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Valuing Scripture and Tradition in liberal thought

Introduction

Over the last generation western Christianity has been polarising into two camps, usually called conservatives and liberals. I am an Anglican, and Anglicans are expressing the differences by falling out over women bishops and gay bishops.

We know the stereotypes. Conservatives say they are being loyal to the Bible. They accept the authority of the Bible, while liberals allow their beliefs to be influenced by secular society. Liberals reply that they are indeed learning from the best insights of modern culture and science, but conservatives do that just as much.

If you are determined to accept the authority of the Bible on all matters, you will believe that the world was made in six days, in 4004 BC, you will support capital punishment for a wide range of offenders including homosexuals, witches and adultresses, you will refuse to wear polyester cotton shirts or wool and rayon trousers, etc etc. If you don’t accept the whole lot you’re a liberal picking and choosing on the basis of modern secular beliefs. But to be realistic, nobody obeys all the laws in the Bible. Just look around you at the men who have shaved their beards off, thus disobeying Leviticus 19:27.

So what kind of authority do we ascribe to the Bible? Since nobody sticks to the whole lot, why pick out a few and treat them as all-important? We have inherited a jumbled mixture of authority claims. I shall introduce the issues with a brief history of biblical interpretation, and then describe how critical biblical scholars describe the Bible’s authority for us today.

History of biblical interpretation

I’ll begin with the New Testament, written by Jews who were followers of Jesus Christ. Even then Jews had a big problem with their scriptures, the Old Testament. All those wars and the cruel acts God told the Israelites to do. The problem was how to carry on treating these texts as holy scripture when anybody who read them didn’t think they sounded holy at all.

As it happened the Greeks had for many centuries had the same problem, and they had found a solution: allegory. Behind the literal sense of the text there lies a deeper spiritual meaning. Jews learned to interpret their outdated scriptures allegorically. For example Deuteronomy contains lots of instructions about how to run your farm. One of them is:

You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain. (Deuteronomy 25:4)

What do you make of this, if you are a sophisticated urban first century Jew who has never yoked a pair of oxen in your life? Paul writes:

Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Or does he not speak entirely for our sake? It was indeed written for our sake, for whoever ploughs should plough in hope and whoever threshes should thresh in hope of a share in the crop (1 Corinthians 9:9-10).

That’s allegory. Allegory became the main way of interpreting scripture. In the fourth century Augustine described how for a long time he was repelled from Christianity by all those unedifying stories of the patriarchs, and the dreadful things God commanded, hardly what anyone would expect from a supreme God; but he was converted by Ambrose who explained how to understand the stories allegorically. At about the same time the historian Eusebius remarked that if Christians were to take the Bible literally – well, they would have to believe ‘incongruous and incoherent fairy-tales’.

Later Pope Gregory the Great classified the four meanings every biblical text could have: the literal or historical meaning, the allegorical or spiritual meaning, the moral meaning and the prophetic meaning pointing to Christ.

From the third century onwards biblical commentaries often attempted to extract a Christian meaning from every phrase. Nobody would defend this procedure today; but Origen justified it by arguing that the real author of the Bible was the Holy Spirit.

The main problem with allegory is that it allows you to draw virtually any meaning out of any text. In practice they interpreted the texts so that they agreed with each other, and also agreed with what they believed Christianity taught. As a result they read into the Bible meanings which were very different from what their predecessors had found, let alone what the authors had intended. They took it that the true meaning of each text was allegorical rather than literal; that the Old Testament as well as the New was speaking about Christ; that the true meanings of all biblical texts must be consistent with each other and with received Christian doctrine; and that the true meanings related not to historical events but to eternal and universal truths. They justified these beliefs by claiming that the true author of Scripture was the Holy Spirit.

Renaissance and Reformation

All the medieval commentaries were based on the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible. When the Renaissance humanists learned Hebrew and Greek, they caused a lot of trouble.

One stick of dynamite was Matthew 4:17. Jesus preached ‘Metanoeite’. The Vulgate translated ‘paenitentiam agite’. The standard interpretation was ‘do penance’ in the standard Catholic way: go to the priest, confess your sins, and do the penances you are given. At the time the Church expected everyone to go to confession regularly, and they justified the obligation by appealing to this text. Erasmus pointed out that the Greek just means ‘repent’. The Church had been appealing to this text to impose a practice which the text didn’t actually command.

What the Renaissance humanists were doing was to revive the tradition of paying close attention to what each text means, and if it contradicted other texts, or wasn’t what the church taught, they said so.

The Reformation

These discoveries paved the way for the Reformation. Protestants continued to believe the Bible was a unity, the Word of God, competent to teach about all matters, providing truths which were true for all time. However they rejected allegory and insisted that the literal meaning is the true one. In their determination to deny that the Catholic Church had the right to impose its interpretations on the Bible, they argued that people should be encouraged to read it for themselves and just accept the literal meaning.

Perspicuity

To justify this argument they developed the doctrine of perspicuity. This doctrine says every text in the Bible is perfectly clear and easy to understand, perspicuous. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin all taught this in their early ministries, though later on they changed their minds.

Of course it wasn’t. By insisting on accepting the literal meaning, they just recreated all the problems the early Christians had had, with all those passages which contradict each other, or seem outrageously immoral, or irrelevant, or just incomprehensible. They convinced themselves that the Bible must be easy to understand because they were determined to reject the Catholic church’s authority to interpret, but they could not, at the time, appeal to an alternative authority.

If the Bible is perspicuous – plain, clear, and to be accepted literally – in theory there should not be any disagreements about what it means. But there were. There was a major dispute between Luther and Zwingli over the words of Jesus at the Last Supper: ‘This is my body’. The meaning of the Communion service depended on it.

So how could they explain the disagreements over those plain, clear texts? One solution was that as well as accepting the truth of the Bible you need faith. Another was you need the inner guidance of the Holy Spirit. These answers turn the problem into a psychological one. I am accepting the plain teaching of Scripture; when you disagree with me, I am being guided by the Holy Spirit so obviously you are not. But you say you are. If you really believe you are being guided by the Holy Spirit into uttering your heresies, there is only one possible explanation. You are being guided by the Devil. You are possessed. Even by talking to you, I am putting myself in spiritual danger. So I’m not going to talk to you – in fact I’m going to tell my friends never to talk to you, because you will only lead them astray by your devilish wiles.

These accusations were repeated over and over again in the Reformation debates. The theory that the Bible is clear and plain produced that bitter in-fighting between rival groups, which has characterised parts of the Protestant tradition, and in the twentieth century was inherited by Trotskyist politicians. You can’t belong to our church unless you believe exactly what we believe. All over the Protestant world you can see churches built across the road from each other, to rival each other because at some stage half the congregation disagreed with their minister over some item of doctrine and couldn’t abide a minister who refused to accept the plain teaching of scripture.

Two motives kept these fires burning. One was the general assumption that if you believe the wrong thing you’ll go to hell for eternity. They took hell seriously; many people spent their lives in a state of panic about it. The other was politics. Until the second half of the seventeenth century, all sides agreed that the state should be governed according to God’s laws, so if we can’t agree about God we can’t agree how the state should be governed. The Reformation debates produced two centuries of religious wars.

Suppression of reason

If you think this doesn’t sound very rational, you are right. They inherited from the later Middle Ages a dualistic theory, according to which there are two distinct ways of knowing things. We know about physical things through reason, but we cannot see or understand spiritual things, so we depend entirely on divine revelation for matters of Christian doctrine. During the Reformation debate, Protestants and Catholics alike believed that there is no place for reason in matters of faith. The Christian’s duty was to just accept divine revelation. And they couldn’t agree about what divine revelation was.

Enlightenment

Eventually reason had to make a comeback. The Enlightenment began as an attempt to bring the religious wars to an end by establishing principles which which did not depend on disputed divine revelations. They looked for universal principles which anybody can work out for themselves, and which will produce knowledge which everybody can accept because they can work it out for themselves. This is the Enlightenment Reason which postmodernists criticise. The two dominant figures of the early Enlightement were René Descartes and John Locke. So what did they mean by reason?

We have different faculties for knowing things. One is rationalism, where we logically deduce one thing from another. Logic and maths. Descartes tried to deduce all knowledge rationally from a self-evident first principle, his ‘I think, therefore I am’.

The other main source of information is the evidence of our five senses. You can see this table, so you know it is here. Locke emphasised the senses. One of his arguments appeals to Noah’s flood. We can be certain the flood happened, he says, because it’s in the Bible. But we are not as certain as Noah was, because Noah saw it for himself. In practice what we see with our own eyes we take to be more certain than what we read in the Bible.

Other things are also going on in our minds: instinct, emotions, conscience. These provide information with less certainty. But as Descartes and Locke saw it, the attempt to establish peace on the basis of reason would not succeed unless reason could produce certainty. In order to establish certainty, they operated with a narrow account of reason, limited to logic, maths and the evidence of the senses.

So just as medieval Catholics treated the Church’s doctrine as supreme on all matters, and Protestants tended to treat the Bible as supreme on all matters, early Enlightenment philosophers expected to show that reason was supreme on all matters. They thought they could establish all knowledge, including the truth of Christianity, on the basis of logic, maths and the evidence of the senses.

It was for this purpose that they invented facts. Before then a ‘fact’ meant the same as the French word ‘fait’, something that has been done. By the end of the seventeenth century it had come to mean something that had been proved true with certainty. You don’t need to ask for the evidence because it has been established. It’s in the bank, secure. The idea was that there is a radical distinction between facts, which have been proved with certainty, and on the other hand beliefs and opinions which have not.

This theory is now called positivism. Two positivist traditions are alive and well today, and they spend their time campaigning against each other. Richard Dawkins and the anti-religious campaigners insist that science has the facts and religion is nothing but beliefs. Fundamentalist Christians, especially anti-evolutionists, argue that the Bible has the facts and modern science is all theory. They attack each other because they speak the same language.

One day these people will catch up with the nineteenth century. At first positivists confidently asserted that reason will establish the truth about everything. This gradually got converted into the corollary: there are some things reason cannot prove, so we must conclude they do not exist. David Hume argued that the existence of God cannot be proved. Auguste Comte set up a positivist religion, based on reason, accepting that there is no God. But Mach showed that reason can prove precious little. If all knowledge is to be deduced with certainty from the evidence of the senses, you don’t know there is a table there. All you can see is a colour and a shape. Certainty is much harder to come by than they thought. Philosophers today argue that the only thing you can be absolutely certain of is the contents of your own mind. You may think you are sitting there listening to me, but that may just be the effect of the illegal substance you smoked this morning.

Authority without certainty

So then, tradition, the Bible, reason. Each of these has been tried as the supreme authority, trumping all else, and they all fail. None of them produces knowledge with certainty. What’s the alternative?

The alternative is to accept that we are not given certainty. There are no absolutely supreme authorities. Only God is infallible.

Instead we have many different sources of information, and because any of them may sometimes mislead us we need them all, to balance each other. There are different ways of listing these sources. I, being an Anglican, am familiar with Richard Hooker’s ‘three-legged stool’ of Scripture, reason and tradition, and I have structured this talk accordingly. Methodists may want to add experience as a separate category. The important point is that there is a variety of different things going on, all useful but none infallible. I shall stick to the three headings so that this talk doesn’t go on too long.

Reason

Reason needs to be understood widely, to include all the mental processes God has given us. God has designed our minds to understand the world well enough to live good and fulfilling lives in it. We can understand what we need to understand, but not everything. Sometimes we ignore information which does not suit our interests. Sometimes we try to do things we haven’t been designed to do. We can work out how to do the shopping for the next door neighbour, but not how to travel at the speed of light.

If you believe God has designed our minds like this, it explains how our knowledge does, by and large, accurately express the nature of reality, while also explaining errors and disagreements. Our knowledge is real but relative, and not absolutely certain.

Tradition

Tradition needs to be understood dynamically. During the Reformation debates Catholics and Protestants alike believed that tradition ought to be an unchanging package of eternal truths. At the other extreme the early Enlightenment philosophers tried to establish knowledge without using tradition at all.

We do not need to choose between these two. Tradition provides us with wisdom inherited from the past, but its insights are neither complete nor certain. Every generation inherits many things from the past, challenges some of them, and adds its own insights, thus contributing to a dynamic tradition which changes over time. Tradition, like reason, contributes to our understanding but is not infallible.

Scripture

And so to scripture, which I believe similarly provides us with insights, but the insights are neither complete nor certain. Christians today inherit their ideas about the Bible from the history I have described, and if there is one common theme uniting conservatives against liberals we might locate it in that expectation of completeness and certainty.

Some Christians expect the true meaning of each biblical text to be consistent with the true meaning of other texts and with true Christian doctrine. I have described how this theory developed around the third century on the basis of allegorizing every text. The early Reformation inherited it, but replaced allegory with literal meanings. We might add that fundamentalism, beginning just over a century ago, reaffirmed literal meanings, but looked for literal meanings about science and history rather than doctrine and ethics. This kind of unitary theory is an all-or-nothing theory: anyone who questions the truth of one text is undermining the authority of the whole Bible.

Those who adhere to this unitary theory often believe they are giving supreme authority to the Bible. In my opinion they are not. They are giving supreme authority to their theory about the Bible, and imposing this theory onto reluctant texts.

The other broad type is the one usually described as critical biblical scholarship. It is an unfortunate term because ‘critical’ sounds as if you are trying to undermine the Bible, and this is exactly what they are often accused of doing. It would be more accurate to say it doesn’t accept a unitary theory; it begins by looking at each text and only later does it generalise about the Bible as a whole.

Before the third century, when some people still knew the authors of some texts, or at least knew why they wrote, they could interpret each text in its context and agree with some points while disagreeing with others. Similarly the Renaissance humanists paid attention to what each text says in its own terms, and from the later seventeenth century onwards textual scholarship was re-established with increasing success.

Scholars anticipate that biblical texts were written by humans, for reasons which should in principle make sense to us, if we can find out what they were. Some biblical authors, like Paul and Luke, tell us why they wrote, and sure enough their reasons sound like the kinds of reasons why people write things today. But we also notice differences. Because we do not have iron age smallholder lifestyles we do not apply most of their laws to ourselves. Recognizing both the similarities and the differences, it becomes possible to affirm the intentions behind a biblical text without necessarily following its instructions today. If we decide that it does have authority for us, we do so after due consideration, not simply because it is in the Bible. This is, in any case, how those books got into the Bible: somebody wrote a book, and later on other people judged it to be inspired by God and counted it among their holy scriptures.

Critical scholars therefore distinguish between two different processes. First they establish what the human authors meant when they wrote each text. After they have understood what the texts were intended to mean, only then do they ask what value it may have for us today, and look for general themes in the Bible as a whole.

In this way critical scholarship makes different judgements about different texts. Some are more authoritative than others. The texts which seem immoral to us may indeed express immoralities; perhaps they were included in the Bible because they were valued for other reasons. Some pairs of texts contradict each other, but both may have been included because both were judged of value.

Critical scholarship uses expert knowledge and techniques. To accept its judgements, we do not entrust biblical interpretation to a church leadership committed to its own dogmas, nor do we expect every believer to read and understand the Bible for themselves. We learn about God much as we learn about anything else. When we go to the dentist, we do not expect the dentist to have complete and certain knowledge, but we expect the dentist to know more about teeth than we do, and to keep informed about new research and techniques. In the same way critical scholarship does not expect the community of biblical scholars to have a collection of infallible certainties, but does expect them to know more than the rest of us do and to keep updating their theories with the latest information and research.

The triad

One more question. If we allow biblical scholars to work out what biblical texts mean, and find a wide range of results, with some texts more impressive than others, what kind of authority do we give to those meanings? Are we just judging the Bible according to our own modern standards, or is there still something about the Bible which makes it authoritative? The answer I am going to give is my own, but I think it expresses what most biblical scholars would believe. Once again I’m going to relate the Bible to reason and tradition.

Whatever you studied for your A levels, in all developing fields of study there is a dialectical relationship between tradition and new research. If every generation began from scratch with reason, but with no tradition, we wouldn’t know much. Conversely, if every generation inherited tradition but didn’t use reason, tradition would never change, so we would never discover anything new. What makes progress possible is the relationship between reason and tradition; each informs the other and they grow.

In addition to these two, there is always something else. You can ask of every tradition: where did it come from? Every tradition has roots. Marxists describe their tradition as beginning with Marx, psychoanalysts with Freud, Islam with Mohammed. Traditions have a story to tell about how they began.

You can ask of any tradition: ‘Why do you begin your story here? What happened at this point to make that point the starting-point? What was it about Marx or Mohammed that makes you begin your story there?’ Each tradition offers its answers, usually with great pride, showing how what happened at the beginning made a big difference. Marx understood economic relationships in a new way; Freud explained the unconscious processes of the mind. And so on. At that beginning one set of ideas was abandoned, another affirmed. In this way each tradition describes its beginnings in a way which reveals its commitments. When you describe the roots of your own tradition you are identifying with its values.

For Christians, the Bible stands as our roots. It is the starting-point for our story. It is in the Bible that we see the insights which make our tradition different from other traditions.

So when we have paid attention to what all the biblical texts actually say, and then compared them with each other to see what patterns emerge, well – what patterns do emerge? As in all living traditions, different Christians describe our roots in different ways. Some emphasize how it turned away from polytheism to insist that God is one. Others focus on Paul’s teaching about freedom from laws. Others again focus on the person of Christ. The Bible is richer than just one single message.

This does not mean that the Bible gives complete or certain knowledge. In the same way Marxists do not say of Marx, nor Freudians of Freud, that their founder’s writings were complete or infallible. In fact they claim the very opposite: that those writings were fruitful. By setting out convincing new ideas Marx and Freud began a tradition which flourished and in time discovered new insights which the founder had not thought of. It is this fruitfulness which characterizes a successful new tradition. The founder has hit on something which produces a succession of new insights building on each other.

Sometimes a tradition even refutes an original insight. For example modern science could not begin as long as scientists believed the world around them was constantly being manipulated by unpredictable invisible demons. They therefore proposed that the physical world is not affected by unobservables. They continued to believe this until the early twentieth century, but now they believe in lots of unobservables from subatomic particles to dark energy. What once was a necessary condition for modern science has now been refuted by science itself.

In the same way the Bible never condemns slavery; on the contrary it lays down a lot of laws about how slaves are to be treated. Nevertheless Jews and Christians alike now believe that slavery is contrary to the Bible’s insights.

So what is important about the Bible is not that it is complete or infallible, but that its approach, its ideas and insights, are fruitful. The insights of the Bible have enabled Christianity to generate new and helpful insights which are not contained within the Bible itself.  As Thomas Aquinas said in the thirteenth century, by examining what we do know we are led to discover other things which we did not know.

Scripture, tradition, reason: how we began, how we have changed since then, the changes we are making now. These elements inform each other in a manner both humble and creative. Humble, because nothing is guaranteed. We may be wrong. Creative, because we may have been wrong yesterday, and today we may discover why; or yesterday’s new insight may lead to another insight today. Accepting the authority of the Bible does not imprison us in the past; it equips us for new adventures in a faith which can be creative, and exciting.