Joseph Smith supposedly had a seer stone that allowed him to interpret sacred text. Ellen G. White supposedly had visions that interpreted the Bible for her. Mary Baker Eddy was knocked unconscious and received her key to biblical interpretation. Roman Catholics have a pope. Eastern Orthodox have a bunch of bishops. The Jehovah's Witnesses have the Watchtower Organization. Some Protestants have denominations that function like the Eastern Orthodox. Some churches have head pastors that function as microcosmic popes. And none of these have any extra thing given to them that enables them to interpret the Bible correctly.
This is because biblical interpretation relies upon the biblical text itself. Language has an objective nature to it already. No one needs someone with spidey-powers to interpret some mysterious text that can't be interpreted without some extra revelation or mystical ability. If that were the case then God would have just used the tongues of angels to write the Scripture, but He didn't. He used the languages of men. Languages that men knew with logical and linguistic rules that men knew, so that using those rules of interpreting language, rules they use every single day to interpret their own languages used in conversations with one another, they would be able to understand what God had written down.
This means that the more "spiritual" someone thinks the text of Scripture is, the less they'll likely understand it because they'll likely not bother with all of that intellectual wrestling with interpretive principles that need to be applied in the interpretation of a text. After all, "It's a spiritual book, not human one," said the Gnostic heretic. The Bible is a spiritual book in terms of what it communicates, not in the way it communicates it. In that regard, it's divine and human in nature. The religious content is divine. The communication of that content is human. And this is what God intended it to be and this tells us that what is needed to interpret it is contained within the language it uses. So it is simply a matter of learning the language of the author as well as possible (his dialect, his vocabulary that includes reference to his world, his grammar, his syntax, and his artistic style of crafting his particular text with particular themes and motifs).
So Scripture has what it needs to be interpreted within itself. I don't mean that all knowledge needed to interpret it is contained in Scripture. I mean that all knowledge that you would need to interpret it is pointed to in Scripture by its assumption of the rules and referents of a known human language.
But how do we know what the Scripture is without some other authority among humanity telling us what it is? As I said in the last post, this just kicks the can down the road. If a divine agent upon the earth must be authenticated by another divine agent upon the earth then what divine agent is going to authenticate that one, or that one, or that one, or that one, or that one. You get the point.
Instead, any divine agent would have to be self-authenticating to avoid the problem of infinite regress. This is an easy one for me since I'm a Calvinist and believe that all who are regenerated by God recognize divine truth when it is taught, and this is why Christians have always recognized core texts of the Bible. The books that were disputed was due to the fact that divine truth is contained in other books outside of Scripture, so the antilegomena were discussed texts but not texts rejected because they might contain heresy like the gnostic texts were. Those were not disputed. They were rejected outright. Eventually, the logic of accepting the gospels and Pauline Epistles, texts always received by Christians, led to the reception of the epistles of John, Peter, Jude, etc. and the placement of the Didache or Epistle of Barnabas outside the Scripture, even though the church encouraged believers to still read them since they contain divine truth.
This, to me, is the only logical conclusion in claiming the legitimacy of any primary divine agency/medium upon the earth.
Having said this, however, the interpretation of Scripture, though self-preserved in the rules of the language it uses itself, is not self-evident to all who are regenerate because God, having used human means to communicate, requires human means to interpret that communication. This does not mean the Spirit is not involved in opening the eyes of people to see what is in the text, and I think this is what the church is for. This is why Timothy must study to be approved as a workman worthy of God. It is why the elders must labor intensively and exhaustively to study the Word and teach it. The Spirit motivates the teacher to study, taps him on the shoulder to notice what he may have missed in the text, and to teach the text to His people. But the Spirit is the Spirit of Truth and He points to His Word because the Word is Jesus. The Bible testifies to the Person and work of Jesus Christ and it is the Spirit's job to testify of Jesus Christ, and so the Spirit uses God's Word to sanctify His people in truth not as another job that He has but as the task given to Him as another Helper. In other words, the Spirit is involved in committing teachers and their listeners to a deeper understanding of the Scripture by pointing to what is already in the Scripture and can be discerned by anyone works hard and understanding the languages that the Bible itself uses. He doesn't need something extra. He doesn't point to something extra. Hence, every scribe/Bible scholar that becomes a part of the kingdom of God is like a man bringing out treasure both old and new from the text of Scripture. He's not adding to it. He's not twisting it to come up with fanciful interpretations. He's not bending it to fit his traditions.
I say all of this to simply say that the idea that the Scripture needs anything else to either authenticate it or to interpret it is fallacious. But where the core religion of Scripture is self-authenticating to all who are regenerate, the individual interpretation of various passages must be decided through the rigorous study of the text as the means through which the Spirit teaches His people.
No comments:
Post a Comment