I belatedly return to the discussion I began two blogs ago concerning biblical interpretation. This will be “Part 2” of a three-part blog, which attempts to give some clue as to “Who has the authority to say, ‘The Bible says…’?”.
In “Part 1”, I ended a basic review of the early stages of the compilation of the Bible by making this statement: “The reason the 66 books we have compiled today are considered Scripture—inspired words of God, the Bible—is that the Church, guided collectively—over time and space—by the Holy Spirit, saw fit to call them Scripture. […] When we take the Bible—any part of it—out of that context, we are sure to miss the mark interpretively.” In saying this, I was anticipating this second installment of the discussion, which will primarily concern how the Protestant Reformation affected our understanding of the proper context for reading and interpreting the Scriptures.
(As a disclaimer, I must graciously acknowledge that I have gleaned much of my knowledge of this section of Church history and its effects on biblical interpretation from an Olivet professor who did his doctoral dissertation on the Protestant Reformation.)
So, as previously discussed (in “Part 1”), the Bible is finally canonized after 300+ years of consensus amongst the Church, and by about 400 A.D. the Bible, as we know it, is well established. Interpretation of these Scriptures, then, is seen as the prerogative of the Church hierarchy—the bishops, priests, and other clergy. This fact of interpretive authority is rarely questioned for 1000 years—save for a few dissenters here and there, like Wycliffe and Huss—primarily because there is no real power at this time amongst the laity of the Church with which to challenge the hierarchy. (Scholars, please forgive my oversimplification.) The “Middle Ages” (of Europe, at least) as they become known are dominated by the Church, which is in a way the glue that holds European culture and society together after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Then, around 1500, some rapid changes begin occurring. Not only changes in the Church—with Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and other reformers’ words and deeds—but changes in society at large. The printing press, international political restructuring, and the waning power of the papacy (the pope) are a few of the factors that make the time ripe for revolution.
It is funny to me that Luther’s “95 Theses”, nailed to the door of the church at Wittenberg, sparked the fire that they did, because they were actually Luther’s second attempt at raising critical questions about the Church; his so-called “97 Theses”, which he wrote prior to his “95”, were basically ignored by his colleagues. Nevertheless, we need not go into a long history of the origins of the Reformation itself: I would imagine most of you are familiar with the tale of how Luther’s “95 Theses” shook the foundations of the Church, so to speak (if you're not familiar, let’s face it, Wikipedia is a great summary tool).
There is a very popular myth amongst Protestants which says that the issue at stake during the Reformation was biblical authority. It is believed that the famous Protestant battle-cry “sola scriptura!” was pitted against the biblically-lax “Catholics” who had let “tradition” trump the Bible. Let me be exceedingly clear on this, because I think it of the utmost importance to how we read the Bible even today: the issue at stake during the Reformation was not biblical authority, it was authority of interpretation. The dilemma posed by the Reformers (whether they recognized it or not) was not “Is the Bible authoritative?” The dilemma was “Who has the authority to interpret the Bible? Who has the right to say, ‘The Bible says…’?” The “Catholic Church” had bound up the authority of interpretation in the hierarchy of the Church, particularly in the pope. (And let’s be honest, during Luther’s time, the popes were usually nothing more than greedy, petty, land-holding princes.) The Reformers wanted to say that the Bible was self-interpreting; in other words, the authority of interpreting the Bible lay in the Bible itself.
No one can fault Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and the other reformers of the time for their desire to see the Church recapture her purity and righteousness: once again, the Church at the time was literally telling people that their salvation depended on things like the purchase of indulgence certificates. However, the assumption of the Reformers—that the Bible was self-interpreting—must simply be called what it is: a mistake… a mistake that still bears fruit today in Protestant circles. Why was it a mistake? Because it did exactly what I’ve already mentioned should never be done with the Bible: it takes the issue of interpretation out of the context of the Church, led by the Holy Spirit.
It was the sincere belief of the Reformers that any rational person would read the Bible and come to the same interpretations as any other rational person. It seems this assumption is still held today. Many Christians (especially of the Reformed tradition, it seems to me) continue to hold to this very modern, rationalistic, individualistic notion of the interpretation of Scripture—namely, that the Bible’s meaning is self-evident to anyone with the mind to understand its meaning.
But let’s face it: the Bible is not interpreted the same way by all individuals. The Church prior to the Reformation guarded against the multitude of conflicting interpretations by embedding the authority to interpret Scripture in the Church hierarchy. The Reformers freed this authority from the hierarchy and attempted to hand it to the individual. This emphasis on the individual’s authority to interpret Scripture is increased in our highly individualistic, democratic societies, of which America is the pinnacle.
And this brings us back around to the illustrations I mentioned in “Part 1.” We have individuals who claim all sorts of interpretations concerning the Scripture which most of us would consider “unbiblical.” But if we truly believe the Reformers’ claim—namely that the Scriptures are self-evident, self-interpreting, and that rational individuals will agree upon its meaning—then how do we even begin to raise objections against another individuals’ interpretations of Scripture? On what grounds do we have the right to say that they do not understand the Bible correctly, since we believe that the authority to interpret the self-evident Scriptures resides with the individual?
I maintain that the Scriptures cannot be rightly interpreted apart from the guidance of the Church as a whole—the entire community of Christ’s disciples, spread out over both time and space. We need to return the authority of interpretation to the Church, rescuing it from the corruption of individualism. This means that we American Evangelicals especially need to give heed to the way the Scripture has been understood by others from the past and others from around our world today. We must hear the whole Church as best as possible in this. We cannot continue to pretend that our little group of evangelicals, or even ourselves as individuals, can rightly understand the Scriptures apart from the community of faith. And we must respond to those who misinterpret the Bible not with clever "evidence"-based exegesis, or with other arguments that beg the question of interpretive authority, but with the simple response: "this is not what the Church teaches, therefore it is not what the Scriptures mean."
The Bible is not self-evident or self-interpreting. It must be the book of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit. Without this context, I reiterate, we cannot rightly understand what Scripture has to say.
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