As a side effect, however, each individual must shoulder the burden of testing everything against Scripture and deciding for himself the true content of the Christian religion. This leads to a situation of inevitable, unresolvable disunity which Martin Luther himself remarked upon in his letter to Antwerp, saying:
“There are nowadays almost as many sects and creeds as there are heads.”One common retort to this Catholic critique goes like this:
“Ya’ll point to the disunity in the Protestant world as proof that Sola Scriptura failed and the Protestant experiment is a bust. But you ignore the disorder in your own house.
In the Catholic world here are progressive parishes and conservative ones. What good is the Pope and Bishops if you never know what you’re going to get when walking into a parish. If they’re supposed to be the answer to Protestant disunity, then it would seem the Catholic way isn’t working either.”How do we respond to this?
