Gregg Allison on Scripture and Its Interpretation

I’m working my way slowly (I apologize) through Gregg Allison’s work,“Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment”.

Throughout, Allison’s method is to show side-by side, the Roman Catholic beliefs, along with what an “Evangelical Assesment” of those beliefs might say. And he does it in the light of a methodology that he clearly articulates at the beginning.

This is necessarily a broad-brush treatment. Other than his role of the explication of Scripture, which describes in the briefest terms the “grammatical historical hermeneutic” by which most Evangelical Protestants understand Scripture, he fails, at the outset, I think, to show how Roman Catholics understand Scripture (in his text here, he makes a brief allusion to the Medieval “fourfold sense of Scripture”. But that is no longer an official methodology.)

Here is one place where he states what Evangelicals believe, without going into much detail of how Roman Catholics understand Scripture. I’ll give Allison’s overview of an Evangelical understanding of Scripture, then I’ll clarify “actual Catholic beliefs” about Scripture below:

The Necessity of Revelation: “A Controversy Between Philosophers And Theologians”

Quoted from Muller (quoting John Duns Scotus, [1266-1308]):

After listing arguments against the necessity of revelation drawn from Avicenna and Aristotle and arguments in favor of its necessity from Scripture, Scotus notes:

In this question we see a controversy between philosophers and theologians. While the philosophers hold to the perfection of nature and deny supernatural perfection, the theologians truly understand the defect of nature, and the necessity of grace and supernatural perfection.

Muller, R. A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy; Volume 2: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology (2nd ed., p. 48). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.

The Authority of Scripture and the Science of Theology in the 13th Century

More from Muller:

The doctrine of the inspiration of Scripture stood, in the systems of the great thirteenth-century scholastics, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas, in a profound and crucial relationship to the emerging concept of theology as a science.

Inasmuch as a science consists in a knowledge of first principles and of the conclusions that can be drawn from them, the issue of certainty in theology is crucial to the conduct of the discipline.

Logically derived conclusions, no matter how expert and precise the logic, cannot be endowed with certainty unless certainty is known to reside in the principles from which they have been drawn.

Aquinas and Bonaventure on the Inspiration and Authority of Scripture

Here’s another long selection from Richard Muller, “Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics”, Volume 2. But it’s important background information for what follows:

Like the majority of the scholastic teachers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Thomas Aquinas did not develop a separate question or article dealing with the doctrine of Scripture.

He did, however, make a major contribution to the medieval doctrine of Scripture and included an extended comment on the sources and grounds of sacred theology in the first question of the Summa.

There, he clearly argues what Alexander [of Hales] stated by implication: that Scripture by its very nature is the ground or foundation of necessary argument in theology—whereas other sources, such as the church’s normative tradition, yield up only “probable” arguments.

Untangling “Tradition” from Scripture in the 13th Century

“Alexander’s comment indicates, thus, his sense both of the priority of Scripture as a source of Christian doctrine and of the sufficiency of the biblical record for the salvation of human beings.”

This is an example of moving back from the brink. At another point, Richard Muller pointed out how “Scripture and ‘the tradition’ had become conflated”, a process that peaked during the 12th century. Later (in the 13th century), this conflation began to come undone, and the “distinction” between the two enabled an emerging doctrine of Scripture to take form during the high Medieval years.

It was discussions of precisely how this came about that led to the doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

Just as the medieval view of text, canon, and exegesis is the proper background against which the Reformation and the subsequent development of Protestant approaches to Scripture must be understood, so also is the medieval doctrine of Scripture the necessary background to an understanding of the development of an orthodox Protestant doctrine of Scripture.