Today I want to address a vital but often misunderstood distinction: the difference between Sola Scriptura and biblicism. This distinction is crucial for Protestants as we consider how to interpret Scripture faithfully. It i also helps us relate to the broader history of Christian thought.
Protestantism has wrestled with the misuse of Sola Scriptura as a rationale for dismissing its theological past. This dismissal can especially target the contributions of early, medieval, and scholastic thinkers. This distortion leads to doctrinal aberrations and departs from the intent of the Reformers themselves. The Reformers were not innovators, despite the common caricature. They did not seek to invent a new tradition. Rather, they sought to renew and retrieve what they believed to be the essential core of the apostolic faith. This is the tradition that Christians have handed down through the church.
Exegesis Needs Tradition
Faithful interpretation of Scripture requires more than a narrow, isolated exegesis of the text. Sola Scriptura does not mean that the Bible is the only resource one considers in theological reflection. That idea—what Matthew Barrett calls solo scriptura—is a form of biblicism at its worst. Roman Catholic critiques of this biblicist tendency are not without merit. We cannot approach Scripture without theological preconceptions, nor should we pretend to. The Reformers understood this. Biblicism, by contrast, often fosters an individualistic and ahistorical approach to the Bible. This approach severs interpretation from the apostolic tradition God has preserved through the centuries.
Theology Needs Tradition
One of the most familiar expressions of this biblicist impulse in evangelical Protestantism is the slogan, “No creed but the Bible.” But the implication of such a claim is that Christians should interpret the Bible apart from any theological framework or historical guide. This inevitably leads to a privatized and often distorted reading of Scripture, unmoored from the church’s doctrinal heritage. This is not what the Reformers intended, nor is it consistent with the apostolic faith they sought to recover.
The Rich Past of Christian History
This issue became personal for me when I began to study Thomas Aquinas seriously. Aquinas, a towering medieval theologian and philosopher, is widely considered the greatest thinker of the scholastic tradition—perhaps rivaled only by Augustine as the greatest Christian thinker of the entire medieval millennium. Because Aquinas is unmistakably Roman Catholic in his views of salvation, the church, and the sacraments, many conservative Protestants reflexively ignore or dismiss him. But I came to believe that there is far more in Aquinas to appreciate, incorporate, and depend upon than to discard, even for those of us committed to a Protestant understanding of the gospel.
This conviction led me to write my master’s thesis on Aquinas and to seriously consider further study in medieval philosophy. Though I ultimately pursued doctoral work in analytic philosophical ethics (on topics like this) Aquinas’s influence—especially in metaphysics, ethics, and the doctrine of God—has remained foundational in my thinking. At one point, I even considered converting to Roman Catholicism, simply because I saw that the Catholic tradition still valued thinkers like Aquinas, while many evangelicals seemed content to skip from Augustine directly to Luther, leaving a thousand years of Christian theology unexplored.
Toward Theological Retrieval
Thankfully, this trend is beginning to shift. Over the past century, and especially in recent decades, Protestant scholars have increasingly recognized the need for theological retrieval. This includes a renewed appreciation for the catholic (small “c”) tradition and a clearer understanding of the Reformation’s continuity with the early church.
Matthew Barrett, in a recent book, The Reformation as Renewal, argues that the Reformers—especially Luther and Calvin—did not see themselves as theological revolutionaries, but as heirs of the apostolic tradition. When accused of innovation, they responded that it was the late medieval Roman Catholic church that had deviated from the faith of the fathers by adding layers of doctrine unsupported by Scripture or early church consensus. Whether one agrees with that historical assessment is a separate matter, and Roman Catholics will naturally dispute it. But the point remains: the Reformers themselves sought to return to the faith once delivered—not to dismantle it.
This is the truth many Protestant evangelicals have yet to grasp. The Reformers were not advocating a biblicist hermeneutic that dismissed all tradition. They understood the importance of interpreting Scripture within the theological and historical context of the church’s teaching. If this is true, then figures like Thomas Aquinas are not only permissible to engage—they are essential conversation partners for anyone seeking to think deeply and faithfully within the Protestant tradition.
Of course, any engagement with Aquinas must be done through the lens of Scripture and in light of the gospel clarity recovered during the Reformation. But that is not the same as wholesale rejection. It is appropriation, discernment, and retrieval—not dismissal. Protestants who ignore the great theologians and philosophers of the church’s past do so to their own peril.