The more I return to the Catholic critique of sola Scriptura, the more I think Protestants often answer the wrong argument.
The critique has force because it presses on an actual weakness in popular evangelicalism. Scripture requires interpretation. Interpretation produces disagreement. Disagreement requires judgment. A rule of faith that cannot adjudicate disputes begins to look useless at the very point where it is most needed. From there the Catholic argument moves quickly. If disputes require a judge, and if a fallible judge leaves the dispute unresolved, then the Church must be protected from error when she judges definitively.
That argument works because many Protestants have already conceded too much. They have accepted an account of authority in which Scripture functions as the only authority in the Christian life rather than the final authority over every other authority. Once that mistake is made, the Catholic critique has an easy target. It is not refuting historic Protestantism. It is refuting a modern evangelical habit of treating the Bible as though it dropped into the hands of isolated readers with no church, no creed, no fathers, no councils, and no binding tradition.
That is not sola Scriptura.
The deeper problem is that the Catholic argument often assumes a particular model of authority without proving it. Authority is treated as a mechanism for producing immediate closure at the point of dispute. If the mechanism cannot identify itself, interpret itself, and settle the argument without remainder, then it is said to have failed. But that is not how authority has functioned in the history of the Church. It is not even how authority functions in ordinary life.
A police officer has real authority. A judge has real authority. A legislature has real authority. Yet none of them possesses final authority. Their authority is real because it is ordered within a larger structure. A constitution does not erase subordinate authorities. It judges them, limits them, and gives them their proper field of action.
Historic Protestantism made a similar distinction. Scripture is the norma normans non normata, the norming norm that is not itself normed. Creeds, confessions, councils, pastors, and traditions are norma normata, normed authorities. They carry real weight. They bind. They teach. They exclude error. But they remain subject to correction by the Word of God.
This is where modern discussions usually go wrong. They assume that if an authority can err, it has no authority. That is nonsense. A pastor can preach truly while remaining fallible. A confession can bind a church while remaining reformable. A council can possess real authority without becoming a second source of revelation. The question is not whether something is either infallible or irrelevant. The question is what kind of authority it has.
This becomes obvious when reading the early fathers. Irenaeus and Tertullian did not treat Christian doctrine as a pile of private interpretations waiting for clever readers to assemble. They appealed to a public rule of faith. They spoke of the faith handed down in the churches. They used creedal summaries to fence off heresy and identify the apostolic faith. Against the Gnostics, the rule of faith was not a decorative tradition. It was a weapon.
Protestants should not be embarrassed by that. They should agree with it. The rule of faith was public, inherited, ecclesial, creedal, and binding. It constrained interpretation. It named the God of Scripture. It confessed the incarnation, death, resurrection, and return of Christ. It gave the Church a grammar for reading the Bible against heretical misuse. But it was not a second stream of revelation standing beside Scripture. Its authority was ministerial. It summarized and guarded the apostolic deposit. It did not create it.
That distinction is the difference between historic Protestantism and modern biblicism. The “no creed but the Bible” instinct is not the Reformation. It is a reduction of the Reformation into a slogan the Reformers themselves would not have recognized. The Reformers cited Augustine, Athanasius, Chrysostom, Irenaeus, and the councils because they were not trying to invent Christianity from scratch. They were arguing about the proper ordering of authorities within the Church.
The Protestant claim was never that the Church has no authority. The claim was that the Church does not have the same kind of authority as Scripture.
This matters especially when the debate turns to the canon. The Catholic argument usually runs like this: Protestants cannot derive the canon from Scripture alone. Therefore they depend on the Church. Therefore the Church must stand in an infallible relation over the canon. The move is rhetorically effective because it shifts categories halfway through the argument.
Scripture is authoritative because God breathed it. The Church recognizes that authority. Recognition is not creation. Athanasius did not make Christ divine by defending him. The councils did not make the Son consubstantial with the Father by confessing it. They recognized, defended, and gave dogmatic form to what was already true.
The same logic applies to the canon. The Church did not make the Word of God the Word of God. The Church received it, read it, tested it, guarded it, and confessed it. The authority of Scripture is ontological before it is ecclesial. It rests in God’s act of speaking, not in the Church’s act of recognition.
This does not mean the Church’s role was unnecessary. It means the Church’s role was not constitutive. The canon was recognized through worship, usage, doctrinal coherence, apostolic origin, and reception across time and geography. The process was historical, uneven, and human. It was also real. It produced convergence, not chaos.
Modern arguments often treat that kind of process as inadequate because it does not deliver the kind of certainty they demand. But that demand is the issue. It assumes that unless an authority arrives in a single infallible act, visible and self-identifying from the start, then it cannot truly bind. Church history does not bear that out.
Nicaea is a good example. The council did not end the Arian controversy the moment the bishops left the room. It was resisted, contested, and received over time. Its authority became clear through the Church’s continued recognition that it faithfully confessed the apostolic faith. It bound the Church, but not because it operated as an independent source of revelation. It bound because it told the truth about Scripture’s Christ.
This is why appeals to an infallible Church do not remove interpretation. They move interpretation to another location. One still has to ask which councils are ecumenical, which statements are irreformable, what those statements mean, how they relate to previous teaching, and how they apply to new disputes. The interpreter has not vanished. He has been handed a thicker rulebook.
That does not make Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy incoherent. It does expose the cheap version of their apologetic. The promise of a visible authority that ends the burden of interpretation is overstated. Every communion interprets. Every tradition receives, weighs, distinguishes, and applies. Every authority structure requires judgment.
So the real question is not whether Christians can avoid interpretation. They cannot. The real question is where authority finally terminates. Historic Protestantism answers: authority terminates in the speech of God.
That answer does not abolish the Church. It places the Church under the Word. The Church teaches, preserves, disciplines, interprets, and hands down the faith. It has real authority. But its authority is derivative and ministerial. It is not self-authenticating. It does not stand over Scripture. It does not complete Scripture as a co-principle of revelation.
This is also why Protestants can say that the Second London Baptist Confession has real authority without treating it as infallible. A Baptist church can be bound by that confession because it has adopted it as a faithful summary of Scripture. Its ministers can teach from it. Its members can be examined by it. Its doctrine can be guarded through it. But if the confession were shown to contradict Scripture, Scripture would judge the confession. That does not make the confession meaningless. It makes it subordinate.
The same is true of creeds and councils. A Protestant can say, “You may not reject Nicaea,” while also saying, “Nicaea is authoritative because it faithfully confesses what Scripture teaches.” That is not a contradiction. It is the difference between final authority and real subordinate authority.
The modern evangelical problem is not that it has taken sola Scriptura too seriously. It has not taken it seriously enough. It has confused Scripture’s final authority with Scripture’s solitary authority. It has often treated tradition as a threat rather than as the Church’s accumulated judgment under the Word. It has mistaken fallibility for uselessness and then acted surprised when Rome and Orthodoxy appear to offer a sturdier house.
But the answer to evangelicalism is not to hand the Church an authority Christ did not give her. The answer is to recover the older Protestant account: Scripture as final norm, the Church as real ministerial authority, tradition as inherited judgment, confessions as binding but reformable, and councils as authoritative insofar as they faithfully speak according to the Word of God.
That account will not satisfy the desire for instant closure. It was never meant to. It gives something less theatrical and more durable: a Church bound to the speech of God, corrected by the speech of God, and forbidden to place even its own best judgments beyond the reach of the speech of God.
Scripture is the highest court of appeal, not the only voice in the room. That sentence is simple. It is also the difference between historic Protestantism and the fragile biblicism that keeps losing arguments it never should have accepted.