On the 30th of July 2018, I published the original post that eventually became this article, in which I showed that Catholic tradition is utterly useless in Christian theology because 2 Timothy 3:16-17 tells us that the scriptures are enough to make a Christian complete, and equipped for every good work. After being virtually silent for 2 weeks, on the 14th of August, the post suddenly lit up again. A great many Catholics swarmed the post, leaving paragraph after paragraph of Catholic dogma. While there were a few exceptions, very few of them actually attempted to address anything said in the post. Instead, they made multiple cliched Catholic arguments like "we gave you the Bible".
That the scriptures are the sole and sufficient authority for Christianity is an inescapable conclusion from reading them. There are plenty of commands not to add to them, remove from them or think beyond them. We are told that God does nothing without revealing His secret to His prophets (Amos 3:7), and that the scriptures make a man complete, equipping us for every good work.
That last one, found in 2 Timothy 3:16-17, is what the original post opened with, and what the majority of the Catholics took issue with. The ones who tried to respond did so by completely ignoring the two words I had capitalised: "Complete" and "every".
If their comments were serious (which I suspect most of them were not), they believed I was arguing "the scriptures are inspired by God, therefore we need nothing else". In reality, I was arguing that the scriptures make us complete, therefore we need nothing else to complete us, and that they equip us for every good work, therefore there are no good works we can't do with the help of the scriptures.
My challenge to Catholics is this: Prove me wrong. Find me one disadvantage to not being part of the Catholic Church. Is there anything the Catholic Church can offer me that I cannot get from the scriptures? The answer, of course, is no. Salvation is found in the Bible. All things needed for doctrine, reproof, correction and instruction in righteousness are found in the scriptures. There are zero things the Catholic Church can offer that the scriptures cannot.
Before this article was originally posted on God Squad Apologetics, I posed this challenge to a Catholic who visited the page. His answer was that the Catholic Church offers an authoritative interpretation of the Bible guided by the Holy Spirit. This answer is so blatantly circular that I don't know how he could say it with a straight face. In order to claim that a "Protestant" cannot gain an authoritative interpretation of the Bible guided by the Holy Spirit without the Catholic Church first assumes that the Catholic Church is authoritative. It is also contradicted by the fact that non-Catholics, particularly "Orthodox" denominations, also draw a lot of the same erroneous conclusions as the Catholic Church, even some of the unBiblical ones. Christians also interpret the Bible in the same way as Catholics on a number of issues, such as on the existence of free will. Both of these facts prove that the Catholic Church is not even needed to draw Catholic conclusions, much less to actually understand the Bible. Finally, once again, it is in stark contrast to scripture, which repeatedly implicitly or explicitly claims that scripture is the sole and sufficient authority in the Christian faith. 1 John 2:27 even goes as far as to say we do not need anyone to teach us, because the Holy Spirit teaches us. Therefore, this answer is inadequate, an fails the challenge.
So again, what can the Catholic Church offer that the scriptures cannot? What does a Christian, ignoring the Catholic Church, lose? I'm not only going to offer that challenge, but I'm going to flip it. What does a Catholic lose by rejecting the doctrine of Sola Scriptura? The answer is that they lose their defence against Satan himself. One of the Catholics tried to argue that scripture is insufficient as Satan tried to tempt Jesus with scripture. He neglected to point out that Jesus fought back not with tradition, but with the scriptures. If you're a Catholic reading this, I humbly urge you to do the same. You've been lied to. You've lost your defence against Satan, and in doing so, you may lose something more: Your shot at eternal life. The Catholic Church cannot save you, and it even admits as much in its preaching of conditional security. As Cardinal John O'Connor said, "Church teaching is that I don't know, at any given moment, what my eternal future will be. I can hope, I can pray, do my very best, but I still don't know." But to my Catholic friends, I tell you that that as a Christian, you cannot only know at any given moment, but at every given moment if you have eternal life. John tells us in 1 John 5:13 that you can know that you have eternal life. Now doesn't that sound better than constantly worrying about losing your salvation? Stop relying on the works based "gospel" of the Catholic Church and instead rely on the grace of Jesus Christ. In doing so, you do not have to hope, pray or do your very best. Instead, you can put your hope in Him. You can have your prayers accepted by God. He did His very best for you, and He succeeded. I hope to see you all in Heaven.