How can Sola Scriptura be defended in light of historical
theology and the record regarding the development of Scripture? How can a
strict Sola position reckon with concepts such as canonicity and authority?
How can a concept like perspicuity exist in light of
translations and all the more given that the individual reader still belongs to
a context?
These are re-worked summaries of questions I have been asked
and will attempt to interact with. Some I have touched on in the past and
others I plan to address in the future. It was pointed out that I have boiled
down so many issues to the question of authority. I believe this often unaddressed basic
question is at the root of so many disputes and in fact I find many disputes
are largely a waste of time. The conflicts actually arise in the realm of
prolegomena and yet much of the debate focuses on mere symptoms of deeply
rooted issues, focusing on the ripples rather than the cause of the disturbance.
It has been correctly observed that I hammer on authority and
to be candid, my own views are in one sense settled and in another sense they
are a work in progress. I have notes for articles that I have been meaning to
write for some time. But things happen, I get distracted by other issues and mundane
concerns and the next thing I know it's been a couple of years and then when
revisiting my notes, I tend to end up starting over. I think I'm hardly alone
in this.
As you know I embrace the Biblicist label (and epithet) but
I'm also trying to re-think and re-work the basis for Biblicism. Specifically
the trajectory I'm on focuses more on what I call the Oracular revelatory
nature of the Scripture as well as what I've sometimes referred to as the
Oracular Mark of the Church. The latter is also wedded to the concept of
Scripture or in other words the centrality of Scripture is the critical mark
that defines the Church. The Oracular aspect dovetails into several areas such
as epistemology and Apostolic authority.
There is a loose coherence to how I would frame this. On the
question of epistemology I resonate (at least in this regard) with the Van
Tillian camp of Presuppositionalists. The question of presuppositions as I'm
sure many readers will know is not merely a question of whether or not one has
ideas and pre-commitments that one brings with them and shapes their thinking,
rather it goes deeper and references the very basis for knowledge and its
necessary preconditions which then (like it or not) govern our epistemological
assumptions and methods. This is where I both strongly resonate with the Van
Tillians but it is also at this point that we then go separate ways. These are indeed
questions of prolegomena and they are right in believing that this where
apologetics and systematic theology overlap. However, unlike them I believe that
our epistemological state, the nature of analogical knowledge and the effects
of the Fall are such that the systematics project while necessary to some
degree... I did reference loose coherence after all.... is nevertheless
severely limited. And thus when it comes to the nature of theology, systematics
and certainly the methodology and role of something like a Confession, we part
company.
It is in the realm of presuppositions and prolegomena that
the questions of authority, of what the Bible is must be answered. This again
is where I posit (and I realise many will differ with me here) that man's
capacity is severely even brutally limited. We can know much, sense much (a
great deal in fact) of the divine and the metaphysical realm. It haunts us and
we rely on its underlying reality for virtually all knowledge we possess and
all coherences we frame. Nevertheless we cannot help but get it wrong and
perilously so. And because (here I suppose I'm more in agreement with
Continental Philosophy and Van Til) the nature of reality tends to be holistic,
interconnected, relational and contingent, we are thus in the most dire of
straits. Because our capacity does not allow us to even come close to accurately
putting any of this together and given our space-time limitations, our
epistemological confusion, our subjectivity and not to mention our moral and
volitional corruption... knowledge for us is at the same time both possible and
impossible. We can know but what we know is reduced to error and confusion. We
get it wrong and we stand condemned.
What truth we are able to comprehend is necessarily
analogical, limited, partial and thus in some sense incomplete, even wrong.
Ultimately we must put our epistemological trust in another. This is the basis
for whatever true knowledge we are able to possess. Faith is necessary for
knowing truth. This way of understanding faith is qualitatively different from
the norms that dominate the Evangelical world. I believe they have (for the
most part) gotten it perilously wrong. Fallen knowledge can give us facts but
their meaning, nature and inter-relational aspects (which are essential) escape
us. Coherence is impossible for we see only in part and that in a fog.
And here's where my understanding of Biblicism differs from
most of the other camps that embrace the label. In other words I would make a
much stronger case, indeed a necessary one for revelation as the basis for
almost any true knowledge. Again, this is where many in the Van Tillian camp
launch off with the Bible in hand as the epistemological basis for construction
of a grand philosophical system, a unified theory to explain all of reality and
of course to address all questions of life.
It echoes the Anselmian/Augustinian way of thinking in that
they believe that with faith, they now possess the tools to construct a
comprehensive philosophy and attain some form or system of true knowledge. This
is also where our Sola Scriptura models part company. I don't believe it's a
starting point but is more or less an end in itself. We are called to trust,
obey and abide. I don't see an imperative to construct, innovate and synthesise
the world's knowledge in order to pursue a grand intellectual and cultural
programme. This is not anti-intellectualism but rather a deep scepticism
regarding man's capacity and certainly a cynicism when it comes to the projects
and potential for Babylon, the cultural manifestation of this present evil age.
And please understand most who claim the name Biblicist
actually hold to a very different concept of epistemology. They are what not a
few authors have referred to as Baconian. Usually this arises in discussions of
Fundamentalism and its approach to the Bible and knowledge. They are Baconian
and largely committed to the premises of Scottish Common Sense philosophy.
Immediately one thinks of someone like Ken Ham. They're coming at Sola
Scriptura and Biblicism from the opposite direction of someone like me. They
have great confidence in man's knowledge and capacity while I have virtually
none. They believe belief in Scriptural authority is the consequence of right
reason applied and a fruit of sound deduction. I believe such Thomistic and Evidentialist
methods will never lead to Scriptural authority but will in the end destroy it.
I often chuckle when talking to members of the different
camps. Arminians will call me a Calvinist. Calvinists insist that I'm a rank
Arminian. Well when it comes to this issue both camps would probably label me a
Hyper-Calvinist in that my views of the Fall are so extreme that I have very
little use for external normative means (or tools) of epistemological
construction. Interestingly (and perhaps for the same reasons) I place great
stock in Oracular external means as being particularly potent and efficacious.
Perhaps this is because I do not subject these means (such as the Sacraments)
to the various epistemological razors that men are so quick and eager to
employ.
This is all prologue to a larger discussion but unless this
groundwork is established there's little hope of understanding my confidence in
the Scripture and indeed why I think it's necessary... and just how utterly
lost we would be without it.
Obviously prior to the New Testament the Word was contained
in both Scripture and in the ongoing revelatory utterances and proclamations of
the prophets who reported and repeated what was heard in the Divine Council and
in visions they were granted. But the New Covenant era is different. While
granted eternal vision they were forced to rely on temporal, perspectival and
contextual idiom. We worship in spirit and in truth and of course the truth
references not truth as opposed to falsehood per se, but truth in terms of actual
reality, a naked and pure truth stripped of type and shadow, form and symbol
and even temporal impermanence. We fail to appreciate this and fail to
appreciate the profundity of the New Covenant epoch of which we are a part. Its
manifestation in this time between the times, this age of Redemptive-Historical
suspension in which the Day of the Lord looms large as being here and yet
seemingly just on the horizon, marks this age and also helps to explain why
after the Apostle-prophets (as those who bear the Word of The Prophet) there
can be no new oracles, no new Word can be given. Everything is finished.
Once one grasps this you can almost see there's a hint of
truth in the error that is Hyper-Preterism. Everything indeed is done but the
final chapter (as it were) is paused in a state of (incomplete) suspension as
there's this mad flurry in both the spiritual realm and here on Earth. The Dragon
and the Beast(s) rage and scramble in desperation even while we bring in the
harvest and bear witness.... bringing glory to God by victory in weakness by
spiritual warfare waged by cross-bearing... not sword bearing.
The Sword of the Lord will come on the Day of Doom but in the
meantime we follow in the footsteps of the Second Adam, the Lamb of God. We too
will share in His righteous Judgment when This Age is overthrown and its powers
are cast down. Indeed we shall not only rejoice in the Judgment of the world
but of the principalities and powers, the angels (as it were) that govern this
present evil age and indeed we will replace them. When we take up the sword, we
jump the gun as it were and we assume eschatological prerogatives that we do not yet rightly possess. We
will in Christ be part of the Judgment but as the Day has not been consummated
we are not to use those means. God establishes the means of restraint and even
the lost states of today like the Babel-beasts of old (Assyria, Babylon et al.)
serve as His Providential means to govern this fallen order and in another
sense are anticipatory agents of His Judgment and thus represent the same kind
of Klinean Intrusion we see in the destructions of Jerusalem and even the
Canaanite conquest.
The point in this is to briefly suggest there is a
Redemptive-Historical context and aspect to my understanding of this question.
Our epistemological dilemma, our Redemptive-Historical context and exegetical
deduction (and I will admit a degree of inference) points to not just an
oracular-apostolic canon as something to be expected and necessary but to its
nature as being a final canon, that (it would follow) must be authoritative,
complete and sufficient.
Now aren't these statements dependent on the Bible itself?
Yes. There is a degree of circularity to this which I know the philosophical
conventions identify as fallacy. And yet this again is where Presuppositionalism
shines in that it identifies all knowledge as succumbing to degrees of
circularity. Even the secular academy has been compelled (at times and to a
degree) to submit to this inescapable quandary. One thinks of WVO Quine and his
famous critiques of the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction.
Again, I'm the Christian Sceptic who believes that apart from
revelatory-based faith we are caught on a nihilist carousel and while we can
invent machines through empirical observation and inductive experiment we
cannot know what things really are nor how they relate to the wider universe,
nor what they mean, let alone their moral capacity in reflecting (or
distorting) truth.
Circularity is at the heart of epistemology. That puts quite
a damper on the pretensions of the philosophical spectrum and its various
schools. In many ways this is anti-philosophy. It's deconstructive. It exposes
both the philosophical project and the City of Man as little more than dust in
the wind.
Ultimately my faith in the Scripture as true knowledge and as
the basis for knowledge... and as a tool to understand itself boils down to
faith... faith in a Person, Christ Jesus. It is in the Incarnation that we find
the paradigms of Scriptural logic that afford a degree of perspicuity which of
course is essential to any Biblicist argument or assumption. It is in the
Incarnation that we find dynamic and dialectical principles which are both
apprehensible and yet defy any viable notion of comprehension. They provide a
basis for intra-Textual lucidity but given the fideistic nature of the
revelation (regarding the Incarnation) the principles and concepts defy further
predication and/or the ability to interact with a world ideologically and morally
sundered from the eternal categories the principles represent. At best we can
understand via analogy and our concepts must be limited or we run the risk of
distortion, exploitation and even intellectual and moral dissipation. With
regard to the latter one need only look to the Scholastic justifications for
feudalism and crusade, the sophistries of the Jesuits and the Magisterial Protestant
endorsement of usury and war. These are but a start.
This perspicuity necessarily shines through translations that
are faithful to the preserved text. Obviously there are levels to Scriptural
understanding. There is a basic knowledge available to anyone who reads the
text through eyes of faith. Since understanding and discernment are
supernatural gifts, the dilemmas created by translation are hardly
insurmountable. Sadly much of the Evangelical world is in danger of denying
this basic truth. From the scholars who have turned to the academy to the
activists who insist the Scriptures are to be 'applied' to lost culture, they
deny the supernatural, Spiritual and covenantal nature of the text and what is
required to understand it.
That said, for those who would seek to truly and accurately
understand what is read, they will need to study to show themselves approved.
Languages are helpful to be sure but I don't believe they are required. This is
even more true today with the abundance of resources that are available to the
average man.
Continue reading part 2
Continue reading part 2