Whose Bible is It?

As a matter of historical fact (and therefore of theological accuracy), the Christian Scriptura has never been sola. When the Christian movement began it had the Tanakh (in most cases the Septuagint) as its Scriptura and, alongside it, the primitive proclamation of Jesus as its fulfillment. Then, by the time this proclamation had itself been written down and fleshed out into the New Testament Scriptura, the church also had the creeds and the liturgy, on the basis of which it decided what the New Testament, and behind it the Tanakh, meant for Christian life and faith. The very conflict over the biblical canon between the Protestant Reformers and the Council of Trent made it clear that even in a doctrine of sola Scriptura the authority of the Bible did not authenticate itself automatically (which would have required some kind of doctrine of repeated inspiration in each generation of the history of the church) but depended on its recognition by tradition and by the church for acceptance. Another aspect of the divine irony that we have seen repeatedly in the history of the use of the Bible within both Judaism and Christianity is that the Bible being used as a weapon against church and tradition had itself come from the arsenal of the church and had been persevered and protected by the tradition. p. 180