I've been trying to find a good way of framing the doctrine of sola Scriptura, so that I would realize what exactly it is that I am rejecting. To start, I assume that it is something between Scriptura nuda on the one hand (which states that everything needed for faith is found directly in Scripture, provable from Scripture, and that we don't need any outside help to get it), and the RC and EO views of tradition one the other. So, how do we account for the status of Scripture while also listening to tradition, without being arbitrary in what we pick?
I posit three models: (1) the heuristic model, (2) the alternative reading model, and (3) the tension model. (1) would be the closest to Scriptura nuda; it says that everything we need, can be found in Scripture and provable by Scripture. However, it has a better grasp of the enormity of this task. For this reason, we seek help from others (from the tradition) to guide us to a correct reading. However, in principle, we could get everything directly from Scripture without a tradition. The tradition acts like a heuristic in mathematics; that is, it doesn't mean anything when it comes down to proving something, but it gives hints to where a fruitful grove of theorems may lie.
(2) is the alternative reading model. (1) only admits of a single reading of Scripture (presumably we would not be able to prove contradictory doctrines, and so would not have contradictory readings). (2) is like (1), only it discusses the matter of multiple interpretations. Let us assume that there are readings of Scripture R and S, such that R leads to doctrine x and S leads to doctrine y, where x and y are mutually exclusive. Further, the tradition affirms doctrine x over doctrine y, or reading R over reading S. Then, the reading R of Scripture is correct. We can say that everything is contained in Scripture, and that the Tradition is necessary for finding the correct view.
(3) is the tension model. Unlike (2), we cannot hold to a specific doctrine as mandatory in Scripture; everything is theoretically up for grabs. However, in practice, this is not what happens as there are checks and balances. All readings of Scripture, throughout time as well as in our own present circumstances, are weighed and hold each other in tension. Our present reading of Scripture is never complete in and of itself, but must be looked at against the Tradition, which in turn must be looked at in light of contemporary thought (therefore, a triad of Scripture, reason, and Tradition). The Tradition keeps us from going off anywhere and everywhere, but cannot anchor us down to any specific doctrine; it must always be heard, but not always heeded. Similarly for any other voice. Turning again to a mathematical analogy, we keep coming up with new equations, occasionally new variables, but each equation gives us new constraints as well. Or, alternatively, we throw in a bunch of different starting points and have them compete amongst each other to see which ones are the best, then start from the winners, throw in more new points, compete again, ad infinitum (like a genetic algorithm, for AI peeps).
I think that (1) is the only version which works for standard conservative Protestantism. Unfortunately, it rests on doubtful assumptions concerning textual interpretation (in theory at least, there must be one and only one coherent reading of the text; I think that different versions might deal with historical information differently), and I'm skeptical about its validity for practice (it assumes that we can take any starting point which has been taken and from there get closer and closer to the intended reading, with the occasional guidance of Tradition; also, even if in theory it works, practice seems closer to (2) and we need to go with what works, not what looks pretty). Simply put, I need to see (1) articulated by scholars with practice in literary interpretation before I would give it any more heed. Also, it seems to fall victim to a classical argument against sola Scriptura: it cannot prove itself, and so by its own criterion cannot be an important aspect for faith.
(2) seems more likely from an interpretation standpoint. However, here we run into the issue of where we draw the line on questions of proof. To avoid saying that the proof for a doctrine comes directly from Scripture, we must say that it comes from a reading of Scripture given within the Tradition. We must then separate readings which are merely Scripture, and so do not violate sola Scriptura, and readings which interpose extra-biblical material. Where is the dividing line between Protestant and Catholic? After all, RC wants to claim that its dogmas are the result of a couple thousand years of meditating on Scripture and the Tradition of the church, and recent RC theology has wanted to reverse the move at Trent which split the two into two different sources. In addition, interpretations of the "sufficiency of Scripture" historically have been loathe to separate it from the Church's understanding of Scripture; this seems to leave the user of (2) in either RC or EO, or foundationless (i.e. Scripture would not support sola Scriptura).
So, this leaves (3). This would be the approach of several groups which are too diverse to catch under a single name. I do not think that relativism leads to groundlessness; space and time are relative, and real conditions of our experience if nothing else which do not fall apart into a merely subjective flux. When I talk about spatio-temporal properties, I mean something, even if I must always be using arbitrary standards and referents. Similarly, we could hold to a single meaning of Scripture which is read off only in particular circumstances, relative to readers yet not a flight of fancy. This is my only hope right now of not going Catholic, but I still have the concerns which I voiced in the last post.
Edit: I think that there is one more model, which is really a version of (2) or (3), which is the closest to the rhetoric which I hear concerning the doctrine. This is the "antiquity" model (A), which gives greater authority to earlier voices (the apostles are the most important to listen to, then next comes the church of the first couple centuries, then the next couple, and so on). If we follow (2), then when the church has had mutually exclusive readings R and S of Scripture, and R is the earlier reading, we pick R over S. If we follow (3), then we count earlier voices as having more weight then more contemporary voices, but still able to be outweighed. I'll have to think about these some more, concerning whether they can escape the problems given above.
11 comments:
I'm not sure (because I'm reading fast and responding somewhat off-the-cuff), but I think (3) sounds closest to my own view. I'm attracted to the "Wesleyan quadrilateral" (which Wesley probably didn't invent), which is a kind of tension model: there are different ways of knowing, as my best friend might say, in this case we are considering four: scripture, reason, tradition, and experience. None of these has intriniscally more weight than the other, and the boundaries that separate each of the four are not impermeable. Scripture is arguably a kind of tradition. Reason and/or tradition and/or experience may bring us to value our experience of and reasoning about scripture over and above other experiences or other traditions.
This is a model of coming-to-know/believe/choose/act, and not a model of *truth*. Sometimes we believe the truth by following this model, and sometimes we fall into error (which comes in degrees of seriousness).
Doing theology with scripture and tradition and reason and experience is preferable to doing theology while leaving one of these out of the conversation. Likewise, it is better to do theology in community, listening to others' voices (reason/experience/traditions/readings of scripture) than to leave everything up to me by myself in a room with the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, the community doesn't automatically get to tell me what to believe, or automatically believe what is true. There is no guarantee that the community is right and the individual is in error.
I am skeptical, as you know, of a Cartesian foundationalism that pretends to certainty about any of our beliefs, no matter what their place in our noetic framework. But I am a realist about truth, and so would modify a Peircean pragmatist view as well.
I personally am attracted to such a view. The Anglican triad of scripture, reason, and tradition has been appealing, and I do appreciate Wesley's emphasis on experience. I'm by no means a foundationalist myself, and if that were all there were to the story, I'd be set.
However, I also am bothered by what conditions we need to have to hold a theological community together, and how those who don't have time for study and who don't have qualified teachers can come to the truth, at least enough to act appropriately. I think that in far too many churches, the Protestant project has failed, and may not be recoverable. It (at least in America) has a tendency toward anti-intellectualism which seems to be deep-rooted in it, which severely hurts the chance for the laity to have the kind of teachers they need. In the universities, there are plenty of good people, but this isn't where most people will learn about their faith.
Re: "what conditions we need to have to hold a theological community together", etc.
As I've probably mentioned before, there's a lot of differences of opinion (I think both politically and theologically) in my immediate theological community. There are disagreements about the role and status of scripture in general, and the "Old Testament" in particular. I am also aware of some differences of opinion regarding homosexuality. Last night several members of my small group were discussing nonviolence and pacifism in the context of protecting oneself and one's family from a violent invader, and two or three different attitudes and practical approaches surfaced. On rare occasion I've heard it suggested in my church that we survive our differences of opinion by avoiding direct discussion of them. I think this is more true of some issues (such as homosexuality, and maybe creation/evolution as well) than others (such as the implications of nonviolence--although I would rather more of these discussions were taking place).
Universal agreement within the community, even on something many of us see as fundamental to our Christian faith and practice as nonviolence, is not really one of my goals. Sometimes I think I would like it if everyone in the community acted on my notions of simplicity and nonviolence and scriptural interpretation, but these thoughts don't last very long, because I know I'm not incapable of error, and I don't want to be setting the standard for orthodoxy in my community. Nor do I want to have someone else set that standard for me, at least not in an authoritative way.
While I was reading Roth's book a question I had about Mennonites was: what does unity in the body look like, and how do you get it, if not by enforcing adherence to a confessional statement through discipline (i.e., saying whether or not you can continue to be a full member of the community if you don't believe in inerrancy or if you don't reject just war theory). I don't have an answer to that question ready, but I think that I live in a community where this is the reality, even if it doesn't seem to make a lot of theoretical sense.
I have questioned the applicability of the "evangelical" label to myself and my church at times, because there doesn't seem to be a rigid or defined standard of orthodoxy. The community ideal doesn't seem to be one of aboslute individualism--we do theology together in community--but neither is it one of doctrinal orthodoxy handed down in a hierarchy. I wouldn't characterize it as anti-intellectual, either.
Within a given community, I think that there can be unity without hammering out the theological commitments (at least in some cases). I might just need to go out and get the practical experience which will demolish my theories. But, in the meantime, I see the inter- and intra-church struggles which cause splits and disunity. A single congregation might hold together for a time, and a group of them even, but what about when they go to talk to other Christians? What happens when, over time, the community splinters into different groups of opinion?
It seems to me that all groups (in my own experience) have some central commitments. Some require yes/no answers to these, others allow for a gradual approach. There may be different views on non-violence within the Mennonite community, but I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't fit in if I were a warhawk. The average person who tells me to "just have faith" and "all that's important is that Jesus died for our sins" typically smuggles in understanding about Jesus' divinity, the status of Scripture, and justification by faith alone.
I'm not saying that everything has to be hammered out in order for a community to exist. It may be that there are certain theological principles which can be held more or less, which come from the people and not another authority structure, which produce a vibrant Christian faith. However, I then want to know how to solve the other problems: why should I, personally, join this group? why should I think that they are right, or at least more right than the norm? can this view sustain itself? is this view something which can be held by all different sorts of people? This is where the epistemology comes in; the average person might not need to have the justification for their views, but as an intellectual outsider looking for a home, I need something to convince me of group A over group B.
What you're saying makes a lot of sense to me. And I'm starting to see that this probably is where I would play an "orthopraxy" card. One of the big questions for me in choosing a visible community, and determining my relationship to that community, is, what is that community's mission, and how are they going about fulfilling that mission? What sort of success are they having, and how do they deal with failure? How are conflicts handled within the community? These are all practical questions, relating to my notions of the work of advancing the Kingdom of God, and practicing Christian charity within the community and also as a community within a larger social context (a neighborhood, a city, a nation, a world). And of course, these are not "mere" practical questions, there is a lot of theology and a lot of theory behind them--behind my asking them, and the way I (and my community) try to answer them.
So: What is the mission of the Church? How do I know this? (ecclesiology!) What is life in the body of Christ supposed to look like? What community around me is striving successfully in what I perceive to be the right direction? What community is even proposing a "meaty" notion of the mission and identity of the Church?
I don't know if these are the things you're referring to when you're talking about not being well fed in generic or typical Protestantism; if they are, then I think I resonate with you.
I don't have sophisticated ready-to-hand answers, in the form of exegetical papers or hermeneutics papers or historical or philosophical theology papers.
(my library clock is expiring! I'll be back...)
This was how I meant to conclude my last comment:
When pushed to give an answer "shooting from the hip" as one of my NT profs would say, I would probably do one of two things.
(1) I would make a weak, defeasible argument based on the perspecuity of scripture: i.e., I would point to some passages in the canonical scriptures that are important to *my* ecclesiology, and try my best to exegete them on the spot, recognizing that this would be one voice among many valid ones, and that it would be in the context of a Wesleyan quadrilateral hermeneutic.
(2) I would give a very Jamesian, pragmatic answer, and say that the outcome of our beliefs matters more in determining their truth than the source of our beliefs. If a certain ecclesiology leads to good in the world, then to that extent it is good. Better, at least, than an ecclesiology that leaves churches impotent to accomplish anything in the way of visible justice & righteousness. (Obviously there is a dependence on some kind of ethical/evaluative epistemology here, too.) The whole Jamesian answer also is subject to the fallibilist qualification: i.e., any ecclesiology is subject to later revision or rejection.
I'm going to be talking about Pragmatism in my next post, so I'll postpone those views. In the meantime, I think that you're right in assessing ecclesiology as the root of my concerns. I'm not sure that it is the main concern itself, but it is what I need to answer in order to answer any of the rest of my questions.
As for why I might choose RC on those issues, I need a reason to stick with a church even when it is degenerating (as all human institutions will do and have done). I consider the Reformation to have been a tragedy, brought about by all sides. Even if I think that RC or EO is wrong (which I am inclined to do), I see value in unity and working from within to reform the church. Most Protestant denominations seem too effervescent for me to say the same thing. I'll agree that there is some merit to the arguments against the "consumer-church" mentality, but at the same time, Protestant theology doesn't give much of a reason for not church hopping.
I think that the Mennonites are the only group I've seen so far who would make me want to stick around, but I can see similarities to them in Franciscan thought within RC, so they don't have a claim of uniqueness. Plus, the splintering over the years which I see among the Mennonites is troubling.
Mennonites are certainly not a unified group. And I'm not sure how many Mennonites are really trying to change that, nor how we would go about it. I think Anabaptists tend to be anti-hierarchical. (Which is something I like, at least at my present stage of life).
I don't have any problem with Mennonites not being unique among Christians.
I agree that the Reformation was a tragedy. Reform from within would be better.
However, from an Anabaptist perspective on Church History (i.e., accepting a "Constantinian Shift" view), the RCC that the Reformers broke from wasn't really the Church as it was meant to be by then. It had been hijacked by the state.
> I don't have any problem with Mennonites not being unique among Christians.
There's certainly no problem; it's just that for me, when trying to find a church, most views and practices which I like among Mennonites I can find elsewhere as well. Merely a practical thing on my end, which could sway me one way or another.
> the RCC that the Reformers broke from wasn't really the Church as it was meant to be by then. It had been hijacked by the state.
I either grant this point, or something close enough to it. However, I think that in the centuries since, and in particular after Vatican II, there has been enough change to talk about reformation from within the RCC. So, if I think that reformation from within would have been better then, and there is a way to bring it about now, I have reasons to join the RCC at this time.
I guess my point about the Constantinian Shift is this:
Formerly my view has been that the RCC was continuous with the early Church as a global body and that splits away from the RCC were unfortunate. True healing and restoration of the Unified Catholic Church would ideally consist of going back up the tree splits, and hence a return to the RCC.
However, if a Constantinian Shift view of church history is adopted, it could be argued that the RCC was not continuous with the early church, and that some other body was continuous with the early church prior to the Reformation. I have heard this argument from some Protestants before (first when I was in Greece from an Evangelical there). I am not sure what I think about this presently, but if the RCC was not continuous with the early church at the point of the Reformation, then returning to the RCC has less attraction to me than otherwise.
This doesn't necessarily have any bearing on your own position.
In case I haven't stated this clearly to you before, I regard the RCC as just one more church body today, and members of that church I would regard as being in just the same position with respect to the Body of Christ as any other Christian. So, I would see nothing vitally important lost or gained by a Protestant's joining the Catholic Church; I just see no reason to do so myself at present. I can easily conceive that there are good reasons for others to make this move; so trying to dissuade you from converting is not in the least a motive for our conversation, as far as I'm concerned. My saying that may not have been necessary, but I wanted to make sure you knew that.
I'm pretty iffy about the whole Constantinian shift theory. For one thing, a bunch of groups try to apply it, using (as far as I can tell) any links they can find in the meantime to bolster their case, whether or not there is true continuity. For another, the main point behind apostolic succession is that it is supposed to help guarantee the handing down of truth. If any minority group could claim apostolic succession, then the doctrine would have no meaning. After all, most heretical groups have had ordained bishops themselves. Also, I'd have to say that the vast majority of the church in the meantime was heretical, which is a bit much for me to swallow. If God just lets 1200 years go by without actually doing anything with his church (or with most of it), why should I think that this God exists and cares one whit about us?
Far better would be simply to deny the need for continuity, if one were to take such a route; the early church had some things right which the Constantinian church messed up. For this reason, we'd want to look more at the early church, but not because the succession meant anything.
> So, I would see nothing vitally important lost or gained by a Protestant's joining the Catholic Church; I just see no reason to do so myself at present.
Fair enough. I'm not seeing you as trying to dissuade me directly; rather, I see my reasons for joining to be largely intellectual, and you provide the best reasons I've seen for why my reasons don't always hold.
Post a Comment