Jason Engwer’s … interesting … plan to “hold critics of sola scriptura accountable.”

ason Eng­w­er is a Calvin­ist who blogs over at Tri­ablogue. He appears to now be the site’s main blog­ger, after the pass­ing of Steve Hays. Mr. Eng­w­er thinks he can break through all the mis­un­der­stand­ings about sola scrip­tura, and he sketch­es out a brief (the blog post is a mere one para­graph) action plan. Five cen­turies of schism and dis­cord, and Jason Eng­w­er comes along on Tues­day, Octo­ber 5, 2021, and ends it all in a para­graph. Shaz­a­am.

Mr. Eng­w­er begins with a stan­dard Protes­tant argu­ment. It goes like this: If the Catholics are right when they reject sola scrip­tura on the grounds that Scrip­ture must be inter­pret­ed by some­one, and there­fore leads to a chaos of con­flict­ing inter­pre­ta­tions, then the same objec­tion can be made against the Mag­is­teri­um. Mag­is­te­r­i­al doc­u­ments have to be inter­pret­ed too. What’s to guard against con­flict­ing inter­pre­ta­tions of the Mag­is­teri­um?

Sure. It sounds per­sua­sive on its face—until you real­ize that the Mag­is­teri­um is a liv­ing author­i­ty and has the abil­i­ty to cor­rect false inter­pre­ta­tions when they would threat­en the uni­ty of the faith.

But Jason Eng­w­er sug­gests that Protes­tants just side­step this prob­lem alto­geth­er and say to Catholics: “You know what? The Bible is to me what your rule of faith is to you!” He says that it is “often help­ful” for Prote­sants to point that out.

Did you know that, dear read­er? I sure did­n’t. The Bible is the Protes­tant’s rule of faith! Well, that changes every­thing. Where did all this mis­un­der­stand­ing come from over 500 years? No one knew before that the Bible was the Protes­tant’s rule of faith. Where we have the Mag­is­teri­um, they have the Bible.

Hard to know how to object to that.