Clearly, the Westminster Assembly either a) used their own authority or b) appealed to some other authority to determine that the deuterocanonical books are not "of divine inspiration". That Maccabees, Tobit, and other "apocryphal" books are so named, rests squarely on the shoulders of some authority under which the Assembly operated.(Continue Reading...)
So who is this authority? Their answer comes in the next two points.
4. The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, depends not upon the testimony of any man, or Church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.
5. ...our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts.
In honor of my friend, Rachel Held Evans, I call this "playing the God Card" in the game of scriptural interpretation. I agree that God alone can interpret Scripture; the problem lies with the last three words of point #5, "in our hearts". The traditional understanding before the Protestant Reformation was that God revealed the truth of the Scriptures through His Church - that is, through those leaders who were spiritually descended from the Apostles. Now, everyday Christians have just as much a right to make interpretive claims as the most educated Biblical scholars.
So what happens when anyone can interpret scripture for him or
herself? You get an explosion of denominations like we now see in the Protestant world. Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Pentecostals, Bible Churches, Church of God, Church of Christ, Lutheran, Anglican, and many many more. Most, if not all, of these denominations now have daughter groups of their own which have splintered off over typically minor - though sometimes major, admittedly - doctrinal issues.And every single one of these groups claims to be following the Holy Spirit's interpretation of Scripture. I am amazed that the Holy Spirit would say so many different things to different faith communities.
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What authority are you ascribing to the "traditional understanding" you speak of in paragraph 3? And are you defining the church as merely those "spiritually descended from the Apostles?" And what does it mean to "spiritually descend" in your context?
ReplyDelete1. the traditional understanding I referred to is the Church's teaching before the reformation. East and West both taught that interpretive authority was held in the Magisterium.
ReplyDelete2. the church leadership always claimed to be in succession of the apostles.
3. "spiritually descended" = "apostolic succession"
Right. That's basically what you said in your blog. What I'm getting at is whether you view said "traditional understanding" to be more authoritative than the one espoused in the Westminster Confession, and if so, on what basis?
ReplyDeletewell, I wasn't actually trying to bolster my opinion by calling it "the traditional understanding". That is simply what it was - most people before the Reformation believed that way. I also was just pointing out the difference between the two, though I don't think it's difficult to see that I prefer the older idea: that interpretive authority is passed down to church leaders directly from the Apostles - rather than the young, reformed view that all Spirit-filled believers can legitimately make interpretive claims.
ReplyDeleteAs for a basis for my belief, I would point to church history and a few Scriptural passages which support the idea.
-2 Thess. 2:15
-Luke 10:16
-Acts 2:42
As for Luke 10:16, I agree fully that those 70 possessed a unique, God-given authority to do what they were doing. Incidentally, expositing the written Word of God was not listed as one of their activities, nor is there anything in the context of that verse delineating the singular authority of their spiritual "children" in doing so. In other words, there's nothing present in that passage indicating anything other than the uniqueness of THOSE 70 at THAT TIME (I only use all caps because italics are unavailable).
ReplyDeleteIn Acts 2:42, I'm lost as well. The verse itself indicates nothing, other than that the Apostles were there and people were listening to them. This certainly doesn't rule out the right Martin Luther has to call the Roman Catholic Church on corruption and abuse of the Scripture for monetary gain 1,500 years later. And nor does the passage's context. The church had just been born, and apostles were still around performing miracles. Not unique or implicative of future exposition of the written Word of God (which hadn't even been fully revealed yet) that people were listening to them.
As for 2 Thess. 2:15, Paul and others referred to as "us" (let's assume he meant "other apostles") had been writing to this specific group of Thessalonians. So he tells them not to forget what he and the "others" had told them. What does that have to do with people interpreting the canonical and deuterocanonical books 2000 years later?
I'm assuming there is some embedded "other" meaning hidden in the text which a non-apostolic successor like me can only fantasize about ascertaining for himself, but since an apostolic successor somewhere has apparently deemed these three passages as "support" for the notion that only apostolic successors can exposit the word forever, who are they and how do they explain themselves?