Activity continues apace at the combox over at Pontifications.
http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=6789188
I’ll quote and comment on Liccione and Robinson, since they are two of the more astute spokesmen for the opposing position.
“36. Michael Liccione Says:
January 30th, 2006 at 5:37 pm
Yet the question underlying even the ecclesiological issue is hermeneutic: by which, and whose, hermeneutic are the relevant historical materials to be read? Of necessity those materials include Scripture, to which Protestants invariably make their primary appeal; but the NT is itself a product of the Church, whatever else it may be; so the question remains: in what larger context is Scripture to be read and interpreted? That’s what the real disagreement is about.”
i) In what sense is the NT a product of the church? Is Matthew or Luke or John or Romans or Hebrews the product of some ecclesiastical commission or ad hoc committee?
No. These were authored by individuals. They are not corporate productions.
So they are not the product of the church. Rather, they are addressed to the church.
ii) But suppose we play along with Liccione’s contention. What church are we talking about? Insofar as the NT is the product of the church, it is the product of the NT church.
That’s completely different from saying that the NT is the product of the Catholic church, conceived of as a self-identical, 2000 year old institution or organism.
“And it comes down to whether the Protestant appeal to Scripture can ultimately be based on anything more than what Newman called “private judgment.” That term does not always and necessarily mean individual judgment; Protestants have their own counter-tradition to which to appeal. But in the final analysis, on what is that counter-tradition based? It is based on an appeal to Scripture and the primitive church that runs counter to how those sources are used in the older traditions. And that appeal can ultimately be based not on anybody’s tradition, but on how the individual studying these matters feels led to read Scripture or whatever source they deem ultimate. Private judgment.
As a Catholic, I just don’t have time for that.”
Except that Liccione must also exercise private judgment whenever, say, he reads the catechism.
Yes, it comes down to private judgment. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Look at how Jesus reasoned with the scribes and Pharisees and Sadducees. Look at how Paul reasons with his audience in Romans? Look at how the author of Hebrews reasons with his readers?
They do exegesis from scratch. They go right back to the primary sources. Right back to the OT.
Now, both Paul and the author of Hebrews were tutored in a particular school of hermeneutics. Indeed, they represent two rather different hermeneutical schools of thought.
And yet, they don’t appeal to tradition.
“37. Perry Robinson Says:
January 30th, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Either we are left with the implausible idea that someone ordained by Peter and Paul, a martyr for the faith, and a Christian in one of the major centers of early Christianity, got so many doctrines wrong or that Protestantism 1500 years later is mistaken.”
What’s so implausible about the idea that Ignatius may have gotten some basic things wrong?
Isn’t a major theme of the gospels the fact that the Twelve often misunderstood Jesus? That he frequently had to correct their misunderstanding.
Indeed, on numerous occasions, he had to correct them even though they should have known better—because they were in a position to know better.
Didn’t the Corinthians frequently misunderstand the teaching of Paul? Didn’t he have to spend a lot of time correcting their misinterpretations of what he said?
Far from being implausible, this actually happens, and with some regularity.
What Liccione, Robinson, and, we might add, Kimel have in common is a top-down approach to theology.
For example, Robinson’s theological method is based on axiomatic assumptions about divine simplicity or what’s intuitively plausible.
By contrast, evangelical hermeneutics favors a bottom-up approach. You begin with the actual data, not with antiseptic abstractions about the way things ought to be.
Here’s a perfect illustration of what I mean:
“I think the Fathers and Council participants were generally in a better position to know the Apostolic message, by which they recognized what was inspired Scripture incidentally, than Protestant laymen writing 1000 years after the fact. Do you mean to really claim that 300 plus bishops at Nicaea who endorsed baptismal regeneration (see canon 2) can be so easily dispensed with by a mere appeal to Scripture?”
i) Notice that this appeal is three steps removed from revelation. Robison is not interpreting the witness of Scripture directly.
What is more, he is not evaluating the quality of patristic exegesis. Rather, all we’re left with is a threadbare argument from authority: what did the bishops teach?
The purpose of the appeal is not to examine how well they construe the text of Scripture, to judge the process by which they arrive at their interpretation.
No, the only objective of the investigation is to find out what they taught. That’s it.
That’s the top-down process at work. Don’t get your pristine theology all smudgy by going back to the primary sources, by confronting the concrete text and context of Scripture.
It’s so much nicer to read the Bible from an altitude of 50,000 feet in the leather-seated comfort of the Concord.
ii) Incidentally, why are the church fathers in a better position to ascertain the meaning of Scripture than a scholar writing some 1000-2000 years after the fact?
Robinson’s assertion is plausible, but specious. An archeologist, 2000 years after the fact, may know a good deal more about, let us say, pre-70 Palestinian Judaism than a 4C church father tutored in the Classics.
But Robinson doesn’t address himself to these elementary questions since that would represent a grimy, grungy bottom-up approach rather than a Platonic, top-down approach. We mustn’t contaminate our theology with historical pollutants.
“Do you mean to really claim that 300 plus bishops at Nicaea who endorsed baptismal regeneration (see canon 2) can be so easily dispensed with by a mere appeal to Scripture?”
That’s exactly right! Just as the Sanhedrin could be wrong in its condemnation of Christ.
“Furthermore, you suffer from the delusion that your opponent is merely Rome-it isn’t. Protestantism stands condemned from both the East and the Western Churches.”
Oh, dear! Now I’m going to cry myself to sleep tonight.
The irony of a guy like Robinson is that he’s a Christian intellectual, and yet, ultimately, when the turf meets the surf, he hides behind fideistic appeals to naked authority. What’s the point of being able to sight-read the Enneads of Plotinus in the original if you’re going to take so many theological shortcuts? He’s an intellectual with an anti-intellectual creed.
iii) And there’s another problem. How does Robinson happen to know what the Nicene Fathers believed? Is he, perchance, applying the grammatico-historical method to the church fathers, but not to the Apostles?
Moving along:
“So Evan, do you really believe that the doctrine of the Trinity might be wrong? How about the canon of Scripture? Do you think it is really possible that Protestants might find out someday that they aren’t correct? I don’t think you do though on Protestant principles you’d be unjustified in that belief. Your belief is sustained by borrowed capital.
Your position doesn’t reduce down to merely having Scripture as your ultimately authority, but Scripture plus only that which you autonomously judge to be normative. This is why everything has to be proved by rational arguments, but this method is inadequate. Suppose for example that there were some teaching passed down from the Apostles which is only hinted at in Scripture so that no clear and necessary inference could be drawn from Scripture to support it. On the Protestant method, the church would never be justified in requiring its members to adhere to it.”
i) Even if this were a problem for Evangelicals, how is it not a parallel problem for the Orthodox? Robison could just as easily cut himself on his own doubled-edged hypothetical.
Suppose oral tradition preserved a unitarian apostolic tradition? What if?
Does Robinson think it’s really possible that the Orthodox might find out someday that they aren’t correct? I don’t think he does, though on Orthodox principles he’d be unjustified in that belief. After all, he never knows what long misfiled MS might be rediscovered at St. Catherine’s Monastery!
It’s really rather funny to see Robinson deploy Da Vinci Code conspiracy theories against the Protestant position.
Perry, please don’t bleed to death from self-inflicted injuries sustained in wielding that double-bladed sword of yours!
“Since semantics outruns syntax, no grammatical approach will be sufficient to normatively and definitively access and fix the meaning of any given passage of Scripture.”
And how does Robinson’s appeal to Cyril or Athanasius or Palamas escape the same acidic dissolution?
Speaking for myself, I’d just say two things:
i) There’s a world of difference between real doubts and hypothetical doubts, between doubts having some evidentiary basis, and a flirtatious scepticism that doubts itself for the sake of doubting itself because it has the abstract capacity to pose ersatz dubieties.
ii) Given Robinson’s residual Van Tilianism, I’d challenge him to make divine providence a presupposition of exegesis. Apart from providence, we can be sure of nothing. But to be unsure of everything is self-refuting.
We can begin with difficulties. We can wallow in the indeterminacy of translation.
We can tease ourselves with imaginary quandaries and pretend to doubt things we don’t doubt for a minute.
Or we can begin with the indubitable fact that we do successfully fix the reference a fair amount of the time; otherwise, communication would be impossible; otherwise, the sceptic would be unable to convey his scepticism.
And then we can ask ourselves what is necessary to account for successful communication. Revelation was meant to be accessible. Inaccessible revelation would be self-defeating.
That doesn’t guarantee any given interpretation of any given verse. But it does shift the burden of proof away from unbridled scepticism. We’re not responsible for disproving the unprovable.
Robinson is welcome to his scarecrows. But there's nothing behind the mask.
Steve and Evan have made a lot of good points, but I want to add some comments on the church fathers.
ReplyDeleteNothing in Ignatius of Antioch would lead us to the conclusion that he was Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. Some people read more into Ignatius than is actually there. I've read all of his letters, and he nowhere advocates baptismal regeneration. His comments on the eucharist can be read as referring to some sort of physical presence, but can also reasonably be read otherwise. He makes comments on other subjects similar to his comments on the eucharist, and I never see anybody interpret those other comments the same way some people interpret his eucharistic comments. And any appeal to doctrinal development would need to show a probable development, not just a possible development. I see no way to show that it's probable that Ignatius would agree with the later development of the perpetual virginity of Mary, the Assumption of Mary, the papacy, Purgatory, prayers to the dead, the veneration of images, and other concepts later accepted by Roman Catholicism and/or Eastern Orthodoxy.
Of course, Ignatius isn't the only early source we have. Some sources predate Ignatius (Paul, Matthew, Clement of Rome, etc.), and it would make no sense to claim that we can read and understand Ignatius for ourselves, but can't read and understand the others for ourselves. There are many good reasons to believe that those earlier sources sometimes contradict Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. And other sources contemporary with or living after Ignatius contradict what Catholics and/or Orthodox believe. Papias, who probably was a disciple of John, was a premillennialist. Hermas and other early sources taught a concept of limited repentance that every modern professing Christian I'm aware of rejects. Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and other ante-Nicene fathers taught a view of the afterlife that's inconsistent with Purgatory. There was a general consensus of the ante-Nicene fathers against the veneration of images. The earliest fathers to write treatises on prayer, or to comment on the subject at length in some other context, speak of prayer as something to be offered only to God and sometimes condemn the offering of prayers to deceased humans. Etc.
Since the fathers do often contradict Catholicism and Orthodoxy, what advocates of those systems will often argue is that the contradictions aren't of much significance unless they're contradictions on a major issue. But why disregard the contradictions on minor issues? And how do we determine what's major and what's minor? If an ante-Nicene father considers the veneration of images idolatry, for example, whereas a modern Catholic or Orthodox dismisses the veneration of images as a minor issue, whose standards should we follow? Idolatry isn't something minor. If a church father thought that an issue was of major importance, whereas a modern Catholic or Orthodox considers it something of minor importance, isn't that disagreement itself something significant? Some of the fathers' contradictions of Catholicism and Orthodoxy can't reasonably be dismissed as insignificant.
We also ought to ask how close an agreement with the fathers is when Catholics and Orthodox claim agreement with them. I'll use an example I've used many times before. Papias believed in extra-Biblical tradition. He rejected sola scriptura. He probably was a disciple of John, and he made efforts to acquire oral traditions from other people who had known Jesus and/or the apostles. But should we therefore conclude that Papias held a Catholic or Orthodox view of "authority", "tradition", "the church", etc.? No. The oral traditions of Papias were radically different from those of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Papias was living under radically different circumstances. As I've said before, if I was in Papias' situation, I would also have rejected sola scriptura. But people living 200, 500, or 2000 years after Papias aren't living under his circumstances. They weren't disciples of John, they couldn't interview people who had been disciples of the other apostles, etc. And what were the oral traditions of Papias that we know of? The papacy? The veneration of images? Purgatory? Prayers to the dead? No. Rather, Papias' traditions consisted largely of material not accepted by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, such as premillennialism and some traditions about Judas. Simply saying that Papias rejected sola scriptura, or that he believed in tradition, isn't enough. Papias' concept of extra-Biblical tradition, such as the way he went about finding that tradition, isn't equivalent to what Catholics and Orthodox believe and practice.
Some of the patristic extra-Biblical traditions might be correct. Papias might have been correct about some of his premillennial traditions, for example. Justin Martyr might have been correct about what products Jesus made as a carpenter. Etc. But credible extra-Biblical oral traditions are few and far between, and the few we have aren't close to the New Testament in terms of the quality of evidence we have for them. We have to draw a line somewhere, and drawing the line at scripture (sola scriptura) is reasonable. If we're wrong to draw the line there - if some oral tradition of Papias turns out to have been correct, for example - then we (Evangelicals) are missing the mark, but not by much. Catholics and Orthodox, on the other hand, are missing it by a far wider margin when they accept such a large number of extra-Biblical traditions.
i actually got into the combox of liccones on this one and questioned them about the idea of private judgement being used by a catholic to interpret the cathechism or the teachings of the magesterium. The replies i got where this - that the difference between protestantism and us is that whereas we both use private judgement to interpret the given teachings only catholicism has a procedure to say "no your interpreting it wrong " or "thats not what it means" etc whilst protestantism does not.
ReplyDeletecan you answer this ?