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Wednesday, October 31, 2018

"Why the Bible is Not the Final Authority!"

I'm commenting on this article because a revert to Catholicism cited this article as partial justification for his return to Rome:


i) There's a sense in which it's not the bare text of Scripture but the interpreted Bible that has functional authority for Christians. However, that functional authority is on loan from the source. 

"Final authority" is imprecise. The Bible has intrinsic authority while creeds have extrinsic authority insofar as they remain true to Scripture. An interpreted Bible is necessarily derivative, and its authority, if any, depends on the match between the interpretation and the original

ii) In assessing interpretations of Scripture with Scripture itself, we compare different interpretations with the text as well as each other. Does the interpretation have good explanatory power? Does one interpretation have better explanatory power than another? An interpretation isn't supposed to be a filter that covers the text and supplants the text, as if we can't see the text beneath the interpretation. Rather, it's always possible to compare or contrast the interpretation with the text. In that regard, Scripture remains independent of interpretation. It doesn't disappear behind the interpretation. Scripture is still the criterion. 

iii) An interpretation of Scripture is only as good as the exegetical argument or evidence provided in support of that interpretation. It's not a coin toss.

iv) Interpreters aren't arbiters of truth. Ball's hermeneutic seems to be reader-response criticism, as if the text means whatever a reader assigns to it. That's a radical and self-refuting position which sabotages his appeal to the Westminster Confession. 

v) Exegetes aren't analogous to popes, but to play along with Ball's claim, a thousand Protestant popes are better than one Catholic pope, if it came to that. Far better to have a thousand Protestant popes, some of whom are right, some of whom are wrong, than be stuck with one wrong pope for everyone. 

If you have a thousand Protestant popes, then odds are the right interpretation will be hit upon multiple times. If, by contrast, you have on Catholic pope, then his errors are binding on everyone else. He singlehandedly leads billions of adherents astray. 

v) In addition, Catholic popes are far more likely to misinterpret the Bible because popes leverage the interpretive process by invoking their alleged authority, or secondary traditions, rather than using responsible hermeneutical methods. 

vi) By appealing to the Westminster Confession, it doesn't occur to Ball that he's simply relocated the issue by substituting an interpreted creed for an interpreted Bible. It's not the bare text of the Westminster Confession that has functional authority, but the interpreted text. The text as interpreted and enforced by the General Assembly (for instance). 

vii) Given Ball's hermeneutical relativism, there's no reason for him to prefer the Westminster Confession to the Council of Trent, Vatican II, or the Racovian Catechism. 

viii) I often consult Bible commentaries. That's not because I think Scripture is generally incomprehensible apart from commentators, but because it's prudent to double-check my impressions against the impressions of other readers. 

3 comments:

  1. //Far better to have a thousand Protestant popes, some of whom are right, some of whom are wrong, than be stuck with one wrong pope for everyone. //

    And that wrong interpretation snowballs into greater error as future Popes and doctors of the Church build upon that error based on the assumption of its infallibility. Whereas we Protestants can question our "fathers" in the faith. For example, I think the Reformers were wrong when they advocated the execution of heretics. I can take their teaches and embrace some aspects of it which are right, while rejecting others which are wrong. Catholics are stuck with, for example, the concept that the Pope can grant indulgences when we toss coins into his coffers.

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    1. //And that wrong interpretation snowballs into greater error as future Popes and doctors of the Church build upon that error based on the assumption of its infallibility.//

      Exactly.

      However, you see Rome doing the same thing today but pretending they aren't.

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    2. For example, the relatively benign belief that the eucharist is a thanksgiving offering snowballs into the Mass as propitiatory. And the benign "real presence" snowballs into transubstantiation. It's only natural and inevitable for humans to magnify the doctrines they were taught to a degree greater than those they learned it from. It's like taking something to its logical conclusion.

      The problem is that it's not always clear what exactly the earliest fathers taught about such subjects. Sometimes the quotations Catholics appeal to in the fathers are statements which were an aside comment on some other topic they were really addressing in full. It's also natural to take figurative language and interpret it literally and metaphysically. In that sense, the fathers were like 20th century fundamentalists who sometimes didn't take the figurative as figurative, but as literal. I don't see why the apostolic fathers (i.e. those closest to the Apostles, and who sometimes knew them) couldn't have misinterpreted the Apostles' teaching in such ways.

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