Well it seemed like we were doing the speaking past each other thing and didn't won't to rock the boat.
Anyway, I think that you hit the nail on the head for why Sacred Tradition is so important. It provides the parameters by which one should remain, when reading Scripture in the Spiritual sense.
If I remember correctly one of the arguments for Sola Scriptura was that Scripture was so straight forward, you really didn't need a Church to interpret it for you. One can do that for himself. Well we all know that isn't the case now.
Yeah, I think that particular (and popular) understanding of Sola Scriptura is more the Reformed position, and appears within Lutheranism as one view among many.
My understanding of Luther's own view is that Scripture is not the sole source for all Christian belief and practice, but is rather the sole
final court of appeal. He is specifically protesting one particular understanding (Jean Gerson's understanding, and it was his account that largely shaped the wording at Trent) of the relationship between Scripture and Holy Tradition in the Catholic Church: that Scripture and Tradition are two complementary but independent streams of revelation, which can both therefore serve as final courts of appeal.
When Luther says Scripture alone, therefore, he not only doesn't exclude tradition from consideration, he doesn't even exclude tradition as authoritative. He means that Scripture alone is the final recourse when evaluating the worth of later traditions.
This still brings up the question of private interpretation. But I think Luther would generally look not to private individual interpretation but to public interpretation of the international community of expert scholars. It's helpful to remember that almost every Renaissance humanist
younger than Luther joined in the Reformation, and there was a fairly strong belief at the time that expert scholarly opinion was on the side of the Reformation. Luther's view is not private interpretation of individuals vs. the ecclesiasical interpretation of traditional authorities, but the public interpretation of the international scholarly community vs. (and I apologize for this terminology, but I think it helps get the point across) the private interpretations of the church's uneducated nobility. Scholar-popes like Benedict XVI weren't even on Luther's radar.
Of course, I think one reason why Luther rejects the whole idea of Tradition as a final court of appeal is because he firmly believed that the only genuinely ancient, first-century apostolic tradition we have access to is the New Testament itself. The New Testament itself is the apostolic deposit of tradition that is handed over to each generation. What he would have done with serious attempts to use scholarly methods to discover genuine apostolic traditions- like Dom Gregory Dix attempted to do with the liturgy- or with textual discoveries like the Didache, I don't know. And whether he ever really dealt with the antenicene fathers, I don't know, either; mostly I think the church fathers appealed to his day were the great fourth and fifth centuries eastern fathers of the apostolic councils and the three great western fathers. I'm inclined to give a bit more credence than some Lutherans to all of those academic attempts to understanding Scripture in light of early developments of tradition and to search for genuine first century Christian practices and beliefs. And, of course, I genuinely appreciate the whole history of the development of doctrine and the evolution of tradition, and so long as it isn't the final court of appeal, I think that process needs to be taken into account. I wouldn't have my degree in the history of theology if I didn't.
