When Doctrine Divides the People of God (eBook)

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We Read Imperfectly

General Hermeneutics and the Clarity of Scripture

Protestants and evangelicals who quarrel over Christian doctrine and practice read the same Bible, the same sixty-six-book canon.1 We may hail from divergent denominations or traditions, but we claim a common authority. We may have particular ways of doing church but all appeal to the same standard to defend our distinctive practices. We sometimes need to go our separate ways because we can’t agree about the implications of the gospel, but all of us want to get the gospel right. We who affirm the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura agree, at least in principle, that Scripture is the supreme source and only guiding norm of Christian theology.

As evangelicals, we long to be “biblical” in what we teach and practice. We want our doctrine—our normative expression of Christian truth—to be rooted in the Bible. We all agree Scripture should have the final word in our disputes, but Scripture must be interpreted (Neh. 8:8; Acts 8:30). We want to be obedient to God’s voice in the text and sensitive to the Spirit’s leading, but even those shared desires do not guarantee uniformity in our interpretations of Scripture. Something about our reading (or our nature) keeps us from coming into the Bible in the same way, from making the same judgments about the text. Though we eagerly await the future day in which all of our hindrances to knowing God fully are removed, now, in the interim period, we see the written word of God through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:12).2

Theologians have long recognized the role our interpretive differences play in doctrinal diversity. The fifth-century Gallic theologian Vincent of Lérins said, “All do not accept [Scripture] in one and the same sense. . . . One understands its words in one way, another in another; so that it seems to be capable of as many interpretations as there are interpreters.”3 Interpretive diversity—and the ever-present threat of heresy—led Vincent to believe “the rule for the right understanding of the prophets and apostles should be framed in accordance with the standard of Ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation.”4 Though Vincent believed Scripture to be a sufficient source of divine revelation in need of no other additional content, he suggested interpreters read the Bible with church tradition so they wouldn’t become heretics. Building on this germ of an idea, later medieval theologians insisted the church needed a formal teaching office to decipher the meaning of Scripture and the will of God for the people.5

The Reformers gave neither the church nor tradition such primacy in biblical interpretation. They conceded the potential for human error in individual interpreters, but they also realized the magisterium and church councils were also made up of people prone to the same kinds of mistakes.6 Luther and the other Reformers maintained Scripture is clear enough for every Christian to interpret it without the need of a divinely instituted teaching office. Scripture has an intellegible meaning communicated by its human and divine authorship. The Reformers presumed that the Holy Spirit involves himself in the interpretation process, helping illuminate the meaning of Scripture for its readers.

Yet these affirmations pose an interesting problem: In what sense can we call the Bible clear if its meaning is so disputed? And why do believers reach conflicting conclusions if the same Holy Spirit is at work in each of their lives? This chapter breaks ground on the larger theme of this book: the relationship between our claims about Scripture as the definitive authority for the people of God and the reality of evangelical theological diversity.

In this chapter I lay out basic evangelical presumptions about the nature of biblical interpretation which will shape the discussion in the following chapters. Here I will borrow liberally from the work of more qualified hermeneutics scholars who defend the ability of authors to convey meaning and who acknowledge the fallibility of interpreters striving to make sense of authorial intentions. Theological diversity does not diminish or take away from the doctrines of the clarity of Scripture and the illumination of the Spirit when these claims are properly understood.

The Nature of Interpretation

How do we know what the Bible—or any text, for that matter—really means? Before tackling the big issues like ecclesiology, eschatology, or election, we must explore the more fundamental questions about interpretation. The term hermeneutics (from the Gk. hermēneuō, meaning “to interpret”) has many uses. Most who hear the word associate it with the rules for interpreting biblical genres (what we also call biblical hermeneutics or special hermeneutics). The term can also refer to a branch of philosophy which examines how human beings make meaning and communicate through texts (general hermeneutics or philosophical hermeneutics).

General hermeneutics is a close cousin to other important areas in philosophy: the study of how we know what we know (epistemology), the search for what it means to be a human being (anthropology), and the field that examines how we use signs in human communication (semiotics). Here, I want to leverage the tools of general hermeneutics to defend the clarity of Scripture and a commonsense approach to biblical interpretation. Though some of the hermeneutical philosophers who shape my thinking here do not share my evangelical worldview, many of the assertions they make about texts and readers are consistent with what Scripture says about God’s self-communication, about human nature, and about the world God has made.7

Theologians sometimes ignore the detours through philosophy so they can jump straight into the fray of exegetical debate, but questions related to general hermeneutics loom large over everything we do in interpreting the Bible and developing doctrine: What are texts? What is the role of the reader in interpretation? Where does the meaning of a text come from—the author, the reader, or the text itself? What is the right way to read a text? The wrong way? Answers to these questions usually fall into one of two categories: author-oriented or reader-centered hermeneutical approaches. Author-oriented approaches to interpretation seek to understand the meaning of a text created by the author. Reader-centered approaches put the onus of creating meaning on the individual reader or reading community. Clarity on these matters is crucial in a postmodern climate where exclusive truth claims are ignored or dismissed, sometimes even among self-described Christians.

Most Christian theologians throughout the history of interpretation have gravitated toward a commonsense hermeneutic that gives the authorship of biblical texts pride of place in interpretation. Before the dawn of modernity, readers usually took for granted the ability of authors to convey meaning through written texts. Even the medieval theologians who affirmed the “fourfold sense of Scripture” (i.e., its literal, typological, moral, and analogical senses) prioritized the “literal sense” of the authors in their interpretation of the Bible. As Thomas Aquinas explains, “The literal sense is indeed what the author intends.”8 Hugh of St. Victor encouraged readers of Scripture to give preference to the meaning “which appears certain to have been intended by the author.”9 Medieval interpreters may have believed the Bible can mean more than what its original human authors intended, but certainly not any less.

The Protestant Reformers downplayed the other three senses of interpretation but agreed with medieval theologians that interpreters should seek to understand Scripture’s literal sense.10 The Reformers’ approach to biblical texts later came to be known as the grammatical-historical method. Contrary to what its name might imply, the grammatical-historical “method” is not so much a step-by-step methodology for biblical interpretation as it is a general orientation toward Scripture. Advocates of the grammatical-historical method see their primary task to be interpreting Scripture in its original linguistic and historical contexts without calling into question its claims. Interpreters in this vein presume the truthfulness of Scripture and receive the claims of biblical authorship in good faith.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the practice of biblical interpretation began drifting away from the grammatical-historical emphasis on the discovery of authorial intent toward a historical-critical method. Modernists asserted that human beings were capable of mastery over their world, which entailed taking the Bible captive as an object of critical study. Instead of taking the intentions of biblical authors at their face value, these modernist interpreters sought to reconstruct the message of the Bible for Enlightenment-era humanity.11

The theologians and biblical scholars of modernity did not deny biblical texts the ability to convey...