User talk:Mkmcconn

Wesley, I'll try to answer your question here. It won't be a great answer, and maybe it won't even speak for very many protestants. But, at least you'll get an idea of my own mind from this.

The Reformers believed that absolute truth was available for all men to know. The rule, by which truth may be discerned, is the word of God contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. The principle by which this rule is applied, is faith. While the Scriptures are the theoretical standard, it is of ultimate practical importance that the Scriptures would be interpreted in faith. So, for the first evangelical churches of the Reformation - the Lutherans and then the Reformed churches - the definition of faith is crucial, because apart from faith there is no reliable principle of hermeneutic.

Along these lines, the Reformers believed in the ancient principle of "the rule of faith": a semi-fixed body of beliefs that express what Christianity is. There has always been an orthodoxy, with indefinite outlines, which is repeatedly and systematically affirmed, and which has been sustained by its public nature - as opposed to something secret. Philip Schaf describes this "Rule" as an oral tradition: "carried forward, apart from all written statements, throughout the entire course of church history, so that everyone, before he wakes even to self-consciousness, is made involuntarily to feel its power ... not an independent source of revelation, but the one fountain of the written word, only rolling itself forward in the stream of church consciousness". It is the "embryo" or "matrix" of Christian doctrine and practice - not in the form only of written statements, but in the reality of the faith, life and worship of the church. And, this "faith" is recognized where it occurs in the documents of the Church, by its antiquity and its universality, beginning with the Scriptures, which themselves are an expression of it, in a continuous line of constant reaffirmation throughout the life of faith.

In order to give outline to faith, then, the Reformers used the Scriptures as the primary exemplar of faith - but not without awareness that they were looking at the Scriptures through the lens of faith provided by the Church. It is not against their belief that faith is passed on by tradition - on the contrary, they counted on this. This is why they quoted so copiously from the early church fathers, and it is the reason that Protestants in this tradition frequently show avid interest in the earliest writings of the Church. And, it's the reason that they strive to embody the faith in such detailed definitions of faith. That's quite a contrast to the modernist Protestants and the later evangelicals, who strive in the opposite direction to remove doctrinal definitions and liturgical constraints, to boil down Christianity into an indefinite "personal relationship with Jesus" and a strong contrast between "Church" and "Christ". For the early Reformers, there was no such antipathy for the Church, or for its teaching authority. Rather, there was great interest in defining precisely what this teaching authority consisted of. Their conclusion is that this authority consists of teaching faith according to the Scriptures. Therefore, what the Scriptures do not teach, the Church has no authority to declare as being an issue of faith.

As mentioned before, the Reformers did not believe that the Scriptures only gave an outline of faith, but an absolute truth available for certain knowledge, not mere probabilities, which also provides the principle by which they are to be interpreted. In the ancient church, this was called the "analogy of faith", and in the Reformation, "analogy of Scripture". In later times, this principle of hermeneutic was interpretation according to "good and necessary consequence". With the Protestant adoption of good and necessary consequence as a criterion of interpretation taught by the Bible, there was a corresponding rejection of allegorical interpretation. For an example of this, they relied on the Syrian fathers, and especially Chrysostom; and they were highly critical of the Western doctors where they rested heavily on allegory. To test the reliability of their judgments, as a check on their own subjectivity, they also looked to earlier reformers, the doctrines of the Protestant churches, and the arguments and councils of the earlier ages. But, the final test of the reliability of both, tradition and reason, is the submission of faith to Scripture. "The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself", the analogy of faith, which appeals to the whole Bible against those who take it out of context or impose upon it a rule that is external to it (which is the same thing as taking Scripture out of context). The history of the faith of the Church is a vital interpretive variable, but it would be an inconstant helper, proving everything and nothing, without Scripture as its foundation - even "official" history has this problem.

But the chiasm of Protestant hermeneutics returns upon its previous theme, to insist that the faith is both knowable and known. I've already said that the truth is knowable, but the Protetant hermeneutic requires also that the truth has been known. What sense would it make to say that the Bible is clear, and its interpretation can be discerned, if it has never been clear to anyone and the interpretation to which it is subject now has never appeared before? History is important to classical protestantism, although it is irrelevant to later anti-Catholic movements. The interpreter who approaches his text, or forms ideas unfamiliar with the historical context in which he operates, especially the historical context of the Church, will always make less progress. He will rediscover old errors long before he discovers old truth, and he will not progress into new truth. And, he will be more proud of any truth he does discover, which though an exhilarating experience is also preparatory to self-deception through the lust for innovation. It is not enough to discover that a novel interpretation has also been discovered in the past. "History is the living magisterium", Calvin said, but "Antiquity without truth is nothing more than an old error", Cyprian said. With only a little exaggeration, interpretation is a "democracy of the dead" (Chesterton's phrase). The dead must be allowed to speak livingly, or we become dead to all life entrusted to them for our sake, and we die. We are not pioneers, but stewards of the faith given once for all, held in trust by every generation for the sake of the last generation. Thomas Oden (a Methodist) writes:

The weighting of references may be compared to a pyramid of sources with Scripture as the foundational base, then the early Christian writers, first pre-Nicene then post-Nicene, as the supporting mass or trunk, then the best of medieval followed by centrist Reformation writers at the narrowing center, and more recent interpreters at the smaller, tapering apex, but only those who grasp and express the anteceding mind of the believing historic Church. I am pledged not to try heroically to turn that pyramid upside down, as have those guild theologians who most value only what is most recent or most outrageous. Earlier rather than later sources are cited where possible, not because older is sentimentally prized but because they have had longer to shape historic consensus. Consent-expressing exegetes are referenced more confidently than those whose work is characterized by individual creativity, controversial brilliance, stunning rhetoric, or speculative genius (Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, vol. 34, no. 1 (March 1991), p. 81)

Remember that it was the Reformation that accentuated the "epistemic problem", not the Catholics. It was the Reformers who asked how we can know that the teachings of the Church are the truth, and who developed the science of hermeneutics according to definite principles - not the Catholics. The Catholics of their time quashed these questions, ruling them out of bounds, and attempted to argue that "implicit faith" is sufficient. The Protestant hermeneutic was, and is, the process of remembering the truth, so that the truth may be extracted from the memorial shrine in which men are prone to entomb it, in order to bring it back to life, to make it live in us again. If Protestants, despite this hermeneutic, show a tendency to foist on the future jibberish of our own making, which we passionately defend, and if we show a tendency to be unappreciative of the past, then we are examples of our own contention that such is the natural tendency of all men even in the Church. The Reformers showed immeasurably more interest in the ecumenical councils, the writings of the fathers, and the principles of interpretation than their catholic counterparts did; and they did a great deal of the original research which has recovered knowledge of the original languages of the Bible and classical history of the Church. In fact, I think a case can be made that the Protestant hermeneutic has been adapted by modern Catholics for use against Protestants, not the other way around. This is not proof of the correctness of Protestantism. However, I think that to suggest that "Protestantism has no hermeneutical principle" is not fully appreciative of the facts. Mkmcconn