Atheism
I am convinced that the case for belief in God is inductively so much stronger than the case for unbelief that true philosophical atheism must be regarded as a superstition, often nurtured by an infantile wish to live in a world proportionate to one’s own hopes or conceptual limitations.
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God
Sola Scriptura in practice
Champions of sola scriptura thought they would set Christian theology and experiential knowledge on firm ground by liberating the rock of God’s word from papal tyranny. In fact, despite themselves they precipitated literally endless contestation about the Bible’s meaning, entangled faith with biblical scholarship in new ways, and unavoidably had respective and rival recourse to their own preferred, putative hermeneutic authorities amid competing claims about the meaning of God’s word.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
The problem, be it noted, is not “scriptura” but “sola.”
By the end of the 1570s, whatever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had known nothing else, which believed the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.
Eamon Duffey, The Stripping of the Altars
However differently they defined the essence of “New Testament” Christianity, the Holiness movement, Fundamentalists, and Pentecostals shared a passion for recovering the “pure fountain” and were equally dismissive of the church’s legacy over twenty centuries.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion
[T]he dispensationalist attack on the institutional church was an argument more likely to find a favorable audience in the United States, where evangelical churchmanship was relatively weak, than in Great Britain, where members of the state churches of England and Scotland exerted great influence in the evangelical movement.
Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
(I acknowledge evidence that dispensationalism is waning in influence in America; my point here is historic.)
For the world? Counter to the world?
The problem I see in the idea of the Church as the catalyst for cultural and/or civilizational renewal — even if it should become that in our time — is the erroneous implication that the Church exists for the sake of the world. She doesn’t. She stands more often than not — as the Bride of Christ, wedded to one Bridegroom — as a counter to the world, marked as the world order is by transient powers, constant instability, “freedoms” that aren’t true freedom, dubious ethics (“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world”; 1 John 2:16), “wars and rumors of wars,” and all the rest.
Addison Hodges Hart, How I Wandered Into Orthodoxy: An Uncharacteristically Personal Reflection.
I tend strongly to agree with Hart on this.
The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.
Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
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