The authority to interpret scripture

In the previous essay I concluded that the Bible is reliable on the basis of the authority of the institutional Church to establish Christian practice and doctrine. But, although Protestants accept from the hand of Tradition both the Bible and its companions, the Creeds, they reject the authority of the Tradition of the Church today (as the battle cry “sola scriptura” proclaims). Such authority must have been removed from the Church sometime (perhaps gradually) between the 4^th Century and the 16^th Century, at which point the Reformation occurred. I have heard it explained in roughly these words: “God gave the institutional Church authority through the apostolic age and through the age of the councils, so that the Bible would be reliably formed, but since the closure of the Canon, the authority to interpret doctrine no longer resides with the leaders of the Church, but with all believers, since the meaning of the Bible is evident and apparent within its completed pages and stands on its own.” Authority to interpret has been removed from the Church, and given to all who can read the Bible for themselves. It is a good thing to read the Bible for oneself, but to place the power to interpret the Bible into the hands of everyone is to destroy all certainty of truth.

The Zionist First Church of God of Holiness

We become aware of this if we consider the hundreds of different protestant denominations, many of which we can agree are dubiously orthodox. Take, for example, Reverend Michael at the Zionist First Church of God of Holiness down the street, who claims to be an apostle, slays people with the spirit, and drives a Rolls Royce because the Holy Spirit told him to tell his congregation to contribute to the work of the Lord. We can’t accept his authority, can we? But on what basis do we reject it? We will answer, “His teaching and lifestyle doesn’t line up with the Bible.” But Apostle Michael quotes heavily from the Bible all the time. So, on what basis do we claim that his teachings don’t line up? “He misinterprets scripture.” And how do we know that he is misinterpreting scripture? Because we know how to correctly interpret the meaning of scripture. On what grounds are we certain of our interpretations?

The first and most common line of reasoning that comes to the Protestant mind is, I believe, based on an incorrect assumption.

Intrinsic meaning?

The Protestant will probably answer that we can be certain of our interpretations because, by careful study of Greek, Hebrew, and biblical history, we can know the original intention of the author to his audience, situated in the historical, linguistic, and textual context, and discovering this intention is to know the meaning of the text. This is based on a key assumption about the nature of meaning shared by most evangelicals and expressed by John Piper:

“The grammatical-historical method…aims to get at something intrinsic to the text, namely its meaning.”

Piper defines the meaning of a text as the author’s intention (as discernible from the historical, linguistic, cultural context, etc.) and claims authority to know it based on the fact that the intention is intrinsic to the words of the text. However, it is decidedly not the case that an author’s intention is intrinsic to his words.

Permit me to get technical for a moment. All meaning is conveyed between interlocutors using a process of coding, transferring, and decoding messages. Words, whether “well formulated in writing” or in spoken utterance, are the signs of meaning, the material used in transfer. In a precise semiology, words are not identical to the author’s intention. The intention or meaning is conveyed by the words in conjunction with the encoding and decoding apparatuses of both interlocutors. My ability to understand someone’s intention is dependent on how well they interpret the message into a form I can understand and how well I interpret the form of their message back into an intention. Therefore, the author’s intention is not simply intrinsic to his words, but passes between him and the reader by the instrument of his words within a communicative act that includes interpretation on both their parts.

Such a denial of the role of interpretation in meaning causes us to (unintentionally) neglect God’s role in interpreting scripture to us, and overemphasize our role. This brings us to the real grounds on which Protestants are sure of their interpretations of scripture.

Faith in Reason

What asserting the intrinsic meaning of the texts of scripture is really doing is placing the full power and responsibility to interpret scripture in the hands of Reason, the faculty of the human mind.

At first, we depend on reason only under the guise of scholarship–“Enough rigorous study and education eventually grant the authority to interpret scripture reliably.” However, the subjection of the scriptures to rational scholarship has, in the past four centuries, produced an enormous amount of scholarship doubting nearly everything that can be believed about the Bible, not to mention thousands of fractures of communion based on contradictions of interpretation. Must we accept the positions of any liberal pastor, any linguist, any historical-critical professor of theology who puts forward a new interpretation of scripture based on scholarly study? If we do, then all we will have left of our Christianity will be an emasculated, ham-strung collection of historical happy thoughts. If we say no, then we must again answer, “On what basis?” It is tempting to pretend that there is a consensus among scholars that we might give authority to, by presenting a list of opinions that excludes scholars we deem to be unorthodox, but as with the Canon we will find ourselves begging the question again.

In the end, the only thing we have left to put forward as the sure authority for the interpretation of scripture is our own reason and intellect. But here we have come to something as indefensible as Reverend Michael’s sermon at the Zionist First Church of God of Holiness, for no man who says that the Holy Spirit spoke to him can be proved wrong, and neither can a man who gives ultimate authority to his own reason. But no reasonable person absolutely relies upon his reason. The sane person never absolutely trusts his sanity. As G.K. Chesterton says, “The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.” In contrast, it is a mark of the insane man that he fixates on his own reasonings. “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” The rational man must admit that he is not exempt from the weaknesses of the mind that cause other men to err with the utmost sincerity, and he will look for something greater than himself in which to anchor his understanding of the divine mysteries.

The Church, the interpreter

What shall we say, then? Here lies the Bible before us, but how can we interpret its meaning into our lives with confidence? Surely God has provided a reliable interpreter. We need an interpreter whose authority is neither merely human (as the scholar’s reason) nor merely divine (as the charismatic’s spirit), but has a foot in both, possessing the same dual nature as our Lord Jesus Himself, who is fully God and fully Man. Where can we find such an interpreter? She stands before us in the One True Church, whose Body is on earth and whose Head is in heaven. It was she that gave us the scriptures by the power vested in her, and it is she who continues to give them to this very day. If she does not interpret for us, there can be no sure interpretation.

The authority to interpret the Bible lies today in the same hands as it did in the 4^th century, those of the Church. We need to repent of our trust in our own minds, which does not bring glory to God, and instead gladly submit to the safety of the authority of the Living Body of Christ which preserves truth. We must accept the holy and catholic Church as the agency through which God has promised to guide our interpretations of scripture and proclaim its truth in power throughout the earth.

How can we trust the Canon?

The assaults of modern skepticism on the foundations of Christianity often levy a question that it is crucial to answer: “How can you be sure that the collection of books now accepted by the Church and no others are holy and divinely inspired, bearing testimony to Jesus’ true original message?” Upon being asked how we can know that the Canon of Scripture is trustworthy, the Catholic will answer, “Tradition,” that is, the scriptures are affirmed as canonical because of their reception by the Church, especially over the first 300 years of Christianity, as ratified by the councils of the 4^th century. The key assumption is that the Church had the authority to sanctify the scriptures they accepted, and the sacredness of the Canon is fully dependent on the Church. However, the Protestant, being wont to bestow such power on Tradition, will admit its function but qualify it by pointing to other factors that can be objectively used to define Canonicity, which they claim were the very factors used by the early church, to the effect that Canonicity has always been primarily attributable to them, and only vicariously to the Church. These alternative bases are most commonly (1) their apostolic origin and (2) their own content, that is, the presence of the Gospel in their text. There may be other bases offered by Protestant scholars, but these options are the only ones I can recall being put forward in my 20 years of Protestant education, and besides, together with Tradition they seem to nearly exhaust the possibilities. Now, I am about to argue that the authority that established the Canon of the Bible cannot be ultimately attributable to either of those things, and must therefore be ultimately attributed to the Tradition of the Church.

Apostolic Origin

Common Protestant reasoning is that the Church accepted the Canon based on the apostolic authority of the authors, whose immediacy to Christ ensured their testimony was the true one he came to bring, and whose authority is manifest in the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, in which they are seen to receive anointing from Jesus and the Holy Spirit to perpetuate the church. Apostolicity does in fact bear a striking correlation with the acceptance of the books in the Canon (almost all of the Canon can be traced to an apostle or an apostle’s associate). However, we cannot accept that a book that merely asserted apostolic authority was authentic, and neither did the early church. There were gospels allegedly written by apostles and asserting the authority of apostolic authorship—the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, among others—which were deemed to be uncanonical. And furthermore, the apostolic origin of some canonical books was disputed at the time of the Canonization of scripture (and is not certain to this day), including at least Hebrews, 2 Peter, and Jude. It is clear that “apostleship” is not a category that can singlehandedly explain to us the difference between canonical and non-canonical books, and it was not sufficient for the early church either. The question is, therefore, on what basis were some books ruled out, and others ruled in?

The Content of the Writings

The reply to this is that the books were judged to be canonical on the basis of the orthodoxy of their content. One of the bases on which their content may have been judged is sometimes referred to as their “Consistent Message,” that is, whether a book contained a “theological outlook similar to or complementary to other accepted Christian writings” . Certainly a degree of consistency is evident in the canonical books, but it cannot be the standard. For one thing, there are some striking inconsistencies in the messages of the books. For example, Martin Luther railed against the book of James and wanted it cast out of the Canon, calling it an “epistle of straw” because its message was so seemingly incompatible with the drift of the Pauline epistles. No, the Canon is not plainly consistent, but full of “dialectical tension,” the precarious balance of paradoxes and antinomies that must be held together by some other cause. By what means could the early church have placed James alongside Galatians, despite the inconsistencies? To what authority would they appeal? Even if we find a core theme throughout all the books (which we do believe is there, deep down), the argument will not hold up, for all that the skeptic need do is choose a book and ask, “What other books was this book judged to be consistent with?” and trace it back to the first epistles and gospels, which could have been consistent with no others, since none existed. (For emphasis, we can recall that in the early era, the books of the New Testament were circulated and possessed by particular churches quite unevenly and incompletely, so that doctrinal decisions based on textual comparisons would have been extremely difficult.) In the end, saying that the Canon was consistent with itself is like being asked “What is a republican?” and replying, “A republican is someone who believes what other republicans believe.” We need to provide some other basis.

Having stripped away mere “self-consistency” as a valid basis, the claim will be revised to state that the canonical books were not consistent with each other, per se, as much as they were consistent with the central message of Christianity, the Gospel. “The early church recognized the sacredness of certain of the circulated writings because it contained the living spark of the Gospel message that they had received. The gospels of Thomas and Peter, for example, were ultimately ruled out because they promoted Gnosticism and lacked an orthodox Gospel core.” Again, this is undoubtedly true, but let us push it further and ask, “How did the early Church know the Gospel? How were they certain of their central message in the midst of many budding heresies?” The Protestant is tempted to say, “They knew it by the standard of the early apostolic writings,” in other words, by the Canon (Greek kanon, meaning rule or measure) of scripture. But here we have committed the logical fallacy of begging the question: The Church knew the Canon because it was consistent with the Gospel, and they knew the Gospel because it was consistent with the Canon! It’s a loop, which reveals that we have inserted some assumption about what the Gospel is. So, on what basis did the early Church know the Gospel?

The Tradition of the Church

At this point we realize it is necessary to believe that the Church has always known the Gospel, inherently—that she possesses the seed that Christ planted and that nothing has ever removed it. This can be attested by much historical evidence—the unbroken apostolic succession of the Apostolic Fathers and their witness through writing—so that we can assert that there was never an opportunity for heresies to have infiltrated the entire heart of the Church, though many were resisted bitterly and several nearly won. However, this belief is ultimately an article of faith, for if we have any confidence in our faith, we must affirm as a fact that God preserved his Church, protecting her from heresy while she presided over the very pugilistic and divisive process of establishing the Bible and doctrines we now hold. Such a belief is warranted in terms of the Bible as well—Jesus prays for such preservation to his Father, and he promises it to Peter and the disciples. Indeed, there is no certain basis for orthodoxy in the first three centuries of Christianity, except that it was kept alive unceasingly in the bosom of the Church, the living body of believers, who passed the Gospel and the Holy Spirit from one to another. The Canon, which gradually materialized throughout this time, owes its birth to her faith. Therefore, all Christians who affirm the inspiration of scripture as we now possess it today must affirm that the institution of the Church was the faithful and authoritative judge and interpreter of the Gospel, at least through the 4^th century.