Beeson Podcast, Episode 427
Kevin Vanhoozer
January 15, 2019
https://www.beesondivinity.com/podcast/2019/Travail-of-Reformational-Protestantism

Announcer:          Welcome to The Beeson Podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. Now your host, Timothy George.

Timothy George:     Welcome to today's Beeson Podcast. Today we get to hear a lecture by Dr. Kevin Vanhoozer called The Travail of Reformational Protestantism: Authority and the Conflict of Interpretive Communities. What's that about? Well, the Reformation intended to call the Church back to its evangelical and Biblical roots. And to do so in a way, not in a static kind of once in a forever there settled, but in a way that opened up to the future as God by Spirit gives guidance to the Church.

Timothy George:     And so the phrase Semper Reformanda, to be always reforming, is at the heart of this idea. Kevin Vanhoozer quotes Karl Barth who said, "What counts in the Church is not progress but Reformation. We're gonna listen to this lecture, which takes on board some of the criticisms that are often made of the Protestant Reformation, that is the source of all division in the Church. And he challenges that by pointing out to some of the central affirmations of the Reformation and how God is the active agent of Reformation, the one Triune God who speaks through His Word enabling faith in the hearers. Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God as Paul said and Luther loved to quote.

Timothy George:     Well, we go to Hodges Chapel and we hear our friend Dr. Kevin J. Vanhoozer as he speaks during our Reformation Heritage Lectures. The Travail of Reformational Protestantism.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    It is very good to be here. People are concerned that I'm getting tired. And this is energizing for me. So I'm away from school, I'm playing hooky. Thank you for letting me play hooky with you. It's been a wonderful experience so far. The Evangelical Covenant Church was founded in 1885 by Swedish immigrants to America. They're perhaps distinct among Protestant Christians in rooting their identity not in a confessional statement but rather in a pair of questions. Where is it written? What do the Scriptures say? The Bible is the Covenanters Supreme Authority. Yet they value their freedom to read and think for themselves in accordance with the Scriptures.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    David Nyvall, founding President of North Park University in Chicago reflects about the tension created by the Covenanters holding Biblical authority and interpretive freedom together when he said, no doubt wistfully, "Freedom is the last of the spiritual gifts to mature. The unity of the Church relies on the shared life of Christ," he suggests, "Not on everyone agreeing about the interpretation of every verse. Would that they were so simple. This inability to solve interpretive disputes has been called the Achilles heel of Protestantism."

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Molly Worthen locates what she calls the crisis of authority at American Evangelicalism just here in the movement's lack of a magisterium, an official instrument with which to arbitrate interpretive disagreements about what the Scriptures say. A Supreme Court for Protestant Biblical interpretation.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    In the wake of post-modernity's critique of The View From Nowhere ... That is the idea that we can use scientific methods to arbitrate our disputes and get to the objective truth ... In the wake of that critique of that idea, the authority of reason is no longer absolute. Reason has become relativized to interpretive communities. So within such communities there are norms for interpretation. But the search for universal rational criteria that would attain across interpretive communities has largely been abandoned.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Stanley Fish argues that what now constrains interpreters is internal to one's interpretive community. So on this scheme, the Church is just one more interpretive community. Or rather, each church, each confessional tradition, is one interpretive community among many others. Now, the Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote a book in 1988 entitled Whose Justice? Which Rationality? And he suggested a way to make comparative, rational judgments between interpretive traditions without pretending to occupy a tradition-transcendent independent point of view.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Now, I can't do justice to his approach here. Some people think it represents a distinct philosophical advance. But I can say it takes a lot of time for it to work. Maybe centuries. And we have to make decisions in the present.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    So what follows is an attempt to think theologically about this problem of how to deal with competing Protestant interpretive communities. I want to begin with a brief description of our current pluralistic situation. Then I'll examine various approaches to Biblical interpretation that confront the Church today. And if this ... As if this weren't challenge enough, I'll hear from three Roman Catholic critics of Sola Scriptura, and then we can return to the Reformation and its heritage. And retrieve some precious resources for dealing with our present situation.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    My overall attempt here is not simply to recover the principle of Sola Scriptura, but to unpack the practice of Sola Scriptura. And that means taking up the unfinished project of the Reformers. Forming right-minded and right-hearted interpretive communities.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    So Point B. Pluralism is the time signature of the present moment. Thus is ... Declares a special issue on theological education between the times in a recent ATS Journal, The American Theological Society Journal. They're worried about what to do as theological educators in a pluralistic situation. Of course, we're not the first generation to face the challenge of being Biblical in a pluralistic age. Ancient Israel lived in a pluralistic culture filled with a variety of religions, practices, and idols. And so did the early Christians, as we can see in Michael Kruger's recent book, Christianity at the Crossroads: How the Second Century Shaped the Future of the Church. The Second Century was very pluralistic.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    But the easiest way to introduce our pluralist age is to say that there are now many stories that serve as the framework for people's plausibility structures and living. So whatever happened to Biblical authority? The use of Scripture as our control story? I want to call your attention to two subterranean yet nevertheless seismic sea changes. First, the Great Reversal in Biblical Hermeneutics. The second, the demise of Biblical civilization.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Hans Frei has called attention to a Copernican revolution in Biblical interpretation in his book, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. It happened in the 17th and 18th Centuries. "Before this time", says Frei, "Christians accepted the Biblical narrative as the true story of the world. They used the Bible as their primary framework to understand God, the world, and their own experience. But at the time of The Enlightenment, the interpretive polarities were reversed." That's the Great Reversal. Modern men and women now accept the story told by natural sciences. And this becomes the template through which we now read the Biblical narrative. Instead of fitting the real world into a Biblical framework, modern thinkers try to fit the Biblical story into the so-called "real world" known independently of the Biblical texts.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    I'm gonna say this one more time to make sure you see The Reversal. Whereas earlier Christians fit their world into the story of the Bible, today we're more likely to try to fit the Bible into one of our critically reconstructed stories. That's the Great Reversal. And Frei's colleague George Limbeck viewed this inability to use the Biblical story as our major frame of reference as a greater crisis than the social, economic, political, and environmental crises put together. This was Limbeck's assessment. And he wasn't even an Evangelical. But he's right. The change from using the Bible as the lens through which we look at the world to using worldly knowledge as the lens through which we look at the Bible, that's as radical a revolution as Copernicus' discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than vice versa.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    This Hermeneutical Reversal effectively repudiates Sola Scriptura. The Enlightenment enshrined a new teaching authority, the Magisterium of modern learning. Yet Reformation Christians know that the Great Reversal gets things the wrong way around. I like the way C.S. Lewis puts it. He says, "Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the other religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things. Not even science itself. I believe in Christianity", he says, "As I believe the Sun", S-U-N, "Has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else." One cannot serve two master narratives. So choose you this day which story you will serve.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    And secondly, Grant Wacker's essay The Demise of Biblical Civilization similarly claims that something happened. Something tremendous happened. He locates it sometime in the 20th Century. He says, "The average American did not consciously renounce faith in the Bible, but simply stopped using it as the primary plausibility structure with which to make sense of life. People tended to understand the meaning of events in this worldly terms, rather than in terms of Divine Providence." So what he calls the demise of Biblical civilization is really the failure of the imagination to read our world through the spectacles of faith.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Now, underlying the Great Reversal and the demise of Biblical civilization is what Charles Taylor calls the Secular Social Imaginary. "A social imaginary is the picture that frames our everyday beliefs and practices," Taylor says. "It's the way people imagine and experience their social existence." It refers to that whole nest of background assumptions, often implicit, that lead people to simply feel things as right or wrong, correct or incorrect. The social imaginary, the way ordinary people imagine their social existence. And Taylor says it's expressed and communicated not in theoretical terms, but it's carried and conveyed in images and stories.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    So a social imaginary is what enables us through making sense of life, the practices of our society. It's Taylor's name I think for what others have called the root metaphor or the control story that shapes people's perception of the world and funds their plausibility structures. For example, the root metaphor of the world as machine become the dominant world picture in Isaac Newton's day. Nature on this view is a structure of physical elements and forces whose movements could be mathematically calculated. So the social imaginary of the world as a machine was firmly established in Newton's time.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Later in modernity it was replaced by a picture of the world as process, an evolutionary story. And that encourages belief in progress. If things are getting better. What about the dominant picture today? What's the social imaginary that reigns in our society? Taylor suggests it may be the world as web. A vast, uncentered network of relations between variously located individuals and communities. But nothing is the center. Now, none of those pictures approximate the Bible's social imaginary of the world as creation. But note the emphasis on social. This isn't an intellectual imaginary. It's not a theory for the elites. It's for individuals, everyday people. It's a story-based way of thinking. And it's taught not in universities, but in culture. Through culture.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    So according to Taylor ... And this is all from his book, A Secular Age, according to Taylor, "People become secular not because they've majored in it or not because they've done an adult education night course called Secularity 101. They become secular simply by participating in a society that no longer thinks in terms of God the way it used to." A social imaginary then is the complex of images and narratives that orientate everyday life, and I would add, indoctrinate us. The doctrines, the teachings, the beliefs we hold. Whether they're philosophical, political, or theological, these doctrines feel right or wrong, plausible or implausible based largely on how well they accord with the prevailing social imaginary.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    In short, our age is secular because it's held captive by a secular picture. A secular rose social imaginary. This is my hunch at least. The demise of Biblical civilization was the result not of some fossil discovery or that God wasn't in outer space or a logical argument. The demise of Biblical civilization was the result of a shift and these taken-for-granted assumptions that frame our everyday beliefs and practices. So if secularism is a crisis for faith, it's primarily because it's replaced the Scriptural imaginary with a secular imaginary.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    I feel so strongly about the role of the imagination in churches and the need to recover a Biblically-based imagination that I've written a whole book about this called, Pictures at a Theological Exhibition. It hasn't done too well, and I'm not quite sure what to make of that. When I say social imaginary, don't think about imaginary friends. We're talking about the way we experience life. The programming that runs our brains and the way we process information.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Point four. In addition to all this, we're living in a globalized world where a new kind of empire rules. Not by armies but by the hegemony of popular culture. I don't want to villainize culture here, I simply want to recognize its power. I strongly believe that culture, everything humans do that is not by reflex, culture is the most powerful means of spiritual formation there is. For example, TV shows in this country have made certain lifestyles not only imaginable but socially acceptable. The new empire, call it the Popular Cultural Industrial Entertainment Complex.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    The new empire uses social media to sell not simply goods, but lifestyles. Lived philosophies. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, all of these can be weapons of mass instruction. But pluralism carries its own pathologies. And I'm especially concerned with the effects of interpretive pluralism on our spirits.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    For example, a British friend came to the States. I took him to an ice cream parlor. I never saw someone go through such existential anguish as having to choose between 31 flavors. But we are now in a position where we have to choose between lifestyles. And this is painful in the extreme. And it generates, secondly, not only consumerism but a spirit of cynicism. Francois Lyotard described the postmodern condition as incredulity towards metanarratives. The inability to belief in a big, true story.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    You see, the cool thing today is not to believe too hard in anything. Let go and let lifestyle. So long as no one gets hurt. Generations X, Y, and Z don't think any one group has the answers. What's more, they may not even care about looking for that epistemological alchemy that can turn the dross of relative opinion to the absolute gold of knowledge.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    So we're living in an increasingly pluralistic and polarized society, where ignorant armies clash by tweet. Our culture is therefore fostering an anticulture. That is, I'm not sure we believe in any universal values strong enough to want to cultivate them in the next generation. Parents are even choosing names that might work with boys or girls so that their child can make their own choice with regard to their gender. The only thing our culture seems to want to cultivate is freedom of choice. Yet, freedom without form is a vacuum, not a vocation.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Now, Point C. To this point we've seen that living in an age that is not exactly conducive to Sola Scriptura is the new situation, the new normal for the Church. We've identified two major problems. First, the empirical fact that fewer people are using the Bible as their primary framework. Second, the existential fact that having to live with uncertainty may be dangerous to our spiritual health. So my concern is, how do we address the apparent problem of interpretive anarchy? Whose reading of the Bible is right? And what makes it so?

Kevin Vanhoozer:    But we also need to do justice or acknowledge the variety of interpretive interests with which people come to the Bible. So I want to look at four sets of interpretive interests. First, confessional. The presenting problem of the immediate aftermath of the Reformation was this conflict of confessional traditions. I don't think William Blake had Calvinists and Armenians in mind when he wrote the final couplet of his poem, The Everlasting Gospel. But he might as well have. It goes like this. "Both read the Bible by day and night, but thou read'st black where I read white."

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Secondly, methodological plurality. I believe that the best barometer for understanding what trends are prevailing in culture or in the academy, the best barometer is the Biblical commentary. Every interest in the academy or society eventually shows up in the way people write commentaries. So we have a variety of interpretive interests within Biblical commentary series themselves.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    And then there's ideological plurality. In her Presidential Address to The Society of Biblical Literature, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza calls for a cessation of ways of interpreting Scripture that encourage discrimination and exclusion. Her title was called The Ethics of Interpretation. And so for 40 years now since that address, the SBL has happily obliged. In The Society of Biblical Literature there is now a place and time for every interest group to have its way with the Bible.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    I just got my program for the 2018 meeting in the mail. Hundreds of papers are going to be served up to be either digested or the cause of heartburn. But here are just a few of the approaches to Biblical interpretation that are represented. Asian, Asian-American. Ecological. Feminist. Latina. LGBTI/Queer. There's many, many approaches to Scripture out there in the academy.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    According to Stephen Fowl, everyone comes to Scripture with an interpretive interest. And, he says, "No one interpretive interest is more authoritative than any other." What controls there are on exegesis are internal to the methodology. Internal to the interests that animates an interpretive community.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    And then, as if this wasn't hard enough, we're in a global context. Graham Hill's new book, Global Church, pulls no punches here. He writes, "Western cultures no longer define how Christians should understand and believe and interpret the Bible. Interpretive approaches in the West are simply part of a global conversation." That's right. But according to Hill, one of the hallmarks of African and Asian approaches is a deep respect for the Bible's authority combined with very creative applications and contextualizations. Hill thinks this Westernizing of Biblical interpretation is a good thing. And I do, too, but it adds to the plurality.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Henning Wrogemann is a pioneer in a new field called Intercultural Theology, an attempt to rethink theology in light of cultural plurality today. And the second volume of his trilogy is called Intercultural Hermeneutics. And towards the end of the book he addresses our question. "What can churches and various cultures do when they agree on the authority of the Bible but not its interpretation? Is there a Hermeneutic method that can mediate confessional, methodological, theological, and cultural differences?"

Kevin Vanhoozer:    And in his book he lists the options. Biblicism, which he associates with an errancy, not Sola Scriptura. So we'll come back to that. Biblicism, Higher Criticism, Pentacostalism, and Liberationism. Those are his four possibilities. I think the book does a great job describing the problem, but it doesn't really offer a normative way forward. And to my mind, he overlooks the Reformational heritage. And that's what I want to explore in a moment.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    But just before I do, I want to tighten the screws on our Achilles heel by turning to three Roman external examiners. Christian Smith is a sociologist who teaches at Notre Dame. He wrote the book The Bible Made Impossible. His criticism of Evangelical Biblicism has attracted much attention. The strength of the book is the detailed documentation of what he calls Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism. The empirical fact that Evangelicals who agree that the Bible is God's Word nevertheless disagree about every verse and what it means.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    His critique, I quote, He says, "It becomes beside the point to assert a text to be a solely authoritative when lo and behold, it gives rise to a host of many divergent teachings on important matters." And much of the evidence that he cites is published by Zondervan. Four views, five views, three views on various questions. He looks at various escape routes, but comes to the conclusion there's no way out of this dilemma for Protestants. "Abandon hope all ye who enter into Biblicism." In my book, I deal with Smith. And in contrast to his emphasis on Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism, I argue for Unitive Interpretive Plurality and suggest that's what the Reformation offers.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    My second interlocutor is Luke Timothy Johnson. He's not as well know to Smith as it's two Evangelicals. Despite all those Biblical names in his name. But his book links study of decision-making in the Church, Scripture and discernment, is deserving of Evangelical attention. In part because he roots his study in analysis of the Jerusalem Council of Acts 15. That's his paradigm for how Christian interpretive communities should resolve disagreements. He helpfully reminds us that what most challenges a community are the decisions about our identity. What makes us us rather than them? Those decisions are very important.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    And the process by which communities reach a decisions also tell us something about their identity. He says, "The process of discernment must occur in a public context. This enables discussion, debate, disagreement, and decision." Now, this is where his proposal runs into trouble. He reads Acts 15 as an example of the Church's rereading of Scripture in light of Peter and the other Apostles experience of those who've received The Holy Spirit. The work of The Spirit among the Gentiles convinces the Jerusalem community not to apply certain Old Testament prescriptions. For example, requiring circumcisions of the Gentiles.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    But then, Johnson thinks that we ought to listen to homosexual Christians discern the work of The Spirit in their lives and then come to the conclusion that we should not impose heterosexual morality on them. You see what's happening. Theological discernment for Johnson is a matter of rereading the texts in light of what he calls "The Texts of Human Lives". And those have as much authority, if not more, than the Biblical texts.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    My own view is that Johnson hasn't attended closely enough to Acts 15. Because just after the announcement of the decision, it seemed good to The Holy Spirit and us. We read in Verse 29 that the Jerusalem Council tells the Gentiles to abstain from sexual immorality. So okay, you don't have to get circumcised, but you do have to abstain from sexual immorality. That is part of our identity, they're saying. Johnson doesn't discuss that.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    There is a repeated and consistent emphasis in The New Testament on the sanctity of marriage and hence the necessity of avoiding other forms of sexuality. And I think this is the Christian way of acknowledging the Lordship of Christ over all things. Including what we do with our bodies. So disagreeing about sexual ethics means differing to some extent about how to read the story of Jesus.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Finally, Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, identifies the contrasting ways that Protestants and Catholics understand Scripture and tradition. Whereas The Council of Trent defended its traditions, plural, from the Reformation critique that they were unBiblical. Vatican II's Dei verbum emphasized tradition, singular, as the Spirit-guided preservation of God's Word in the Church.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    For Ratzinger, the Word of God is not, he says, "An independent reality floating above the Church, but rather is something The Lord has passed on to and in the Church." And so he poses the key question for Protestants, "Can the Word be set up as an independent without handing it over the arbitrariness of the exegete to be emptied into disputes of historians and thus to the complete loss of normative authority?"

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Ratzinger says, "The Offices of Bishop and Pope play an important role in ensuring the right reception of God's Word. The Church needs a teaching office when there's disagreement about which tradition is truly Apostolic." So for Ratzinger, teaching office guarantees integrity of the Word rather than vice versa for Protestants. He says, "Apart from the concrete reality of the Church lived Roman tradition", for him, "Scripture becomes a victim of experts' disputes." Hence The Travail of Reformational Protestantism. That's the problem.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    I now want us to board The Good Ship Reformational, set sail with Sola Scriptura, and tack against these prevailing winds. And the three points I want to make correspond more or less directly to Smith's attack on Sola Scriptura, Johnson's construal of decision-making in the Church, and Ratzinger's insistence that God's Word requires a magisterium in order to be rightly received.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    First, let me say a word about Sola Scriptura. Sola Scriptura is not simply a formal principle with which to resolve interpretive disputes. I want to suggest it is a pedagogical practice, profitable for training in righteousness and making wise to salvation. It refers primarily to Scripture's authoritative content, yet indirectly to the process of discernment and decision-making in the Church. The practice of Sola Scriptura can itself be part of our training in righteousness. And therefore, a means of spiritual formation. That's the big idea.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    So Point One. Sola Scriptura means that Scripture alone is the wholly reliable, sufficient, and final authority for the Church's life and thought. And here I want to add imagination. Imagination. So Scripture is our textbook. The Holy Spirit is our Teacher. The Church is our schoolhouse. And the topic, of course, is the knowledge of God. On this proposed model, I see Sola Scriptura not simply as referring to the textbook, but to the curriculum. The School of Faith. And what we're trying to learn is not simply information, but worship and wisdom. How to process information. How to become the kind of people who avoid idolatry and give God His due.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    The Bible is useful for instruction to be sure, but this involves more than factual information. If teaching were a mere matter of telling people what is the case, then spreading knowledge would be as easy as spreading butter. But the task of theological education is more challenging than that. Theology is faith seeking understanding. Theological education is the ministry of forming understanding.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    And this leads me to my claim. If we're to preserve the heritage of the Reformation, we must do everything we can to ensure that Sola Scriptura becomes the supreme rule for Christian understanding. Scripture alone exercises supreme authority over Christian faith and life. And the, for lack of a better term, Ecclesial imaginary. The way congregations imagine their life.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Remember, a social imaginary is this story or description of the world that shape a culture. The way a culture thinks and lives. This is what we need to recover I think with regard to Sola Scriptura. Scripture along are supreme rule for rightly imagining reality. For rightly inhabiting and enacting the new reality in Christ. Which is the only reality there is.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    So we need to recover the Bible as the control story, not simply of our official theology, but also of everyday Christian thought and life. This is a job not only for professional theologians, but first and foremost for pastors. To help their congregations regain a Biblical literacy and a Biblical social imaginary.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    As I've already said, secular culture is in the business of spiritual formation. But what it's forming is consumerist and pluralist and cynical spirits. The Gospel, especially this announcement that God has raised Jesus from the dead, exorcizes these spirits. And sets the captive imagination free. The Evangelical imagination, ruled only by the Gospel, frees us to see, judge, and act in faith in accordance with the way things really are, not the way Madison Avenue says they are. These are the vain imaginings of our time. So the Evangelical imagination and an imagination ruled by the Biblical narrative opens up the possibility of living along with the grain of reality.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    I don't know if any of you happened to catch the CBS sitcom comedy that premiered last year entitled Living Biblically. It was based on a book by a journalist, A.J. Jacobs. And it was called A Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest To Follow The Bible As Literally As Possible. Well, the TV show is a satire, which in God's Providence was canceled after the first season. But it featured a man who after the death of his best friend decides to improve his life by living according to the Bible. So every episode is devoted to his attempt to put one Biblical commandment into practice.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    The overall impression that the show gives is that living Biblically is simply a matter of following moral principles and sometimes laws that are culturally irrelevant in our time. Nowhere does this show suggest that living Biblically means participating in what the Father is doing in the Son through the Spirit to renew Creation. Not a whiff of that.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    It's up to us to give that phrase, living Biblically, a different connotation for our culture. But before we can bear witness on our society, we have to clean up the social imaginary in our own house. The Church as a Holy nation needs to march to the beat of a different picture than the rest of the world. We ought to be living parables of the Kingdom of God as Christian communities. In a disenchanted age, the embodied lived Gospel alone is able to satisfy people's passion for truth and meaning and beauty. I don't see too many other alternatives, frankly.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    So do you see why I'm calling Sola Scriptura our curriculum? What we're ultimately trying to learn in the schoolhouse of the Church is how to understand the world Christianly. This means developing our imaginations. But it also means knowing how to live the story out in our place and time.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Point Two. Back to the idea of councils. The Church as an interpretive community does have a place, along with the great tradition and what I call the pattern of interpretive authority. Now here's the key Reformation idea. The Bible alone authorizes, but the Bible that authorizes is not alone. I mean that the Scriptures are the sole magisterial authority of the Church. But, Scripture doesn't play its role independently of the Church or The Holy Spirit. Things like tradition have ministerial authority.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Scott Swain puts it like this. "The Spirit who enables and sustains our reading of Scripture also provides a community to aid us in our reading." Luther and Calvin had no problem appealing to the Church fathers as ministerial authorities. And I love Herman Bavinck's description of tradition as, quote, "The method by which the spirit causes the truth of Scripture to pass into the consciousness of the life and thought of the Church."

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Sola Scriptura, then, is the practice of attending to the Spirit speaking in the Scriptures and to those who are equally attentive trying to do the same. Now, tradition has a place in what I call the Economy of Light. God is Light. Christ is the Light of the World. Light from Light. And Scripture is the appointed instrument through which the Light of Christ shines into our heart thanks to the Spirit. Light from Light from Light. God is Light. Yet interestingly enough, God appointed Lights. He might even call them Luminary Offices. Lights in the expanse of Heaven to give light upon the Earth. In His economy, this is how God decides to make common His Light.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Genesis 1:16 says God made two great lights. The greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night. I like to think of tradition as the lesser light. The Moon to Scripture's Sun. I think it works, because the light the Moon gives off is always and only a reflection of the Sun. But it's real light, nevertheless. Scripture alone is the Supreme Authority, yet God in His Grace decided it was not good for Scripture to be alone. He thus authorized tradition. So that when Scripture saw it, Scripture said, "This at last is norm of my norm and light of my light. She shall be called Post-Apostolic Testimony because she was taken out of Apostolic Testimony."

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Traditions begin with Church councils that set interpretive trajectories. And Protestants are, for lack of a better term, convictional conciliarists. Convictional conciliarists affirm Catholicity, but insist that the Church means the whole Church, not just the clergy, not just one denomination. They insist that interpretive authority is distributed throughout the whole Church. Not concentrated in one head monarchy. This authority that's distributed to the whole Church best comes to expression in councils that are truly representative of the whole Church. I see councils as corporate expressions of Protestant interpretive conscientiousness. That is the awareness that the Spirit is working not only in us, but maybe working in others to illumine Biblical truth.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    And then Point Three. One of the concerns about Sola Scriptura I've heard expressed is that it encourages interpretive pride. Some people think Sola Scriptura encourages individuals to think that they have or could be high priests of the interpretation. They alone. I see Sola Scriptura very differently. I see it as a standing challenge to that kind of interpretive pride. The whole point is that Scripture alone is authoritative, not my interpretation of it. Sola Scriptura means I have to practice the fallibility of my own interpretations.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    So Scripture affords us opportunity to discuss with others what discipleship means for today. And it's precisely in those discussions with others ... Including those who disagree with us ... That we are most challenged to have the Mind of Christ. I think nothing less than the integrity of Evangelicalism is at stake in the way we negotiate our difference over Biblical interpretation. One of my students from Edinburgh said, "If we can't all stay in the same room and talk to each other, we're telling the world the Gospel isn't true."

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Now, I'm not saying that the Gospel isn't true if we can't agree. I'm saying our witness to the Gospel will fail or at least fall short if we cannot speak the truth, including our disagreements, in love. The Reformers worked hard to achieve unity. They ... This included working to resolve disagreements about the theology of The Lord's Supper, for example. And those proved to be unsuccessful at the time. But that was not the fault of Sola Scriptura. That was the result of human stubbornness, finitude, and sin.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Roger Nicole was asked to give a lecture at Gordon-Conwell to mark the 30th anniversary of his teaching there. And the topic he chose was How To Deal With Those Who Differ From Us. He posed three questions. What do I owe them? What can I learn from them? How can I cope with them? I think we hear that third question a little differently than he intended it. But his answers to the first two, "I owe them to seek to understand what makes them tick. Why your interpretive interests? Why are you passionate about that? I can learn from them that I may be wrong, or at the very least, I may not be expressing myself well."

Kevin Vanhoozer:    And by asking how to cope with those who differ from us, Nicole has in mind how to commend truth versus error from Scripture. He encourages his listeners not to fall prey to the psychology of the boxing ring. Where the contestants are bent upon demolishing one another and winning. But rather, remember Paul's advice to Timothy. The Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone. Able to teach. Patient. Enduring evil. Correcting his opponents with gentleness in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    So Reformation Protestants have freedom and responsibility under God's Word and an obligation to be people of interpretive and dialogical virtue. People who can read the Bible rightly with others in the Church and who can demonstrate the fruit of the Spirit when engaging people, especially those who read the Bible differently.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Last month, Union Seminary of New York City tweeted about Biblical inerrancy. The basic gist was this. Believing in inerrancy is comforting and convenient. But the truth that the Bible is a book written by people grappling to understand God, the truth opens the door to a far deeper nuanced and complex faith. Getting real, they say, means having to cope with doubt. The last tweet was, "There's no cheat sheet that you can simply refer to to hear God's Voice."

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Now, I have to confess. When I was younger to having a certain fear of hearing something that might challenge my doctrine or my interpretation. But then I realized perfect fear casts out love. And if I can't love and if I'm not patient and all the other things Paul says Timothy should be, I'm less likely to come to the truth. It was liberating to realize that disagreements may be the Spirit's means of getting me to come to a deeper understanding of the truth. I think we need to get past the fear that casts out love.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    We need to stop looking at the conflict of Protestant interpretive communities simply as a problem to be solved. Or a battle to be won. But can we see it rather as a teaching moment? A moment for witness and possibly a moment for our own spiritual formation? Why do the Holy Nations rage? Why does God permit interpretive squabbles between Protestant tribes over things of second and third order? It's a difficult question. Once answer may be that this is our distinctly Protestant wilderness wandering. Which is to say, it's our distinctly Protestant means of being formed into a Holy Nation.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Uncomfortable though it may be, we may need to acknowledge that no one form of Protestantism exhausts the Gospel's meaning or gets everything right. I'm not sure how that makes you feel, but there was a time when that would have made me feel very threatened. I think Evangelicals need to be or do better at striking the right balance between boldness and humility, distinguishing God's Word from our interpretation of it. And knowing when the situation requires boldness and when the situation requires humility. Wisdom is the virtue that tells us when.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    But it's precisely by taking part in open and honest dialogue with other conscientious interpreters who are standing under the authority of Scripture is precisely in those conversations that the Spirit may form us into more right-minded and right-hearted readers.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    I can't help but hear an echo to Paul's words to the Philippians here. Philippians 2. In humility count others and their interpretations, more significant than yourselves. That each of you look not only to his own interpretive interests, but also to the interpretive interests of others. The original context is about doing what's necessary to complete Paul's joy. Being of the same mind. The mind or disposition of Christ Jesus marked by servant-like humility. But I wonder if it applies to us today as well? Especially as to disagreements over Biblical interpretation.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    Well, if Christianity is a finishing school for Holy Nations, this is surely the most challenging part of the curriculum. The steepest part, the steepest climb for pilgrim pupils. The Spirit is forming us to be more like Christ. And this includes learning how to disagree with one another and love without becoming even the least bit indifferent or cynical with regard to truth. We need to become the kind of people who can listen and accept correction and the kind of people who can offer correction in ways that build up rather than tear down.

Kevin Vanhoozer:    So may we all cultivate the Mind of Christ as we practice Sola Scriptura, agreeing and disagreeing with one another for the Love of Jesus and the Glory of God. Thank you.

Announcer:          You've been listening to The Beeson Podcast with host Timothy George. You can subscribe to The Beeson Podcast at our website, beesondivinity.com. Beeson Divinity School is an interdenominational Evangelical Divinity school training men and women in the service of Jesus Christ. We pray that this podcast will aid and encourage your work. And we hope you will listen to each upcoming edition of The Beeson Podcast.