a distinction that is often missed, and it changes everything. The view many people assume today is better described as nuda scriptura, meaning “Scripture alone with no role for tradition.” This position rejects all external authorities such as creeds, councils, or historical teaching. It is, in a sense, Scripture stripped bare of the community that preserved, interpreted, and transmitted it.

The difficulty is that nuda scriptura is self-defeating. It is itself a tradition that is not found explicitly in Scripture. The moment one says, “I follow only the Bible,” one has already adopted an interpretive framework that stands outside the text. Even the identification of what counts as Scripture, the canon, comes to us through the life of the church as tradition.

Here is where our Catholic and Orthodox brothers often press the point, and it is a fair one. The canon of Scripture was recognized through the church’s tradition. The creeds that define orthodoxy, such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, emerged from that same tradition. The early church lived and worshiped long before the New Testament was fully compiled. From their perspective, Scripture and Tradition are inseparable, because Scripture is received within Tradition.

If that is true, then what did the Reformers mean when they insisted on sola scriptura?

The answer is more nuanced than most modern debates allow.

The Reformers affirmed that Scripture is the only infallible authority. Infallible here means incapable of error in all that it teaches regarding faith and doctrine. That is a strong claim, and it remains a defining feature of Protestant theology. However, they did not reject tradition. They recognized that the church’s teaching, its creeds, its councils, and its theologians possess what we might call ministerial authority. That is, a real but subordinate authority that serves Scripture rather than rivals it.

In this sense, the Reformers rejected nuda scriptura but lived in practice much closer to what is often called prima scriptura. This term means that Scripture is primary, the highest authority, but not the only authority. Tradition still speaks, still guides, still shapes understanding, though always under the judgment of Scripture.

In one sentence, the Reformers’ position might be expressed this way. Scripture is the only infallible authority, but the church’s tradition is a necessary, Spirit-guided, subordinate authority.

“Therefore stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.” – 2 Thessalonians 2:15

That passage has often been at the center of these discussions, not because it resolves the debate, but because it reminds us that the earliest Christians did not operate with a sharp divide between written and received teaching.

Consider how Protestants actually live this out. Nearly every major Protestant confession affirms the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. Luther wrote catechisms. Calvin wrote the Institutes. The Westminster Confession continues to guide Reformed churches. Even the famous five solas are themselves a tradition, a summary handed down and taught. So much for the idea that Protestants have no tradition.

What they have instead is a hierarchy of authority. Scripture stands alone as infallible. Tradition stands beneath it as helpful, necessary, and yet reformable. This is not a rejection of tradition. It is a reordering of it.

“The Spirit of truth… will guide you into all the truth.” – John 16:13

The Reformers believed that promise did not end with the apostles. They believed the Holy Spirit continues to guide the church across generations. Not perfectly. Not without error. But genuinely. If that is the case, then the modern misuse of sola scriptura becomes easier to understand.

We live in an age that distrusts institutions. The idea of “just me and my Bible” feels liberating. It seems to remove the risk of corruption or error that has marked parts of church history. And to be fair, that instinct is not entirely wrong. The Reformers themselves protested real abuses. Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses were not written in a vacuum. They were a response to practices that had drifted away from what he believed Scripture taught.

Yet there is a danger here.

When interpretation becomes purely individual, the result is fragmentation. The existence of countless competing interpretations is not a sign that everyone is being led by the Spirit in isolation. It may instead reveal how easily we read ourselves into the text. Cognitive biases shape how we interpret information, often without our awareness, leading us to favor conclusions that align with what we already believe.

History gives us sobering examples of where this path can lead. Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-day Saints, and Charles Taze Russell, founder of what would become the Jehovah’s Witnesses, both claimed to recover true Christianity through personal interpretation of Scripture apart from the historic consensus of the church. Whatever one makes of their sincerity, the result was not renewal within the shared faith once delivered to the saints, but the emergence of entirely new theological systems that departed in significant ways from historic Christian orthodoxy. These movements did not arise in a vacuum. They illustrate how easily private interpretation, when detached from the corrective wisdom of the broader church, can move from reform into reinvention.

Private interpretation, untethered from the wisdom of the church across time, can become less about submission to truth and more about confirmation of self. This is why the Reformers did not abandon tradition. They knew that fallible authorities are still necessary. Teachers, creeds, and councils serve as guardrails. They do not replace Scripture, but they help us read it faithfully.

And here is where something surprising happens.

In practice, Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox approaches begin to look closer than many would like to admit. All three affirm that Scripture is authoritative. All three rely on tradition to interpret it. All three recognize that the church plays a role in preserving and transmitting truth. The differences are real, and they matter, and I don’t want to downplay them. They concern the nature and authority of that tradition, whether it can be considered infallible in certain forms, and how it is to be interpreted.

But the gap is not as wide as our rhetoric often suggests. The real question, then, is not whether tradition exists. It does. The question is how we discern which traditions are faithful.

This is where the Reformers drew their line. Not all traditions are equal. Some align with Scripture. Others drift. The task of the church is ongoing discernment, a continual returning to the text, not in isolation, but in conversation with the saints who came before us.

Perhaps the deeper issue is not sola scriptura at all.

Perhaps it is whether we are willing to do the hard work of understanding the faith as it has been handed down. Not reducing it to slogans. Not collapsing it into individual preference. But entering into the long, sometimes difficult conversation that stretches across centuries.

Because the moment we do, we may discover that what divides us is often less about Scripture itself and more about how we have chosen to stand in relation to those who came before us.

And that is a far more humbling place to begin.

“You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.”  – John 5:39–40 NRSV

Excerpt

What if sola scriptura never meant Scripture alone in isolation, but Scripture as the only infallible authority within a living, Spirit-guided tradition? The Reformers did not reject tradition. They reordered it, reminding us that faithful interpretation requires both humility and the wisdom of the church across time.

Make It So Say We All