The Last Word 6

Today we visit chapter 5 of N.T. Wright's "The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture". In this chapter, Wright covers the history of biblical interpretation and authority of scripture in the first 1600 years of the church. It is more a cursory look at those 16 centuries as that isn't the entire focus of the book.

Wright describes the early church, the Christians in the second and third centuries, as keeping the scriptures central (along with the tradition of the church) in their defense against the attacks on Christianity that had risen from Marcion and the Gnostics. He views the early church as a 'scripture-reading community' at its heart. The appeal to scripture led to an 'emphasis on the historical nature of the church', which stressed the continuity from the time of Jesus to their own as well as the continuity from the days of Abraham.

The emphasis on the Jewish nature of the Scriptural story was difficult to maintain as the church expanded into the Greek world. As time went on, the idea of scriptural authority became detached from the context of the biblical narrative, which then isolated it from the goal of the kingdom. Scripture instead developed into a court of appeal (the rule-book from which doctrine and ethics were decided) and lectio devina (devotional reading where individuals could hear God personally).

The next major shift in the use of Scripture was the development of allegory as a major technique for understanding the Bible. The church leaders insisted on the importance of keeping the whole Scripture central, yet they developed ways of lessening the tension between the authority of Scripture and the interpretation. The big question that Wright asks here is, "How far can a reinterpretation of the text go before it ceases to carry the authority which was the point of interpreting it in the first place? At what point in this process are we forced to conclude that what is really authoritative within such an operation is the system of theology or devotion already believed or embraced on other grounds, which is then 'discovered' in the text by the interpretive method being used?"

The medieval church developed four different "senses" of Scripture in order to help ascertain meaning: the literal (the original meaning, which may itself include allegory if that allegory was originally intended), the allegorical (the discovery of Christian doctrine in a passage where the original meaning did not have anything to do with it), the anagogical (a way of discovering in the text a picture of the future life - i.e., Psalms that talk about going up to Jerusalem as referring to lifting up the heart and mind to contemplate higher things), and the moral (discovering lessons on how to behave hidden in texts which were not straightforwardly teaching such things). As with the allegorical interpretations, these four senses provided a way to ensure that the church would live under the authority of Scripture, even though at times they failed to pay attention to what Scripture itself was saying. The trouble was that once interpretation becomes this broad, you can make Scripture say anything and it no longer becomes authoritative in that it is no longer 'leading the way, energizing the church with the fresh breath of God himself'.

Along with the development of the 'four senses' came the development of the parallel authority of 'tradition' and the church became the guardian of that tradition. One of the major complaints of the Reformers was that tradition beliefs and practices were nowhere to be found in Scripture. They battled for the recovery of the literal sense of Scripture against the other three senses. Again, the "literal" sense refers to the original meaning of the text. For example, when Psalm 18:8 says that smoke comes out of God's nostrils, the "literal" sense is that this is a metaphor talking about the anger of God against those who oppress his people, not that God actually has giant smoke-filled nostrils.

Unfortunately, in their focus on the details of doctrine and practice, the Reformers missed the sense that Scripture is the narrative of "God, Israel, Jesus and the world, coming forward into our own day and looking ahead to the eventual renewal of all things". Their readings of the gospels focus a great deal on the saving events of Good Friday and Easter but do little to integrate those events into the Kingdom-proclamation that preceded them. While the Reformers recovered many things that had been missing, they left other important issues open for discussion.