For what reads like a pretty fair summary of the broader issue of sola scriptura click on this AI link.

This post is about my personal experience with the doctrine.

I was baptized at the behest of my parents when I was a young teen in a United Methodist Church in Maryland.  I did it mostly for my parents, which is probably typical for all Christians who are baptized while a child of any age.  That is to say that baptism at that age is more about the adults who surround the child than the child.  They are too young to have any rigorous theological or philosophical understanding of the liturgy.  The Church community contextualizes the event in the months that follow.  As months turn into years the child becomes a man and grows in his responsibility to fully understand the indelible spiritual quality of what happened when the Church baptized him.

I was presented with an inscribed Bible by the Church at the baptismal liturgy.  I have it today, some fifty-five or so years later.  I think the sola scriptura idea/doctrine was probably mentioned to me as part of the preparation for the baptismal liturgy, but I’m not certain.  I remember having a special feeling about the inscribed Bible.  I read from it periodically as a child.  I never developed a habit of daily Bible reading.

I found written and visual material of an erotic nature to be much more meaningful than Bible verses as a teenager.  While I wanted to act out what I read, and viewed, in the “literature” I never developed the habit of fornication beyond self-stimulation inspired by the jewish-promoted “literature” known as porn.  I always knew that the Bible I owned was critical of the habit, and of all forms of lust.  Talmudically, I chose to rationalize the dichotomy.

I fell in love at eighteen years old with the woman I would marry.  Raised in the Pentecostal Church she had a deeper, more emotional, connection to sola scriptura than did I.  We both attended Protestant Bible College where she studied music, and I obtained a degree in Religion & Philosophy.  I accepted the doctrine uncritically all through this process until 2020 when I entered the Roman Catholic Church. That’s when I started to think deeply about it.

As I write this blog post I’m celebrating the end of my sixth year as a Catholic.  I find deep peace in having a Priest, and the Bible, in my life.  My Priest spent years sorting through the theological and philosophical issues/controversies that followed Luther’s articulation of sola scriptura’s modern form in the 1500s.  I trust my Priest on this point mostly because the alternative in America is Protestantism, which has disintegrated into tens of thousands of small groupings that each rally around some novel interpretation and/or charismatic personality.

The oldest of the Protestant groupings are all woke now.  Their biggest concern is transgendering. They’ve developed all sorts of theological and philosophical “reasoning” to support the insanity.  They get away with it because almost nobody attends their “worship” services anymore.  They are all closing, along with the Catholic Churches that maintain a relaxed attitude toward jews and their Talmudic ideas.

During my lifetime the only christian churches that enjoyed growth were evangelical zionist enterprises.  They were captured politically by the Republican Party at the time of Ronald Reagan.  The zionism was buried in eschatology that probed from the margins of daily and weekly worship until Trump was elected for a second time.  It appears that zionism is now a major dogma of the evangelicalism that I defended for twenty years as leader of the Christian Civic League.

I never defended zionism.  I stayed away from eschatology.  I’ve always reasoned that the future belongs to God and I was never comfortable with current event, headline driven “prophets”, teachers and preachers.

I’m not surprised to see what is happening right now in Washington D.C.  After spending four years leading a Christian community that ministered to troubled souls I entered Maine’s political world at the highest layer of engagement.  I spent twenty years as the spokesman for the century old Protestant institution who’s job it was (and is) to influence public policy, The Christian Civic League of Maine.

What Trump is doing makes perfect sense to me.  He has surrounded himself with evangelical “judeo-christian” Americans who sincerely believe that Old Testament verses are as timely, relevant and authoritative today as they were when they were written.  Sola Scriptura requires that the social order honor the absolute right of every individual Christian to interpret and apply the Bible for themselves alone. Protestant pastors teach this duty, and each denomination develops unique and independent rules to tamp down the inevitable chaos.

Most teach that the Old Testament must be interpreted through the lens of the New Testament, which introduces Jesus into the interpretation and application of Old Testament ideas.  But … never forget … that the doctrine empowers every individual to interpret and apply any, and all, Bible verses themselves.

This highly individualized and sovereign characteristic, encouraged by the doctrine, creates men like current Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.  The Pope recently reminded the world that the gospel cannot be used to justify war, “Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.”

The American Evangelical Christians who are the most enthusiastic supporters of Trump’s war of choice against Iran are quoting the Old Testament out of context.  Hegseth quotes from it regularly.

I’m not a theologian.  Never have been.  I’m barely a philosopher having merely earned a Bachelor of Arts degree.  I do, however, have practical experience at 65 years of age.  And it is from those decades of experience that I respectfully offer my perspective.

Christians in the West desperately need the help of educated Priests with their spiritual lives as they work to sort out the world that is emerging from the ashes of the American empire.

Protestantism isn’t helping.  It will end up in the dust bin of history because it has always been nothing more than a heresy.

Selah