Dr. Keith Mathison (of Ligonier Ministries/Reformation Bible College, etc.) wrote "The Shape of Sola Scriptura" back in 2001. In it, he exposes the errors not only of Rome and Orthodoxy, but also of Evangelicalism and modern Reformed with its false doctrine of solo (not sola) scriptura. He shows how this SOLO scriptura is not the position of the actual Reformers (who held to SOLA Scriptura and can trace that doctrine back to the early church fathers and of course to Scripture itself) of the 15th and 16th centuries and is really a post-Enlightenment relativism and man-made tradition.
On the one hand, this seems obvious to me and those I talk to in the Reformed world. But then again, I was blessed to go to Reformation Bible College, I took the time to listen to R.C. Sproul's teaching series, I have done some reading on this, and I largely avoided the errors and deviations of Evangelical and even many Reformed seminaries today. Mathison himself notes that this was the situation way back in 2001 (that is 25 years ago believe it or not!), namely, that Evangelicals and many who are Reformed had already largely abandoned sola scriptura for SOLO scriptura.
It seems evident that we need as Protestants and Reformed in the 21st century to admit that our modern Evangelical and Reformed seminaries are largely broken (on a number of levels) and many have descended into SOLO scriptura, reducing the creeds and councils of the early church to something so unimportant that it carries little more weight in terms of establishing and delineating essential doctrine/truth of the Christian faith than your pastor's sermon or your own private reflections on Scripture. This is the sad reality that we cannot ignore, and we can easily do this without making the opposite error of Rome and Orthodoxy, which claims that there are unwritten apostolic traditions that are revelatory and that various ecumenical councils had the quality of infallibility, or that the Pope himself is infallible under certain conditions, such that there is allegedly an infallible interpretation of the infallible Scriptures deposited within the Church.
We also need to have some humility in the Reformed world. We are small, we are feminized, we are not even following and/or are embarrassed by what those who wrote our confessions and catechisms actually believed and taught when it comes to male and female, what constitutes a nation and its native people versus foreigners, etc. In short, many Reformed denominations are apostatizing. Pretending otherwise when we are so clearly naked and wrong on so many things today will only encourage men to leave the Reformed faith for Rome or Orthodoxy, and when they see the grass isn't necessarily greener there either, they may apostatize altogether themselves. Evangelicalism in general today is even worse, if possible, than much of the Reformed world.
None of this is to say that Rome or Orthodoxy has it all put together today, or that all their boastful claims are true. They are not. But they do have massive openings to break through and do not even need a battering ram to break in to take many Christians into their communities. The walls are already falling and some are happy to escape before the ceiling falls down on their head.
I am probably going to begin referring to myself as "historically Reformed" or perhaps "old Reformed" in certain contexts, to differentiate myself not only from the modern Reformed which is a sham, but also from the so-called "confessionally Reformed" who have hollowed out the Reformed confessions in a way similar to how many complementarians have hollowed out the biblical teaching (and historic church tradition/interpretation of Scripture and nature traced through the early church fathers and through the 18th century at least) of male and female, the creation order, the headship of the man, the submission of the wife, and so on. Thinning or hollowing out the Westminster Standards or Three Forms of Unity is to sink beneath confessionalism.
But since that word is currently captured, more must be said to differentiate. So for now, Historic Reformed or Old Reformed it is.
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