Part of my musing about 'Scripture Alone' is that the future of the church (all churches, around the world) will depend on Scripture as the one common authority for faith and practice. One contributing observation here is that when the Reformation utilised Scripture as a plumbline to measure the then Western European church an eventual consequence was that the Roman-led Western European church in the centuries following (enlarged, of course, through those centuries into a global church) itself drew closer to Scripture and sought more rather than less justification from Scripture for its decisions.
There are glaring Roman exceptions, but even these can be argued to highlight the increasing rather than decreasing role for Scripture. Thus I notice Diarmaid MacCulloch in his monumental A History of Christianity mentions such a glaring exception, 'In 1950 [Pius XII] used papal infallibility to define the doctrine of the bodily Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven, a move which infuriated Protestant, Orthodox and Eastern Churches alike' but goes on to also observe the character of internal Catholic opposition to the move 'and which did not please those Catholic theologians who cared about the doctrine's lack of justification in the Bible or in early Church tradition.' (p. 952) In my personal reading of Catholic literature I find an increasing recognition of the need to underpin doctrine with Scripture. It is a subjective judgement I know, but I find it difficult to believe that Benedict XVI, careful scholar that he is, making a similar unScriptural definition some sixty years later. In those six decades a renewed interest in bibical scholarship has been expressed, as well as a new freedom (with some constraints) to engage in critical scholarship free of the anti-biblical scholarship 'Modernist' campaigns of the era between Vatican 1 and Vatican 2.
Nothing is simple about the apparently simple phrase 'Scripture Alone'! For the church of the future a complex discussion will concern the question 'what Scripture?' (the Protestant Bible or Catholic Bible or Orthodox Bible?!) There will continue to be vigorous discussion about interpretation of Scripture. But at least there will be such a discussion rather than, say, a discussion about abolishing Scripture or relegating it to the archival bowels of theological libraries. Why will we retain Scripture? I will attempt to reflect on that in the next post, and do so in such a way as to re-express why Scripture is unique, and thus why some credence may be given to the idea of 'Scripture Alone.'