"Sola Scriptura" - 'by Scripture alone' - was one of the great slogans of the Reformation. It asserted the supremacy of the Bible over other sources of authority: church tradition, human reason and religious experience. There is one aspect of Sola Scriptura that is often neglected, however, and that is the assertion of Scripture Alone over all sorts of speculative theology. We are not to go beyond what the Bible says.
This really came home to me yesterday, when I attended a training session for Relgious Education. The organisation that runs it (Council for Christian Education in Schools) is quite inter-denominational, and so we had a very mixed bunch of people at the seminar. We started with a Bible study on Luke 24:13-35 - the account of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus conversing with Jesus. It was an excellent study, actually, and I got a fair bit out of it. But things got quite interesting when we got to verse 31. This is when Jesus breaks bread with the disciples, they recognise him, and he disappears from their sight.
How did the disciples recognise Jesus? Not often attending ecumenical Bible studies, I was a bit surprised by the plethora of explanations that followed. One lady suggested that maybe they saw the nail-prints in his hands. Another thought that they possibly received some sort of emotional trigger. Someone else speculated that maybe the recognition came through "breaking the bread" - like Communion, perhaps.
Well, all these explanation may or may not be correct, but the fact of the matter is, we're not told. Scripture is silent on this matter. All it says is that "their eyes were opened", which suggests divine intervention. Rather than speculating on the various means God may have used, we are directed to recognise the work of the Holy Spirit.
And this is an important component of Sola Scriptura: not using the Bible as a spring-board to various you-beaut theories and clever ideas, but sticking to the Bible alone.
I had thought this would be obvious, but the people in the study took a bit of convincing...
As I said, though, it was a very profitable session, and I learned quite few things from Luke 24 that I hadn't noticed before. Not only does it speak of the centrality of the work of the Holy Spirit (verse 31), but it also indicates the centrality of the Scriptures (verse 27) and the cross (verse 26) - as well as pointing out that important difference between knowledge and belief (verse 25).
One more thing: the disciples got up at once to go back to Jerusalem and tell the disciples - don't forget it was dark, and they had been all set to spend the night in Emmaus!
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