Allen and Swain on solo Scriptura as "a bastard child nursed at the breast of modern rationalism and individualism"

Last week, I finished reading Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain’s Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation (Baker Academic, 2015). I was struck by this quote on the distinction between sola Scriptura and solo Scriptura:

Indeed, sola Scriptura has served for some moderns as a banner for private judgement and against catholicity. In so doing, however, churches and Christians have turned from sola Scriptura to solo Scriptura, a bastard child nursed at the breast of modern rationalism and individualism. Even the Reformational doctrine of perspicuity has been transformed in much popular Christianity and some scholarly reflection as well to function as the theological equivalent of philosophical objectivity, namely, the belief that any honest observer can, by use of appropriate measures, always gain the appropriate interpretation of a Biblical text. Yet this is a far cry from the confession of Scripture’s clarity in the early Reformed movement or even in its expression in the post-Reformation dogmatics of the Reformed churches. On top of this type of mutation, we regularly encounter uses of the doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” that ignore or minimize the role of church officers as well as the principle of sola Scriptura to affirm a lived practice of “no creed but the Bible.” Right or not, then, many people embrace sola Scriptura, thinking that they are embracing individualism, anti-traditionalism, and/or rationalism. Similarly, right or wrong, many critique sola Scriptura as one or more of these three things (85).

JTR