Scripture is truly a living and active Word and it takes a living and active God to interpret it rightly. Thankfully, the people of God made alive by the Spirit are given everything we need for life and godliness—both in the Scriptures and in the Spirit. 

Writing about Sola Scriptura in his book Biblical Authority After Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity, Kevin Vanhoozer notes that the reformation principle of Scripture Alone “implies the sufficiency of Scripture” (114). But then he asks and important question: “Sufficient for what?” What does the sufficiency of Scripture promise? And what does it mean?
To that question, he gives four answers—one negative and three positive. Here they are in abbreviated form.

Scripture is not sufficient for anything and everything that it may be called upon to do or describe.
“Scripture is sufficient for everything for which it was divinely inspired. ‘[My word] shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it’ (Isa. 55:11).”
“Scripture is materially sufficient (‘enough’) because God has communicated everything we need to know in order to learn Christ and live the Christian life: ‘all things that pertain to life and godliness’ (2 Pet. 1:3).”
Scripture is formally sufficient, which means when it comes to interpretation “Scripture interprets Scripture” so long as the interpretive community (i.e., the church) relies upon all the means of grace created by the Holy Spirit.

Understandably, these four answers need further elucidation, and in his chapter on “Scripture Alone,” Vanhoozer explains each point that I have abbreviated above. Here are a few quotes and explanations to help round a sufficient doctrine of Scripture’s sufficiency.
Four Aspects of Biblical Sufficiency
1. Sufficiency Caricatured
Introducing the topic, Vanhoozer asserts that Scripture is not sufficient for everything. He writes,
To say “Scripture is sufficient for everything—stock market investments, leaky faucets, clogged arteries—is to saddle it with unrealistic expectations, and eventually to succumb to naïve biblicism and the quagmire of pervasive interpretive pluralism.” (114)
Sadly, many have taken the Bible to address everything in creation. But this only creates more problems than it solves. Instead of overpromising what the Bible can do, we should read the Bible and learn what it says it can do.
2. Sufficiency Simpliciter 
If the Bible does not say that it is sufficient for everything, it does say what it is sufficient for—namely knowing God in Christ and how to live by faith in the promises of God.
Scripture is sufficient for everything for which it was divinely given: “[My word] shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isa. 55:11). Paul tells Timothy that Scripture is “profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). These verses help us see what sufficiency means and does not mean. The Bible is sufficient for the use that God makes of it, not for every use to which we may want it put. In John Webster’s words: “Scripture is enough. This is because Scripture is what God desires to teach” [Domain of the Word, 18]. Scripture is “enough” to learn Christ and the Christian life. (114)
Indeed, this is the simple answer to the question of what Scripture is sufficient for. However, Vanhoozer presses deeper to explain what “enough” means.
3. Material (or Doctrinal) Sufficiency
Going beyond the basic statement that Scripture is enough, Vanhoozer states,
Scripture is materially sufficient (“enough”) because God has communicated everything we need to know in order to learn Christ and live the Christian life: “all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Pet. 1:3). Article VI of the Church of England’s Thirty Nine Articles makes exactly this point: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation.” The material sufficiency of Scripture excludes any possibility of Scripture needing an external supplement in order to achieve the purpose for which it was sent. The Westminster Confession forbids adding any new content to Scripture, “whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men,” thereby echoing statements in Scripture itself, such as Revelation 22:18: “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described this book.” What God has authored is adequate for his communicative purpose: “Scripture is materially sufficient for the bearing of propositional content (the presentation of Jesus Christ as the means of salvation) and for the conveying of illocutionary force (the call or invitation to have faith in him)” (Timothy Ward, Word and Supplement, 205). (114–15)
In short, the Bible reveals everything necessary for knowing God and living before him (Coram Deo). Still, there is something else and Vanhoozer shows us that a full doctrine of Scripture must consider another kind of sufficiency—namely, one that grapples with the interpretation of Scripture, and not just its doctrinal content.
4. Formal (or Interpretive) Sufficiency
Acknowledging the difficulty of interpretation and the criticisms leveled against Protestants, especially those who ignore their confessional heritage, Vanhoozer states that material sufficiency does not “authorize its own interpretation, or to adjudicate between rival interpretations” (115). That is, affirming that Scripture contains all that is necessary for life and godliness is not the same thing as stating that all who read Scripture are sufficient to interpret correctly. We are not, and this is why many will criticize the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura.
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As a society, we should question why we’re extending social and government benefits to a group based on sexual behavior while excluding other, nonsexual unions that are more worthy. Why allow civil unions for the lesbian couple down the street but not for the widowed daughter and mother-in-law who live next door?

David French recently sparked a lively debate by addressing marriage in “Why I Changed My Mind About Law and Marriage, Again.” French, a conservative evangelical, explains his “flip, flop, and flip back again on civil marriage” (emphasis in original).
“I emphasize the word civil because my view on the religious nature of marriage has not changed,” says French. “It is a lifelong covenant between a man and a woman, sealed before God, and breakable only on the limited conditions God has outlined in his Word.”
Not surprisingly, French’s article has received considerable backlash. Dozens of articles, blog posts, and Twitter threads have pushed back against his change of heart. While some of the responses are motivated by personal dislike of French (some have said he’s not even a Christian), I think the general reaction is due to a broader frustration with evangelicals who share his viewpoint. And that group is growing larger every day.
A Gallup poll taken in May revealed that “support for legal same-sex marriage reflects steady increases among most subgroups of the population, even those who have traditionally been the most resistant to gay marriage.” One of the last remaining groups to hold the line are Americans who report they attend church weekly. But even in that group, 40 percent are in favor of such “marriages” and only 58 percent are opposed. Many of us are frustrated because we’re losing the argument even among people who share our faith and values.
The tide of public opinion is unlikely to be turned by publishing another article pointing out why French and the other 40 percent of churchgoers are wrong. Still, there’s a solution to the problem that is easily implementable and that should be acceptable to almost every Christian (and most secular Americans)—yet no one’s talking about it.
5-Legged Dog of Marriage Law
Before we get to the solution, though, we must point out why same-sex civil marriage is a problem in need of correction. The essential problem, as many people have consistently pointed out, is that there is not and can never be such as thing as same-sex “marriage.” This is true even for civil marriage. Here’s why.
As Abraham Lincoln was fond of asking, “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” “Five,” his audience would invariably answer. “No,” he’d politely respond, “the correct answer is four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.”
Like Lincoln’s associates, many of our fellow citizens—including many Christians—appear to fall for the notion that changing a definition causes a change in essence. The attempt to change the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions is a prime example. Simply calling such relationships “same-sex marriages,” many believe, will make them marriages. Such reasoning, however, is as flawed as thinking that changing tail to leg changes the function of the appendage.
Consider the change that must occur in our tail/leg example. A dog’s tail cannot perform the same functions as its leg. He can’t use his tail to run or swim or scratch an itch. In order to use the term for both parts, we must discard all qualities that make a tail different from a leg. The new meaning of leg will require that we exclude any difference in form (for example, we can no longer say that a paw can be found at the end of a leg) or function (for example, legs are not necessarily used for standing). In other words, by redefining the term tail we have not made it equivalent in form or function to a leg; we’ve merely stripped the term leg of its previous meaning and made it as generic a term as “appendage.”
The same is true with the attempts to redefine marriage. Because marriage requires the specific form of a union of man and woman (Gen. 2:24), applying the term to same-sex unions alters the very concept of what a marriage is for and what functions it takes.
Changing the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions doesn’t make it more inclusive but rather more exclusive, since it requires excluding all the functions previously believed to be essential to the institution of marriage (for example, permanence, fidelity, and sexual complementarity).
But doesn’t that fall back on a religious argument? Can’t governments determine the standard for civil marriages? No, they cannot, because marriage is both a prepolitical and prereligious institution that was instituted by God before any formal government or religious institutions were created.
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God never does a great work in the history of the Church except through a band of brothers and sisters. This is true of the Ancient Church, the Celtic Church and its powerful missions, the Reformation, the Puritans, and the Evangelical Revivals of the 18th century.
In a recent statement regarding some of the cultural turmoil in North America, fellow historian Owen Strachan made an observation about church history that I found quite surprising. He noted that “Epic stands for truth…are usually taken alone, so high is their cost.”
I found it quite surprising because my own study of church history, now stretching back to the fabulous courses I took at Wycliffe College in the 1970s under men like John Egan, Eugene Fairweather, Michael Sheehan, and then teaching full-time from 1982 to the present at a variety of seminaries and colleges, has given me a fundamentally different perspective.
It is one that I have learned inductively from church history (be it the Apostolic era with the Pauline circle, or the Cappadocian Fathers, or the Celtic Church, or the Reformers, or the Puritan brotherhood, or the Evangelical revivals of the 18th century—all of which I have studied in depth), and it is namely this:
God never does a great work in the history of the Church except through a band of brothers and sisters. This is true of the Ancient Church, the Celtic Church and its powerful missions, the Reformation, the Puritans, and the Evangelical Revivals of the 18th century.
The idea of one lone figure standing for Truth against the minions of evil and the failure of like-minded men to stand with him is the product more of a reading of church history shaped by a “High Noon” culture than the actual facts.
And in some ways to assert otherwise is to make church history a narrative of “celebrities” when the reality is better expressed in these concluding lines of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” (albeit she would have meant them quite differently):
“That things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
The “Great Man” Way of Doing History
Prof Strachan’s remark “Epic stands for truth…are usually taken alone, so high is their cost” is redolent of the “great man” way of doing history. In contrast, I am concerned to affirm that in church history and in the church there are no small people.