Which means that the final locus of authority is in the Scriptures, and the final court of appeal to what the Scriptures teach is in the Spirit-illumined conscience, not in a second authority outside the Bible and outside the conscience. This conviction is rooted in the very nature of biblical faith and the nature of biblical submission. And here is what I mean.
To say another human authority outside the Bible could bind the human conscience against what it sees in Scripture is to demand that faith and submission not be an act of understanding, but only an act of blind submission to external authority. It is in the very nature of faith that a person cannot believe as biblical something contrary to what he sees in the Bible just because another person tells him it is so. He can’t. It is the nature of faith.
You can’t believe as biblical what you don’t see as biblical, no matter who tells you to. If I see one thing in the Bible, but submit to an authority that teaches something different, I am de facto elevating that authority above the Bible. And I am attempting the impossible: to believe as biblical what I see to be unbiblical. That is my second response.
3) And the third response is this—and I have always been amazed that people don’t seem to function this way—namely, deciding what church to belong to. Don’t at that moment just take the issue of authority into account and leave all the other doctrines aside.
It seems to me that an evangelical who has shaped his convictions around biblical truth would have to simply close his eyes to be led in the dark in order to embrace the Roman Catholic doctrines of baptismal regeneration with its undermining of the biblical necessity of saving faith as a sign of the new birth and the doctrine of justification on what God works in me, not on the basis of Christ alone through faith alone, and the doctrine of transubstantiation at the mass and the transfer of grace through those physical instruments and practices and the doctrine of indulgences as strategies of penance and forgiveness which the present pope has brought forward again and made explicit.
We thought that was all gone, and it is not all gone: the veneration of Mary, which I just saw appallingly in my days in Italy a few weeks ago, and the prayers to her, elevating her in effect to a co-redeemer with the accompanying diminishing of the centrality of Christ in the piety of millions of people.
So, in other words, when you ponder the issue of authority—that is, the issue of Scripture alone versus the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman Church—are you willing to isolate that issue? Does not the entire sacramental system almost at every point contradict what you have seen in Scripture as an evangelical? And if so, are you willing to sacrifice your conscience and say, “I do not see what I see”?
