The amateur ecumenist

Enloe is currently offering his customized version of sola Scriptura:

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Admittedly, my previous post on this subject and this one as well have been partly motivated by apologetic concerns raised by some interactions I have had (or have seen others have) with Jonathan Prejean. Following such arguments as found in Sherrard's book The Greek East and the Latin West, Prejean argues that sola Scriptura is incompatible with Christianity because it ultimately reduces Christianity to the text of Scripture. Namely, only those things can be believed which can be "verified" by direct appeal to the Scriptures Alone, whose "plain" meaning is exactly equivalent, without remainder, to the original meaning as discerned by purely "scientific" criteria of hermeneutics.

This view of Scripture, though seemingly popular among Modern Protestants, begins over time to look like a kind of textual "positivism"--and positivism is surely no friend of the Christian religion. I think this criticism is insightful when directed against said Modern Protestant concept of sola Scriptura, but I do not think it disqualifies sola Scriptura conceived of in its properly Reformational sense. It is the burden of these hastily-constructed, probably too sketchily-argued posts, to explain why I don't think sola Scriptura is actually impacted by the type of argument found in Sherrard's book. In addition to the foundational matters I discussed in the last post on this subject, I will here attempt to interact with some of the concerns of Catholics regarding sola Scriptura as expressed in such official documents as Vatican II's Dei Verbum.

Christianity cannot be reduced to only those areas of experience which are accessible to, quantifiable by, and really controlled by, the intellect (reason).

In speaking of written and unwritten "aspects" of Christian doctrine I believe Sherrard has expressed an important point about the incarnated religion of Christianity--a point which even we as Protestants ought to be able to affirm without difficulty. That point is that the Christian religion is about far more than sentences, propositions, and texts. The Christian religion is about all of reality, and this fully includes embodied reality. By its very nature, then, the Christian Faith cannot be about only what we find in a text--not even in the Divine Text itself. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Incarnated reality simply cannot be reduced to marks on a piece of paper, regardless of what those marks mean in terms of sentences and propositions. Indeed, not even a complete collection of such sentences and propositions gleaned from the Divine Text would be a complete Christian faith, but only part of it. Why? Because there is embodied reality outside of the text, and what we get from the text is not truly complete unless we live it out.

Now what does this mean for sola Scriptura? Everything depends on how the phrase is construed. If, for instance, we wrongly take the "sola" to mean that no authority except Scripture can have any real say-so, and correspondingly we then seek an exegetical theory which claims to have zero input from "traditions" because it "only" deals with the text of Scripture, we immediately fall into the rationalistic philosophical trap of which Sherrard speaks. Because especially over the last 350 years or so (since the cultural triumph of the Enlightenment) the Protestant mind has adopted a truly excessive suspicion of "tradition", reading remarks such as Sherrard's above all too easily raises fears that the authority of Scripture is being somehow downplayed and mere human notions brought in to enslave. We might find ourselves deeply suspicious of Sherrard's category of "aspects" of Christian doctrine, and suspect that the qualities of Scripture such as its "sufficiency" and "clarity" are being denied in favor of "traditions of men".
(though the mere propositional statements would not exhaust the meaning since the meaning has to be lived out in the community of the faithful).

To think of Scripture--and our process of understanding it--in such
a manner is to think like an idolator precisely because it reduces Scripture to something fully immanent, which we can control with our Reason.

How does such "controlling" of Scripture happen in the Enlightenment Protestant scheme? Like this. In the Modern world, when immanent Reason faces a problem it creates a technology (that is, a techne) to solve it. In terms of the Modern problem with finding "certainty" of interpretation the technology which has been created is "scientific" hermeneutics.

From Descartes's "clear an distinct ideas" to Paley's Divine Watchmaker to Hodge's Common Sense Realism, well-meaning Christians surrendered the field of battle to rationalism, and the result was, as history shows us, the general reduction of faith to whatever Reason could be said to approve.

That criterion being the autonomy of Reason, immanent systematization became the goal of Protestant theology as well as of all other fragmented areas of study (known as "subjects"). Biblical hermeneutics thus became one more "science" proceeding by its own autonomous rules and cut off from external sources of information and clarification--such as the category of "tradition" and its transmitter, the embodied life of faith… On this Enlightenment concept of knowledge and truth, "sola" Scriptura became the theory that "only" Scripture has any say-so, and Scripture's say-so (in the sense of its presumed eidos) is discovered via hermeneutics, a form of technology (techne) that leads us to correct Rational thinking (episteme).

We thus deny all hermeneutical attempts to rip Scripture (and its interpretation) out of its natural context--the ongoing, organic, messy life of the community of the faithful--and place it "above" all other things in the sense that nothing else can have any significant input because we heed "only" (sola) Scripture. Every attempt to interpret Scripture already involves philosophical and linguistic assumptions which, contrary to a naive Scripture "only" view of "sola" Scriptura do not arise from the text of Scripture itself--assumptions which we often do not see precisely for the reason that when we look out a window we usually do not see the window itself, but only that which we are looking at through the window. The trouble with blindspots is precisely that you can't see what is going on in them without the aid of something that is outside of them.

This is a tough subject to navigate under the best of circumstances, but certainly it is even tougher in a climate where both sides are merely repeating 500 year old developed polemics against each other and confusing this with actually listening to each other and dealing with what is being said within a very different framework.

That is, it has been confined to the purely Rational interpretation of black squiggles on the pages of a book--which, although it certainly is the Divine Book and to be reverenced above all other books, was never intended to (and indeed cannot) express the totality of divine revelation and the apostolic religion which is built upon it.

Christologically-speaking, because the Church is the Body of Christ, participating in His divine life, and because Christ is not just fully man but fully God as well (indeed, He is the image of the Father), the Body of Christ is not reducible to the merely historical--or the merely textual. Christianity is surely a "historical religion," but this does not mean that it is reducible to historical factors and expressions, since Christ Himself is not so reducible.

This implies that from the Christian or any other genuinely religious point of view, there can be no common measure between the Truth, in its absolute and eternal nature, and its formal expression in terms accessible to the human intelligence. The Truth is, a priori, independent of, and superior to, its expression in human terms, the latter being as nothing when compared with it. And this is so even in the case of such a supreme expression of the Truth on the human plane as its historical incarnation in the life of Christ: if the eternal Logos, in the Incarnation, 'became flesh', this assumed human nature does not absorb or exhaust the divine nature, and represents, vis-a-vis this latter, a limitation, in the sense that it gives a finite form to what is infinite and, from the point of view of the human intelligence, formless. What applies in the case of such a supreme manifestation of the Truth as the Incarnation applies necessarily to a greater degree to any other expression it may take on the human plane, and especially to formulas made in conceptual and logically coherent terms. The Truth itself is beyond any such formulations, and to seek for it in the latter is to confuse what belongs to a relative, and imperfect, order with what is absolute and universal--is, in fact, to fall into the kind of idolatry of which the Christians accuse the pagans, namely, that which arises from worshipping creation rather than the Creator. (Sherrard, 51)

Notice again the idea that people have to be "capable of receiving" a Truth which is presented to them, which, as developed in the first post, means that they have to reside within the community of faith, the life of which affects them in ways that actually make them able to understand spiritual things in a manner that those cut off from the life cannot. This instantly eliminates all notions of "Truth" as merely intellectual…It in effect reduces Truth to immanence, and thus by destroying transcendence destroys basic orthodox Christianity itself.

It is merely a plea for situating hermeneutics within something beyond the text which hermeneutics seeks to interpret--namely, the community of faith which cannot itself be reduced to the text. It is also a plea for not reducing hermeneutics to a Modernistic "science", an episteme or technological method whose goal is, like all technologies, to subdue that upon which it operates, to quantify it, package it, explain it without residue, and thus indeed, to control it.

Because Scripture is the Divine Text, speaking to the community which God Himself has called out of the world and which He Himself is daily redemptively working within both to transform it and use it to transform the world, it is not susceptible to this type of Rational control--and if we attempt to so control it we make ourselves idolators.

Again, it is not hermeneutics per se that is the problem, nor is it inherently problematic to attempt via hermeneutics to find the original meaning of the text. What is problematic is taking the additional step of reducing Truth and Meaning to ONLY what is found in the text by means of some such methodology like "the assured results of critical scholarship"

http://www.societaschristiana.com/archives/000464.html#more

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i) Notice the overweening conceit of a man with no institutional standing--whether academic or ecclesiastical—supposing that he’s going to broker a deal between Catholicism and Evangelicalism.

ii) This mini-series is yet another illustration of how very suggestible and impressionable Enloe is. He believes the last thing he reads, and rushes into print to announce to the world that he has discovered long lost key to unlocking the Catholic/Evangelical impasse.

He reads on the fly, thinks on the fly, writes on the fly with these half-read, half-baked, half-digested reaction-pieces. Instant analysis takes the place of measured reflection.

iii) We are, of course, treated to the deep-dyed, bald-faced lies about how the Svendsens of the world do exegesis. Was Enloe always a pathological liar? Or was it somewhere along the line that he chose to cultivate this studied, culpable ignorance and appetite for confabulation?

Turning from generalities to specifics:

iv) There is his pantheistic notion of the Incarnation, whereby the uniquely particular and unrepeatable event of the God-man is universalized into a general framework, based on Enloe’s sloppy, overly literal extrapolation from the church as the body of Christ.

v) There is the equally sloppy inference that if Christianity is not reducible to propositional revelation, then that somehow invalidates the grammatico-historical method.

Such an inference fails to draw an elementary distinction between subjective and objective faith—between believers and belief, on the one hand, and the object of faith or belief-system on the other. We truly live out our faith only to the extent that we are true to the meaning of the sacred text.

Meaning is propositional. The meaning is there whether or not we pattern our lives accordingly. If we are faithless, that does nothing to negate the meaning of the text.

vi) Meaning is, indeed, immanent. God has made his meaning immanent in his act of self-revelation. He has made his meaning immanent in the process of inspiring verbal propositions.

God is the one who has formulated his truth, articulated his truth, verbalized his truth. This is not something we have done, but something God has done.

Yes, there is a larger truth outside of Scripture. God is omniscient. But you cannot find that larger truth outside of Scripture. For that larger truth is no part of revealed truth.

This isn’t our attempt to exert control over God, but a way in which God exerts control over his church. To seek the meaning of Scripture is to resign our pretensions of personal autonomy and submit to the autonomy of God.

Hermeneutics is not an autonomous discipline, cut off from external sources of information. To the contrary, the grammatico-historical method adapts its method to the subject-matter. What a sentence means is whatever the author meant it to mean at the time he wrote it. That is simply a truism of communication.

The natural context of Scripture is not the “ongoing” audience, but the original audience. And the way to apply Scripture to the church is to analogize from the original situation to our own situation.

vii) Truth is, indeed, merely intellectual. Enloe is confounding truth and faith. Belief is more than truth, and faith is more than belief, but truth is a purely intellectual property, a property of proposition, of true beliefs—Enloe’s pious nonsense notwithstanding.

viii) How many commentators claim absolute certainty for their every interpretation? This is Enloe’s imaginary straw-man argument—like a twitchy, jerky street person who swears at invisible adversaries and swats away nonexistent flies.

ix) What’s so bad about Paley’s watchmaker argument? Is there something inherently wrong with the teleological argument?

x) The reason we’re locked into a 500-year-old polemic is that Rome locked herself into a particular posture with the Tridentine anathemas. “Listening” assumes an open-ended dialogue of give-and-take. But Rome is unable to take back her words without resigning her pretensions to a divine teaching office. So there is no “give.”

xi) 1 Cor 2:13-14 doesn’t mean that you must be in the church to understand the Bible. In this passage, Paul speaks of the Spirit, not of the church. Regeneration is the prerequisite.

Moreover, Paul’s point is not that the unregenerate are incapable of understanding the Bible. Rather, as he explains, they find it foolish.

We have a number of examples, in the Book of Acts, of Paul preaching to a hostile audience. Why were they hostile? Because they didn’t understand? Or because they did understand, but didn’t like what they were hearing?

xii) Since idolatry is, itself, a biblical category, it can never be rightly applied, in self-referential fashion, to Scripture itself. Where in Scripture is the listener ever admonished to take the word of God less seriously? Are we not to revere the word of God?

It’s a sorry and telling evidence of Enloe’s theological degeneracy that he is now resorting to the old Bible-hating slogans of a paper pope and bibliolatry.