Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: mls@cbnewsm.att.com (michael.l.siemon) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: The three-legged stool Message-ID: Date: 1 Jul 89 07:00:18 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories Lines: 117 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu In article , hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu writes: > > I've been thinking about the three-legged stool. I'm sympathetic with > what I see as the goal of Anglican theory, namely to avoid extremes of > both Protestant and Catholic interpretation. I'd say that is more a result, or a disposition of Anglicans, and not a goal as such. It's true that we have a certain skepticism about any extreme view. > Rather than three legs, I see them as maybe a leg, an arm, and a seat. > (No, I'm not going to say which is which.) Second, I think maybe there > should be a fourth: the Holy Spirit. Um... The idea is that the Spirit breathes through all three, that they are in fact indistinguishable except in theory. Scripture simply cannot be read without tradition (language and its history of usage are inherently a matter of tradition) and reason (which is to say, the evaluation of how scripture is to be taken in a present situation.) Leaving it at this sounds like _sola scriptura_ in drag; you should also see symmetrical points about the others -- reason is empty logic chopping (or other intellectual operations) when it does not address the issues forced on us by tradition and when it operates without the light of scripture. I leave it to the reader to make the parallel point about tradition. > However of these, I see only Scripture as being a real source of > revelation. I go back to the concept of Christianity as a revealed > religion. It is based on God's interventions in history. The Bible > is an account of those events and of the teachings that surrounded them. But the events are inherently communal events. Moses and the Israelites enter a covenant with JHWH; the prophets passionately confront the Israel of their day. Jesus writes no book, but leaves behind him a community of disciples. Out of the Israelite revelation we have a deposit of scripture, as again we do from Jesus' actions as the community responds to him. It seems to me to be paradoxical to say that once the community has written some part of its experience down, we can dismiss any other part of its witness. You go on to address this below as a matter of "primary source" -- but historians will use secondary sources when the primary ones don't speak to their concerns. Scripture is normative in that it is a *fixed* repository that tradition and reason must acknowledge to derive from the witness of the community that still had the apostles as living witness. Since everything human is changeable, we constantly revert to this fixed witness as a rein on excesses of reason (or of tradition.) But *to the extent that we can trust them* the witness in the Spirit by the community of the Church to what derives from that apos- tolic community has the *same* status as scripture. The tragedy of the Reformation is that half of Europe found that it could *not* trust this witness on many important points. Once the trust is broken, there is no chance at all that it can be repaired -- the Church's faith in apostolic succession has become a sacramental rather than a practical trust. > the basic authority as being not the book in itself but what we > encounter in it, both intellectually and experientially. But do we not encounter Christ directly in His Body? And do not the heavens proclaim the Majesty of God? Heavy rhetoric aside, I am really not certain what claim you are making for Scripture that is not equally valid for the Church itself, as community -- i.e. as tradition. I agree that reason is the most useless (for spiritual purposes) of the three legs in isolation; only in the revealed witness of scripture and church do we have any control on the self-indulgence of human intellect. > As long as each person still encounters the Bible for > himself, help is always appreciated. I dunno about that. I think Charley's point was quite sound -- the net is witness to lots of people reading the Bible in what amounts to isolation, and coming up with monstrosities. (Some readers here may think that I am guilty of that same charge in some cases :-) If we could imagine a hypothetical point midway between Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed readings (and in the academic realm, I think such a point represents the majority of scholarship) it seems to me that the more isolated an interpretation is from these specific communities, the more questionable it is -- on the grounds of tradition and reason -- as departure from the center of the revelation in Scripture. And the further away from that center, the less willing people are to consider proffered help that isn't already filtered through an isolated understanding. > It is when the Church tries to > take the place of that encounter, or dictates its results, that we > have problems. There is a cost to this. Perhaps the Reformers didn't > realize what the cost was, since the experiment was new to them. But > now we know. If we give up the concept of authoritative > interpretation, we are going to have disorder. People are going to > disagree. I believe this is a cost that is worth paying. I would > rather have lots of groups who have encountered God in the Scripture > and who believe they are being led by the Spirit in different > directions than a group who all hold correct views but have given up > the direct encounter. Thus far I agree ... > I'm inclined to think that sola scriptura > should be taken more as an existential statement than an intellectual > one. It's not that people don't need help in an intellectual sense to > understand it, but that in their faith there should be nothing between > them and the Scripture. But here I'm not sure I really understand what you are getting at. It will defeat the purpose of your existential encounter if one comes to Scripture with a preformed agenda, or a guide that lays out all the answers (with the implicit presumption that it knows all the questions!) The Church *can* get in the way there, as can secular or other-religious programs; but everyone approaches Scripture already guided by *some* tradition, at the very least the tradition that teaches whatever language conveys the translations. It's ultimately a question of WHICH tradition, and what critical tools of reason, we will bring with us to this existential encounter with the Spirit. And in default of a better answer (I did note the breach in trust that wounds this) it would seem that a tradition continuous with the community that wrote the books is highly desireable. Failing that, I still see a responsibility to read *externally to* but with as much understanding as possible of that base tradition. -- Michael L. Siemon Psalm 82:6: "I say, 'You are gods, contracted to AT&T Bell Laboratories sons of the Most High, all of you; att!mhuxu!mls nevertheless, you shall die like men, standard disclaimer and fall like any prince.'"