Tag: interpretation

Must the Church be an organization?

In my last post, I concluded that the authority to interpret Christian doctrine rests on the One True Church; however, I have not defined this One True Church. Before we may venture further, we must establish what we mean by this word “Church” (including its capitalized and lower-case forms).

When we refer to a “church” [uncapitalized], we usually refer to a particular congregation of Christians and/or the building they gather in. When we refer to “The Church” [capitalized] we may mean one of two things:

(1) An organization of these churches sharing common doctrinal beliefs affirmed by a central and terminal authority, such as a council, convention, or pontiff (for example, “The Roman Catholic Church” or “The Southern Baptist Church”), in other words, a denomination

(2) The entire global body of Christians, the Body of Christ

When we give the power over interpretation of doctrine to the True Church, we certainly mean the Church in this second, global sense. The question that emerges, though, is whether we must also mean a particular organizational Church (sense 1).

I think we must. My reasons for thinking so are connected to my reason for arguing for the True Church as the defender of orthodoxy in the first place; or put another way, I think this institutional concept of the church is entailed by the role that I have suggested it has.

If we define the True Church as simply the global body of Christ, the question must be asked, do we mean that all Church denominations are included in this? We would then be in the position of affirming the Fire Baptized Church of God of Holiness of the Americas, the Central Yearly Meeting of Friends, the Branch Davidians, the Indian Shakers, not to mention both the Catholics and the Protestants, as all authoritative for interpreting Christian doctrine and practice. Certainly this is not tenable! It is more likely that we mean that the Church transcends the denominations, not fitting perfectly into any one of them. Some people from any denomination might be part of the True Church, and some people from any denomination may not be part of it. In other words, the Church is a spiritual entity known to God and not fully to man.

However, thus abstracting the True Church away from any earthly form leaves us in danger of being unable to recognize it. It cannot be that we are left without any means of ascertaining the Church, because we must be a part of it! Christ wills for us to participate in his Church. Accepting an agnostic position in which we are not concerned about the authenticity of our own church and denomination leaves us powerless to affirm truth or reject falsehood. We may be part of a false or deficient church, and thus develop falsities and deficiencies in our soul, and those around us. We might imbibe false prophecy and erroneous teaching without even knowing it. This is certainly not a possibility that the Good Shepherd leaves open to his precious flock. There must be some way of knowing for sure whether our church or denomination is part of the True Church.

Is there any way that we can affirm the truth of our church or our denomination without equating it to The Church? There is a way, the way taken by congregationalists and quakers and those who see their churches as democratic gatherings of autonomous believers. It is an appeal to a power outside the church or denomination itself: to Reason. The congregationalist believes in his church because he believes that his pastor or his elders or he himself has enough reason and insight, and that their Reason has the authority to interpret Christian doctrine and practice, using the Bible as a basis.

However, I have argued previously that the authority to interpret Christian truth cannot be trusted to the reason of men, for we are flawed and sinful and incapable of reliably interpreting the divine mysteries. The True Church, for whose preservation Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, could never surrender her members to such a treacherous guide, but would protect them from error by her own authority. Since The Church is herself the true authority (as I said in my last post), she would never abdicate to an impostor.

If we affirm more than one denomination, we fall to contradiction, and if we affirm none of them, we fall to an agnosticism that renders us powerless against error, which itself can only be remedied by giving Reason the scepter of interpretation, which The Church would never do. We must therefore regard a single Church, a denomination, as The Church.

We have now come to the point when we can and must ask, “Which Church (sense 1) is the Church (sense 2)?” or put another way, “Which denomination is the True Church?” I will consider this immense and crucial question later, but the significance of the point we have just come to cannot be overstated, namely, that the question can be framed in those terms at all.

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 4th Century and the 16th 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 4th 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.