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Seriously, Read the Bible: Part Two

Seriously, Read the Bible: Part Two

Last updated on: February 20, 2017 at 8:11 am by Anne Kennedy

Seriously, Read the Bible: Part Two 2017-02-20T08:11:09-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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With two head colds in the mix, and the fact that sometime this week you should be hearing the dulcet tones of my very own voice on the Eric Metaxas Show, I’m going to postpone all the rest of my Links until that auspicious moment. Instead, today I have for you the treat of a paper on the question of whether or not the Bible is Suffcient. The paper is 30 some pages long so I’m not going to paste it all here, but below you will find a goodly portion and the link to get to the rest. You may think, ‘wow, 30 pages, I don’t have time for something that long!’ But then you might also think, ‘wait a minute! Is the Bible really useful? Shouldn’t I both know how to read it but also why?!’ When you think of it that way, of course you would carefully bookmark and work through it in a calm and disciplined way. And then you will find yourself equipped and helped by the clarity and depth, able to understand the critical doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture. And I promise, the rest of the week will be all sweets and treats. Enjoy!

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It is a clear night. The moon is full. You are a college student attending an astronomy course. Your instructor has decided to hold class outside. As an experiment the instructor asks each student to look through her telescope and propose a hypothesis regarding the composition of the moon’s crust. Most students suggest various types of rock. But one of your classmates, always a bit odd, steps away from the telescope and observes: “The moon is made of cheese. Judging by the holes in the surface I’d say it’s Swiss.”

Everyone laughs, assuming it is a joke. But he insists, adding more observations to support his hypothesis. Other students step in to argue against him, employing observations and hypotheses. After a long and increasingly absurd discussion, the instructor intervenes. “The moon’s crust”, she says, reciting the conclusion from an article published by the American Astronomical Society (AAS), “is composed of silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum.”

“I don’t believe you,” objects the lunar cheese advocate.

“It doesn’t matter whether you believe me. I am telling you what we know from data the scientific community has gathered not only from observation but also from those who have been there and brought back samples.”

“I don’t believe you,” objects the lunar cheese advocate. “It doesn’t matter whether you believe me. I am telling you what we know from data the scientific community has gathered not only from observation but also from those who have been there and brought back samples.” “I don’t believe them either. Did they sample every inch of the surface? How can we know that their samples are representative? I don’t see anything like silicon or aluminum or any of that other stuff. And there are disagreements even between professional astronomers as to what exactly makes up the crust. Maybe they are all wrong? It looks like cheese to me so I’m sticking with cheese.”

A friend of yours, looking troubled, whispers into your ear. “He’s got a point. The moon isn’t made of cheese, of course, but equally brilliant astronomers have posed mutually exclusive theories about its composition. How do we choose between conflicting but equally plausible interpretations of the data? It’s an epistemic nightmare. When faced with these kinds of questions, it is always best to trust the AAS conclusions. Otherwise, we’re doomed to chaotic subjectivity.”

“But,” you object, “the AAS, while invaluable and necessary, has been wrong before. Didn’t the AAS definitively affirm the ‘Steady State Theory’? Then Hubble discovered the red-shift and everything changed. Where would astronomy be if every astronomer simply accepted the conclusions of the AAS as if they were infallible? Can’t the data speak for itself? Shouldn’t we look to the moon itself to confirm or invalidate our hypotheses about the moon? If we trust that the AAS will always provide the right interpretation of the data don’t we risk blinding ourselves to the data? Wouldn’t that effectively shut down inquiry and debate?”

“Yes. Exactly,” your classmate says, “that’s the only way to avoid thousands of individuals with their telescopes creating their own absurd forms of astronomy. We’d soon have as many theories about lunar composition as we do varieties of cheese!”

The scenario above, while admittedly ridiculous, does lay out the contours of the debate.

The moon, in this case, represents the scriptures. The astronomy class represents the church. The instructor fills the role of the pastor-teacher. The AAS conclusions the instructor presents are the teaching tradition. The lunar cheese advocate represents an admittedly caricatured version of the Solo Scriptura position. And the whispering classmate represents what some have called the “Sola Ecclesia”3 position. Christians must either embrace the infallible interpretive authority of the Church (the AAS) or find the church swamped by lunar cheese advocates4. The Church then becomes the “norma normans”, the norm by which all other norms are normed. The notion of an infallible interpreter ultimately subordinates the object studied (the scriptures) to the student (the Church).

“Sola Ecclesia” ultimately does violence to the bible’s own claim about itself — that it is a light to our feet and a lantern to our path5, that it is God’s breathed-out word6 to his people expressed in understandable7 human language, that by it God speaks clearly to his Church as a whole, feeding8 sanctifying9, correcting, rebuking, and encouraging10 every individual within her. In short, by denying the general perspicuity of the bible, the argument for an infallible interpreter assumes the insufficiency of God’s word, and thus God, to communicate adequately to the human creature and to do what God breathed it out to do, that is to bring disciples to completion.

The Solo Scriptura position equally does violence to the very book it seeks to uphold as supreme. The bible itself presents the pastor/teacher as a gift from God given for the purpose of enabling the people of God to understand and apply what he has revealed in his Word. By disregarding the accumulated teachings of those who have occupied the pastoral office for the last two thousand years (i.e. tradition), those who take the Solo Scriptura position blithely cast away the gracious assistance God has provided for human frailty. The Solo “Scripturist” ironically exalts the individual Christian to the very place to which the Roman church exalts the Magisterium. If the individual’s interpretation is to be generally preferred over that of the Tradition, then God’s communication to the Church as a whole has failed and scripture is, just as Rome’s position suggests, insufficient.

An exhaustive examination of all the biblical texts dealing with the nature of the relationship between scripture, the teaching office, and people within the church is beyond the scope of this essay but since the various texts consistently express a single principle, an exhaustive examination is also unnecessary. What follows is a brief but representative sampling of texts that illumine the right relationship between the Scriptures, the teaching office of the church, and the individuals within the church.

Carry on reading here.

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