I’m not bringing any presuppositions to the text. I’m just reading it plainly, the way any first-century Jewish fisherman would.
- Anonymous, twenty-first century
As an atheist from the womb who came to Christ in adulthood, I find that I retain something of the outsider’s perspective in some matters. Originally, many of my interests were in apologetics. Partly, I suspect, because they are what this studious interloper found on his way into the church: the best answers to the hard questions. What I’ve found, though, is that there’s also apologetic value in internal consistency. When your neighbor’s house is orderly, you might wonder how it stays so.
And so as a relatively new convert, I find myself fascinated with the foundational disputes of the Christian faith. In this essay I will explore an aspect of Sola Scriptura. Men and women much better learned than I, and with a far greater life of grace to draw wisdom from, are more qualified to discuss and debate the doctrine as such. As a lay theologian, I intend to examine a humbler visage: the aesthetic of Sola Scriptura, and a curious milieu it inhabits.
The inheritance
The milieu I have in mind is the culture of American evangelical Protestantism, specifically the more intimate settings: small groups, group chats, what brothers and sisters say to each other away from the rigor of a pulpit or a good podcast. In these moments, we faithful carry an inheritance we call Sola Scriptura.
The inheritance is not what its name suggests. What we might call the folk Sola Scriptura holds three positions stronger than the careful Reformation formulation: that Scripture is perspicuous beyond what is necessary for salvation, that Scripture is the only authority rather than the only infallible one, and that the Christian who holds these positions is operating from Scripture alone rather than from a tradition-shaped reading of it.
These three positions reinforce each other, and undermine Sola Scriptura by moving authority into the self. This produces Christians who believe their positions are biblically derived when they need only be biblically defensible, and who believe their tradition’s reading of Scripture is the whole of Scripture itself.
The aesthetic persists because the desire it answers is understandable: certainty on contested matters Scripture itself treats as open. What is understandable is not therefore right. Recovering the careful tradition means recovering the discipline of walking by faith where Scripture invites faith, and reserving certainty for the gospel that warrants it.
Aesthetic
The word aesthetic has narrowed in contemporary English to mean something like “style” or “taste,” a veneer. The philosophical sense, introduced by Baumgarten in Aesthetica (1750) and consolidated in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), is older and deeper. It recovers the Greek aisthētikos (αἰσθητικός), meaning of or pertaining to sense perception, from aisthanesthai, to perceive both by the senses and by the mind. When I use the word aesthetic in this essay, I mean it in that philosophical sense: the domain of what is perceived, the form in which something is encountered. Form, in this sense, is not separable from substance. The same doctrine functions differently in different minds.
This is why an aesthetic can detach from the substance it once expressed and begin to do different work. The Westminster formulation of Sola Scriptura was forged in particular controversies, against particular opponents, with particular qualifications attached. When that formulation is inherited stripped of its context, the words remain but the work they do changes. The aesthetic remains; the substance has thinned.
One distinction emerges. The difference between the biblical and the biblically defensible. A position is biblical when Scripture has taught it. A position is biblically defensible when a reader can defend it from Scripture against objection. The two are easy to confuse, especially from the inside. The folk Sola Scriptura lives in the confusion. Eventually, what one can defend from Scripture, one comes to believe Scripture has taught. This is the process by which a tradition’s reading of Scripture is mistaken for Scripture itself.
Westminster
In 1643, in the midst of the English Civil War, Parliament convened an assembly at Westminster Abbey. Some hundred and twenty men, mostly English Puritans with a smaller delegation of Scottish commissioners, gathered to advise Parliament on the reform of the Church of England. They convened for nearly six years. The documents they produced, chief among them the Westminster Confession of Faith, became the doctrinal standard for the Reformed Presbyterian tradition and a foundation for anglophone Protestantism generally.
They met in a contested moment. The Reformed tradition at that time had been fighting on multiple fronts for over a century. Against the Catholic Church at Trent, the Reformers had insisted that Scripture, not the Magisterium, is the supreme rule of faith. Against the Spiritualists and the radical reformers who appealed to private revelation, they had insisted that this rule is the written Word, not the inner voice. Against Anglican and Laudian appeals to the authority of bishops and tradition, the Reformed had refined the claim further. Each opponent shaped a different edge of the doctrine. The careful formulation is the sum of those edges.
The structure of the Westminster doctrine mirrors the structure of its opposition. Where Rome claimed an authoritative interpreting body, Westminster placed Scripture itself as the supreme judge. Where the Spiritualists claimed access through inner illumination, Westminster bounded illumination to the ordinary means. Where Laud claimed the weight of episcopal tradition, Westminster acknowledged tradition’s real but subordinate role. Each qualification answers a particular pressure.
It would be a mistake, though, to reduce the Westminster effort to mere opposition. The divines believed they were doing foundational work, striving to define what they took to be in need of definition. Consider the Confession’s first chapter, seventh paragraph:
All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all; yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation, are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.
- Westminster Confession of Faith, 1.7
Notice what the Confession does not say. It does not say Scripture is uniformly clear. It does not say a reader needs no help. It says the things necessary for salvation are clear enough that an ordinary believer, using ordinary means, can come to understand them. The perspicuity is bounded by purpose, bounded by means, and bounded by acknowledgment.
What the Westminster divines wrote with care, steeped in historical context and controversy, is inherited by contemporary Protestants as aesthetic without substance. The important qualifications now read like fine print, and the doctrine does more work than it was intended to do. In small groups and passing discussions, Sola Scriptura drifts into something the Confession would not recognize.
The drift
What Westminster wrote with qualification, later Christians inherited as a doctrine severed from its original substance and tightened under new pressures. Each tightening was a response to a real challenge, and each was carried forward by serious theologians working in good faith. But the cumulative effect, across three centuries, is a doctrine that has expanded in scope and carries fewer qualifications than the one the divines wrote.
The first major tightening came in the late nineteenth century at Princeton Theological Seminary. Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology (1872-1873) and the later work of B. B. Warfield gave the doctrine of Scripture a form Westminster would have recognized but not chosen. Responding to German higher criticism and to Darwin, the Princeton theologians sharpened inerrancy as a technical category and pressed it further into the territory of historical and scientific claim than the Confession had. They wrote with care; they were serious scholars. But the doctrine they handed forward was tighter than the one they had received.
The popular form followed. The Fundamentals, a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 and distributed widely, brought the Princeton tightening to a lay audience in compressed form. The Scopes trial in 1925 hardened the public stakes and divided the popular and scholarly traditions along lines that have not closed since. By the time the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy convened in 1978, a new formulation had been ruminating for a century, and the Chicago Statement was an attempt to give that tradition scholarly form.
In the 20th century, the major philosophical and theological debates have been over the question, “How do we know what is true?” The inerrancy of the written Word of God is the Christian’s answer to that basic question.
- Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, 1978
The pressure has shifted from who decides to how we know. Chicago answers the new question by giving Scripture a role Westminster did not give it: not only the supreme rule of faith and practice, but the ground of certain knowledge as such. Where Westminster had said not alike plain, Chicago’s fourth summary point says no less in:
Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.
- Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, Summary 4
Westminster acknowledged that different parts of Scripture address the reader differently. Chicago insists that all parts are equally true. The two claims are not contradictory, but the rhetorical center has shifted. Chicago itself remains careful; the drafters were not folk Protestants. The Statement insists elsewhere that history must be treated as history and poetry as poetry. But the no less in construction does work the careful qualifications elsewhere in the document cannot quite contain.
What reaches the small group is the construction without the qualifications. No less in hardens into a claim about uniform readability. The acknowledgment that different parts address the reader differently drops out. By the time the doctrine reaches passing conversation, the speaker has come to believe that any truth Scripture addresses is addressed plainly, and that any topic on which Scripture is silent is a topic on which Scripture has spoken decisively.
The slope from Westminster to the small group is now visible. Westminster, through Princeton under new cultural pressures, into Fundamentalism and a popular audience. Chicago codified what has been forming for a century. The small group inherits the form without the substance that bound it carefully.
Motte and bailey
In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Norman conquerors of England built fortifications across the contested territory. Eventually this lineage would lead to the famous Medieval Castle, but early implementations were simpler. A large hill, sometimes natural and sometimes artificial, supported a wooden tower at its summit. Below the mound, enclosed by a ditch and a wall, lay a larger courtyard. The mound was called the motte. The courtyard was the bailey.
The two parts of the fortification served different purposes. The bailey was where ordinary life happened. It held stables, kitchens, workshops, barracks, and the everyday business of a garrison. The motte, by contrast, was confined and defensible. When the bailey came under attack, the inhabitants could retreat up to the motte. They couldn’t live there, but they could survive until the attack passed, and then return to the bailey to resume ordinary life.
In 2005, the philosopher Nicholas Shackel proposed that this medieval strategy describes a common pattern in argumentation. A person can hold one belief and operate from another. There is a position that is easily defended but limited in scope, and there is a position that is broader and more useful but harder to defend. The arguer occupies the broader position in ordinary life. When challenged, he retreats to the narrower one, and returns to the broader position once the pressure passes. Shackel called the defensible position the motte and the operating position the bailey.
Sola Scriptura, as actually practiced in much of American evangelical Protestantism, runs exactly this pattern.
The motte is the careful Westminster formulation: Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith and practice. Tradition, reason, and experience are real sources of theological knowledge, but they are subordinate to Scripture and correctable by it. This is what Luther meant at Worms; this is what the Reformed confessions teach. It is a coherent and historically grounded position.
The bailey is where most of the practice lives. Everything in Scripture is plain. Everything I believe is biblical. I have no tradition; I just read the Bible. The positions I hold are not opinions to be defended but obvious readings to be recognized.
This produces Christians who believe their positions are biblically derived when they need only be biblically defensible, and who believe their tradition’s reading of Scripture is the whole of Scripture itself.
The motte and the bailey feel like one castle to those inside. There is no sensation of movement between them. It is all just Sola Scriptura.
Outside observers feel the structure differently. Just as a medieval besieger might breach the bailey only to find himself stopped at the foot of the motte, so the Catholic or Orthodox interlocutor finds his argument successful one moment and becalmed the next. The Protestant has not, in his own experience, retreated. He has simply continued to hold Scripture’s authority. But what felt to him like continuity feels to his interlocutor like the goalposts have moved.
At the risk of over-extending the metaphor, some Norman fortifications had multiple baileys. The same is true of folk Sola Scriptura. There are three.
The three baileys
The English word perspicuity comes from the Latin perspicuus, meaning transparent or clearly seen through, from perspicere, to see through, to look clearly. The doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture, as the Reformers held it, claims that Scripture is sufficiently clear on what is necessary for salvation that an ordinary believer, using ordinary means, can come to a saving understanding of the gospel. Westminster’s seventh paragraph, quoted earlier, is precise: not all things in Scripture are alike plain; only those things necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation.
The unbound aesthetic extends the claim. Perspicuity comes to mean Scripture is so plain I need only me and my Bible. I just read what the Bible says, and faith guides me to the truth in all it says. The Confession bounded perspicuity to what is necessary for salvation. The aesthetic unbinds it.
The English word authority comes from the Latin auctoritas, from auctor, an author or originator, one who brings something into being and stands behind it. An authority in the older sense is not simply the power to compel but a source from which power flows. The careful Reformation tradition holds that Scripture has this kind of authority: it is the sole infallible rule of faith and practice. Reason, conscience, and experience are real authorities, but they are subordinate to Scripture and correctable by it. Scripture is supreme; it is not exclusive.
The unbound aesthetic collapses this distinction. Sola becomes solo. Scripture is treated not as the supreme authority among subordinate authorities but as the only authority. Church fathers are cast aside as mere men, rather than wise elders. Creeds are received with suspicion, as if reciting them were a substitute for reading the Bible. Philosophy is dismissed as the fallen wisdom of the world. Reason is treated as a competitor to Scripture rather than as a complementary faculty. The believer comes to operate as if no other source of theological knowledge has any standing. Scripture has gone from supreme to exclusive, and the careful tradition has always held the first while the aesthetic slides into the second.
The English word tradition comes from the Latin traditio, a handing down or over, from tradere, to deliver or transmit. To stand within a tradition is to receive what has been handed to one and to hand it on in turn. Scripture itself was handed down within the church. The canon was recognized by the church under the Spirit’s guidance across the first four centuries. The rule of faith was articulated by the church before any Reformer was born. The Westminster Confession is itself a piece of tradition, handed down from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first. The careful tradition holds that Scripture is read within an inherited interpretive community, and that this is not a compromise of Sola Scriptura but the condition under which Sola Scriptura is coherent.
The unbound aesthetic denies the inheritance. I have no tradition; I just read the Bible. The believer believes himself to be reading without mediation. He believes his interpretation arrives at the text rather than coming with him to the text. The shape of his reading is invisible to him precisely because he has absorbed it as Scripture itself. He does not know he is in a tradition because his tradition has taught him he is not.
The man who says he has no tradition is most tradition-shaped of all. The believer outside a tradition he can name is the believer most fully formed by a tradition he cannot.
The three baileys reinforce each other. If Scripture is plain on every matter, the believer needs no other authority and no tradition. If Scripture is the only authority, tradition has no standing to be recognized. If there is no tradition, then reading is just Scripture, which proves Scripture is plain. What is biblically defensible is held as biblically required, and the believer cannot tell the difference.
The case of creation
Take young earth creationism as an example. Set aside, for a moment, the question of whether the position is true. Ask instead: does Scripture require us to hold it? This is the difference between the biblical and the biblically defensible.
The careful Reformation tradition need not answer yes. Westminster’s seventh paragraph reserved perspicuity for the things necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation. Creation is not in that category. The careful tradition allows that Genesis 1 may be read in different registers without compromising any article necessary to be believed. A Christian may hold a young earth, an old earth, or remain uncertain, and the Gospel is not challenged or tarnished.
The folk version cannot answer no. The Bible plainly says six days. If you do not believe Genesis 1, you do not believe the Bible. The aesthetic has narrowed what was open in the careful tradition into something that feels closed. The position is held not because Scripture requires it, but because the aesthetic does. This is the perspicuity bailey.
The authority bailey runs alongside it. The careful tradition holds Scripture as the sole infallible rule, with reason and experience subordinate but real. Science is the disciplined application of reason and experience to the created world. The same God who in the beginning was the Word gave us a rational mind, and the world our rational mind investigates. Where the world and the Word both speak, both must be heard, and any apparent conflict must be negotiated with care. The careful tradition has room for science as a legitimate authority on creation.
The folk version does not. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood, the Chicago Statement says, in a sentence that holds together only if Scripture’s teaching on creation is taken to be univocal with its teaching on salvation. The bailey extends further. Science is treated not as a subordinate authority that can speak truly within its domain, but as a competing authority that must be refused when it contradicts the plain reading. The motte’s Sola has collapsed into Solo.
Augustine saw the consequence in the fifth century:
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
- Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1.19
Augustine is not arguing for or against any particular reading of Genesis 1. He is naming the cost of Christians refusing the legitimate authority of reason within its domain. The unbeliever, hearing the Christian assert what observation contradicts, concludes that the Christian is unreliable on matters of salvation as well. Augustine treats this not as an academic problem but as a pastoral and apologetic disaster, and he is right. The witness of the Gospel is damaged when Christians weaponize Scripture against reason.
The tradition bailey runs with the other two. The plain reading of Genesis 1 as twenty-four-hour days is itself a tradition. Some of its antecedents are older, but the form it takes in twenty-first-century American evangelicalism is largely a nineteenth and twentieth-century development, formalized by Scofield and his heirs and amplified by the modern young earth movement. The reader believes himself to be just reading the Bible. He is reading the Bible through a hermeneutical inheritance handed down to him without his knowing. The tradition-blindness bailey makes this invisible.
The cost falls hardest on those who don’t yet know the Lord. As a young man approaching the faith from outside, I encountered the aesthetic before I encountered the tradition. The version of Christianity I met required me to believe that Genesis 1 reported chronology and that science was wrong about the age of the earth. As an unbeliever, why would I have believed that? Accept the plain reading or reject the faith. I rejected for years, and I was not alone.
When I came to faith, it was through the careful tradition. I encountered theologians and pastors who held creation as the work of the Logos, the Word through whom all things were made, and who held science as the disciplined attempt to know what He had made. They did not require me to deny what I could see. They invited me to consider what I could not see. The careful tradition has always had room for this, in figures from Augustine to Calvin to Lewis. The unbound aesthetic does not.
I gesture only briefly toward what a recovery of the careful tradition makes possible. The fuller account belongs to another essay. But the gesture matters here, at the end of this section, because the alternative to the aesthetic is not the abandonment of Scripture. It is the recovery of a Scripture held with the humility the careful tradition built in: clear on the gospel, open on what Scripture itself leaves open, in conversation with the creation God made and the minds He gave us to know it.
Love in Truth
The folk position is not held in bad faith. It feeds a real spiritual hunger. The careful tradition cannot give certainty on every contested matter; it explicitly refuses to. The aesthetic offers what the careful tradition withholds, supplying certainty by extending the doctrine. It is sincere; it is felt as fidelity; it is, in its own register, a form of love for the Word.
The castle metaphor might even hold against the powers and principalities which besiege the faithful: but the fallacy it encourages is harmful to truth while helpful to confidence. Where Scripture, Authority, and Tradition should all be hallowed, they become hollow.
The recovery is a return to the careful tradition, and the return is harder than the aesthetic. The Reformers wrote with care because their moment demanded it; ours demands it no less. Westminster’s qualifications were pastoral as well as intellectual. They tell us where to seek certainty, in the gospel that warrants it, and where to walk by faith on contested matters Scripture itself treats as open. To recover this is not to retreat into uncertainty about everything. It is to be certain about the right things, and humble about the rest.
Such humility takes courage. It is harder, not easier, than the aesthetic. The believer who recovers the careful tradition must live without the false certainty the bailey offers. He must speak in the small group as a man without all the answers, willing to say I do not know where Scripture itself does not say. He must accept that the brother who reads differently may be a brother still. He must hold his Bible with reverence and his readings with care, and he must distinguish the two in his own mind without losing the love that draws him to the text. This is the discipline the Reformers built into the tradition. It is the discipline the aesthetic strips away.
I write as a critic of a tradition that I myself inhabit. I respect my brothers and sisters, and this is offered as a brother’s word, not as an outsider’s correction. A love of Scripture as the holy word of our Lord is a good to be cherished. But love must be in truth.