The role the church plays in interpreting, applying, and adapting scriptural teaching is fraught with concern, at least for Protestants. The sixteenth-century Reformation was based, in a good part, on the principle that the Bible, and not the church, was the ultimate authority in matters of doctrine and practice. The Protestant Reformers contended that the church had erred from scriptural truths because human authority and tradition had been placed over Scripture. One of the ways in which this had happened was allowing the papacy to be the ultimate interpreter of biblical truth.