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Whatever else you might say about Protestants and Catholics, what seemed obvious to me as an outsider of both, was that the protestant approach of Sola Scriptura, was an obvious contributor to the massive amount of division among protestant communities. It’s why I could go to one church and here one kind of teaching and another and here something entirely different – especially about difficult questions like sexuality.

Prior to the protestant reformation, while there may have been internal conflict, the Church in the West was generally united. But after protestants tried to build their new reformed church on doctrines like sola scriptura, dramatic and unambiguous division was the immediate effect. Every generation of protestants was producing breakaways who were convinced that their interpretation of scripture was the right one and nobody could tell them otherwise, because scripture is their only authority.

Which revealed an obvious, painfully obvious problem to me. What happens when two theologians or two groups disagree about what scripture teaches? How does that get resolved if both are appealing to the same sole infallible source, but coming away with different interpretations – which isn’t just a hypothetical problem because it had happened and was still happening in Church history. Whatever the answer might be, the result was usually division – which is how we end up with thousands of denominations in a short period of time.

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

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