Excerpt from Why Sola Scriptura Doesn’t Work

Saint Augustine describes the type of person fit for the proper study and understanding of scripture on Christian doctrine. Fr. Whiteford summarizes for us in this helpful tract saying that such a person

One: Loves God with his whole heart and is empty of pride.
Two: Is motivated to seek the knowledge of God’s will by faith and reverence rather than pride or greed.
Three: Has a heart subdued by piety, a purified mind dead to the world, and neither fears nor seeks to please men.
Four: Seeks nothing but knowledge of, and union with Christ.
Five: Hungers and thirsts after righteousness, and
Six: Is diligently engaged in works of mercy and love.

Absent from this description in Saint Augustine is the kind of PhD a person has acquired, the university that granted it, or a mastery of the finer points of ancient near-Eastern history. While all these things are great in their own right, they neither guarantee nor even suggest that a person with that sort of experience is equipped to understand the scriptures as part of Holy Tradition. Without rejecting scholarship we must be careful to balance scholarship with the necessary holiness, piety and mystical union with Christ which can only take place in His body, the Apostolic and Catholic Church of the interpreter.
If we truly believe that the scriptures are divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit then their right understanding can only be the result of theosis or deification. If our salvation is an acquisition of the Holy Spirit, as Saint Seraphim of Sarov says, then with that acquisition comes the mind of God, a mind that is attuned to the breath of the Spirit as he breathes through the life of the Church.
The Church is not some other competing academic institution alongside seminaries and universities. Those led astray by the academy can be tempted to subvert tradition for the sake of, let’s say, academic merit-badges. But rather than pitting the Church against the scholarly community, we must learn to appreciate both in their proper context, reminding ourselves that the qualities of a true interpreter of Divine Revelation are more related to holiness than they are to academic credentials. If a scholar’s primary goal is to blaze new trails, be controversial or directly subvert Holy Tradition, they are not seeking the mind of Christ.
The Church is the very body of Christ as 1 Corinthians 12-27 says. If it is the fullness or the pleroma of God as it says in Ephesians 1:23, and as Paul writes in 1 Timothy 3:15, it is the pillar and ground (or foundation) of truth.
It is only in the life of that mystical, theanthropic, or divine human communion, that a person can ever hope to acquire this mind, and to both read and understand the scriptures rightly as the precious summit and anchor of God’s revelation to His people.


Source:

full transcript and audio
http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/commentaries/why_sola_scriptura_doesnt_work