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From Michael Horton’s article in the latest Modern Reformation: “There can be no covenant without a canon or a canon without a covenant. In fact, the covenant is the canon and vice versa.” If those are new concepts to you, this essay is a helpful introduction. To my knowledge, the best full-length studies on the relationship of covenant and canon is Herman Ridderbos’s Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures and Meredith Kline’s The Structure of Biblical Authority.

He also has a helpful section on the sufficiency of Scripture, contrasting the Reformational view with the Roman Catholic one:

The Latin slogan [sola Scriptura] means “by Scripture alone,” not “Scripture alone” (solo Scriptura). For example, both Lutheran and Reformed churches regard the ecumenical creeds, along with their own confessions and catechisms, as authoritative and binding summaries of Scripture, to which they are all subordinate. We accept these statements because they summarize biblical teaching, not on the basis of the church’s authority. The key difference is that whereas the Roman Catholic view treats the church’s authority as magisterial (sovereign), churches of the Reformation view it as ministerial (subordinate to Christ’s scriptural Word).

Those who want to explore this issue further will be helped by Keith Matthison’s The Shape of Sola Scriptura.

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