Denouncing prescribed prayer is a form of self exhaltation

The best thing, where it is possible, is to keep the patient from the serious intention of praying altogether. When the patient is an adult recently reconverted to the Enemy’s party, like your man, this is best done by encouraging him to remember, or to think he remembers, the parrot-like nature of his prayers in childhood. In reaction against that, he may be persuaded to aim at something entirely spontaneous, inward, informal, and unregularised; and what this will actually mean to a beginner will be an effort to produce in himself a vaguley devotional mood in which real concentration of will and intelligence have no part. One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray “with moving lips and bended knees” but merely “composed his spirit to love” and indulged “a sense of supplication.” That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the Enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time. At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.

C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters

Luther appeals to the long held Catholic tradition of the sacraments as an interpretive guide to the real presence

a. Moreover, this article is no doctrine or fixture (auff satz) dreamt up by men apart from Scripture, but is clearly established and founded in the Gospel through luminous, pure, undoubted words of Christ, and has been unanimously believed and held in all the world from the outset of the Christian church to this hour, as is proved by the books and writings of the dear Fathers of both Greek and Latin language and also by daily custom and the work of experience to this hour. This testimony of the entire holy Christian church (assuming we had no more than it) should alone suffice to attach us to this article and to move us neither to hear nor to tolerate any factious spirit on this matter. For it is a perilous and dreadful thing to hear or believe anything against the unanimous testimony, belief, and doctrine of the entire holy Christian church.

b. It would be a very dangerous to conclude that for so many hundreds of years the Church across all of Christendom did not have the right understanding of the sacrament.

Martin Luther
a. Letter to Duke Albrecht of Prussia, 1532
b. Opinion of 17 December 1534

The unraveling onion of the Reformation criticism of tradition

Like many of the Protestant critics who followed him, Semler could claim to be following in the footsteps of Luther and the Reformation, and to be doing so with greater consistency than the political situation of the 16th century had permitted the first Protestant reformers themselves to do. The same kind of historical–critical scrutiny to which Luther and his fellow reformers had subjected to cherished traditions and doctrines of the medieval church, such as the claims of the Papacy or even the sacramental system, could and should be rolled back to the very first centuries of the history of the church. Even the first century, revered as “apostolic,” must not be beyond the reach of historical criticism.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Canon and the Critics

The irony of pitting the Bible against the Church

Another aspect of the divine irony that we have seen repeatedly in the history of the use of the Bible within both Judaism and Christianity is that the Bible being used as a weapon against church and tradition had itself come from the arsenal of the church and had been preserved and protected by the tradition.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Bible Only

The Bible is not self authenticating

The very conflict over the biblical canon between the Protestant Reformers and the Council of Trent made it clear that even in a doctrine of sola Scriptura the authority of the Bible did not authenticate itself automatically (which would have required some kind of doctrine of repeated inspiration in each generation of the history of the church) but depended on recognition by tradition and by the church for acceptance.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Bible Only

Progress is gradual and always builds off of a foundation

The dichotomy between tradition and insight breaks down under the weight of history itself. A “leap of progress” is not a standing broad jump, which begins at the line of where we are now; it is a running broad jump through where we have been to where we go next.

…The growth of insight — in science, in the arts, in philosophy, in theology— has not come through progressively sloughing off more and more of tradition, as though insight would be purest and deepest when it has finally freed itself of the dead past. It simply has not worked that way in the history of tradition and it does not work that way now.

Jaroslav Pelikan
The Vindication of Tradition

The nature of the Christian to the Church is that of a child to a parent

We do well to recognize as infantile an attitude toward our parents that regards them as all wise or all powerful and that is blind to their human foibles. But we must recognize no less that it is adolescent, once we have discovered those foibles, to deny our parents the respect and reverence that is their due for having been, under God, the means through which has come the only life we have.

Jaroslav Pelikan
The Vindication of Tradition