Douglas Campbell, author of The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul, has a helpful metric for discussing the rhetorical strategies we use to understand texts: over- and under-determination. Over-determination is where the text under consideration says something unhelpful or even contrary to what the claims based on it needs (think of how St James says "justification is not by faith alone" (2:24) and then look at the collective hand-wringing being done by searching that phrase in Google). Under-determination is where the text does not provide the necessary backing for the claims based on it. He makes a compelling argument in the book that the standard Protestant reading of St Paul and 'justification' is riddled with over- and under-determinations. The book (which is massive) is well worth a read, even if you don't end up agreeing with his conclusions. I'd like to use that metric to return to the topic of inspiration of the Scriptures, which I've written on before and will repeat some of the things I said there. (And, as always, I reserve the right to disagree with myself.)
The stereotypical argument concerning inspiration, at least as I learned it, went something like this:
A: The Bible is God's Word
B: God is Truth (or, negatively, God cannot lie)
C: Therefore, God's Word is true ("in all it speaks on" is a possible under-determination)
None of this is, for the most part, controversial (that the Lord Christ, member of the Trinity, is actually God's Word, from whom the Scriptures derive their authority, is an important point, but more is made of the difference between the two than is actually warranted). Also, none of this speaks a whit about inspiration. Inspiration is a teaching about the origin of the Scriptures, not their veracity or reliability. There may be correlations between the two topics, but they cannot, and so should not, be collapsed into one another. To do so would be to commit the genetic fallacy: the conclusion that the truthfulness of something is inherent in its origins. This particular fallacy has gotten lots of play in biblical scholarship over the years, especially in Old Testament studies with the Documentary Hypothesis; it also has a long life within the culture wars when we assume that if we have evolved from brute animals, we must be nothing more than animals (and do note that I'm not making any claims about this subject: it is beyond my ken).
It is possible, though, that even saying inspiration is a doctrine of textual origins is an over-determination. Once we clear out the texts about God's (and, consequently, His Word's and Spirit's) truthfulness, we have precious few didactic texts about inspiration itself. The main one is found, of course, in 2 Timothy 3:16: "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God..." Unfortunately, there is no parallelism, nor any explanation of the term used for inspiration, which happens to be, alas, a hapax legomenon. The term itself, θεόπνευστος, is a compound word from "God" and "breathing," so it could mean "God-breathed." Again, though, this may be problematic as compound words in all languages do not necessarily equal the sum of their parts. As this seems to be a word of Pauline origin (it is not extant in any other relevant ancient literature), it would seem best to look at how God's breath/Spirit is understood in the rest of the Scriptures. Here we find, of course, God's breath fluttering over the primordial Creation (Gen. 1:2), or the filling of Bezalel and Aholiab "in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all workmanship" (Ex. 31:3 -- the connections between this passage and that of 2 Tim. 3 should not be overlooked), or His dwelling with -- and leaving -- the judges and the kings, or the famous passage in Isaiah 61 ("The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me...to preach..."). God's Breath, then, is God's coming in power, especially in regards to the granting of words and wisdom. If we take this background back to 2 Tim. 3, we might see that the passage isn't speaking of origins, but rather how the Scriptures, bearing the Spirit of God, have power and authority: it is because they are a conduit of the divine Spirit that they can "make wise unto salvation...[be] profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness." Read like this, the passage is utterly non-controversial. It does not speak about how the Scriptures came to be (other places speak vociferously about that: "the Word of the Lord came to me..."), but about the power of the Word in the apostolic ministry.
That last clause merits some unpacking. The biggest under-determination of this text is using it divorced from its canonical context. While one of the beauties of the Reformation was its opening of the Scriptures to any literate person (and the subsequent drive for mass literacy that is only now waning in Western culture), it came at the heavy price of all Scripture being read flatly, as if all Scripture was addressed to everyone in the same way at all times, and, worse, led to Scripture being read outside of its necessary ecclesial context. An argument I heard while listening to a podcast called "Kingdom Roots," made by Scot McKnight, assumed that this text meant anyone picking up the Scriptures could utilize that power and be "trained in righteousness," etc. However, this misses the point that St Paul the Apostle is writing this epistle to St Timothy, the designated guardian of the Apostolic Deposit (2 Tim. 1:14, 3:14, etc.). For him who has "carefully followed my teaching, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, love, perseverance, etc." the power, the God-breathedness, of the Scriptures is made available to him for teaching (as a catechist), for reproof (as a pastor), for correction (again), for instruction in righteousness (note the chiasm), "that the man of God [those in St Timothy's care] may be thoroughly equipped for every good work" (3:16-17), or as St Paul put it elsewhere, "and He gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors-teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ..." (Eph. 4:11-12). What tools do these gifted by the Spirit have for this work of equipping and edifying? The God-breathed Scriptures. Along with them, though, and inseparable, is that Apostolic Deposit, that way of life learned from the Apostles, what came by mouth or by letter (2 Thess. 2:15). There is no tension here between the Scriptures and the Tradition, for both came from the same Source: the Spirit given to the Apostles by the Lord Christ. The Church, which is the dwelling place of that selfsame Spirit, is the keeper of the Deposit -- which includes the Scriptures -- and the place where they must be properly understood and applied to the life of the believers in communion.
All this to say, and the true impetus behind writing tonight, is that we need to locate the Source of the Scripture's inspiration: the Spirit working through the Church. We over-determine 2 Tim. 3:16 in an attempt to ground sola Scriptura in Scripture, creating a bizarro circular argument in a text that was never meant to bear the weight of the Chicago Declaration. What is missing in the arguments about inspiration, precisely, is the Church herself. Inerrantists will be quick, in the face of all the text critical facts, to say that the Scriptures have been preserved from all error; yet the Church, the dwelling place of the Spirit (according to those Scriptures), is untrustworthy, fallible, corrupt, etc. What the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy should make us do is to probe further our own understandings of what God is doing in history through His people, whom He has promised to indwell by His Spirit. The hard questions raised by post-evangelicals who have modified their views of Scripture based on the dilemmas and problems sola Scriptura and inerrancy (particularly) can be answered, but only as (paradoxically) we return to the Scriptures -- in their proper context, the Church -- and see what God has actually said about those Scriptures and the Church (and not just already assume our post-Reformation traditional answers).
Showing posts with label Sola Scriptura. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sola Scriptura. Show all posts
Monday, April 18, 2016
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
The Scriptures, the Church, and the Trinity
Friends, what a long, strange trip it has been.
Over at Eclectic Orthodoxy, Fr. Kimel has been reblogging a shortened series of articles on the relationship between the Scriptures as we have them and the Church. The full series starts with a fascinating and too-close-to-home salvo entitled "Unitarianism and the Bible of the Holy Trinity". In it, he responds to a few evangelical thinkers, pastors, and scholars who are traveling the road away from any semblance of historical orthodoxy to a form of 'biblical' unitarianism. Readers of this blog and close friends will see some remarkable similarities to my story, especially as it was expressed in my "Postmodern Protestant Dilemma" phase. Reading the sources Fr. Kimel has been critiquing, along with the comments on the various postings, has been a trip down (a very painful) memory lane. I've, in a certain narrative form, detailed most of the important things from that time before. I still struggle, from time to time, with holdovers from that formative decade. The strange thing to me, as I reflect on it further, is how those theological struggles effectively deconstructed my inherited Western (that is, Catholic-Protestant) understanding of God and built in its place an Eastern (that is, Orthodox) understanding via almost all the heresies of the ancient Church (as if they've ever really gone away). To me, the grace of God is evident in hindsight; I wouldn't have known it at the time, though.
To continue the strangeness, Fr. Kimel's posts have been tackling the same questions I asked (and experienced as spiritual pain), in almost the same order. One of the main ones, which I'd like to focus on here, is: is it possible to read a set of texts outside of their intended context and get their meaning? In other words, can the Scriptures be divorced from the historical ecclesial setting they were written in and for, and still lead us to Trinitarian dogma? It is a fascinating question; one that gets to the roots of lingering problems for Protestants and biblical interpretation.
One of the corollaries of sola Scriptura, as it is commonly practiced today, is that the Scriptures are a self-contained, self-interpreting set of documents. Since they are the "only infallible rule for faith and life," they must contain completely clear and authoritative teaching on all that is necessary for faith and life. (I know that this was not the original intent of the Reformation doctrine: I'm looking at my own experience with it and what I see in contemporary Protestantism.) The Church can err; their interpretation of the documents can be taken as wisdom, but not ultimately authoritative, which includes confessional standards to which individual denominations and individual believers profess some sort of allegiance. I've discussed this problem before. Without a binding, authoritative (and implicitly infallible) interpretation from an ecclesial community, it falls to the individual believer to ascertain dogma for themselves. This is key, as it opens up the problem of relativism: is there a dogma in these texts? If so, how can we sufficiently prove it for the salvation of all humans? In other words, once we determine the dogma behind the Scriptures, we must become apostles of it. One can look at the work of Frank Viola in Reimagining Church for just such a stance. One may also look at the work of Douglas Wilson and the CREC, or Mark Driscoll and the Acts 29 Network, or...etc. But, and this is a rather sticky wicket here, if the individual is the arbiter of the text's meaning, how can it be objectively judged as the authoritative and binding (that is, true or infallible) interpretation of the text?
Short answer: it can't.
At this point, even if one were to adhere to some theory of "mere Christianity" (a common core of beliefs that are non-negotiable, whether C.S. Lewis-style or "The Fundamentals"-style), there is no medium to assure and discern either accuracy of interpretation or authoritative status. One individual's reading is just as likely to be Spirit-inspired as another (especially given the demotion the Spirit often "enjoys" in evangelical circles from reality/hypostasis to emotion). In the end, there is nothing that can be done about this, which calls for a radically different sort of ecclesiology, very akin to what we see in evangelicalism as it exists today.
However, the Scriptures never assert a doctrine of self-containment or self-interpretation. In fact, "the Scriptures" itself doesn't exist in the Scriptures as understood in the modern world: what we call "the Bible" or "the Scriptures" are an abstraction. The implicit understanding is that this collection of books is (a) self-authenticating, (b) complete by its own authority and testimony, and (c) self-contextualizing. In other words, the Scriptures stand alone interpretively, without historical development or communal use. This isn't to say that a community (or set of communities) hasn't utilized the books for its "faith and life," but that the community is always under judgment for error of misappropriation (semper reformanda secundum verbum dei).
Looking at the genesis of the texts (and here I'll concentrate on the New Testament), though, we see that this was not the intention of the authors. Here's my claim: the authors of the New Testament never intended their epistles or books to have meaning outside their use in the ecclesial community started by Jesus Christ through His apostles and their legitimate successors. In other words, there is no meaning to the, say, book of Romans outside of its context in the Church. Certainly, the words and sentences can be read and understood by those trained to read texts; but all that such a reading will generate are interesting tidbits that lack any binding authority for "faith and life." Such a reading misses, for example, the link between St Paul's language of "faith" and the ecclesial sacrament of baptism. The letter itself was never intended to be excised from this context, even though it was originally addressed to a certain (set of?) congregation in a historically delimited time and place. Wherever the local Church is, there is the Catholic Church, we might say. If we desire, then, to find the "original" meaning of a biblical text, it must be read within the liturgical and ascetic life of the Church. To do otherwise is to produce, necessarily, eisegesis.
Another example might be the Gospels themselves: there are lots of scholarly theories about what they mean, which of the Lord Christ's sayings are "authentic," and what communities they were written for. However, there is no evidence that the books ever circulated independently in disconnected communities (this isn't to say that they definitely never did, as one cannot prove an argument from silence): rather, the first mentions of them as authoritative texts come from, say, St Irenaeus who always speaks of them as a diverse unity. What point, then, is there to trying to find their individual genesis? Whether or not they ever circulated independently, they were not intended to stay that way (and very quickly left such a situation). Any attempt to "get behind" the texts to figure out the "Johannine community" (for example) is an eisegetical red herring.
What, then, does the ecclesial context look like? Here we encounter a question that I've only recently thought to ask: what did the Apostles hand on to the communities they established and nurtured? I think I had always assumed that they gave them a verbal form of the Scriptures, maybe a copy of the Old Testament (and some not-yet-canonized New Testament works), and left it at that. However, this assumption is riddled with problems: did they expect those who just came out of paganism, full of idolatry and immorality, to puzzle together what worship was and what it was for? (I think, although I cannot prove this, that here is the origin of the various theories that put early Christian "innovations" such as invocation of the saints and iconography in the hands of the 'unwashed masses' who foisted them upon powerless and unsuspecting bishops. These same pusillanimous bishops, of course, are they ones who used their power welded to Constantinian statecraft to force Trinitarian tritheism on the aforementioned pure unitarian 'unwashed masses.') It seems clear, not only from the New Testament (particularly the necessarily laconic Pastoral Epistles) but also early Church history, that the Apostles were very thorough in passing on liturgies, ascetic practices, institutional forms, and dogmatic assumptions necessary for rightly reading and applying the inspired texts of Holy Writ. In other words, "Holy Tradition" is just as old -- and necessary -- as the documents of the Church. Tertullian and St Irenaeus, for example, received the (amazingly consistent, even with their variations) regula fidei from those who went before them as the necessary and unquestionable assumptions that guided biblical interpretation. Those regula were, by all accounts, Trinitarian in form, even if not as fleshed out as they would need to become by the Arian, Eunomian, Pneumatomachian, Nestorian, Monophysite, Monothelite, Monoenergite, and other controversies that threatened to misinterpret and therefore damage the Apostolic Deposit.
What about the irregularities we see in these early centuries, though? The whole of the Church Catholic did not, for example, use the so-called St John Chrysostom liturgy. This is to be expected. It only becomes a problem if we take the ecclesial context out of its own context: the action and work of the Holy Spirit within the community. Could the liturgy develop in different ways in different historical and geographical contexts, yet still proclaim the same Faith? Yes, as long as the same Spirit guided the developments. Any theory that posits some some of "fall" of the Church needs to commit a terrible heresy: the Holy Spirit abandoned, wholesale, the Church sometime after the death of the Apostles. In my own personal journey, this was the question that started to break up my own arrogance at interpreting the Scriptures outside the Pneumatic and ecclesial contexts in which their home is: if the Spirit had so abandoned the communities, why was my interpretation privileged? Could the Spirit have just as easily (if not more easily, given my historical and cultural distant from the original Apostolate) have abandoned me? Was it Descartes' proposed demon whispering my interpretive work in my ears?
This isn't to say, in the aftermath and my salvation via St Irenaeus and St Antony of Egypt, that things have gotten particularly easier. The questions of where (that is, in what community) the Spirit resides, which form of the text is authoritative, and so on continue to dog me. But the air has been sufficiently cleared from trying to read the Scriptures as a stand-alone document. Conceived as such, they are a wax-nose: the Trinity won't be found in them because, and this is vital, the Trinity is the assumption needed to make sense of the texts. Salvation is, in the end, sharing the Life of God (called "the Kingdom" and "eternal life"), so it only stands to reason that participating in that Life is necessary for the right use and understanding of the texts gifted to us by that very same God: Father, Son, and Spirit.
Over at Eclectic Orthodoxy, Fr. Kimel has been reblogging a shortened series of articles on the relationship between the Scriptures as we have them and the Church. The full series starts with a fascinating and too-close-to-home salvo entitled "Unitarianism and the Bible of the Holy Trinity". In it, he responds to a few evangelical thinkers, pastors, and scholars who are traveling the road away from any semblance of historical orthodoxy to a form of 'biblical' unitarianism. Readers of this blog and close friends will see some remarkable similarities to my story, especially as it was expressed in my "Postmodern Protestant Dilemma" phase. Reading the sources Fr. Kimel has been critiquing, along with the comments on the various postings, has been a trip down (a very painful) memory lane. I've, in a certain narrative form, detailed most of the important things from that time before. I still struggle, from time to time, with holdovers from that formative decade. The strange thing to me, as I reflect on it further, is how those theological struggles effectively deconstructed my inherited Western (that is, Catholic-Protestant) understanding of God and built in its place an Eastern (that is, Orthodox) understanding via almost all the heresies of the ancient Church (as if they've ever really gone away). To me, the grace of God is evident in hindsight; I wouldn't have known it at the time, though.
To continue the strangeness, Fr. Kimel's posts have been tackling the same questions I asked (and experienced as spiritual pain), in almost the same order. One of the main ones, which I'd like to focus on here, is: is it possible to read a set of texts outside of their intended context and get their meaning? In other words, can the Scriptures be divorced from the historical ecclesial setting they were written in and for, and still lead us to Trinitarian dogma? It is a fascinating question; one that gets to the roots of lingering problems for Protestants and biblical interpretation.
One of the corollaries of sola Scriptura, as it is commonly practiced today, is that the Scriptures are a self-contained, self-interpreting set of documents. Since they are the "only infallible rule for faith and life," they must contain completely clear and authoritative teaching on all that is necessary for faith and life. (I know that this was not the original intent of the Reformation doctrine: I'm looking at my own experience with it and what I see in contemporary Protestantism.) The Church can err; their interpretation of the documents can be taken as wisdom, but not ultimately authoritative, which includes confessional standards to which individual denominations and individual believers profess some sort of allegiance. I've discussed this problem before. Without a binding, authoritative (and implicitly infallible) interpretation from an ecclesial community, it falls to the individual believer to ascertain dogma for themselves. This is key, as it opens up the problem of relativism: is there a dogma in these texts? If so, how can we sufficiently prove it for the salvation of all humans? In other words, once we determine the dogma behind the Scriptures, we must become apostles of it. One can look at the work of Frank Viola in Reimagining Church for just such a stance. One may also look at the work of Douglas Wilson and the CREC, or Mark Driscoll and the Acts 29 Network, or...etc. But, and this is a rather sticky wicket here, if the individual is the arbiter of the text's meaning, how can it be objectively judged as the authoritative and binding (that is, true or infallible) interpretation of the text?
Short answer: it can't.
At this point, even if one were to adhere to some theory of "mere Christianity" (a common core of beliefs that are non-negotiable, whether C.S. Lewis-style or "The Fundamentals"-style), there is no medium to assure and discern either accuracy of interpretation or authoritative status. One individual's reading is just as likely to be Spirit-inspired as another (especially given the demotion the Spirit often "enjoys" in evangelical circles from reality/hypostasis to emotion). In the end, there is nothing that can be done about this, which calls for a radically different sort of ecclesiology, very akin to what we see in evangelicalism as it exists today.
However, the Scriptures never assert a doctrine of self-containment or self-interpretation. In fact, "the Scriptures" itself doesn't exist in the Scriptures as understood in the modern world: what we call "the Bible" or "the Scriptures" are an abstraction. The implicit understanding is that this collection of books is (a) self-authenticating, (b) complete by its own authority and testimony, and (c) self-contextualizing. In other words, the Scriptures stand alone interpretively, without historical development or communal use. This isn't to say that a community (or set of communities) hasn't utilized the books for its "faith and life," but that the community is always under judgment for error of misappropriation (semper reformanda secundum verbum dei).
Looking at the genesis of the texts (and here I'll concentrate on the New Testament), though, we see that this was not the intention of the authors. Here's my claim: the authors of the New Testament never intended their epistles or books to have meaning outside their use in the ecclesial community started by Jesus Christ through His apostles and their legitimate successors. In other words, there is no meaning to the, say, book of Romans outside of its context in the Church. Certainly, the words and sentences can be read and understood by those trained to read texts; but all that such a reading will generate are interesting tidbits that lack any binding authority for "faith and life." Such a reading misses, for example, the link between St Paul's language of "faith" and the ecclesial sacrament of baptism. The letter itself was never intended to be excised from this context, even though it was originally addressed to a certain (set of?) congregation in a historically delimited time and place. Wherever the local Church is, there is the Catholic Church, we might say. If we desire, then, to find the "original" meaning of a biblical text, it must be read within the liturgical and ascetic life of the Church. To do otherwise is to produce, necessarily, eisegesis.
Another example might be the Gospels themselves: there are lots of scholarly theories about what they mean, which of the Lord Christ's sayings are "authentic," and what communities they were written for. However, there is no evidence that the books ever circulated independently in disconnected communities (this isn't to say that they definitely never did, as one cannot prove an argument from silence): rather, the first mentions of them as authoritative texts come from, say, St Irenaeus who always speaks of them as a diverse unity. What point, then, is there to trying to find their individual genesis? Whether or not they ever circulated independently, they were not intended to stay that way (and very quickly left such a situation). Any attempt to "get behind" the texts to figure out the "Johannine community" (for example) is an eisegetical red herring.
What, then, does the ecclesial context look like? Here we encounter a question that I've only recently thought to ask: what did the Apostles hand on to the communities they established and nurtured? I think I had always assumed that they gave them a verbal form of the Scriptures, maybe a copy of the Old Testament (and some not-yet-canonized New Testament works), and left it at that. However, this assumption is riddled with problems: did they expect those who just came out of paganism, full of idolatry and immorality, to puzzle together what worship was and what it was for? (I think, although I cannot prove this, that here is the origin of the various theories that put early Christian "innovations" such as invocation of the saints and iconography in the hands of the 'unwashed masses' who foisted them upon powerless and unsuspecting bishops. These same pusillanimous bishops, of course, are they ones who used their power welded to Constantinian statecraft to force Trinitarian tritheism on the aforementioned pure unitarian 'unwashed masses.') It seems clear, not only from the New Testament (particularly the necessarily laconic Pastoral Epistles) but also early Church history, that the Apostles were very thorough in passing on liturgies, ascetic practices, institutional forms, and dogmatic assumptions necessary for rightly reading and applying the inspired texts of Holy Writ. In other words, "Holy Tradition" is just as old -- and necessary -- as the documents of the Church. Tertullian and St Irenaeus, for example, received the (amazingly consistent, even with their variations) regula fidei from those who went before them as the necessary and unquestionable assumptions that guided biblical interpretation. Those regula were, by all accounts, Trinitarian in form, even if not as fleshed out as they would need to become by the Arian, Eunomian, Pneumatomachian, Nestorian, Monophysite, Monothelite, Monoenergite, and other controversies that threatened to misinterpret and therefore damage the Apostolic Deposit.
What about the irregularities we see in these early centuries, though? The whole of the Church Catholic did not, for example, use the so-called St John Chrysostom liturgy. This is to be expected. It only becomes a problem if we take the ecclesial context out of its own context: the action and work of the Holy Spirit within the community. Could the liturgy develop in different ways in different historical and geographical contexts, yet still proclaim the same Faith? Yes, as long as the same Spirit guided the developments. Any theory that posits some some of "fall" of the Church needs to commit a terrible heresy: the Holy Spirit abandoned, wholesale, the Church sometime after the death of the Apostles. In my own personal journey, this was the question that started to break up my own arrogance at interpreting the Scriptures outside the Pneumatic and ecclesial contexts in which their home is: if the Spirit had so abandoned the communities, why was my interpretation privileged? Could the Spirit have just as easily (if not more easily, given my historical and cultural distant from the original Apostolate) have abandoned me? Was it Descartes' proposed demon whispering my interpretive work in my ears?
This isn't to say, in the aftermath and my salvation via St Irenaeus and St Antony of Egypt, that things have gotten particularly easier. The questions of where (that is, in what community) the Spirit resides, which form of the text is authoritative, and so on continue to dog me. But the air has been sufficiently cleared from trying to read the Scriptures as a stand-alone document. Conceived as such, they are a wax-nose: the Trinity won't be found in them because, and this is vital, the Trinity is the assumption needed to make sense of the texts. Salvation is, in the end, sharing the Life of God (called "the Kingdom" and "eternal life"), so it only stands to reason that participating in that Life is necessary for the right use and understanding of the texts gifted to us by that very same God: Father, Son, and Spirit.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
The Limits of Sola Scriptura
There is a very common objection, from Roman Catholics and Orthodox, to the doctrine of sola Scriptura: it makes each individual believer the official -- and potentially infallible -- interpreter of Scripture. For some Protestants, of course, this is true. It was true in my case, at any rate. I remember a student, who is now a relatively well-known Lutheran apologist, talking to me once about my views on justification. He asked how I could hold a certain position, since it didn't seem to jibe with the Westminster Confession. My response, which was the same I gave my pastor at the time, was that I didn't particularly care if my interpretation lined up with the WCF, as that was a human produced document of only relative authority. Rather, all I cared was whether or not my understanding agreed with Scripture. What I didn't realize at the time was that I had made my own reason, and investigative powers, the benchmark of interpretation. I was not necessarily any closer to what Scripture actually meant, but I was very close to what I meant. This is not to say that my baseline critique wasn't valid, it just didn't go far enough.
Let me explain.
There is no reason to believe that my researches in history, philosophy, textual transmission, or even theology would lead me to a particularly proper interpretation of Scripture. Using the historical-grammatical interpretive method (and this could be applied to most other "critical" methods) actually leads us into a quagmire: if we cannot understand the Scriptures without detailed analysis of the history and language behind them, then we will never truly understand the Scriptures. Both fields, linguistics and archaeology, are fraught with human interpretive foibles. Not to mention that those communities who, historically speaking, have not had access to decent scholarship are therefore put in an unenviable position: they may believe, but they cannot fully or truly believe. They are relegated to an impoverished state in the Church. (This is also a problem with holding that inspiration stops with the autographa, or original documents from the Apostles and Prophets -- they don't exist anymore, so any copy of the Scriptures is potentially riddled with errors; how can we confidently know what to believe, especially with scholars like Bart Ehrman telling us that the communities in charge of the manuscripts have emended them to suit their particular ideological needs?) Not only this, but the sort of biblical interpretation as rational, scholastic endeavor means that those unable to engage on that level (children, the mentally handicapped, the uneducated) cannot fully benefit from the teaching of the Word of God.
To get around some of these individualist difficulties, there is the option to be a confessionalist: that is, the baseline interpretation of Scripture, at least theologically, is found in the WCF or the Three Forms of Unity, etc. (There still is the option for grammatical-historical work here, of course; but at least it has boundaries around what is and isn't possible to ascertain from the texts themselves). This does lead right into debates about how to interpret these documents and the various positions of "strict" v. "moderate" subscriptionism. Supra- or infra-? Paedo- or credo-? And so on. However, this isn't the problem that I had/have with the confessions. That lies in the actual authority of them. The reason my denomination holds the Confession in high regard is due to the belief that they are an accurate interpretation and application of Scripture. But, who gets to decide that? The authority of any confession becomes, quickly, circular. "We believe the Confession to be adequately interpreting of Scripture; why do we believe this? Because Scripture rightly interpreted produces the Confession." This is, of course, a gross over-simplification of the issue; but the point remains. As I've argued before, there is no "plain, clear, obvious" reading of Scripture. Each reading arises out of a certain theology, out of a regula fidei that is necessarily foreign to the Scriptures themselves (in other words, there is no such thing as solo Scriptura). The authority of the Confession, then, is a presupposition that cannot be adequately verified: it is an authority because it is an authority. It reminds me, rather, of the Anarcho-Syndicalism scene in Monty Python's The Quest for the Holy Grail.
Both ways of engaging in sola Scriptura, the individual, academic route and the confessionalist route, both fail to provide an adequate authoritative base. Both, in the end, must succumb to a form of fideism: we believe this to be the interpretation of the Scriptures because this is what we believe. Maybe, in the end, this is where, epistemologically speaking, we must end up. I hope not.
Again, the question becomes: where is the Spirit? If there is any theme that runs through my thinking, it is this. If we want to properly interpret the Scriptures, that is, if we want to read them towards the goal of salvation, then we must read them with and in the Spirit. This assumes, though, that the Spirit is an actual reality (Gr: hypostasis) and not just a cipher for an emotional state. We cannot say that we have the Spirit, and so are interpreting Scripture rightly, based on how we feel or on the presence of ostensible charismata, as both of those things can be engineered or manipulated (not just by preachers, but by our non-corporeal enemies). How do we know who has the Spirit, then?
Let me explain.
There is no reason to believe that my researches in history, philosophy, textual transmission, or even theology would lead me to a particularly proper interpretation of Scripture. Using the historical-grammatical interpretive method (and this could be applied to most other "critical" methods) actually leads us into a quagmire: if we cannot understand the Scriptures without detailed analysis of the history and language behind them, then we will never truly understand the Scriptures. Both fields, linguistics and archaeology, are fraught with human interpretive foibles. Not to mention that those communities who, historically speaking, have not had access to decent scholarship are therefore put in an unenviable position: they may believe, but they cannot fully or truly believe. They are relegated to an impoverished state in the Church. (This is also a problem with holding that inspiration stops with the autographa, or original documents from the Apostles and Prophets -- they don't exist anymore, so any copy of the Scriptures is potentially riddled with errors; how can we confidently know what to believe, especially with scholars like Bart Ehrman telling us that the communities in charge of the manuscripts have emended them to suit their particular ideological needs?) Not only this, but the sort of biblical interpretation as rational, scholastic endeavor means that those unable to engage on that level (children, the mentally handicapped, the uneducated) cannot fully benefit from the teaching of the Word of God.
To get around some of these individualist difficulties, there is the option to be a confessionalist: that is, the baseline interpretation of Scripture, at least theologically, is found in the WCF or the Three Forms of Unity, etc. (There still is the option for grammatical-historical work here, of course; but at least it has boundaries around what is and isn't possible to ascertain from the texts themselves). This does lead right into debates about how to interpret these documents and the various positions of "strict" v. "moderate" subscriptionism. Supra- or infra-? Paedo- or credo-? And so on. However, this isn't the problem that I had/have with the confessions. That lies in the actual authority of them. The reason my denomination holds the Confession in high regard is due to the belief that they are an accurate interpretation and application of Scripture. But, who gets to decide that? The authority of any confession becomes, quickly, circular. "We believe the Confession to be adequately interpreting of Scripture; why do we believe this? Because Scripture rightly interpreted produces the Confession." This is, of course, a gross over-simplification of the issue; but the point remains. As I've argued before, there is no "plain, clear, obvious" reading of Scripture. Each reading arises out of a certain theology, out of a regula fidei that is necessarily foreign to the Scriptures themselves (in other words, there is no such thing as solo Scriptura). The authority of the Confession, then, is a presupposition that cannot be adequately verified: it is an authority because it is an authority. It reminds me, rather, of the Anarcho-Syndicalism scene in Monty Python's The Quest for the Holy Grail.
Both ways of engaging in sola Scriptura, the individual, academic route and the confessionalist route, both fail to provide an adequate authoritative base. Both, in the end, must succumb to a form of fideism: we believe this to be the interpretation of the Scriptures because this is what we believe. Maybe, in the end, this is where, epistemologically speaking, we must end up. I hope not.
Again, the question becomes: where is the Spirit? If there is any theme that runs through my thinking, it is this. If we want to properly interpret the Scriptures, that is, if we want to read them towards the goal of salvation, then we must read them with and in the Spirit. This assumes, though, that the Spirit is an actual reality (Gr: hypostasis) and not just a cipher for an emotional state. We cannot say that we have the Spirit, and so are interpreting Scripture rightly, based on how we feel or on the presence of ostensible charismata, as both of those things can be engineered or manipulated (not just by preachers, but by our non-corporeal enemies). How do we know who has the Spirit, then?
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