A final attribute of Scripture to consider is its sufficiency, celebrated in the Reformation slogan sola scriptura. After developing and defending this important aspect of biblical authority, this chapter provides an account of how theology moves from the biblical text to church dogmas.
In chapter 4, I underscored the connection between canon and covenant (see esp. “God’s Ruling Constitution,” pp. 151–55), but in considering the sufficiency of Scripture we now include community. As means of grace, the Word (particularly the gospel) preached creates the church; as normative canon (constitution), the Word as Scripture stands over the community. Through this Word, Christ not only creates a redeemed communion but governs it as Prophet, Priest, and King. The church is the recipient of God’s saving revelation, never a source.
Before we survey the Roman Catholic-Protestant debate, it is helpful to refer briefly to the relation of tradition and Scripture in the Christian East. As on other points, the East is more fluid in its conception of this relationship. Some Orthodox theologians hold that the tradition of the first five centuries, particularly as enshrined in liturgical forms, belongs to the deposit of faith. Others, however, insist upon the qualitative distinction between Scripture and tradition. Sergius Bulgakov (1871–1944) affirmed the unique authority of Scripture “above all the sources of faith, especially of all tradition in all its forms,”1 while Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958) regarded these as a unity.2 Bulgakov held that Scripture is self-attesting, “an inherent witness to itself,” while tradition depends on it.3
We have seen that, at least in its official pronouncements, the Roman Catholic Church affirms the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. Among others, Heiko Oberman has pointed out that the nature of Scripture was not at issue in the Reformation dispute with Rome. Rather, differences emerged over the relationship between Scripture and tradition.4 The Latin slogan sola scriptura means “by Scripture alone,” not “Scripture alone” (solo scriptura)5 For example, both Lutheran and Reformed churches regard the ecumenical creeds, along with their own confessions and catechisms, as authoritative and binding summaries of Scripture, to which they are all subordinate.
The emergence of parity between Scripture and tradition as two sources was due largely to the canon lawyers in the twelfth and subsequent centuries, yet still there were theologians of the stature of Duns Scotus and Pierre D’Ailly who insisted that Scripture was sovereign over tradition.6 Only at the Council of Trent (1545–1563) was this view, defended by the Reformers, officially condemned. Augustine’s famous statement that he would never have believed had he not been moved by the authority of the church was the touchstone for Rome’s argument for the priority of the church over the Word.7 Since the church preceded the canon and the latter evolved within and was finally authorized as such by the church, the conclusion seemed self-evident to Roman Catholic theologians that the church was the mother of Scripture. Furthermore, Scripture has to be interpreted. Would the Spirit inspire the canon without also inspiring its living interpreter, the church?
The Council of Trent established the view that Scripture and tradition are actually two forms of God’s Word—“written” and “unwritten.” Many unwritten (i.e., oral) traditions were passed around by the apostles and their circle and passed down by them to successive generations. Crucial to the development of this conception of tradition was the assumption that the apostolic office is still in effect, with the pope and magisterium as the successors to Peter and the other apostles.8 However, it was not until the First Vatican Council (1870) that papal infallibility became a binding dogma for Roman Catholics.9 According to this teaching, the pope, when speaking as Peter’s successor (ex cathedra means “from the chair”), is preserved from error and may promulgate doctrines that are necessary to be believed for salvation.
The Second Vatican Council represents a more nuanced view of the relation of Scripture and tradition, thinking through the many variations that had been held before the arteries were hardened in the Counter-Reformation. However, this council repeated the dogma that Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition flow from the same source. “In order that the full and living gospel might always be preserved in the church the apostles left bishops as their successors. They gave them ‘their own position of teaching authority.’”10 One may discern in this statement a subtle form of the traditional Roman Catholic distinction between a written canon and a living community. Rome had made this a major argument in the Counter-Reformation, equating Paul’s contrast between the “letter” and the “Spirit” (2Co 3:6) with the difference between Scripture and the living church.11
The council continues, “Sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture, then, are bound closely together, flowing out from the same divine wellspring, come together in some fashion to form one thing, and move toward the same goal” (emphasis added). In fact, it is Sacred Tradition that faithfully “transmits in its entirety the Word of God” in both its apostolic and postapostolic form.
It transmits it to the successors of the apostles so that, enlightened by the Spirit of truth, they may faithfully preserve, expound, and spread it abroad by their preaching. Thus it comes about that the church does not draw her certainty about all revealed truths from the Holy Scriptures alone. Hence, both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honored with equal feelings of devotion and reverence. Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture make up a single deposit of the Word of God, which is entrusted to the church (emphasis added).12
Tradition is therefore the process of transmitting the Word of God. Although the magisterium is the servant of this Word, “whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition,” the two “are so connected and associated that one of them cannot stand without the other.”13
The magisterium (the teaching office, with the pope as primate) proposes or commands dogmas to be believed on the assumption that the apostolic authority that produced the New Testament continues in an unbroken succession through Rome’s popes.14 While Scripture and postcanonical tradition differ in degree of authority, they belong to the same genus, since they are both equally the offspring of divine revelation in the church. From this principle emerges Rome’s dogma of implicit faith (fides implícita), which requires acceptance of all dogmas commanded by the church. The basis for this implicit faith is the church’s own inherent authority. “Sacred theology relies on the written Word of God, taken together with Sacred Tradition, as on a permanent foundation.”15
While some Roman Catholic theologians (especially Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Yves Congar, and George Tavard) have tried to revive the view held by some medieval thinkers that Scripture is uniquely normative, Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) replies that since there are many extrascriptural dogmas that such theologians must hold, “What sense is there in talking about the sufficiency of scripture?”16 Once again we recognize the tendency of Rome to fall back on its scale-of-being ontology, with revelation consisting of different levels of intensity, conflating in its own way inspiration and illumination: “Scripture is not revelation but at most only a part of the latter’s greater reality.”17
Therefore, in spite of its high view of biblical inspiration, Roman Catholic teaching elides the important distinction between inspiration and illumination. Eliminating any qualitative distinction between apostolic and postapostolic offices and traditions, Rome denies the sufficiency of Scripture as the sole rule for faith and practice. Just as the New Testament supplements the Old Testament, Ratzinger argues, the church’s ongoing interpretation supplements both.18
The crucial difference between Roman Catholic and confessional Protestant interpretations at this point is easily summarized. While the former treats the church’s authority as magisterial, the latter treats it as ministerial.19 Neither possessing absolute authority nor devoid of any authority, the church’s role is that of a court rather than of a constitution. Christ has indeed established a teaching office in the church, but it depends on the illumination of the Spirit for its fallible interpretation of the infallible canon inspired by the Spirit.
A brief survey of Calvin’s treatment in the Institutes (1.7–9) is instructive. Calvin challenges the idea that the church is the mother of Scripture: “[Paul] testifies that the church is ‘built upon the foundation of the prophets and apostles’ [Eph. 2:20]. If the teaching of the prophets and apostles is the foundation, this must have had authority before the church began to exist” (1.7.2). Augustine’s famous maxim (“I would not have believed that the Scriptures are God’s Word unless I had been taught this by the church”) is nothing more than the relation of his own experience of how he came to faith rather than an assertion concerning the source of the faith’s authority (1.7.3). Unless the credibility of doctrine is established by divine rather than human authority, our consciences will always waver. Those who seek to first prove the reliability of Scripture by appeals to an authority external to it (whether church or reason) are “doing things backwards” (1.7.4). “Scripture indeed is self-authenticated [autopiston]; hence, it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning” (1.7.5). Once this divine authority is firmly established, we may certainly appeal to such external arguments, including the church’s ministerial authority, as “very useful aids” (1.8.1). “In this way, we willingly embrace and reverence as holy the early councils, such as those of Nicea, Constantinople, Ephesus I, Chalcedon, and the like, which were concerned with refuting errors—in so far as they relate to the things of faith” (4.9.1).
Protestant orthodoxy followed in the same path as the Reformers. Rome had argued that even if the Scriptures had been lost, there would still be the living voice of the church. However, Robert Rollock responded, far from a dead letter waiting to be animated by a living church or apostle, Scripture is “most effectual, most lively, and most vocal, sounding to every man an answer of all things necessary unto salvation…. For the Scripture contains in it the word of God, which is lively and powerful (Heb 4:12).”20 It is the Scriptures themselves that declare that they are living and active, Rollock adds.21 “The voice of the church … doth depend on the voice of the Scripture,” since the church often errs.22 After all, “the church is born and bred, not of mortal, but of immortal seed, which is the word of God, 1Pe 1:23.”23
Rollock responded to the argument that it was tradition that preserved the covenant under the patriarchs by pointing out that “the substance of the Scripture was in those very traditions whereby the church was edified and kept” (emphasis added). Of course, the church came before the Scriptures as a completed canon, but a canon “was not then necessary, for that then the lively voice of God itself was heard.” But now it is necessary.24
William Perkins wrote, “We hold that the very word of God hath been delivered by tradition.”25 In fact, Perkins adds, “This is true not only of the Old Testament, but of the New Testament as well, as some twenty to eighty years passed before the traditions were committed to writing And many things we hold for truth not written in the word, if they be not against the word.”26 William Ames makes the same point: In substance, the Word preceded and in fact created the church, although this oral tradition was later committed to textual form.27
Protestants had no trouble agreeing that there was a time when written Scripture and oral tradition were two media of a unified revelation, but they denied that this situation applies in the postapostolic era. The critical question for us is whether the noninspired traditions of ordinary ministers of the church can be equated with the revelation given through the extraordinary ministry of prophets and apostles.
Jesus excoriated the religious leaders for raising “the tradition of men” (Mk 7:8) to the level of God’s Word. “So for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God” (Mt 15:6). On the other hand, Paul exhorts the Thessalonians to “stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2Th 2:15). A chapter later he warns them to keep away from those who are not walking “in accord with the tradition that you received from us” (2Th 3:6). In spite of their strife and immaturity, Paul commends the Corinthians “because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you” (1Co 11:2).
Jesus and Paul do not stand in contradiction on this point. The difference between “the tradition of men” and the tradition to which Paul refers is clear. Jesus recognized a qualitative difference between the inspired Scriptures (the Law and the Prophets) and the noninspired tradition of the elders. However, Jesus commissioned officers of the new covenant who stood on a par with the prophets. After the apostles, the church is served by ministers who are called not to lay the foundation but to build on it. When the traditions of the elders (in either covenant) are faithful interpretations of Scripture, they are valid, but when they raise themselves to the level of Scripture itself, they are invalid.
Judicial decisions and the history of case precedent cannot be equated with the constitution itself. The new covenant had been inaugurated and now, by Christ’s appointment, was receiving its constitution. While all apostolic pronouncements concerning faith and practice were to be received as God’s Word (“either by our spoken word or by our letter”), the Spirit saw fit to commit the most necessary oral and written teaching to the New Testament Scriptures. Analogous to postprophetic traditions, then, postapostolic traditions have ministerial but not magisterial authority. The court is not the author of its own constitution.
Sound tradition is the effect of the Spirit’s illumination rather than inspiration. Lutheran and Reformed churches do not regard creeds, confessions, and the decisions of councils and synods as compromising sola scriptura. Rather, they regard church dogmas as authoritative because they are “clearly revealed in the Word of God, formulated by some competent church body, and regarded as authoritative, because they are derived from the Word of God.”28 In its deliberative assemblies, the church has an ordained power to direct the confession and interpretation of the Word of God, but always in subservience to it. Where Rome holds that the faithful must believe everything that the church teaches (fides implicita), based on the authority of the church, Protestants maintain that we must believe everything that the Scriptures teach even if an angel or apostle were to bring a different gospel (Gal 1:6–9).
The distinction between the magisterial role of the Scriptures and the ministerial role of the church assumes a qualitative distinction between the extraordinary apostolic office and the ordinary offices of ministers and elders. Since there are no more apostles, there is no ongoing revelation. This is the argument that the Reformers made against both Rome and the radical Protestants.29 The Scriptures are sufficient. If the ancient church recognized postapostolic tradition as an extension of apostolic tradition, why did their criteria for recognizing canonicity limit authorized texts to those of apostolic origin? Surely these ancient bishops did not regard tradition as a form of ongoing revelation; in fact, it was precisely against this view of the Gnostics that Irenaeus and others inveighed.
The church does indeed play an important role as a servant of the Spirit in illumination. Nevertheless, Johannes Wollebius asks,
What can be more absurd than to make the words of the Master to receive their authority from the servant … or that the Rule should have its dependence from the thing ruled? … We know that the oracles of God are committed to the church, Ro 3.2, and that she is the pillar and ground of truth, 1Ti 3:15. But as it is foolish to tell us that the candle receives its light from the candlestick that supports it, so it is ridiculous to ascribe the Scripture’s authority to the church.30
We believe through the ministry of the church, not because of the church, Francis Turretin argued. He adds,
We do not deny that the church has many functions in relation to the Scriptures. She is (1) the keeper of the oracles of God to whom they are committed and who preserves the authentic tables of the covenant of grace with the greatest fidelity, like a notary (Ro 3:2); (2) the guide, to point out the Scriptures and lead us to them (Isa 30:21); (3) the defender, to vindicate and defend them by separating the genuine books from the spurious, in which sense she may be called the ground (hedraiôma) of the truth (1Ti 3:15); (4) the herald who sets forth and promulgates them (2Co 5:19; Ro 10:16); (5) the interpreter inquiring into the unfolding of the true sense.31
These are weighty assignments. “But all these imply a ministerial only and not a magisterial power Through her indeed, we believe, but not on account of her” (emphasis added).32
No less than the ancient and medieval church did the Reformers view the ecumenical creeds as “the rule [kanôn] of faith.” In fact, they appealed in painstaking detail to citations from the church fathers in support of their claim that the church has no intrinsic authority to prescribe articles of faith or commands to be followed. However, they held that creeds and councils have a secondary authority, binding believers only because they are summaries of Scripture as the final rule for faith and practice. Christ is the head who saves and rules his body. Therefore, the church is always put into question in its faith and life by the Word that created and preserves it, and it must always be ready to be reformed by it. Paul said that he had “laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it” (1Co 3:10). That is the order: apostolic foundation followed by the ordinary ministry of the church on that basis. “For no one can lay a foundation other than that which laid, which is Jesus Christ” (v. 11, emphasis added). There is the foundation-laying period, and then the building phase.
If Paul could warn the Corinthians “not to go beyond what is written” (1Co 4:6), then surely those of us living in postapostolic times are no less obliged to this principle. Especially as the church was already being racked with internal division and errors, Paul in effect invoked the principle of sola scriptura in forbidding the saints from going beyond the written texts. Paul urges this in the context of his defense of his ministry against the charges of the “superapostles,” who led many Corinthians astray by their claim to extraordinary revelation that circumvented the apostolic circle. It is interesting that while Rome increasingly answered the heretics by appealing to its own authority (an ongoing apostolic authority), Paul himself, though indisputably an apostle, drew the Corinthians’ attention to that which had been already committed to writing even while the apostles were living. There one could not go wrong. That Peter even refers to Paul’s epistles as “Scripture” underscores just how early the apostles were talking about official pastoral letters as canonical (2Pe 3:16).
Ultimate authority always resides outside the self and even outside the church, as both are always hearers of the Word and receivers of its judgment and justification. The church is commissioned to deliver this Word (a ministerial office), not to possess or rule over it (a magisterial office). Thus, the authority is always transcendent. Even when it comes near us, it is never our own word that we hear (Ro 10:6–13, 17).
This sovereignty of Scripture over the church may be defended not only from the New Testament but secondarily from the actual process by which the postapostolic church arrived at the canon. Our twenty-seven books in the New Testament canon were first codified in an official list at the councils of Carthage (393) and Hippo (397).33 However, two important facts need to be considered.
First, most of these texts were already widely recognized and employed regularly in public worship as divinely inspired. In fact, this was one criterion that was used for determining which texts were canonical. As we have seen, Peter refers to Paul’s writings as Scripture. Tertullian was already quoting from twenty-three of these twenty-seven books by the late second and early third centuries. The wide use of these books (as well as the Old Testament) by the ancient Christian writers to judge all views and controversies testifies to the fact that they were already functioning as Scripture long before they were officially listed in a canon. In 367, Athanasius drew up the first list of all twenty-seven books, even identifying it as a canon, and maintained that “holy Scripture is of all things most sufficient for us.”34 Basil of Caesarea (330–379) instructed, “Believe those things which are written; the things which are not written seek not.”35 “It is a manifest defection from the faith, a proof of arrogance, either to reject anything of what is written, or to introduce anything that is not.”36
Second, from these ancient Christian writers we can identify four main categories in which texts were to be placed: canonical, widely accepted, spurious, and heretical.37 There were criteria employed for determining canonical books, all of which had to do with the nature of the texts rather than with the authority of the church. These criteria included well-attested apostolic authorship or certification, wide acceptance and use as Scripture already in church practice, and consistency of content—or what became known in Reformation teaching as the “analogy of Scripture” (interpreting passages in the light of other passages, comparing the parts in the light of the whole, and vice versa). The canonicity of the letters of James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 John, and 3 John, though they were widely accepted, was debated in the early church before they were recognized as belonging to the canon.
Both of these points underscore the fact that the church was recognizing, not creating, the canon. These leaders of the ancient church were engaged in historical criticism—determining which books were canonical, not endowing them with canonical authority. Athanasius, for example, rejected the Shepherd of Hermas because, though widely used, it did not have adequate evidence of apostolic origin and did not bear the marks of belonging to the circle of the apostles themselves.38
Finally, the sufficiency of Scripture is inseparable from both its scope and its perspicuity (or clarity).39 Rome’s contention has been that Scripture itself is difficult to understand, especially by laypeople, and that it therefore requires an infallible interpreter. Historically, it is difficult to justify the claim that Rome’s teachings are clearer or more internally consistent than Scripture itself. In fact, the church’s teachings—even those it requires belief in for salvation—fill a library of volumes, with pronouncements so detailed and technical that a layperson hardly knows where to begin. Doubtless, this fact contributed to the doctrine of implicit faith—believing whatever the church teaches, even if one is not aware of it. In fact, some views that were eventually settled upon as official church teaching had been previously condemned as heretical. In addition, for more than a century (1309–1437), there were four rival popes, each anathematizing the others’ see. This division, known as the Western Schism, meant that all of Christendom lived under the condemnation of one or more popes, unsure of who had the real power of excommunication. In contrast, although the New Testament itself refers to internal debates even among the apostles, the canonical texts exhibit a striking clarity and unity.
From the evangelical perspective, Scripture is sufficient as the source of truth because Christ is sufficient as the basis, grace as the motive, and faith as the instru-ment of receiving everlasting salvation. In defending sola scriptura, Berkouwer reminds us, “The sharp criticism of the Reformers was closely related to their deep central concern for the gospel,” which is evident in the other solae.40 In this connection, the concept of canon is closely bound up with that of the covenant of grace. God is always the initiator, and we are the recipients. We are not first a certain kind of people who then create or adopt a certain constitution; we are constituted by the charter that defines us as those who belong to God in a covenant of grace. “The early church did not create the story,” writes Herman Ridderbos. “The story created the early church! … Without the resurrection the story would have lost its power. It would have been the story of the life of a saint, not the gospel.”41
The bewildering proliferation of denominations and sects seems to justify Rome’s denial of Scripture’s inherent clarity. However, as any parent can attest, children are often reprimanded for failing properly to hear or heed clear instructions. Furthermore, a student of church history will become increasingly sensitive to the complexity, ambiguity, crises, and even contradictions in church teaching. Although the divisions within Protestantism are a scandal, the histories of both Orthodox and Roman Catholic communions attest to similar strife—even if the institutions themselves have been held together by an implicit (and for much of their history, politically enforced) faith in bishops and popes.
Some of our differences in interpretation arise from the inherent richness and polyphonic voices of the human authors of Scripture. Even the four gospels reflect diverse interests, perspectives, accounts, and even theological emphases. Furthermore, there are different contexts, such as Paul’s engagement with legalism and James’s with antinomianism. While acknowledging the canonicity of Paul’s writings, Peter could acknowledge that there are some things that are difficult to understand, which “the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures” (2Pe 3:16). By laying the blame at the feet of false interpreters, Jesus and the apostles uphold the inherent clarity of Scripture. The church is not only fallible; it is prone to misinterpret God’s Word apart from the constant faithfulness of the Spirit’s illuminating grace. Even the gospel, which is as clear as the statement “Christ died for our sins and was raised for our justification” (cf. Ro 4:25), may be obscured, confused, distorted, or denied—again, partly because of its inexhaustible richness and partly because the gospel remains to a certain degree a stumbling block and foolishness even to Christians.
Finally, the clarity of Scripture is not uniform. There is a fundamentalist version of Scripture’s perspicuity or clarity that undervalues its humanity, plurality, and richness, treating the Bible as a collection of obvious propositions that require no interpretation. However, this is not the classic Protestant understanding of Scripture’s clarity. The Westminster Confession (1.7) freely acknowledges that the Scriptures are “not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all.” We must interpret obscure passages in the light of clearer ones, and we must do this together, not simply by ourselves. In doing so, we can discern the clear teaching of Scripture on the most important matters that it addresses.
Like its sufficiency, the clarity of Scripture is inseparable from its scope. If we come to the Bible looking for answers to our own questions that it does not address explicitly, treating it as an encyclopedia of general knowledge, we will draw from it conclusions that it does not intend. For instance, if we seek from Scripture infallible information concerning the age of the earth, we will miss the point of the passages we are citing. Passages of this kind require more interpretive skill than do the abundant and obvious declarations of the gospel. The tragic fact that Rome has condemned as heretical the clear teaching of the gospel is the most decisive challenge to its claim to be the church’s infallible teacher of God’s Word. The same must be said, also with great sorrow, for any Protestant body that strays from the clearest declarations of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. If the gospel is not known and proclaimed in its purity and simplicity, it is the teacher rather than the text that is unclear.
The churches of the Reformation embrace ecumenical creeds and agree on specific confessions and catechisms. However, they do this not because they think that Scripture is insufficient, difficult, or inconsistent and required an infallible interpreter. Rather, they require communal subscription to these confessions precisely because they believe the Scriptures are so clear and consistent that their principal teachings can and should be summarized for the good of the whole community, children as well as adults.
Therefore, the Reformers rejected both the magisterial authority of the church defended by Rome and the denial of the church’s ministerial authority that was often exhibited by radical Protestants. When Philip found an Ethiopian treasury secretary returning from Jerusalem reading Isaiah 53, he inquired, “Do you understand what you are reading?” “How can I, unless someone guides me?” the official replied (Ac 8:30–31). After Philip explained the passage in the light of its fulfillment in Christ, the official believed and was baptized and “went on his way rejoicing” (v. 39). Christ appointed the offices of teacher, pastor, and elder not to continue the extraordinary ministry of prophets and apostles but to preserve and proclaim the truth of Scripture. No one denies the need for interpretation, and, at least for the Reformers and their heirs, the church, through its representative synods, is given a ministerial authority to offer such communal interpretations. The question is whether ecclesial interpretations are always subject to revision by the light of Scripture or whether they are to be believed simply on the authority of the church itself.
Given the analysis above concerning the nature of God’s Word as sacramental as well as canonically regulative, sola scriptura is not simply an affirmation of the unique authority of the Bible over tradition but a confession of the sovereignty of God’s grace. Because God alone saves, God alone teaches and rules our faith and practice. Because the church is the creation of the Word (creatura verbi) rather than vice versa, “salvation belongs to the LORD!” (Jnh 2:9). Prior to becoming pope, Cardinal Ratzinger nicely summarized the difference between Rome and the Reformation churches on this point. According to the latter, the Word guarantees the ministry, whereas Rome holds that the ministry guarantees the Word. He adds, “Perhaps in this reversal of the relations between word and ministry lies the real opposition between the views of the church held by Catholics and Reformers.”42
Protestantism has had its own challenges in retaining its confidence in the sufficiency of Scripture, especially in the wake of the Enlightenment. Modernity enshrined the self as the sovereign arbiter over Scripture and church, whether in the form of reason, duty, experience, pragmatic usefulness, or felt needs. In Anglicanism, a moderating (“Latitudinarian”) position emerged, treating reason, tradition, experience, and Scripture as four legs of a stool of ecclesiastical authority. While insisting on the primacy of Scripture, John Wesley affirmed this fourfold authority. In 1965, Albert C. Outler coined the term Wesleyan Quadrilateral for this view that he discerned in Wesley’s writings.43
With Schleiermacher, any qualitative distinction between the Bible and other media of revelatory experience was eroded. Ironically, it was in Protestantism, therefore, that even the Roman Catholic caveat that the authority of Scripture is intrinsic rather than given to it by the church was eliminated.44 The Scriptures “must become the regulative type for our religious thinking, from which it is not of its own motion to depart,” Schleiermacher argued. Nevertheless, the sufficiency of Scripture is lodged in the use we make of Scripture rather than in its nature as such: “And when the Holy Scripture is described as ‘sufficient’ in this regard, what is meant is that through our use of Scripture the Holy Spirit can lead us into all truth, as it led the apostles and others who enjoyed Christ’s direct teaching” (emphasis added).45 Therefore, in this view God’s Word originates from within the individual or community (this is inspiration) and is expressed in ever-new variations within ever-new historical contexts.
It was against this departure from Christianity that Karl Barth launched his famous protest, recalling the decisive claim of the Reformers against the medieval church that God’s Word comes to us from outside of the self and the community. Whatever objections we may have to some of Barth’s views of revelation, he was emphatic on the point that the church always stands under the norm of Scripture alone.46
As I mentioned in the previous chapter (see “Collapsing the Distinction between Inspiration and Illumination,” pp. 169–73), some evangelical theologians today are attracted to views of Scripture that repeat familiar trajectories of liberal Protestantism. Rather than faith being created by the Word of God, the Word itself is created by the experiences of the community, according to this perspective. Obviously this requires “a revisioned understanding of the nature of the Bible’s authority,” as Stanley Grenz suggests.47 Sola scriptura has a noble history in evangelicalism. “The commitment to contextualization, however, entails an implicit rejection of the older evangelical conception of theology as the construction of truth on the basis of the Bible alone.” Instead, Grenz suggests that we adopt “the well-known method of correlation proposed by Paul Tillich” and the “Wesleyan quadrangle.”48 The Bible’s authority should be reciprocally rather than hierarchically related to our heritage and our contemporary context; and even here he adds, “the Bible as canonized by the church,” as if the church authorized rather than received the canon (emphasis added).49 Understandably, Grenz believes that this view will yield greater convergence between Protestant and Roman Catholic interpretations of Scripture and tradition, while also incorporating a Pentecostal and charismatic emphasis on continuing revelation.50 However, each of these proposed media is itself relativized by yet another source of revelation: contemporary culture.51
From the foregoing summaries we can see that scholars across the ecclesiastical spectrum have been domesticating God’s sovereign voice to the voice of the church or the individual. John Webster reminds us that when God’s speech acts and human speech acts become qualitatively indistinguishable, the church more easily indulges in the fantasy that it is already the fully realized kingdom of God, with “a broadly immanentistic ecclesiology” that lodges the church’s visibility in its doing of its works rather than in its hearing of God’s works. “Indeed, such accounts can sometimes take the form of a highly sophisticated hermeneutical reworking of Ritschlian social moralism, in which the center of gravity of a theology of Scripture has shifted away from God’s activity toward the uses of the church.”52
This process of shifting the weight from God’s saving and ruling speech to that of the community happens in all sorts of ways—in the traditional Roman Catholic way, but also in the widespread interest among Protestants in “translating” and “applying” the Bible in ways that assume its inherent irrelevance for contemporary thought and life. In numerous variations, across the theological spectrum, we often imagine as believers and as churches that our speaking is more relevant for our contemporaries than God’s speaking. Webster identifies this with a sort of Arminian or even Pelagian tendency to play down God’s work and play up our work of “reading” and “interpreting.” According to Webster, this risks surrendering not only sola scriptura but sola gratia53 “Scripture is not the word of the church; the church is the church of the Word.” Therefore, “the church is the hearing church.”54 Only because the church passes on what it has heard is its authority something other than an arbitrary exercise of institutional power.
It is possible to hold a high view of biblical authority and sufficiency in theory while yielding a magisterial role in practice to sociology, politics, marketing, psychology, and other cultural authorities. Within evangelical circles, the decline of expository preaching in favor of topical speeches laced with personal anecdotes, insights, and examples drawn from cultural authorities communicates to God’s people where we think the power and relevance of our speech really lies.
Similar to Tillich’s method of correlation, the working assumption in much of contemporary evangelicalism seems to be that modern culture, whether identified with academic disciplines or with popular fashion, exegetes human identity and the ideals of proper human flourishing. According to this assumption, the culture shapes the horizon of our experience, expectations, and felt needs—determining what is relevant—and the Christian task is to apply the Bible to this already-defined “life” in relevant ways.
However, this is to invoke the Bible too late. When God breaks in on us through his Word, we are confronted with a series of contradictions. We learn that we do not even know the meaning of our daily lives or the world, or human identity and flourishing, until God interprets us, our lives together, and our history in the light of his actions. “Popular education, the cultivation of morality and patriotism, the nurture of the emotions—none of these really need us theologians,” Barth reminds us. “Others can do these and similar things much better than we can. The world knows this and acts accordingly. We are examined and rejected, and rightly so, before we become apprentices in such dilettante occupations.” The church’s activity, including its speech, is truly useful in the world only “when it stands under a norm.”55
The missionary imperative has always called forth enormous energies in communicating the Christian faith in terms that can be understood by people in different times and places. Sometimes the ancient theologians accommodated too much to their philosophical and political milieu, but there are striking examples in which they subversively reinterpreted pagan categories in service to Christ.
However, the concern to relate the Bible to culture—displaying the relevance of Christianity for contemporary life—is a characteristically modern obsession. In the process, the definition of the gospel often broadens to include nearly anything that promotes the flourishing of humanity. Therefore, definitions are of first importance. By gospel, I mean that specific announcement of redemption from sin and death in Jesus Christ, promised and fulfilled in history. Also susceptible to varied definitions, culture may be understood (with Clifford Geertz) as “webs of significance”—beliefs, practices, tools, habits, relationships, and artifacts—that are created by human beings in particular times and places.56 Of course, in this sense, the church is also a distinct culture. However, I am using the term here to refer to the common realm of social practices, vocations, beliefs, and assumptions that Christians share with non-Christians in a given time and place.
Of course, the sovereignty of God’s speech in no way eliminates the significance of human utterances, whether in terms of culture, tradition, experience, or reason. Each of us is conditioned in our hearing and reading of God’s Word by our cultural-linguistic location. Nevertheless, the most decisive cultural-linguistic location for the covenant people is “in Christ,” under the normative authority of his Word. In theory at least, the classic Protestant position with respect to the sources of theology is simple, though somewhat clumsily expressed: the norm that norms but is not normed (norma normans non normata est). As with tradition, the relationship of Scripture to culture, experience, and reason is magisterial and ministerial, respectively.
There is no such thing as culture, reason, tradition, or experience in the abstract. There are only cultures, reasoners, traditions, and people who experience reality. We cannot help but come to Scripture with these resources, but they are not neutral. We come either as covenant servants or as would-be masters. To the extent that we are able, we must make our tacit assumptions explicit. This is in part what it is intended in 2 Corinthians 10:5: “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” This can only be done if we acknowledge a normative authority standing above our tacit assumptions and recognized convictions drawn from our cultural conditioning.
No more than reason, experience, or tradition is culture itself to be viewed as inherently opposed to faith. Rather, it is our sinful condition that causes us to use these gifts as weapons against the sovereign God who gave them. God speaks providentially in his common grace through reason, experience, tradition, and culture, but he has only spoken miraculously and redemptively in his Word (Heb 1:1). To say that culture, reason, tradition, and experience are subordinate to Scripture is simply to assert that human beings are subordinate to God. A dialogue with culture may yield important formal agreements on universal human rights, stewardship of creation, and other dictates of the moral law inscribed on the human conscience. However, no more than reason, experience, or tradition does culture possess any inherent possibilities of discovering God’s saving grace. On this point, Barth was correct to warn against turning culture into a source of gracious revelation alongside the Word of God.57
Descartes and Locke thought we should dispense with all external authorities, presuppositions, and inherited assumptions in order to arrive at incorrigible truths. However, this is a pretense—as impossible as it is unhelpful. Therefore, the popular assumption that people become Christians (or anything else) simply as an individual act of immediate intuition, unbiased investigation of the facts, or inner experience is more evidently modern than biblical. In the covenant of grace, God promises, “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you” (Ge 17:7).
God’s mighty acts, celebrated in the great feasts and defined in the doctrines and commands of Torah, are to be “on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Dt 6:6–7). From circumcision to burial, each Israelite was shaped by the covenant. It was their environment, not simply a set of doctrines and ethical norms to which they yielded formal assent. It was not something that they knew about as detached observers, but a form of life that they indwelled, from which they interpreted all of reality. Israel’s creed—the Shema (Dt 6:4–5)—was the summary of a whole network of narratives, practices, and texts they had absorbed into their bloodstream.
In its New Testament administration, this covenant of grace followed the same course. The narrative generates the doctrines and practices, evoking thanksgiving that then fuels discipleship. All of this is done in community. Even outsiders become insiders by hearing the same gospel, being baptized along with their household (Ac 16:15, 31–34), sharing in the Supper, being catechized in the same doctrine, and being shaped by a common fellowship of saints in local and broader assemblies. The covenant is the “form of life” or cultural-linguistic context that shapes Christian faith, practice, experience, witness, and service in the world. Yet even this ecclesial culture is corrupted by our sinful prejudices, errors, and practices. The covenant community itself remains simultaneously justified and sinful and must therefore always be transformed through the renewal of its mind by Scripture (Ro 12:2). This Word always stands above the world and the church because it is the voice of the Father; it alone is able to save us from lords that cannot liberate because its content is Christ; it always establishes its own relevance and creates its own form of life because its perlocutionary effect is produced within us by the Spirit.
When tradition and culture are given authoritative roles alongside Scripture, the church and the world are not able to be judged or redeemed by the voice of a stranger. In fact, the church easily becomes indistinguishable from the world instead of a witness to Christ in the power of the Spirit. The church cannot serve two masters. While God’s general revelation may be evident in culture, it is only his special revelation that creates the church and keeps it from its constant tendency to be reabsorbed into this passing evil age. Because of God’s common grace, no culture is entirely devoid of any sense of truth, justice, and beauty. Because of our common curse, no time, place, cultural movement, or civilization is capable of restoring paradise. There is indeed general revelation, which allows us to work with our unbelieving neighbors toward greater justice, charity, stewardship, and beauty in the world, but we must never forget that, apart from the gospel, this general revelation is always distorted by our ungodly hearts. Therefore, every natural theology will always evolve into a form of idolatry. The church is thus not a facilitator of a conversation between the gospel and culture, as if they were two sources of a single revelation.58 Rather, it is that part of the world that lives—if it will live at all—by hearing God’s announcement and binding address.
Of course, theological claims are always made from a particular cultural location.59 However, precisely because the gospel functions as the primary entity in the conversation—even to the point of turning the dialogue into a divine monologue—the relativity of our perspective does not entail the relativism of what is known. Analogous to the hypostatic Word (Jesus Christ) and the written Word (Scripture), the church is the city of God descending from heaven (Rev 21:9–13). Christ assumed a human nature, not a human person. In other words, although he was a male Jew shaped by his own time and place, he is the “firstfruit” of a whole harvest and the head of his body because the nature that he assumed belongs to us all—in every place and time. In this way, he transcends all of our cultural differences and binds us into one people. This communion or society therefore transcends every cultural movement and every empire, ethnic group, economic class, and social demographic. As the sole head of his church, Jesus Christ alone establishes the catholicity of the church in the power of the Spirit through one faith and one baptism (Eph 4:5).
The kingdom of God is not a tower we are building to the heavens but a ladder that God has descended to reach us. The church originates not in human planning and organization but in God’s eternal election. Nevertheless, it is also a human institution, reflecting the circumstances of its varied times and places. Because the city of God is a cultural-linguistic system descending from heaven through the work of the triune God, a third-century African Christian confesses the same faith as a twenty-first-century Asian or North American believer. This community is constituted by God’s Word—“one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph 4:5)—even while being conditioned (for better and for worse) by the distinct cultures and societies it inhabits. As Laura Smit reminds us, commenting on Calvin’s view, “All of our knowledge of God is mediated, [but] he believes that it is mediated, not by our cultural context, but to our context by God himself.”60 The covenant of grace trumps all of the social contracts that vie illegitimately for our ultimate allegiance.
George Hunsinger reminds us that many of the recent attempts to find a “post-modern” way of doing theology turn out to be little more than an echo of prominent themes in modernity.61 He observes:
The Christ of natural theology is always openly or secretly the relativized Christ of culture. The trajectory of natural theology leads from the Christ who is not supreme to the Christ who is not sufficient to the Christ who is not necessary…. “God may speak to us,” wrote Barth, “through Russian communism or a flute concerto, a blossoming shrub or a dead dog. We shall do well to listen to him if he really does so” [Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, part 1, 60]. No such object, however, can ever be allowed to become a source of authority for the church’s preaching, for no such object can have independent revelatory or epistemological status. Only by criteria derived from the one authentic scriptural voice of Christ can we know if God might be speaking to us in those ways or not.62
In every age, the gospel—as a surprising and offensive word that comes to us from outside of ourselves both as individuals and communities—radically disrupts the status quo of the church as well as the world.
Precisely because God’s Word comes to the church and to the world from outside, to interrupt human conversation of religion, spirituality, and morality, they can be the theater of redemption. In spite of the genuine diversity of cultures and social locations, the Bible recognizes the solidarity of humanity in Adam under sin and death and the solidarity of the new creation in Christ.
Given the distinction between inspiration (Scripture) and illumination (tradition), how does theology move from the teachings delivered in the canon to its interpretations? What is the nature and role of church dogmas?
Working our way in concentric circles from the widest horizon—namely, ontology to epistemology and then to revelation and Scripture—we now arrive at the nature of Christian doctrine.
Once again we are assisted by an able typology, this time that of Yale’s George Lindbeck (1923 –), from his book The Nature of Doctrine.63 Lindbeck’s contrasting models are the cognitive-propositional and the experiential-expressive, to which he adds his own cultural-linguistic model as an alternative. With this section we bring together all of our reflections thus far in this chapter.
Lindbeck defines the cognitive-propositional theory of doctrine in roughly the same terms as Dulles’ uses in his description of “revelation as doctrine” (model 1), which I delineated in chapter 3 (see “Models of Revelation,” pp. 113–15). In fact, his examples are the same as Dulles’s—namely, conservative evangelical Carl F. H. Henry and conservative neo-Thomist Catholic theologians. According to this perspective, doctrines are regarded as factual statements that correspond to reality. At the other extreme, the experiential-expressive theory treats doctrines as hypotheses that express religious experience. Naturally, this approach to doctrine is most consistent with Dulles’s model of “revelation as inner experience” (or as new awareness). Simply put, these rival models represent modern conservative and liberal approaches, respectively.
Carl Henry, representing the cognitive-propositional model, followed Gordon Clark in endorsing a univocal rather than an analogical relationship between divine and human knowledge.64 In God, Revelation, and Authority, Henry asserts that doctrines are “the theorems derived from the axioms of revelation.”65 Whereas Reformed theologian Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949) spoke of Scripture as an unfolding drama of redemption rather than merely a collection of timeless truths, Henry seems to have regarded propositions as the only conveyers of real truth.66 Henry reflects an enormous debt to his mentor, who argued that biblical language is “inadequate” until distilled in propositional language.67 Clark wrote, “Truth is a characteristic of propositions only. Nothing can be called true in the literal sense of the term except the attribution of a predicate to a subject.”68 In this way, language (specifically, Christian doctrine) is reduced to a single illocutionary stance—that of asserting and describing.
Navigating between these extremes, Lindbeck offers his own constructive proposal: a cultural-linguistic theory of doctrine that understands Christianity pri-marily as a language and doctrine as its grammar. In this perspective, doctrines are neither propositional statements of external facts nor expressions of inner experience; they are rules developed by the church that govern the speech and practices that form people to have certain beliefs and experiences in the first place. Lindbeck argues that both conservatives and liberals assume a modern foundationalist epistemology, with doctrines arising either out of universal rationality or experience—which is one of the main reasons his position is identified as postliberal. Influenced especially by the later Wittgenstein and the cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz, Lindbeck views the Christian faith as its own distinct language game.
Conservatives, Lindbeck maintains, cannot account for the truth of a religion apart from holding that its doctrines are without error, while liberals cannot account for the possibility that a given religion (such as Christianity) may be “unsurpassably true.”69 Lindbeck holds that a doctrine is true only when it is being “rightly utilized.”70 A crusader’s cry, “Christ is Lord!” while cleaving the skull of an infidel, is categorically false.71
Lindbeck’s model is superb at challenging the assimilation of the church’s grammar to alien religious and secular grammars. Echoing Barth, Lindbeck insists, “It is the text, so to speak, that absorbs the world, rather than the world the text.”72 Christianity is not a species of religion but is its own language game. Statements such as “Jesus died for our sins and was raised for our justification” are meaningless simply as propositions abstracted from the narratives and the actual form of life that is engendered in the church through participation in preaching, sacrament, fellowship, prayer, praise, service, and witness. The drama must not only be explained, but performed in the “community theater” instituted by Christ and choreographed by the Word and Spirit. However, Lindbeck’s model is not as successful in resisting the assimilation of revelation to the church’s agency. Ultimately, in his model, it is the truthful praxis of believers that determines the truth value of Christian claims, and it is the church’s use of Scripture that makes it authoritative. Is it the church’s praxis that makes God’s Word true, or vice versa?
Like Dulles’s models of revelation, Lindbeck’s models of doctrine—including his own—are richly suggestive but seem in the end to be too reductionistic. Lindbeck’s description of the cognitive-propositionalist model draws on examples from Carl Henry, but he fails to distinguish these positions from the more nuanced perspectives of Protestant orthodoxy and its more recent proponents. In Lindbeck’s own model, doctrine (like Scripture) appears to be authoritative because the church has determined its own grammar; the divine warrant beyond ecclesial sanction is as bracketed from his account as it has been in modern liberalism since Kant. Where Paul teaches that all Scripture is “profitable” because it is “breathed out by God” (2Ti 3:16), Lindbeck seems to argue the reverse. A doctrine is “categorically true” when it is “rightly utilized.”73 And its ontological (“propositional”) truth depends on its categorical truth.74 Systematic theology, then, is the attempt “to give a normative explication of the meaning a religion has for its adherents.”75
Yet how different is this really from Schleiermacher’s famous definition: “Christian doctrines are accounts of the Christian religious affections set forth in speech"?76 As appropriated by some evangelical theologians, Lindbeck’s theory is taken to mean that the principal objective of Scripture is not to deliver true doctrine but to generate authentic religious experience and to offer practical imperatives for daily living.77 At the end of the day, Lindbeck’s proposal seems to share with the experiential-expressivist view an equivocal account of doctrine. In spite of certain affinities to Barth, Lindbeck seems no less reticent to identify God as the object of theology than Kant was. Furthermore, the tendency of his model (especially evident in his students, such as the often insightful and provocative Stanley Hauerwas) is to give priority to the church’s practices rather than to God’s—only when we use them properly in our daily practice do Scripture, baptism, and the Eucharist become means of grace. They seem to be in this view less God’s objective means of salvation than occasions for communal self-description.
Cleavages have emerged on this issue within the Yale school itself. One of Hans Frei’s students and leading interpreters, George Hunsinger, observes, “The culturallinguistic pragmatism of [Lindbeck’s] preferred type, however, raises a question of whether finally his proposal is not so much ‘postliberal’ as ‘neoliberal,’ since pragmatism has always been a routine liberal option.”78 Evangelical theologian Kevin Vanhoozer has noted that Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic method, at the end of the day, sounds like the experiential-expressivist view that he criticizes. He is especially concerned with the uses made of Lindbeck’s theory by some evangelicals.79
Similarly, Colin Gunton judges, “So some kind of immediate experience appears in modern times to have replaced a traditional view of the mediation of the faith in propositional terms. George Lindbeck’s critique of what he calls the cognitive-propositional conception of theology is in effect an attack on the notion of revealed religion.”80 Gunton observes, “If it was once true that Jesus died for our sins on the cross, then it is always true.”81 Happily (for the world as well as for believers), the truth value of this proposition does not depend on how conformably to it we live or how faithfully we utilize it. Rather than determining its truth, our experiences and practices must be conformed to the reality of Christ’s resurrection. “The heart of the problem is not the proposition, but our tenuous hold on the tradition,” says Gunton. “Modernity has made doubters of us all, has appeared to cut such a breach between ourselves and our creedal past that we do not know whether there is a faith once delivered to the saints, or at least whether we may appeal to it.” He concludes, “The problem is not that the propositions with which we are concerned are static; it is that they have been called into question.”82
George Hunsinger argues that although Lindbeck’s theological method remains more liberal than postliberal, and Carl Henry’s model remains mired in a modernist epistemology, Hans Frei (Hunsinger’s mentor and Lindbeck’s colleague) and Reformed theologians like Kuyper and Bavinck are more promising conversation partners. “Other and very different formulations of Henry’s concerns have standing within the evangelical community, formulations that uphold a strong doctrine of ‘inerrancy’ without Henry’s modernist excesses.” He adds, “In particular I will suggest that the views of Abraham Kuyper and Herman Bavinck offer a greater possibility for fruitful evangelical dialogue with postliberalism.”83 “The rejection of univocity separates them from someone like Henry, just as the affirmation of adequate and reliable reference separates them from modern skeptics.”84 “Whereas Henry seems to think the narratives are finally about the doctrines,” notes Hunsinger, “for Frei it is just the reverse,” and the same is true of Kuyper and Bavinck.85 This volume, taking its bearings from Geerhardus Vos’s insistence that doctrines arise out of the unfolding drama of redemption, is consistent with Hunsinger’s conclusion.
Cognitive-propositionalist theories tend to reduce the faith to doctrine, understood as propositional statements. Experiential-expressivists tend to reduce the faith to doxology, which erupts from within the self’s own religious experience. Similar in some ways to liberation theologies, the cultural-linguistic model gives pride of place to ecclesial praxis (discipleship). Narrative theologies focus on the unfolding drama of redemption.
What we desperately need in our day is a reintegration of these emphases. Abstracted from the drama of the biblical narrative, doctrines become timeless principles rather than explanatory notations in the script. At the same time, narratives need to be explained before their significance for us can be recognized. This recognition ordinarily yields an emotional response—fear, delight, sorrow, and thanksgiving—and motivates a certain way of being in the world as disciples of Christ.
Christian doctrine, in this view, is revealed by God and focuses especially on God’s saving purposes in Christ. It is God’s revelation of and the church’s reflection upon God’s works in history. Precisely because biblical doctrines are not the revelation of general, timeless truths, our inner experience, church practices, or God’s commands for our daily lives, they decisively shape our experience and prepare us to follow God’s commands in our daily living. Even in considering the church’s practices, which Christ mandated, we must distinguish between those practices through which God himself ministers his grace (preaching and sacrament) and those practices that flourish among the saints as the fruit of this ministry (hospitality, generosity, service, justice, charity, and other acts of love).
We may summarize the first part of this volume as an exposition of the principal elements of a covenantal approach to the theological task. First, this task presupposes that God is qualitatively distinct from the creature. Therefore, creaturely knowledge will always be revealed, dependent, accommodated, ectypal, and analogical rather than coinciding with God’s archetypal knowledge at any point. Second, this task presupposes that God’s revelation comes to us from outside of ourselves. Even the law, which is universally declared to the human conscience ever since creation, becomes a personal summons to judgment in our encounter with God in his self-revelation. The gospel is not buried deep within us but is known only in special revelation. Third, every covenant has its canon—the historical prologue, stipulations, and sanctions that constitute and develop a norm for God’s people. The new covenant canon, therefore, constitutes and regulates the faith and practice of the covenant community, rather than being generated by it.
Just as God’s revelation was not given all at once but developed organically, keeping up with the unfolding plot of redemptive history, the church’s interpretation and formulations with respect to Scripture’s sacred mysteries evolved over time, through conflict, refinement, and reformation. The church is a heavenly commonwealth created by the triune God, not by the people. Liberating his people, he gave them a constitution. Still, this constitution has to be interpreted and applied, not simply by individual citizens but by church courts with narrower and broader jurisdictions, as was the case at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 and in countless synods ever since. There is also a tradition of landmark cases with rulings that became established precedents for interpreting current laws—heresies that were resolved after prolonged conflict and a faithful interpretation of the ecumenical constitution that was distilled in creedal summaries.
Beyond these decisive cases that established the consensus of the whole church, particular traditions arose, elaborating this consensus in confessions and teaching them to new converts and their youth through catechisms. Finally, there are the individual pastors who must proclaim and teach God’s Word and theologians who serve them, using all of these guardrails as they interpret the divine constitution, challenging the church to reflect more deeply and critically on its confession in the present. Recognizing the descending order of priority of these authorities—and the qualitatively distinct authority of the magisterial constitution over the ministerial authority of the church and its teachers—we are in a better position to avoid both ecclesial and individualistic hubris.
While they were still living, the apostles laid the foundation on which all subsequent ministers would build. The redemptive narrative surrounding Christ’s person and work generated new doctrines—not wholly new, of course, because they were foretold by the prophets, but new in the sense that they were a change in covenantal administrations. Whereas Gentiles were once unholy, now believing Jews and Gentiles are one people in Christ (1Pe 2:9–10). Those who were far off have been brought near by Christ’s blood (Eph 2:11–4:13). Yet precisely because the doctrine arises out of the unfolding narrative of redemption rather than as timeless concepts, it was difficult even for the apostles to get used to the new teachings and practices that were generated by the events of the new covenant.
After internal controversy even among the apostles, an overture was brought to the whole church through a representative assembly (Ac 15). There, “the apostles and the elders” concluded the matter by issuing a circular letter that was to be binding on all the churches. Gentile believers were not to be subservient or forced to become Jews in order to belong to the one people of God in these last days. Although the term dogma was first used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament and in the New Testament to refer to government edicts or the laws of Moses (Est 3:9; Da 2:13; Lk 2:1; Ac 17:7; Eph 2:15; Col 2:14), in Acts 16:4, dogma (derived from the verb dokeo) is used to refer to the “decisions” of the Jerusalem Council. Not even the apostles were delivering a new gospel, which neither they nor an angel from heaven were capable of doing (Gal 1:6–9), but they were interpreting the doctrine they had received (uniquely, by divine inspiration) in the promulgation of church dogma. We may rejoice in the fact that the gospel was a judge and liberator rather than a conversation partner with culture, tradition, reason, and experience. Though promised in the Old Testament, the revelation of the mystery hidden in past ages is a new doctrine, announcing that the dividing wall between Jew and Gentile has been dismantled. And it gives rise to a new praxis or discipleship, realized concretely in Christian community.
The era of divinely revealed dogmas as interpretations of the biblical narrative closes with the apostolic era. Correlative to the distinction between inspiration and illumination, the extraordinary ministry of the prophets and apostles is not in effect but has been succeeded by the ordinary ministry of pastors, teachers, and evangelists, as well as elders and deacons, and by the general sharing of gifts in the body of Christ. Christ’s prophetic, priestly, and ruling ministry continues in the world today through his magisterial canon and the ministerial interpretations of the church’s local and broader assemblies.
A constitution can be undermined as easily by undervaluing as by overvaluing the authority of the courts that it establishes for its interpretation. Like judicial precedents, tradition may err, but to dispense with its counsel is simply to shift the interpretive authority from the community to the private individual. We would find ourselves in a situation similar to the era between Joshua’s death and the rise of the monarchy, when everyone did “what was right in his own eyes” (Jdg 17:6; 21:25), or in the condition of scattered sheep without a shepherd, the condition lamented in Jeremiah 23. The New Testament repeatedly calls us to submit to the magisterial authority of Scripture alone, guided by the ministerial authority of our pastors and elders. Nowhere in the New Testament is the authority for settling disagreements left to individual believers.
The church has no independent authority to create dogmas, but it does have a dependent and authorized role under Christ to arrive at Spirit-led decisions that serve the whole body. Since such teachings of the church (dogmas) are considered the teachings of Scripture (doctrines), they are binding; yet since the church in this present age remains simultaneously sinful and justified, they are always open to correction from the Word of God.86
Like the Jerusalem Council, where the apostles and elders together deliberated on the proper interpretation of God’s Word, churches today—in their local and wider assemblies—have an obligation to confess the same faith together. Natural scientists formulate theories on the basis of their investigations of nature by drawing together various conclusions that are either explicitly or implicitly required from their data. Similarly, the church formulates its dogmas on the basis of Scripture, even if the formulas themselves are not expressed in Scripture directly. As Berkhof observes,
The church does not find her dogmas in finished form on the pages of Holy Writ but obtains them by reflecting on the truths revealed in the Word of God. The Christian consciousness not only appropriates the truth but also feels an irrepressible urge to reproduce it and see it in its grand unity. While the intellect gives guidance and reflection, it is not purely an intellectual activity but one that is moral and emotional as well.87
It is to be done by Christians “only in communion and in cooperation with all the saints. When the church, led by the Holy Spirit, reflects on the truth, this takes a definite shape in her consciousness and gradually crystallizes into clearly defined doctrinal views and utterances.”88 The church joins its fallible witness to the infallible witness of the prophets and apostles. Thus, for the definition of dogmas, “It is generally agreed that an official action of the church is necessary.”89 Christ gave pastors and teachers as gifts to the church, “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Eph 4:14).
Heretics arise within the church, quoting Scripture in the solemn persuasion that they are properly interpreting it. Often, they reject church dogmas on the basis that those doctrines are not found directly and explicitly formulated in Scripture—and often employ extrabiblical terminology. However, every science seeks to interpret the whole in the light of its parts and vice versa and, especially in the face of challenges to a particular teaching, draws on precise terminology in order to more clearly state its faith and more sharply distinguish it from error. The Westminster Confession (1.6) points out that everything necessary for doctrine and life “is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequences may be deduced from Scripture” (emphasis added). The Bible does not use terms like essence and persons (or even “trinity”) to formulate its teaching on the Trinity, but the formula, “one in essence and three in persons,” is an obvious example of a good and necessary consequence deduced from Scripture. The Confession (1.7) adds that although everything necessary for salvation may be understood by the unlearned as well as the learned, “All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all.” Therefore, through the ministry of pastors and elders, Christ’s body is built up, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God,” with Christ as the head and each part working properly (Eph 4:12–13, 15–16).
This affirmation of the church’s ministerial authority is consistent with Christ’s commission to the church to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you’ (Mt 28:19–20, emphasis added). The apostle Paul calls us to be “of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind” (Php 2:2). In fact, he exhorted Timothy to “follow the pattern of the sound words” that he had taught him (2Ti 1:13). Peter calls the church to “have unity of mind” (1Pe 3:8). In the Christian life as in any discipline, including the physical sciences, tradition is as valuable as it is inescapable; yet it must be always open to revision in the light of its source.
In church history, some dogmatic formulations have risen to the level of dogmas (namely, the Trinity, the two natures of Christ in one person, etc.), but they are never the work of any single theologian. They are the cumulative fruit of communal reflection and win the consent of the body of Christ. These different categories must be carefully distinguished. Some formulations of dogmas attain such credibility within a tradition that they are not—and should not be—easily challenged. Again, this is analogous to the natural sciences, where a widely approved paradigm is defended even when faced with unexplained anomalies. A paradigm only collapses when it becomes so overwhelmed by anomalies that it no longer is seen to account for the widest amount of data.90 The Reformation may be seen as one such paradigm shift in the history of the church. Even so, the Reformers did not start over from scratch but incorporated their insights into the broader paradigm of catholic Christianity.
However, even the writings of a list of weighty theologians cannot be made confessionally binding. It is significant that Lutherans do not regard Luther’s writings as ministerially binding. Lutherans subscribe to his Small Catechism and Large Catechism only because they were judged by a church body to reflect its consensus regarding scriptural teaching. None of Calvin’s writings are included in the confessions and catechisms of Reformed and Presbyterian churches.91 From a confessional perspective, whatever our churches do not publicly and corporately confess in our doctrinal standards cannot be required for subscription. Hardly legalistic, confessional subscription frees the Christian conscience on a host of issues, such as specific details of end-times eschatology, political agendas, distinctives of personal piety not addressed in Scripture, and many other issues that tend to divide churches in our day.
This course charted by the magisterial Reformation upholds the church’s teaching ministry under the sovereign authority of Scripture. The seventeenth-century theologian Francis Turretin pointed out that while Rome fails this test by addition (making assent to all church teaching necessary for salvation), Arminians and especially Socinians fail the test by subtraction. For them, only those dogmas that are considered practically necessary for morality and religious experience are reckoned among the essentials.92 Eventually, this subjective criterion led Schleiermacher to consider the dogma of the Trinity at best unimportant.
Ironically, as Berkhof notes, “the so-called fundamentalists of our day join hands with the liberals on this point with their well-known slogan, ‘No Creed but the Bible.’”93 If liberalism challenged creedal and confessional Christianity in the name of reason, biblicism rejects the legitimate authority of the church in drawing from Scripture “good and necessary consequences,” assuming that its doctrines are taken directly from the words of the Bible. However, many of the fundamentals that it wishes to protect have been formulated by church courts by deducing necessary conclusions. When we lose our regard for the ministerial authority of the church to teach and confess the truths of God’s Word, it is usually not long before we come to question the magisterial authority itself. The Westminster Confession nicely summarizes this conception of ecclesiastical authority:
For the better government, and further edification of the church, there ought to be such assemblies as are commonly called synods or councils: and it belongeth to the overseers and other rulers of the particular churches, by virtue of their office, and the power which Christ hath given them for edification and not for destruction, to appoint assemblies; and to convene together in them, as often as they shall judge it expedient for the good of the church. It belongeth to synods and councils, ministerially to determine controversies of faith, and cases of conscience; to set down rules and directions for the better ordering of the public worship of God, and government of his church; to receive complaints in cases of maladministration, and authoritatively to determine the same: which decrees and determinations, if consonant to the Word of God, are to be received with reverence and submission; not only for their agreement with the Word, but also for the power whereby they are made, as being an ordinance of God appointed thereunto in his Word.94
The Westminster Confession adds the important caveat that such synods or councils “may err; and many have erred. Therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith, or practice; but to be used as a help in both.” They are “to conclude nothing, but that which is ecclesiastical: and are not to intermeddle with civil affairs which concern the commonwealth, unless by way of humble petition in cases extraordinary.”95
From the Latin credo (“I believe”), a creed is simply a summary of the church’s faith. Sometimes faith is used in Scripture to refer to the faith that is believed (fides quae creditur, 1Co 16:13; 2Co 13:5; Eph 4:5, 13; Col 1:23; 2:7; 1Ti 4:1; 6:12; 2Ti 3:8; 4:7; 2Pe 1:1; Jude 3), while elsewhere it refers to the personal act of believing—the faith by which we believe (fides qua creditur). In its essence, faith is not a subjective experience or decision but a knowledgeable assent to and belief in Jesus Christ as he gives himself to us in the gospel.
As an apostle preparing for the post-apostolic era with the ordinary ministry of the Word, Paul commands Timothy to censure anyone who “teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness” (1Ti 6:3). Elders “must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that [they] may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it” (Tit 1:9). “But as for you,” Paul instructs Titus, “teach what accords with sound doctrine” (Tit 2:1). In fact, he tells Timothy, “Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. By the Holy Spirit who dwells within us, guard the good deposit entrusted to you” (2Ti 1:13–14, emphasis added). Not only sound words but the pattern of the sound words is enjoined by Paul. There is a way of saying the faith that is sound and that therefore guards “the good deposit entrusted to [us].”
We have seen that the apostolic generation represents the foundation-laying era of the New Testament church (1Co 3:10–11). The ordinary ministers like Timothy are to build on this foundation, to guard it, and to defend it. “Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life … about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses,” Paul instructs Timothy (1Ti 6:12). Instead of exhorting his understudy to add to the deposit of apostolic truth, Paul urges him, “O Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you” (1Ti 6:20; cf. 2Ti 1:14). The apostles did not pass on their office to successors, but they did entrust the treasure to the office of the ordinary ministry. To borrow an illustration from U.S. history, the founders of the republic who achieved independence and drafted the Constitution are qualitatively distinct even from the greatest presidents who followed. Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy occupy cherished positions, but as the first among equals who swear allegiance to the Constitution. They cannot add to or take away a single word from the Constitution, and their interpretations are subservient to the text and to the secondary (interpretive) ruling of the courts. Of course, the distinction between apostles and ministers is even more emphatic when we are talking about a divinely inspired constitution.
There is evidence that Paul himself was simply passing on (and lending his apostolic authority to) summaries that functioned as creedal formulas in the ancient church: “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures” (1Co 15:3–4). In recalling the Corinthians to the proper celebration of the Lord’s Supper, he declares, “I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you” (1Co 11:23). He also includes various “trustworthy sayings": “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1Ti 1:15; cf. 2Ti 2:11). The church is “a pillar and buttress of the truth,” says the apostle, adding, “Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory” (1Ti 3:15–16).
Fragments of such early creedal summaries are found not only in the body of the apostolic letters but in their liturgical expressions found in the opening salutations and closing benedictions. Evidently, some of these creedal summaries were sung, and Paul incorporates them, for example, in praise of Christ’s supremacy in Colossians 1:15–20 and in his summary of Christ’s humiliation and exaltation in Philippians 2:6–11. It is no wonder, then, that Paul regarded singing as a means not only of thanking God but of making “the word of Christ dwell in [us] richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom” through such psalms and hymns (Col 3:16).
Of course, creedal formulas in the canon have normative status and magisterial authority, but postapostolic creeds possess a ministerial authority as consensual summaries of Scripture’s central teachings. As the church grew not only numerically but geographically, its center of gravity shifted from the Jewish to the Gentile world. As Paul’s own ministry demonstrates, mission always provokes conflict, even within the church. Getting the gospel right was as important as getting the gospel out. The church had to not only define its positions more carefully vis-à-vis these heresies; it had to formulate them in such a way that although they remained mysteries, they were not logical contradictions.
In all of these cases, the church’s motivation was mission. How do we confess Christ in the light of the impressive challenges inside and outside of the church? Faithfulness to the message and the mission of Christ on the basis of his Word and in dependence on his Spirit led the postapostolic church to develop more refined creedal statements. The results of this era were the Nicene Creed (technically known as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, focusing on the dogma of the Trinity); the Chalcedonian Definition (concentrating on the person of Christ); and the Athanasian Creed (summarizing the catholic faith). Despite continued eruptions of discord through the centuries and widespread criticism in the modern era, these conclusions reached in the first five centuries created a consensus that has remained the touchstone of Christian confession to the present day.
It was precisely because of the enormous vitality and richness of its fresh encounter with Scripture (especially its translation from the original languages into the vernacular of the people) that the Reformation produced confessions and catechisms for building up the body of Christ in its common faith and practice. Far from proposing an alternative to either the Bible or the ecumenical creeds, the Reformers saw their confessions and catechisms as ways of reviving the significance of the Bible and the creeds in the life of the church. In fact, it was the renewal of catechetical instruction in the Reformation that provoked this practice in Roman Catholic circles. In the preface to his Small Catechism, Luther explains that he was motivated by a profound disappointment with the ignorance of most Christians he encountered even of the most basic elements of the Bible. He lamented that few even knew the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, or the Ten Commandments. Confessions and catechisms are not academic treatises but expressions of the priesthood of all believers: the witness of the whole church to the whole world.
We do not believe the Bible’s teachings because of the church’s authority, but we do believe them through the church and its ministry. Children and theologians alike take their place under the magisterial norm of Scripture and its communal interpretation by the ministerial guidance of the church. Theological reflection must be aware of related disciplines, especially languages, philosophy, and history, but its primary calling is to the church rather than to the academy. Theologians find their proper place as servants of ministers of the Word and sacraments. This then is the proper order: (1) the Scriptures as the infallible canon, qualitatively distinct from all other sources and authorities; (2) under this magisterial norm, the ministerial service of creeds and confessions; (3) contemporary proclamation of God’s Word in the church around the world; (4) long-standing interpretations in the tradition; (5) the particular nuances of individual theologians.
Conceived by the Spirit through Word and baptism, born in faith, sustained by Communion, and nurtured through prayer, fellowship, and discipleship, the church and every member of it always need theology because they always need God.
1. Sergius Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church (London: Centenary, 1935), 28.
2. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Orthodox Church (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 25.
3. Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church, 22.
4. Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 365-75.
5. A fruitful study of the Reformation’s interpretation of this phrase is found in Keith Mathison, The Shape of Sola Scriptura (Moscow, Ida.: Canon, 2001).
6. Muller, PRRD, 1:41.
7. Augustine: “Ego vero evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae ecclesiae commoveret auctoritas” (Contra epistulam Manichaei quam vocant Fundamenti, I.v., in PL). Appeals were also made to Irenaeus, the second-century bishop of Lyons, who urged believers to recognize only interpretations of the Scriptures that are taught by the bishops. However, in both cases the context was the refutation of heresy (for Irenaeus, the Gnostics; for Augustine, the Manichaeans in particular). Motivated by pastoral concerns, these church fathers were intent on directing believers to authentic shepherds, because together they taught and pledged themselves to the rule of faith.
8. Although episcopal (governed by bishops), the East was always suspicious of the hierarchicalism of the West and emphasized that the whole body of Christ is infused with the charism of the apostles—not that its members are apostles themselves, but that they are filled with the Spirit and led by the Spirit. According to the West, the idea gradually emerged that this charism was reserved for the priesthood, and especially for those who were part of the magisterium (cardinals and popes).
9. For a fuller treatment of this development, see Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150-1350 (Leiden: Brill, 1988).
10. Austin Flannery, OP, ed., Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Postconciliar Documents (Northport, N.Y.: Costello, 1975), 754.
11. In 2 Corinthians 3, however, the letter/Spirit contrast is explicitly correlated with old/new covenants.
12. Flannery, Vatican CouncilII, 755.
13. Ibid., 755-56. Formally, Rome does not hold that private revelations can add anything to the deposit of faith: “Christian faith cannot accept ‘revelations’ that claim to surpass or correct the Revelation of which Christ is the fulfillment” (Catechism of the Catholic Church [Liguori, Mo.: Liguori Publications, 1994], 23). Nevertheless, we have seen that for Rome, revelation takes two forms—the written (Scripture) and the unwritten (tradition).
14. “The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops, enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office, when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful—who confirms his brethren in the faith—he proclaims by a definitive act a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 235, citing Vatican Council I).
15. Flannery, Vatican CouncilII, 763.
16. Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger, Revelation and Tradition (trans. W. J. O’Hara; Freiburg: Herder, 1966), 29.
17. Ibid., 36—37.
18. Ibid., 44.
19. From master and servant, this distinction refers to the normative (magisterial) authority of Scripture over reason, experience, tradition, and culture.
20. Quoted in Muller, PRRD, 1:85.
21. Ibid., 1:87.
22. Ibid., 1:88.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 90.
25. William Perkins, “A Reformed Catholic,” in The Works of William Perkins (ed. Ian Breward; Appleford, U.K.: 1970), 547.
26. Perkins, “A Reformed Catholic,” 548-49.
27. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology (ed. John D. Eusden; Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth, 1968), 187.
28. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 19.
29. In fact, Calvin wrote, “We are assailed by two sects,” referring to Rome and the Anabaptists, even though they “seem to differ most widely from each other.” “For when they boast extravagantly of the Spirit, the tendency certainly is to sink and bury the Word of God, that they may make room for their own falsehoods.” “Reply by John Calvin to Cardinal Sadoleto’s ‘Letter,’” in Calvin’s Tracts and Treatises (trans. Henry Beveridge; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958), 1:36.
30. Quoted in John W. Beardslee, Reformed Dogmatics (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), 5, 7, 9.
31. Turretin, Elenctic Theology, 1:87–90.
32. Ibid., 90.
33. Bruce Metzger, The New Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content (Nashville: Abingdon, 1965); D. A. Carson, Douglas Moo, and Leon Morris, An Introduction to the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992); Craig A. Evans, Noncanonical Writings and New Testament Interpretation (Pea- body, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1992); Lee McDonald, The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority (3rd ed.; Pea-body, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2007); Craig A. Evans and Emanuel Tov, eds., Exploring the Origins of the Bible: Canon Formation in Historical, Literary, and Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008).
34. Athanasius, in NPNF2, 4:23.
35. Basil, “On the Holy Spirit,” NPNF2, 8:41.
36. Ibid.
37. See Eusebius, “The Church History of Eusebius,” in NPNF2, 1:155-57.
38. As Brunner notes, this process was far from an arbitrary exercise of ecclesiastical power: “If we compare the writings of the New Testament with those of the subapostolic period [e.g., Epistle of Clement, Shepherd of Hermas], even those which are nearest in point of time, we cannot avoid the conclusion that there is a very great difference between the two groups; which was also the opinion of the fathers of the church” (Emil Brunner, Reason and Revelation [trans. Olive Wyon; London: SCM, 1947], 132).
39. For a recent account of Scripture’s clarity, see Mark D. Thompson, A Clear and Present Word: The Clarity of Scripture (New Studies in Biblical Theology; Downers Grove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 2006).
40. G. C. Berkouwer, Holy Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 302.
41. Herman Ridderbos, Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures (trans. H. DeJongste; Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R, 1988), 42.
42. Rahner and Ratzinger, Revelation and Tradition, 29.
43. Albert C. Outler, John Wesley (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965); cf. Don Thorsen, The Wesleyan Quadrilateral: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience as a Model of Evangelical Theology (Lexington, Ky.: Emeth, 2005). The United Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline (2004) identifies Scripture as primary.
44. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (ed. and trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), 594–95. According to Schleiermacher, the Scriptures are simply “the first member in the series” of “presentations of the Christian Faith” which have “ever since continued,” though in some sense a norm for succeeding generations because of the uniqueness of Christ’s degree of God-consciousness. Since Scripture gives expression to the common spirit of the community, “everything of the kind which persists in influence alongside of Holy Scripture we must regard as homogeneous with Scripture.”
45. Ibid., 606.
46. In addition to a host of citations one could draw from Barth’s Church Dogmatics (vol. 1, pts. 1 and 2), see Karl Barth, The Göttingen Dogmatics: Instruction in the Christian Religion (ed. Hannelotte Reiffen; trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 1:273.
47. Stanley Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 88. A fine alternative to Grenz’s interpretation of canon and covenant is Kevin J. Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Linguistic Approach to Christian Theology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), esp. 115–50, 211–42.
48. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 90–91.
49. Ibid., 93.
50. Ibid., 123, 130.
51. Ibid., 101–3.
52. John Webster, Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch (Cam bridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003), 43.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 44.
55. Barth, Göttingen Dogmatics, 1:273.
56. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
57. Of relevance in this connection is my treatment of general revelation in ch. 3.
58. Like Stanley Grenz, John Franke appeals to Tillich’s method of correlation (with some modification), concluding, “Neither gospel nor culture can function as the primary entity in the conversation between the two in light of their interpretive and constructed nature; we must recognize that theology emerges through an ongoing conversation involving both gospel and culture” (The Character of Theology [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005], 103). My concern is that post-conservatism, at least as Grenz and Franke delineate it, revives the experiential- expressivist side of pietism and, with it, some of the same liberal presuppositions that defined a distinctively modern theology. See, for example, William Dyrness, “The Pietistic Heritage of Schleiermacher,” Christianity Today 23:6 (Dec. 1978); cf. Barth’s critique of Schleiermacher as a radical pietist in The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24 (ed. Dietrich Ritschl; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982).
59. Franke, Character of Theology, 90.
60. Laura Smit, “The Depth Behind Things,” in Radical Orthodoxy and the Reformed Tradition (ed. James K. A. Smith and James Olthuis; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 209.
61. George Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace: Studies in the Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 76, referring to Harvey Cox: “One problem with Cox’s analysis, which many will be sure to note, is that there really is nothing ‘postmodern’ about it. At best it simply rearranges the furniture in the old modernist room. Perhaps theology is just getting around to appropriating Marx’s insights about how the poor are exploited and Lessing’s insights in Nathan the Wise about the plurality and underlying unity of religions, but that hardly seems any reason to dignify the affair with an exalted term like ‘postmodern.’ After all, why have modern skeptics been so skeptical if not largely because their encounter with religious pluralism convinced them that all religious truth claims are arbitrary?”
62. Ibid., 80. “Certainly,” Hunsinger adds, “one can only imagine Barth raising his eyebrows at the current crop of well-meaning enthusiasts who can think of no better way to promote his work than by extolling him as a ‘postmodernist’ before his time” (253). Referring to Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod, Hunsinger concludes, “Wanting to assimilate theology into the foreign mold of the surrounding culture … is an essentially Gentile aspiration” (255).
63. George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1984).
64. See my interaction with Carl Henry on this point, with citations, in Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 189-91.
65. Carl Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority (Waco, Tex.: Word, 1976), 1:234.
66. Carl Henry, “Narrative Theology: An Evangelical Appraisal,” Trinity Journal 8 (1987): 3.
67. Gordon Clark, Religion, Reason, and Revelation (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1961), 143.
68. Gordon Clark, “The Bible as Truth,” BSac 114 (April 1957): 158.
69. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 49.
70. Ibid., 35.
71. Ibid., 64.
72. Ibid., 118.
73. Ibid., 35.
74. Ibid., 52.
75. Ibid., 118.
76. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (ed. and trans. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1928), 76.
77. Grenz, Revisioning Evangelical Theology, 18, 30, 32, 33-34, 48, 51-54, 57.
78. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, 11.
79. Kevin Vanhoozer, “Disputing About Words? Of Fallible Foundations and Modest Metanarratives,” in Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views (ed. Myron Penner; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 197–99. Vanhoozer suggests that, if taken to its logical conclusion, John Franke’s version of constructivism is “devastating to biblical authority” (198). Cf. Vanhoozer, Drama of Doctrine, 10, 94–99, 175–84. In fact, Vanhoozer’s elaboration of a “canonical-linguistic” model of doctrine appropriates Lindbeck’s insights while making the appropriate corrections.
80. Colin Gunton, A Brief Theology of Revelation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 7.
81. Ibid., 8.
82. Ibid., 12.
83. Hunsinger, Disruptive Grace, 340.
84. Ibid., 360.
85. Ibid., 349.
86. Louis Berkhof nicely states this position: “There are no dogmas as such in the Bible, though the doctrinal teachings which they embody are found there. But these become dogmas only when they are formulated and officially adopted by the church. It may be said that religious dogmas have three characteristics, namely, their subject matter is derived from Scripture; they are the fruit of the reflection of the church on the truth, as it is revealed in the Bible; and they are officially adopted by some competent ecclesiastical body” (Systematic Theology, 21).
87. Ibid., 23.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., 24.
90. Michael Polanyi points out similar comparisons in Personal Knowledge (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), 20. See also Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).
91. Ironically, evangelical churches that do not subscribe to particular creeds and confessions are often more defined by the particular beliefs and writings of their leaders. For example, the doctrinal standards of Methodism include John Wesley’s revision of the Thirty-nine Articles and his sermons.
92. Turretin, Elenctic Theology, 1:48.
93. Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 32.
94. The Westminster Confession of Faith, ch. 31, in The Trinity Hymnal (Philadelphia: Great Commission Publications, 1990), 866-67.
95. Westminster Confession, ch 31.