Sola Scriptura: How Anyone Can Know God

“If God spare my life, before very long I shall cause a plough boy to know the scriptures better than [priests] do!” -- William Tyndale

It can be said that the spirit of the Renaissance really culminated in the Protestant Reformation, which was a veritable rebirth of religious spirit and connection with God sparked by the perceived materialism and of the Catholic Church. Tyndale, who is best known for translating the bible into English, believed like many that a priest was an unnecessary intermediary between an individual and God, that what was really necessary was faith and the scriptures.

Literacy levels of plough boys aside, the idea that a plough boy could be as familiar with a bible as priest is as Renaissance as the Vitruvian man, because it is only possible due to the newfound humanistic spirit of introspection self-worth, which encouraged those in that time to strive for social mobility, to sign their own artwork, and even to read the Bible themselves instead of taking the Catholic priest’s word for it. A serf in medieval times would never think of reading the bible (because of their station in life, their ability to read Latin, and the fact that a copy of the bible cost more than a house pre-Guttenberg and the printing press) nonetheless being able to understand it at a priests level. This idea of individual accomplishments was as foreign as ideas of the non-Catholic cultures (and continents) being explored at that time.

It’s also interesting to think that with the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance, the concept of understanding the Bible was also different. After all, the Catholic Church had rigid Latin sacraments and practices like the indulgences that emphasized action over understanding. The contrast between that and the debate encouraged by the rediscovered rhetorical practices from the Greeks and Romans along with the new model for courtly behavior, discussions, and education, was manifest in gospel discussion as the scriptures themselves where dissected but those like John Calvin who sought to persuade their listeners to their vision of the gospel.

In late elementary school I took it upon myself to read the Bible. While this was largely an excuse to stay up past my bedtime (a foreign world in itself to me at the time) it quickly became a lot more. While I admit that I read maybe half of it, I managed to discover that these stories that I had learned all my life had so much more—and less—details than I had been expecting to discover. While my discoveries where very shallow at that age, it quickly established that by reading the scriptures myself instead of relying totally on someone else’s interpretation I could gain an understanding of the scriptures that, while lacking the background facts provided by a teacher, was so much more personal and applicable to myself as an individual. Because the bible is available to me in English the figurative ploughboy that I am can understand the scriptures and how they affect me better than any priest could apply them to my life, just as Tyndale intended.