Scripture, Part II
In my last post, I told you how I was becoming increasingly frustrated with my failure to find a solid interpretive method for the Bible. Sure, I could venture what I thought any particular passage meant, but where was the answer key? How could I check my work? Obviously, there are some views that are more “mainstream” than others about certain things, but does that mean the majority gets to decide the correct interpretation? Then we have to ask which majority? Of people living right now? Of Christians throughout history? How do we define Christian throughout history if we haven’t yet established what the proper interpretation is? We don’t want to let heretics vote, do we?
The best “rule” I decided to use is coherence. All of the bits have to fit together and not lead to any contradictions. But to evaluate that, one would have to figure out what every passage meant and then compare all of those to all the others. That’s a lifetime task and if you found a contradiction, you’d have to start adjusting. There had to be a better way.
Eventually, I came to a point where I did not feel I could, with integrity, hold to some traditional Brethren interpretations of Scripture. Namely, non-creedalism and non-sacramentalism. I found myself adrift, looking for a new church home. The Anglican church stepped into my life and suddenly I found a hopeful prospect: tradition!
It made more sense to have a tradition that went deeper than 1708. You could argue becoming Anglican only gained me a few centuries, but it also opened up a certain appropriation of early Catholicism. At this point in my journey, the “branch theory” seemed feasible—that the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican communions were all branches of the one church. It seemed better than being a split of a split of a split, anyway.
I found myself busy becoming Anglican. I was ordained a transitional deacon and continued studying to be ordained a priest. It was all very interesting, and new, and exciting. (For me, anyway…I’ll talk about my wife’s thoughts in another post.)
About this time I heard of a book that sounded very interesting, given my struggles over the previous two decades.
Christian Smith is a sociologist working at Notre Dame University. He observed how American Evangelicalism had a problem. What they profess about Scripture is disproven by how it actually plays out in their churches. He lays these evangelical assumptions about Scripture out in his first chapter. I give them here in full.
1. Scripture contains the very words of God. (Divine writing)
2. The Bible is God’s exclusive means of communicating with people.
3. Everything God needs to tell us about belief and life is in the Bible
4. Anyone can read, understand, and then rightly interpret the Bible.
5. The Bible can be understood in it’s plain, literal sense.
6. We can build theology from scratch without using creeds or confessions.
7. All passages touching on the same topic can be brought together into a harmonious whole.
8. The Bible is universally applicable to people in all times and places.
9. Inductive method leads to right hearing of the text.
10. The Bible, read this way, provides a handbook for living. (Pages 4-5)
All of this leads to what he labeled “pervasive interpretive pluralism,” which he describes as “the very same Bible—which Biblicists insist is perspicuous and harmonious—gives rise to divergent understandings among intelligent, sincere, committed readers about what it says about most topics of interest….What it means in consequence is this: in a crucial sense it simply does not matter whether the Bible is everything that the Biblicist claims theoretically concerning its authority, infallibility, inner consistency, perspicacity, and so on, since in the actual functioning the Bible produces a pluralism of interpretations.” (emphasis added)
Yes! He put into words what had been my growing unease over that last twenty years. He goes on in the rest of the book to illustrate how this plays out, but he stopped short of giving steps to fix it all. The tension was still there, but I could put my finger on it and I had a name for it. I knew it wasn’t just me.
Smith footnoted another work multiple times and it made me curious enough to track it down.
John Barton is an Anglican scholar who wrote this work about the development of the canon of Scripture. I had never really studied how the Bible came to be. It was just sort of an a priori book for most of my life as a Christian. It existed and I didn’t question that existence.
Barton’s book opened my eyes to how the canon of Scripture came together in the first few centuries of the Church. I had always understood that the bodies of Tradition and Scripture were more or less like this:
However, reading Barton, I came to realize the picture is actually much more like this:
Or, to put it another way, the Church didn’t arise out of the Scriptures as much as the Scriptures arose out of the Church. If the Church pre-dated Scripture (at least all of the New Testament), then the Church, through the Apostles and the sense of the faithful, created the New Testament as an authoritative collection of texts. Therefore, it seemed that the Church which had the authority to do that also had the authority to give the definitive interpretation of those texts.
It wasn’t up to me after all!
Thankfully, I still had the branch theory. I could have it both ways, or so it seemed, but in hindsight, this was the corner that once I turned, I was inevitably going to end up crossing the Tiber into Catholicism. It took about 7 years for that to work it’s way out, but the trajectory was set.
On a related note, as an Anglican, I now had a bigger Bible. We didn’t see the so-called “Apocryphal books” as authoritative, but they were part of tradition and there was no prohibition on reading them. It was interesting to read Judith, Tobit and Maccabees for the first time. Judith and Tobit both seemed like wild stories, but it helped me re-appreciate the rest of the Old Testament because, well, there are lots of wild stories. 1 & 2 Maccabees filled in the intertestamental history. Wisdom and Sirach were like extensions and expansions of Proverbs. The rest were additions to books I already knew: Jeremiah, Daniel, and Esther.
I learned that these books had been widely accepted for most of Christian history. (Even the first editions of the King James Version included them.) Yes, there had been some disputes concerning them, but that was true for books in the Protestant canon as well.
I was settling into a deeper history of Scripture and its interpretation. I discovered St. John Chrysostom and his sermons, as well as many of St. Augustine’s sermons. I was a bit more connected to the Church throughout history. I felt I was getting closer to the faith we are told to uphold in Jude, “the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.” (verse 3, RSVCE)
Grace & peace,
Chris