My mother surprised me with a phone call today. Usually her calls are accompanied by a short report on the church activities at my home church. Today, I was shocked to hear that she had reached an epitome.She thought that maybe I wasn’t all that wrong about organized religion.
I was surprised, partly because my mother had been so orthodox for most of my life (excluding of course my parents’ time in college-I actually don’t remember that much church from then), and because I think she had a bit of a misconception about how I felt about organized religion. Indeed, I had not even brought up the question to her in a long while; partly because I was unsure of my own opinions on the matter and because most of our previous conversations about it ended poorly.
I prodded her a bit for the answer and I made the conclusion that she was judging my current philosophy on how I felt when I was 16 years old. I suppose it isn’t surprising to note that I was a lot different two years ago, but I suppose a woman of her years merely thought of me like any other adult-set in one’s ways after a certain point in one’s life, unable to change but with something life-altering like a mid-life crisis or death in the family.
Anyhow, she told me that I was very right about how the organization of religion essentially took away its true meaning. My mother has never dabbled in the realm of the existential past protestant philosophy, but even within this limited scope she made an amazing realization, one that, I, myself, had not come upon.
Sola scriptorum, a term which exclusively used among theologians, is a philosophy upon which the original protestant churches were built. It dictates, in layman’s terms, that the interpretation of the word of God ultimately rests within a person and his or her personal relationship with God. That is, no one else can tell you how to believe in God. Originally, the reason why the title ‘protestant’ was bestowed upon non-Catholic (or non-orthodox) Christians was because these people, armed with nothing better than a printing press, and the ideas of sola scriptorum, protested the spiritual structure of the Catholic church. What Protestants did not realize, however, is that in the process, many of them created their own webs of untruths and strange interpretation. That, of course, added to the original philosophy of self-interpretation, led to the fragmentation of the protestant church in its earliest years-certainly the disunity among protestant churches is not a new development.
Perhaps we should ask ourselves what the virtues of sola scriptorum entail. It is an idea which is better in practice in a 21st century environment. Indeed, with the state of the society of most of Christendom, Catholicism, with its emphasis on looking to spiritual leaders to provide guidance-hence its seemingly confusing (at least to protestants) structure-was actually better for Christians. The truth of the matter is, sola scriptorum is not a philosophy that grew out of a spiritual need to be separate from a corrupt Catholic church, it was merely a power play by theologian rebels which resulted in a schism which could have been avoided altogether.
In practical terms, relying on one’s own interpretation of the Bible would be unreasonable for most of the history of humanity. Indeed, before the invention of the printing press (an event which came before the reformation) the thought of every individual determining how to understand God on his own was impossible. Even after Bibles were made available in large numbers (which was not directly after the invention of the printing press), the literacy rates of the most advanced countries of the world were abysmal. Looking at the philosophy from a 21st century perspective may be easy, but retrospectively sola scriptorum may have simply been a manipulative ploy devised to explain to an incredibly confused congregation why the Catholic church’s views of Christianity were not necessarily the gospel truth.
Add that to the fact that even with modern education the Bible is incredibly difficult, and the fact that most people during the earliest days of the Protestant church were probably farmers or at least people who labored constantly for hours a day, and the thought that every man could become his own little mini-priest is ridiculous.
This is not to discredit Protestant churches-I am in no position to judge the fate of all of Christianity; but it is fun to muse on the possibility of an entire religious structure based on a faulty notion of individual free-thinking.