Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your background, especially having spent time in the Reformed tradition.

You said Reformed theology is an interpretation laid over Scripture, but that misses the point. The Reformers didn’t claim to create authority for Scripture, they affirmed that Scripture is self-authenticating because it is the very Word of God. The church didn’t establish the canon; it recognized what the Spirit had already inspired.

Yes, the Bible doesn’t include a divinely inspired table of contents but that doesn’t make tradition the final arbiter. The Spirit who authored the Scriptures also leads the church to recognize them. As the Westminster Confession says, their authority doesn’t depend on “the testimony of any man or church, but wholly upon God (who is truth itself), the author thereof.”

Orthodoxy may reject Rome’s pope, but it still replaces the sufficiency of Scripture with ecclesial tradition. And once you elevate tradition alongside Scripture, you’ve lost the foundation. You’ll always need someone above Scripture to tell you what it means, and that’s not what Christ gave His church.

God has spoken. And His Word is enough. Grace and peace