CONCEPT
Sola Scriptura
Luther's doctrine that scripture is the supreme and self-sufficient authority, requiring no institutional mediation to be understood—the demand for disintermediation that broke a thousand years of interpretive monopoly and whose structure maps precisely onto what AI is doing to every profession that controls access to expert knowledge.
Sola scriptura—scripture alone—was
Martin Luther's most explosive doctrine, and not primarily for its theological content. What made it dangerous was its structural implication: that the believer did not need the Church as intermediary between herself and the authoritative text. The Church's interpretive monopoly was not merely a doctrine; it was an entire architecture of authority, employment, and social control. Removing the necessity of the intermediary did not merely change a theological position; it threatened the institution that ordered a substantial fraction of European society. The structure of this conflict maps with precision onto the central economic anxiety of the AI era. The medieval Church's position is now held by the professions: the layperson does not go directly to medical knowledge but to the physician who mediates it; does not go directly to the law but to the lawyer who mediates the statute. Each professional occupies the structural position of