I've quoted and/or interacted with Iain Provan's The Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture, which was published, not coincidentally, during the 500th anniversary or the Reformation.
i) It's an uneven book. On the plus side, it makes some important contributions to the case for the Protestant canon, literal interpretation (as Provan defines it), and typology. And it's very well documented.
ii) On the minus side, he rejects inerrancy. In addition, he fails to directly rebut or solve the alleged problem of "pervasive interpretive pluralism" spawned by sola scriptura. He doesn't seem to have a full-blown answer to that. He stakes out a compromise position similar to Keith Mathison, as well as Allen and Swain in Reformed Catholicity. For reasons I've detailed on other occasions, I think that's a conceptually confused and unstable mediating position.
iii) However, he doesn't seem to think it's that big a deal. For one thing, he doesn't seem to think the Bible is that ambiguous or obscure. He remarks on how Jesus and Paul directly appeal to the OT to prooftext their positions. And they do this in public speeches to rank-and-file Jews, not just the experts. Likewise, Paul takes for granted that a Gentile audience should be able to follow his OT-based arguments.
iv) In addition, since Provan doesn't think the Church of Rome has a living oracle, the invidious contrast between fallible Protestant interpretation and infallible Catholic interpretation is illusory. Catholics are in the same boat as Protestants: they just pretend that they occupy a different boat. If interpretive pluralism is a problem, that's a problem for both sides. It's just that Rome tries to camouflage the problem.
v) Provan also notes that the Catholic church has come around to Protestant positions on hermeneutics and textual criticism, so that diminishes the contrast.
vi) There's the further fact that Provan is an academic whose Catholic dialogue partners are fellow academics. There's a difference between the quaint Catholicism of lay Catholic pop apologists and mainstream Catholic Bible scholarship representing spokesmen with Catholic training and institutional positions. The reactionary antimodernist scholarship of Brandt Pitre (and his sidekick John Bergsma, a convert to Catholicism) is virtually a lone exception.
So to some extent I think Provan's book is a failure. It doesn't provide a fully-satisfactory alternative to Catholicism (although that wasn't it's only aim). It can, however, be cannibalized from some very useful spare parts.
I have found much the same re contemporary academic scholarship along pan - traditional lines.
ReplyDeleteEven Pitre's dissertation was done in dialogue with (and using much) Protestant exegetical works. And his supervisor was David Aune (who's a Protestant). So even in his case, it's still quite different from. Most pop apologists one comes across. And once one realises that being Catholic does not actually provide any greater epistemic access to the text or exegetical insight, then there's really not much to say for the old "your interpretation" v "the church's interpretation" caricature.