The church-wide discussion and debate on the new Amendment B highlights the value our tradition places on theological reflection, and our conversations, at their best, reflect that respect for critical thinking. Of course, as Protestants, our theology places much weight in this discussion on Scripture. It is a primary authority for our system of belief, hence the pains that are being taken on all sides of the debate to be faithful to the Bible.
Perhaps, then, it would be valuable for our community to reflect on what it means to be faithful to the Bible. To obey this mandate we must come to terms with how we read, how we listen to, and how we assign meaning to this text. In short, any faithfulness to Scripture begins with some reflection on what Scripture is.
We can begin with the formulation that Scripture is the Word of God. Many of us accept this as true and it is weekly affirmed in worship services around the country. However, if we look closely at our tradition, we may begin to question this usage. Martin Luther and John Calvin, when they used the phrase “Word of God” were rarely referring to the Bible. Luther in particular is quite explicit on this point. The Word of God for Luther is none other than Jesus Christ. The Bible occupies its centrality in our tradition because it is the most faithful witness to the Word. For many of the early reformers, the Bible itself is an act of interpretation, an explication of the ministry of Jesus.
Luther and Calvin were adamant on this point and for a very particular reason. Among the differences these reformers had with the church of their day was its tendency to slip into idolatry. For Luther, Calvin, and most explicitly Zwingli, idolatry was an ever-present danger in the Christian life and it occurred when we placed something other than God in God’s place. This rejection of the taint of idols took place most explicitly in the design and decoration of churches. There is theology behind the austere architecture and decoration of our most historic houses of worship.
It may seem strange to think of the Bible in terms of idolatry, but when the Bible itself takes on the aura of the divine, when it becomes God for us, we run the danger that it becomes an idol. Not for nothing did our tradition place such stress on putting the Bible in the hands of the people of God, written in the languages of the people of God. The Bible was not to be treated as a sacred relic, the mysterious property of the few. It was a document to be lived with, sweated over, argued about. But it was not to be worshipped.
Being faithful to the Bible then takes on a different quality than being faithful to God. Our theological forebears demanded a level of engagement with the text that they found lacking in the church of their day. Scripture was serious business to these early Protestants. But in claiming the Bible for the people of God, the reformers were also explicitly denying church authorities the right to determine correct interpretation. On many points the reformers directly challenged Catholic doctrine based on new interpretations of Scripture. In their day, Luther and Calvin were revisionist readers of the most radical sort and we as their followers must have the same respect for and curiosity about what the Bible says.
We must be unafraid to interpret Scripture because any act of reading is simultaneously an act of interpretation. However patently obvious the meaning of a text may be to us, when we assign that meaning we are making decisions based upon what we bring to the text. It is useful to bear this in mind when we draw on Scripture to answer a theological dispute. We will not be able to discover the objectively right reading of a passage of Scripture. What we offer instead is a meaning subjectively assigned by a particular reader. To make any sense out of Scripture we have to be interpreters. So part of being faithful to Scripture is to be vigorous interpreters, engaging the text with our hearts and our minds.
But along with a boldness of spirit, we must also bring humility to our reading. We should be constantly aware that because reading and interpretation are human acts, they carry with them the potential for error. When we remove from our consciousness the idea that we are the ones reading Scripture and we are the ones giving the text its meaning we run the danger of reifying our own interpretations. What should be understood as a considered and reasoned opinion becomes instead The Word of God. And that is idolatry of the worst sort, placing our speech in the mouth of God.
So as we debate theology we should be debating Scripture. That is what Protestants do. In coming to our decisions on Presbyterian theology we should focus not only on civil rights and science but also on Scripture and its privileged position in our tradition. But we should do so with the certain knowledge that the meaning of Scripture is constantly being revealed and has not been established once and for all time. Only by allowing the Bible to function as a living text can we possibly be faithful to it as our forebears were. That our knowledge of Scripture evolves over time was as much a certainty to Luther and Calvin as their belief that our relationship with the Word of God in Jesus Christ does the same.
Robert Trawick is a Presbyterian elder and associate professor of Religious Studies at St. Thomas Aquinas College in Sparkill, N.Y.
