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It's no secret that the Catholic Church unequivocally rejects these two doctrines as dangerous to the Christian soul and to the Church at large. The Catholic Church can appreciate what these two doctrines try to protect. "Faith alone" attempts to preserve the radically gracious nature of the Gospel, and this intention should be commended. "Scripture alone" seeks to protect the doctrine of Divine Revelation and protect the Church from the erroneous doctrines of men. Again, good intentions. The Catholic theologian Louis Bouyer discussed the "good intentions, bad doctrines" of the Reformation at length in his The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism - a book I highly recommend to anyone interested in the Reformation debate. Bouyer shows that the Protestant Reformers were speaking out against abuses, but unfortunately employed the nominalistic worldview available to them. There were not equiped to handle the nuances and made conclusions that ultimately undercut their project.

If this one-two punch of the Reformation (sola fide and sola scriptura) is so key, why doesn't the Bible ever articulate these two doctrines? The words "faith" and "alone" only appear together once and that is in James 2:24 - "You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone." Christ never proclaims the doctrine of justification by faith alone. St Paul speaks of the importance of justifying faith, but his just condemnation of "works" is always the "works of the law" - by which Paul means the "works of the Mosaic Torah," a reference to circumcision, the lunar calendar of Israel, etc. If you've read the New Testament, you know that Christ and His Apostles did not once articulate "justification by faith alone." It derives from Luther's insertion of the word "alone" into his translation of Romans 3:28.

"Scripture alone" is self-refuting, because it too is not found in Scripture. There are some who will immediately want to quote both 2 Tim 3:116-17 and 2...