The Bible and Protestantism

The Bible and Protestantism

One of the most enduring descriptions of Protestantism comes from the English theologian William Chillingworth (1602–44). In his The Religion of Protestants the Safe Way to Salvation (1637), he famously declared that “the Bible, the Bible alone, is the religion of Protestants.” This is perhaps one of the most familiar statements of one of the slogans that emerged from the early Reformation and is characteristic of Protestantism as a whole—the Latin phrase sola Scriptura (“by Scripture alone”).¹ At its heart, Protestantism represents a constant return to the Bible to revalidate and where necessary restate its beliefs and values, refusing to allow any one generation or individual to determine what is definitive for Protestantism as a whole.²

This might suggest that Protestantism is a text-centered religion like Islam. It is important to appreciate from the outset that this idea can be misleading. There are indeed parallels between the two, particularly in relation to how texts are interpreted and the problems that arise through an absence of centralized authority figures and structures. While some very conservative Protestants do treat the Bible as if it were the Christian Qu’ran, the majority are clear that the Bible has a special place in the Christian life on account of its witness to Jesus Christ rather than its specific identity as a text. For Martin Luther, the purpose of scripture was to “inculcate Christ,” who is the “mathematical point” of the Bible. The real contrast is thus actually between the Qu’ran and Jesus Christ, not the Qu’ran and the Bible. When the first generation of Protestants spoke of the “authority of the Bible,” this was to be understood as “the authority of the risen Christ, mediated and expressed through the Bible.”³

The Pierpont Morgan Libarary, New York, NY; Photo: The Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource, NY

Title page to the New Testament, from the King James Bible. London: Robert Barker, 1611.

Protestantism shares with other forms of Christianity an emphasis and focus upon the historical figure who stands at its center—Jesus Christ. As Stephen Charles Neill, a Protestant missionary-scholar with vast firsthand experience and knowledge of the religions of India and Africa, once commented, “The historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth is the criterion by which every Christian affirmation has to be judged, and in the light of which it stands or falls.”⁴ For Protestantism, Christ is both the focus and foundation of the Bible.

Precisely because Jesus Christ stands at the heart of the Christian faith, Protestants argue, so must the Bible. There is the most intimate interconnection between the Bible and Christ in the Protestant tradition. The Bible is the means by which Christ is displayed, proclaimed, and manifested. Why read scripture? For Calvin, the answer was as clear as it was simple: because by doing so we come “to know Jesus Christ truly, and the infinite riches which are included in him and are offered to us by God the Father.” Karl Barth, widely regarded as Protestantism’s greatest theologian of the twentieth century, made much the same point: “From first to last, the Bible directs us to the name of Jesus Christ.”⁵

THE PLACE OF THE BIBLE IN PROTESTANT THOUGHT

The first generation of Protestants regarded an appeal to the supreme authority of the Bible as both theologically correct and ecclesiastically liberating. The authority of the pope could be resisted, even undermined, through the programmatic assertion that all are ultimately under the authority of the Word and are to be judged by it. The slogan Verbum Domini manet in aeternum (“The Word of the Lord abides in eternity”) became emblematic for Lutheranism in the 1520s.⁶ Lutherans literally wore their ecclesiological hearts on their sleeves by embroidering the letters VDMA on their garments and even carving them on household implements.⁷

Given the importance of the notion of the “Word of the Lord” for the fledgling movement, it is not surprising that the first phase of Protestantism saw the appearance of a wide variety of resources designed to enable and encourage ordinary believers to become familiar with the Bible. Aware of the difficulties that many experienced in reading and making sense of the Bible, Protestant theologians and pedagogues produced a rich range of material that aimed to make an engagement with the Bible as simple and productive as possible. The role of the printing press in allowing the ready production and dissemination of these resources was of critical importance to the success of the Protestant enterprise at this point. There were four main categories of resources:

The Protestant sola Scriptura principle is linked with two subsidiary ideas. The “sufficiency of scripture,” already noted, affirms that no doctrines other than those clearly set out in the Bible are necessary for salvation. The Anglican “Thirty-nine Articles” (1571) set out this position with classic precision in article 8: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” Or, as the Princeton theologian Alexander Archibald Hodge put it: “[Protestants] affirm that every essential article of faith and rule of practice is clearly revealed in Scripture, or may certainly be deduced therefrom.”

The second idea is that of the “clarity of scripture,” sometimes also referred to as the “perspicuity of scripture.”⁸ This holds that the basic meaning of the Bible can be ascertained by ordinary Christians. The perspicuity of scripture affirms the basic principle that its core teachings are clear and that those parts of it that are harder to understand can be interpreted in the light of clearer passages.

During the first phase of Protestantism, both of these ideas were vigorously disputed by Catholic writers. The Spanish Dominican writer Melchior Cano (1525–60) argued that the Bible is far from clear and that ordinary people need help with its interpretation. Protestantism, he argued, ends up making the individual believer the judge of the meaning of the Bible and has no place for the corporate judgment of the church. A similar criticism was made by Roberto Bellarmine (1541–60). It is obvious, he argued, that the Bible is difficult to interpret, a fact that Protestantism tried to conceal by following a herd instinct and pretending that this amounted to divine guidance.

There are some serious issues here, and we consider these later in this volume. It is a simple fact of Protestant history that in four major areas of biblical interpretation, the consensus has shifted between 1500 and 2000. We have already noted one of these—the changed understanding of Matthew 28:19. Were the apostles being charged with the task of evangelization (a virtually universal interpretation in sixteenth-century Protestantism), or was this responsibility being passed on to individual Christians in later generations (the dominant view since the nineteenth century)?

A further notion of importance is that of “adiaphora,” or “matters of indifference.” This basic concept, articulated out of necessity by Philip Melanchthon during the crises faced by Lutheranism in the late 1540s, acknowledges that sometimes the interpretation or application of the Bible is not clear. The first decades of the Reformation threw up many such issues: What form of dress should the clergy wear? What forms of worship should be adopted? Should hymns be sung in church? In such cases, Melanchthon argued, Protestants must be free to make their own judgments, while being respectful of the views of others. As the Puritan writer Richard Baxter (1615–91) put it: “In necessary things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity.” We shall return presently to consider how Protestants interpreted and applied the Bible.

It is important to appreciate that Protestant readings of the Bible are often shaped by past controversies. An excellent example is to be found in Protestant attitudes to Mary, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth. Luther gave Mary a significant role in evangelical devotion, seeing her as an exemplary model of Christian discipleship.⁹ Yet Protestantism as a whole has been wary of giving Mary a significant role in the lives of believers, despite the New Testament’s positive statements concerning her. Indeed, many scholars argue that Protestantism is characterized by the modesty, even ambivalence, of its statements about Mary. Why? The reason is simple: Protestants have reacted to what they have seen as Catholic overstatements about Mary, particularly in relation to her role in salvation.

This situation is now changing. As we pointed out earlier, Protestant perceptions of “the other,” which have played a critically important role in shaping Protestant self-definition, have changed since 1960. No longer is Catholicism the enemy. As a result, Protestants have shown themselves willing to reexamine the Bible and, where necessary, correct any past interpretations of scripture that can now be seen to represent polemical reactions against Catholicism rather than faithful and obedient renderings of the text.¹⁰ The result has been a cautious yet decisive willingness to give Mary a place in Christian devotion—above all, at Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter—that is more in line with the New Testament witness than with past Protestant polemics.

Changing attitudes among Protestants toward Mary is one sign of the greater openness among Protestants to Roman Catholicism in general, on the one hand, and on the other, remaining faithful to the fundamental Protestant principle of constantly reexamining existing readings of the Bible to ensure that these are faithful. Though some may find this paradoxical, the emerging interest in Mary is entirely consistent with Protestantism considered as a way of doing theology, even though it may cause tensions with Protestantism considered as a fixed body of attitudes from the past.

Although Protestants have always regarded the Bible as authoritative, various attempts have been made to formalize this authority by developing theories that would explain precisely what it is about the Bible that gives it such an authority.¹¹ These theories date mainly from the later nineteenth century, when the proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility in 1870 put Protestants under pressure to clarify their understanding of authority. One of the most influential such theories was set out by the Princeton Reformed theologian Benjamin B. Warfield.¹²

For Warfield, the unique authority of the Bible lay in the fact that it is inspired. “Inspiration is that extraordinary, supernatural influence…exerted by the Holy Ghost on the writers of our Sacred Books, by which their words were rendered also the words of God, and, therefore, perfectly infallible.” (It may be noted that Warfield’s use of the term “infallible” to refer to the Bible may represent a response to the First Vatican Council’s insistence that the pope is infallible.) Although Warfield is careful to stress that the humanity and individuality of biblical writers were not abolished by inspiration, he nevertheless insists that their humanity “was so dominated that their words became at the same time the words of God, and thus, in every case and all alike, absolutely infallible.” Other theories of inspiration located this authority elsewhere.¹³ What is important, however, is that recognition of the authority of the Bible preceded any attempt to formalize that authority theoretically.

Yet this raises an important question, one that has been the subject of considerable debate between Catholics and Protestants since the sixteenth century. What range of writings does the canon of the Bible embrace?

THE SHAPE OF THE BIBLE: THE OLD TESTAMENT AND THE APOCRYPHA

The rise of Protestantism forced reconsideration of what had up to that point been a relatively unproblematic question: what specific texts does the phrase “the Bible” denote? At a fairly early stage in its history, the Christian church had to make some important decisions as to what the term “scripture” actually designated. The first major phase in the history of the church, often referred to as the “patristic period” (c. 100–c. 450), witnessed the setting of the limits to the New Testament—a process usually known as “the fixing of the canon.” The word “canon” derives from the Greek word kanon, meaning a “rule” or “reference point.” The phrase “the canon of scripture” thus refers to a limited and defined group of writings that are accepted as authoritative within the church.

What criteria were used in drawing up this canon? The basic principle underlying this process appears to have been that of the recognition rather than the imposition of authority. In other words, the works in question were recognized by Christians as already possessing authority; they did not have an arbitrary authority imposed upon them. For the early church father Irenaeus, the church does not create the canon of scripture; it acknowledges, conserves, and receives canonical scripture on the basis of the authority already inherent to it. Some early Christians appear to have regarded apostolic authorship as of decisive importance; others were prepared to accept books that did not appear to have apostolic credentials. Although the precise details of how this selection was made remain unclear, it is certain that the canon was closed within the Western church by the beginning of the fifth century. The issue of the canon would not be raised again until the dawn of Protestantism.

At the time of the Reformation, a major debate broke out over whether some works accepted by the medieval church as canonical really deserved this status. It must be emphasized that the debate centered on the Old Testament; the canon of the New Testament was never seriously questioned, despite Martin Luther’s misgivings about the canonicity of the letter of James and three other shorter letters. While all the New Testament works were accepted as canonical—Luther’s misgivings would gain little support—doubts were raised concerning the canonicity of a group of Old Testament works. A comparison of the contents of the Old Testament in the Hebrew Bible, on the one hand, and in the Greek and Latin versions (such as the Septuagint and the Vulgate), on the other, shows that the latter contain a number of works not found in the former. Following the lead of Jerome, the reformers argued that the only Old Testament writings that could be regarded as belonging to the canon of scripture were those originally included in the Hebrew Bible.

Protestants thus drew a distinction between the Old Testament and what they termed the “Apocrypha.” The former consisted of texts found in the Hebrew Bible, while the latter consisted of text found in Greek and Latin versions of the Bible but not in the Hebrew Bible. While some reformers allowed that the apocryphal works made for edifying reading, there was general agreement that these works could not be used as the basis of doctrine. However, Catholic theologians of the Middle Ages, followed by the Council of Trent in 1546, defined the Old Testament as “those Old Testament works contained in the Greek and Latin bibles,” thus eliminating from the outset any distinction between “Old Testament” and “Apocrypha.”

From the beginning, therefore, Catholics and Protestants have had quite different understandings of what the term “the Bible” means, and this difference persists to the present day. A comparison of current Protestant versions of the Bible—the two most important being the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and the New International Version (NIV)—with their Catholic counterparts, such as the Jerusalem Bible, reveals these differences.

One practical outcome of this sixteenth-century debate was the production and circulation of authorized lists of books that were to be regarded as “scriptural.” The fourth session of the Council of Trent (1546) produced a detailed list that included the works of the Apocrypha as authentically scriptural, while Protestant congregations in Switzerland, France, and elsewhere produced lists that either totally omitted any reference to these works or indicated that they were of no importance in matters of doctrine.

PROTESTANT INTERPRETATIONS OF THE SOLA SCRIPTURA PRINCIPLE

At the Diet of Worms, held April 18, 1521, Martin Luther famously declared: “My conscience is captive to the word of God.” In its formative phase, Protestantism was characterized by a belief—a radical, liberating, yet dangerous belief—that scripture is clear enough for ordinary Christians to understand and apply without the need for a classical education, philosophical or theological expertise, clerical guidance, or ecclesiastical tradition, in the confident expectation that difficult passages will be illuminated by clearer ones. Although some early Protestants appear to have believed that it would be possible to develop a single, well-defined biblical theology and church practice, it soon became clear that additional constraints would be needed.

This point has been recognized since the 1520s. Martin Bucer, alarmed at the needless tensions that were emerging within Protestantism on account of the violent disagreement between Luther and Zwingli over sacramental theology, proposed that Protestantism simply declare that it would respect a reasonable degree of theological diversity, since this appeared to be the inevitable outcome of biblical interpretation.¹⁴ So long as it could be shown that a given doctrine was adequately justified on the basis of the Bible, Bucer asserted, it should be accepted as lying within the spectrum of Protestant thought.

In the end, Bucer’s irenic approach was not adopted because it was seen as vague and imprecise. Yet Bucer, one of the most perceptive Protestant thinkers during this formative age, had appreciated the fundamental problem of Protestant theological identity—namely, that the movement was primarily about a certain way of doing theology that could lead to an uncontrollable diversity of outcomes. To illustrate the issue, we may consider a question of no small relevance to tensions within North American culture at present.

What do Protestants believe about the creation of humanity, especially in the light of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution? This is a significant, highly contentious question, and we consider its importance in more detail in a later chapter. As someone with a specialist interest in this area, I can easily identify at least nineteen distinct Protestant answers to this question, each claiming to be the correct interpretation of the Bible. So which is the Protestant answer? Which one is right?

The first question can be answered quite simply. All nineteen positions represent answers that have been shaped by what is clearly a Protestant approach to the interpretation of scripture. The nineteen approaches may well be different, but each one has every right to call itself Protestant and to be recognized as such by other Protestants. The question of which approach is right is rather more difficult!

Since every Protestant has the right to interpret the Bible, a wide range of interpretations cannot be avoided. And since there is no centralized authority within Protestantism, this proliferation of options cannot be controlled. Who has the right to decide what is orthodox and what is heretical? For many early Protestants, this was a dangerous idea that opened the floodgates to a torrent of distortion, misunderstanding, and confusion.

So what could be done to limit the range of biblical interpretations? This was a pressing question, since the more radical thinkers within Protestantism chose to interpret the Bible in ways that seemed to many to lie beyond the pale of orthodoxy. John Dryden, writing in the seventeenth century, pointed out that both heretics and the orthodox appealed to the Bible. They happened to interpret it in different ways. And if there was no Protestant equivalent of the magisterium, the centralized teaching authority of the church, how could these positions be defined as heretical? Or even as un-Protestant?

For did not Arius first, Socinus now

The Son’s eternal Godhead disavow?

And did not these by Gospel texts alone

Condemn our doctrine and maintain their own?

Have not all heretics the same pretence,

To plead the Scriptures in their own defence?

“The Hind and the Panther,” part 2, lines 150–55

Over the years, each strand of Protestantism developed its own way of understanding and implementing the sola Scriptura principle.¹⁵ Each accorded primacy to scripture yet recognized a number of additional resources—such as tradition, reason, and experience—that might serve in connecting scripture with the intellectual and experiential world of every generation. Two approaches, both affirming the important role of the Christian community in interpreting scripture, proved to be of particular importance. The first stressed its synchronic role—in other words, the role of the present-day community of believers in seeking to understand a text. The second emphasized its diachronic role, looking to the testimony of believers in the past as an aid to the present-day task of interpretation.

The first approach stressed that biblical interpretation is ultimately a corporate, rather than an individual, matter. Individual believers have every right to ask for an explanation or defense of the views of the wider body, according to this approach. While the Holy Spirit has indeed been given to all believers—partly to illuminate their reading of scripture—the community of faith has a vital role in checking misperceptions or misreadings. Questions of doctrine are to be settled, however, by the community of faith as a whole, not by a single person. Anabaptism, often regarded as the form of Protestantism that gave individuals the greatest degree of freedom in this respect, generally emphasized the importance of the congregation in determining how to interpret scripture.¹⁶ Similarly, American Baptist theologians respect the judgments of earlier luminaries within their tradition, regarding them as important dialogue partners in the contemporary task of explicating and applying the Bible.¹⁷

The second approach emphasized the role of the past in interpreting scripture. The mainline reformers argued that since Protestantism represented the continuation and renewal of apostolic Christianity, it was able to share in the early Christian community’s decisions concerning norms of faith and that community’s identification of heresies and other inauthentic forms of faith. Most Protestants therefore accepted the traditional ecumenical creeds, regarding these as publicly authorized and endorsed interpretations of scripture. This approach was generally not adopted by sixteenth-century Anabaptist communities, which had serious reservations concerning the authenticity of earlier forms of Christianity, even during the patristic period. However, modern Anabaptist theologians take their own tradition with the greatest seriousness in attempting to fashion an appropriate engagement with the Bible in the light of today’s questions and issues.¹⁸

The form of Protestantism that probably exemplified this approach best was early seventeenth-century Anglicanism. Francis White (1564–1638), sometime Bishop of Ely, was a leading representative of early seventeenth-century Anglican theology, which represented a classic statement of the “reformed Catholicism” of the Church of England at this time, combining the Reformation’s insistence on the theological priority of scripture with a Catholic understanding of the institutional mediation of scripture through the church.¹⁹

For White, the church constructs “her faith and religion upon the sacred and canonical Scriptures of the Holy Prophets and Apostles, as upon her main and prime foundation.”²⁰ Yet White insisted on the need for an agreed, consensual means by which the Bible might be interpreted, and he found this in “the consentient testimony and authority of the Bishops and pastors of the true and ancient Catholic church,” which were to be set over and against innovations resulting from individualist speculation.

In effect, White distinguished between two sources of authority—one magisterial, the other ministerial; one sovereign, the other subordinate. The former is scripture; the latter is the “voice and testimony of the Primitive Church,” which acts as “a ministerial and subordinate rule and guide, to preserve us and direct us in the right understanding of the Scriptures.”

The recognition that the church has a role to play in the interpretation of the Bible in no way invalidates the sola Scriptura principle. William Whitaker (1547–95) echoed a general Protestant consensus when he stated: “For we also say that the church is the interpreter of Scripture, and that the gift of interpretation resides only in the church: but we deny that it pertains to particular persons, or is tied to any particular see or succession of men.”²¹ This naturally leads us to consider the role of tradition as an aid to the interpretation of scripture.

THE BIBLE AND TRADITION

The word “tradition” comes from the Latin term traditio, which can be understood to mean both the “act of handing over” and “what is actually handed over.” The idea is found in the New Testament itself, as when Paul speaks of handing over to the church at Corinth teachings about Jesus Christ that had originally been handed over to him (1 Corinthians 15:1–4). The mainline reformers believed that the Bible had been honored, interpreted, and applied faithfully in the past and that Protestant theologians were under an obligation to take their reflections into account as they interpreted the Bible in the present day.²²

Luther insisted that tradition—understood as ideas inherited from the past—operated in a ministerial, not magisterial, mode, serving not directing the church.

There is genuine disagreement within Protestantism over the relation of the Bible and tradition. The Anabaptist wing of the Reformation argued, not entirely without justification, that the only consistent way in which the sola Scriptura principle could be applied was to limit Protestant belief and practice to what was explicitly taught in scripture. Since the practice of infant baptism was not mentioned in the Bible, it was therefore to be rejected as unbiblical. Similar anxieties were expressed by some radical writers about the doctrine of the Trinity.

The mainline reformers, such as Luther and Calvin, held that upholding the supreme authority of the Bible did not mean rejecting the church’s past history of biblical reflection as a God-given resource to help with its present-day interpretation.²³ As we noted earlier, Luther styled his reforming program at Wittenberg as a return to “the Bible and Augustine” and regarded Augustine as something of a theological lodestar. Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon developed similar arguments, most notably that the Reformation could be seen as a return to the consensus of the early church, especially as found in the writings of Augustine and Ambrose. Calvin insisted that the Reformation was about a return to the doctrinal purity of the early church, corrected as necessary against the Bible. Like Luther, he had an especially high regard for Augustine of Hippo.²⁴

The fundamental idea here is that the past can be a resource for the present. Where radical writers such as Sebastian Franck dismissed patristic writers such as Augustine as servants of anti-Christ, mainline Protestantism valued them and saw itself as a continuation and expansion of all that was good about the early church. This allowed early Protestants to make a critical apologetic point. In response to their Catholic critics who declared that Protestantism was an innovation—where was your church before Luther?—they replied that they stood in continuity with the early church. The Catholic church, they argued, had itself distorted the early church’s teachings during the Middle Ages.

At the Council of Trent (1546), Catholicism responded by arguing that Protestantism had lost its theological moorings. It valued the Bible, which was good in itself, but failed to recognize that the church possessed unwritten traditions, passed down from one generation to the next, on central themes of the Christian faith. The principle of sola Scriptura simply cut off Protestantism from these necessary truths, and hence from the full riches of the Christian faith. Trent developed a “two-source” theory of tradition that regarded the Bible and unwritten tradition as sources of equal value for doctrine and morals. By denying tradition as a source of revelation independent of the Bible, Protestantism had cut itself off from the apostolic period, and hence from Christ himself.²⁵

Protestant attitudes to tradition are deeply revealing about the movement’s self-understanding. Mainline Protestantism was emphatic that it was not a new church brought into existence by the circumstances of the sixteenth century. It represented a reform and renewal of Christianity, implying and affirming continuity with the great historic tradition of Christian faith and stretching back through the patristic era to the apostles themselves. Protestantism saw itself as a purified and renewed vision of Christian identity and pointed to historical landmarks in the past—such as the Pelagian controversy—that indicated that a similar process of criticism and regeneration was built into the fabric of faith.²⁶

Anabaptists, however, preferred not to speak of the “reformation” of the church, in that this implied that a Christian church existed before the Reformation—a belief that Luther and Calvin regarded as historically and theologically self-evident and unproblematic. For more radical Protestants, the church needed to be re-created from its very foundations. This Promethean reconstruction of the church from ground zero was better expressed as a “restoration” of the church rather than a “reformation.”

THE TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE

Whereas Islam insists that the Qu’ran must be read in its original Arabic, there is no requirement in the Bible that it be read, other than for reasons of scholarly accuracy, in its original languages. During the Middle Ages, the laity was largely disconnected from the Bible. Many monastic orders—such as the Benedictines—placed a high value on detailed, extensive study of the Bible. Yet such a knowledge of the text was simply impossible for most ordinary Christians, most of whom could neither read nor afford to buy a manuscript of the Bible. The advent of printing would alleviate the latter problem, although Johann Gutenberg’s first printed Bibles cost far more than large houses of his day.

Things began to change in England in the late Middle Ages, even though the translation of the Bible into English was illegal at this time. John Wycliffe, the English religious reformer of the fourteenth century, is often referred to as the “morning star of the Reformation.” It is an appropriate, if not totally accurate, designation. One of Wycliffe’s best-known slogans, shamelessly plagiarized by Abraham Lincoln, affirms the fundamentally democratizing consequences of giving people access to the Bible: this book would give rise to “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Wycliffe himself made no small contribution to this development, although he appears to have inspired others to translate the Bible into English rather than to have done so himself.²⁷ The fourteenth-century Wycliffite translations into English were based on the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible rather than the original Hebrew and Greek texts. It was not until the year 1516 that new possibilities opened up, when Erasmus of Rotterdam published the Greek text of the New Testament. It is no accident that this landmark event took place so close to the dawn of the reforming challenges to the established social, religious, and intellectual orders of the day.

Luther demanded that all Christians should be able to read the Bible for themselves. Lay access to the Bible was about power as much as it was about encouraging personal spirituality. The pressure to place the Bible in the hands of the ordinary person was an implicit demand for the emancipation of the laity from clerical domination. Always a realist in matters of human nature, Luther knew that it was a waste of time demanding that everyone learn the original biblical languages. The needs of the situation demanded action on his part. The Bible had to be translated into ordinary German! But that would take time—something that Luther simply did not have in 1520.

Then events took an unexpected turn, and Luther suddenly found himself with an abundance of time on his hands. Following his condemnation at Worms, Luther was “kidnapped” in May 1521 by his friends and placed in safe custody in Wartburg Castle. “Junker Jörg” (Sir George)—as Luther was known during this period of enforced isolation—spent his first eleven weeks translating the New Testament into German. The “September Testament” was edited by Melanchthon and others and published in 1522. It created a sensation and had a permanent effect on the shaping of the modern German language.²⁸

Others were inspired by this effort and longed to do the same. William Tyndale even traveled to Wittenberg in order to benefit from both Luther’s personal example and his translation of the New Testament.²⁹ Perhaps as many as three thousand copies of Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament were printed in great secrecy in the German city of Worms and imported shortly afterward into England, where they caused a sensation. The bishop of London ordered that every available copy be seized and burned.

Why was the translation regarded as so dangerous? Two reasons stand out. First, any English translation was dangerous because it enabled ordinary Christians to carry out a reality check on the teaching and morality of the church. It was a disconcerting, even threatening, development. Second, Tyndale’s translation used vocabulary that threatened to undermine traditional authority structures within the church. An example will make this point clear.

The English church had had priests since anyone could remember. Yet Tyndale’s New Testament rendered the Greek word presbyteros, traditionally translated as “priest,” as “senior.” The English word “priest” should, he argued, be reserved solely for translating the Greek term hiereus, used in the New Testament exclusively to refer to Jewish or pagan priests or to Christ himself. The Greek term ekklesia, traditionally translated as “church,” was now translated as “congregation.” Sections of the New Testament that could have been taken as endorsing the institution of the church were now to be understood as referring to local congregations of believers. In both cases, the new translation threatened to subvert the existing structures of the church by implying that they were not found in the New Testament itself.

Realizing that they could not prevent such translations from getting through to England, where they would secure a ready and enthusiastic readership, the authorities reluctantly decided they would have to authorize and produce their own English translations of the Bible. Far better, they reasoned, to have a translation they could control than to try to fight off subversive translations. A series of English Bibles thus appeared over the next eighty years, battling it out for the loyalty of the English public.³⁰ We have already noted the importance of the unauthorized Geneva Bible (1560), produced by Protestants in Geneva. Yet perhaps the greatest English translation of the Bible was the King James Bible of 1611, also known as the “Authorized Version.”

The origins of this version can be traced back to the first year of the reign of James I. Anxious to secure religious peace in England, James authorized the production of a new English translation of the Bible early in his reign. The fifty translators were divided into six “companies,” two based at Westminster, two at Oxford, and two at Cambridge. Each was allocated a section of the Bible, including the Apocrypha. They were given strict instructions about how they were to proceed with the translation. They would make no marginal notes; they would use traditional English ecclesiastical language (for example, “church,” not “congregation”); and they would draw upon earlier English translations as appropriate. The new translation would be conservative theologically while maintaining complete accuracy by the standards of its day.

The resulting translation, published in 1611, eventually became a religious classic—even if it did take about eighty years for it to be fully accepted as such. The impact of the King James Bible on the English language was decisive. Countless phrases originally deriving from Hebrew—such as “to fall flat on one’s face,” “the skin of one’s teeth,” “to stand in awe,” and “to lick the dust”—now found their way into everyday English. The impact of such translations on the shaping of national languages and cultures has been immense. The English Bible, above all the King James Bible, has shaped “the common code of the English-speaking world,” almost as if it were some kind of linguistic DNA.³¹

Yet the most interesting section of the King James Bible is now generally omitted, owing to lack of space. Miles Smith, writing on behalf of the translators, provided a preface that offered an account of the benefits of biblical translation to the people of God. It allowed them to gain access to the spiritual nourishment found in the Bible. Translation opened a window and let in the light; broke the shell that we might eat the kernel; drew aside the curtain that we might look into the most holy place; removed the cover of the well that we might drink of its water, “even as Jacob rolled away the stone from the mouth of the well, by which means the flocks of Laban were watered [Genesis 29:10].” To translate the Bible was an act of service to the people of God.

By 1900 the King James Bible was firmly established as a religious classic. Several North American religious groups have regarded it as the definitive translation of the Bible and refused to countenance others.³² Many have felt that this text, like Shakespeare’s works, is vested with the dignity and sanctity of a classic and therefore cannot be revised.

It is beyond doubt that the King James Version of the Bible was an outstanding translation by the standards of 1611 and beyond. Yet translations eventually require revision, not necessarily because they are defective, but because the language into which they were translated changes over time. Translation involves aiming at a moving target that has accelerated over the centuries. Living languages are developing more quickly today than at any time in their previous history. Some words have ceased to be used, while others have changed their meanings. For example, consider this sentence from the King James translation:

For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. (1 Thessalonians 4:15)

A modern reader would find this puzzling, in that the 1611 meaning of “prevent”—“to go before” or “to precede”—is different from its modern sense of “to hinder.” Linguistic change makes classic translations—such as the King James Bible—capable of misleading and confusing readers. When a translation itself requires explanation, it has ceased to function as a working translation.

This point has considerable relevance to late twentieth-century American debates over the place of the King James translation. Those who insist on retaining the King James Bible as the only acceptable English translation of the Bible actually betray the intentions and goals of those who conceived and translated it—namely, to translate the Bible into living English.³³

ISSUES IN BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION

How is the Bible to be interpreted? This unavoidable question lies at the heart of Protestantism. In virtually every debate that takes place within the Protestant community of faith—whether concerning the origins of humanity, the ministry of women, the nature of the end times, or the legitimacy of abortion—all sides will make an appeal to the Bible. One side will accentuate one set of texts and the other side another set, or both will appeal to the same basic texts yet interpret them differently.³⁴ The outcome is a range of interpretations of the Bible. Some issues on which Protestants have offered—and continue to offer—significantly different readings of the Bible include:

Other issues can easily be added to this list, which is clearly illustrative, not exhaustive.

The vast majority of Protestant theologians do not regard this diversity of biblically based beliefs and practices as compromising the principle of the perspicuity of scripture. The essential point made by this principle is that, at any given point in the church’s history, scripture is both clear and sufficient in all things that are necessary to salvation. As early as the 1520s, irenic Protestant theologians, such as Martin Bucer, were stressing the importance of learning to live in a community that was producing important differences of biblical interpretation and thus different conclusions drawn from the same foundational document.

In part, the issue has to do with the identity of Protestantism itself. It is not difficult to identify specific groups within Protestantism according to their relatively well-defined and well-defended—yet different—ways of interpreting the Bible. In the United States on the eve of the First World War, for example, relatively coherent and distinctive belief systems, each rigorously based on the Bible, were associated with Presbyterianism, Methodism, the Southern Baptist Convention, Episcopalianism, and Lutheranism. Reinforced by dedicated seminaries, denominational theological textbooks, and preachers, each group defended its specific reading of the Bible against the alternatives.

The difficulty emerges if one imagines that there exists a universal category called “Protestantism” that is embodied in each of these groups. The reality is that Protestantism has always been a somewhat diffuse notion, whereas each of the individual religious groupings just named—to which others, such as Pentecostalism, could easily be added—are living social realities. Sociologically, it is easy to show that Americans in the years immediately before the First World War may have been vaguely committed to the greater, overarching notion of “Protestantism” but defined themselves primarily in terms of their own denominations. Even as late as 1960, most Americans had serious misgivings about worshiping at Protestant denominations other than their own, feeling that this compromised their religious identities. Their loyalty was primarily—and in many cases exclusively—to the specific beliefs, structure, and life of a particular denomination. If the category of “Protestantism” is proposed as the primary category of identification, a significant degree of diversity on such matters as church order, doctrinal standards, and sacramental practice arises, precisely on account of the different historical traditions that make up the greater category of “Protestantism.”

In practice, this has not troubled most Protestants, who are sufficiently historically literate, on the one hand, to realize the inevitability of this problem and sufficiently tolerant, on the other, to cope with the varieties of beliefs and practices that arise from this situation. Such limited diversity has been present from the outset within Protestantism and is arguably the inevitable outcome of its shared commitment to the authority of the Bible and its special place in Christian life and thought.

The same phenomenon arises within Islamic interpretation of the Qu’ran, which shows important parallels to—with equally important divergences from—Protestantism’s engagement with the Bible. Although there are some shared assumptions that govern Qu’ranic interpretation within Islam, this has not led to anything approaching uniformity within the movement. Is the Qu’ran a document of its own age that must be interpreted within that historical context? Or is it a timeless document, liberated from the specifics of its history?³⁵ To what extent can one break with traditional interpretations of the Qu’ran in facing new contexts and challenges?³⁶ Islam, like Protestantism, faces increasing diversification as new contexts and issues emerge, demanding new interpretations of the Qu’ran and placing older, traditional interpretations under increasing conceptual and ethical strain.³⁷

Yet this historical diversity of biblical interpretation has been the cause for some concern and even distress for those who believe that Protestantism ought to be characterized by a homogeneous, monolithic belief system. Mistakenly believing that even a modest diversity of biblical interpretation compromises the notion of the “clarity of scripture,” they have sought ways of securing and enforcing a single, unambiguous interpretation of the Bible at every point. In effect, the equivalent of a “Protestant papacy” has been proposed, by which the correct interpretation of the Bible might be laid down by decree. Such efforts have not proved successful, for two main reasons. First, they involve the imposition of single meanings on clusters of core passages, but it is clear that a diversity of interpretations has existed throughout Protestant history. Second, the nature of Protestantism is such than no one has the right or authority to speak for Protestantism in this way. Indeed, the Reformation itself, by insisting on the right of all believers to read and interpret the Bible for themselves, can be seen as a revolt against this quasi-papal centralization of authority.

One strategy of particular interest emerged during the 1980s, when some conservative Protestants, particularly in the United States, began increasingly to characterize the Bible as “infallible” or “inerrant.”³⁸ In doing so, they were picking up some themes from the nineteenth-century writings of Benjamin Warfield, while giving them a new and significant emphasis. Yet this claim did not, as some had hoped, solve the problem of multiple interpretations. It is perfectly possible for an inerrant text to be interpreted incorrectly. Asserting the infallibility of a text merely accentuates the importance of the interpreter of that text. Unless the interpreter is also to be thought of as infallible—a view that Protestantism has rejected, associating it with Catholic views of the church or papacy—the issue of determining the “right” meaning of the Bible is not settled, or even addressed, by declaring that the sacred text is infallible. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, regard the Bible as infallible, yet interpret core passages in a way that most Protestants find unacceptable, especially in relation to the identity of Jesus of Nazareth.

Debates about biblical interpretation take place in every Christian community, not merely Protestant ones. What distinguishes Protestantism at this point is its principled refusal to allow any authority above scripture, such as a pope or council. This principle is often affirmed using the Latin slogan Scriptura ipsius interpres (“Scripture is its own interpreter”). Whereas Catholicism resolves such tensions through magisterial pronouncements on the part of the teaching authority of the church, Protestantism recognizes no such authority above scripture. Such tensions must be resolved by means that will command support within Protestantism on account of their intrinsic merits, including their intellectual plausibility and their consonance with the biblical witness as a whole.

The classic Protestant approach has been well defended in recent years by J. I. Packer, an Oxford-educated theologian who spent the most significant part of his career teaching at Regent College in Vancouver. Packer argues that two principles are essential to a Protestant approach to the interpretation of the Bible:

Scripture yields two basic principles for its own interpretation. The first is that the proper, natural sense of each passage (i.e., the intended sense of the writer) is to be taken as fundamental; the meaning of texts in their own contexts, and for their original readers, is the necessary starting-point for enquiry into their wider significance…. The second basic principle of interpretation is that Scripture must interpret Scripture; the scope and significance of one passage is to be brought out by relating it to others.³⁹

Packer emphasizes that the “natural” or “plain” sense of a passage depends on whether that passage was intended to be read as history, prophecy, poetry, narrative, or teaching. Not every biblical passage can be forced into the same preconceived mold; each must be interpreted on its own terms.

So what are the issues that arise in biblical interpretation? How do these affect the beliefs, values, and actions of Protestants, whether as individuals or as communities? The best way of dealing with such questions is to explore some general issues that arise in biblical interpretation and then see how these relate to contemporary or classic debates. Here we look at four issues. There are others—including how to resolve apparent conflicts between biblical texts—that fully deserve to be discussed but have been omitted simply on account of space constraints.

The Relation Between the Old and New Testaments

Protestants regard the Bible as having two major sections—the Old and New Testaments. Following John Calvin, most Protestants affirm the theological continuity between the two Testaments: both are the work of the same God, setting out the same fundamental themes of creation, grace, sin, judgment, redemption, and consummation. At the theological level, the New Testament states more clearly and more fully what is sometimes set out more opaquely in the Old. This basic theme is often summarized in a slogan of Augustine of Hippo: “The New Testament is hidden in the Old; the Old is made accessible by the New.”

But what of the Old Testament’s moral commands? For example, the Old Testament commands that the Sabbath (Saturday) be kept holy and prescribes the death sentence for those who defile it. Virtually every Christian community, including Protestantism, insists that a distinction must be made between the “cultic” and the “moral” commandments. Where the Old Testament lays down a general moral principle—such as “You shall not murder”—this is binding on Christians. Where it lays down a command linked with the Old Testament cult—for example, relating to sacrifices, the priesthood, or the worship of the Temple—this is not binding. On this reading, the command to observe the Sabbath is a cultic requirement and is therefore open to reinterpretation by Christians.

This issue has become of major significance in recent debates over homosexuals and the ordained ministry. Those who oppose the ordination of active homosexuals often appeal to texts in the “holiness code” of the Book of Leviticus that condemn homosexuality. This section of the text deals with eating blood (17:10–11; 19:26), proper sacrifices (17:2–8; 19:5–8), incest (18:6–18; 20:17), menstrual uncleanness (18:19), adultery (18:20; 20:10), homosexuality (18:22; 20:13), Sabbath keeping (19:3, 30), and unclean animals (20:25). Most interpreters have regarded the “holiness code” as mingling cultic and moral issues, in that the Old Testament makes no distinction between them, whereas Christians regard the distinction as significant.

Debates within Protestantism over the question of homosexual ordination thus tend to focus on the question of whether its prohibition in the Old Testament is cultic or moral. Those in favor regard the prohibition as cultic; those who are opposed see it as moral.

The Status of Biblical Language: Literal, Metaphorical, Poetic, or Accommodated?

The Bible frequently makes statements of the form “A is B.” Debate has often arisen over whether the deceptively simple word “is” means “is literally identical with” or something rather more nuanced, such as “is like” or “points to.” We have already seen how precisely this kind of debate fractured both the personal relationship between Luther and Zwingli and that between the German and Swiss Reformations. That debate was over this statement made by Jesus of Nazareth at the Last Supper: “This is my body” (Matthew 26:26). For Luther, this statement was literally true; for Zwingli, Jesus was using a figure of speech meaning “this represents my body.”

Protestant fundamentalism is often portrayed as interpreting the Bible literally at every point. It requires only a modest familiarity with the writings and sermons of fundamentalists to realize how inaccurate this characterization is. Fundamentalists undoubtedly regard as literally true certain texts that other Protestants might interpret symbolically or allegorically—for example, the visions of the Book of Revelation. Yet fundamentalists interpret other texts spiritually—such as the prophecies of the liberation of the poor and oppressed (Isaiah 61), which they generally take to mean “spiritually impoverished and oppressed.” Untidy though it may seem, all Protestants agree that some texts are to be interpreted literally and others metaphorically. The problem is that there is no universal agreement on which texts should be allocated to each category.

John Calvin introduced another category that proved to be influential at this point. Noting that classical orators adapted or accommodated their language and imagery to their intended audience, Calvin argued that God adapts or accommodates revelation to the abilities of those toward whom it is directed.⁴⁰ God might use strongly realist imagery—such as the “arm of the Lord”—to enable effective communication to its recipients. Biblical statements that at first sight appear to be literally true might therefore be “accommodated” and might need to be interpreted in this light. This issue would become of major importance in the Protestant reaction to the Copernican model of the solar system, which we shall consider later.

A related issue concerns the literary genre in which a given text is located. For example, the Psalms declare that “the mountains skipped like rams, the hills like lambs” (Psalm 114:4) in response to the great saving acts of God. Is that to be taken as literally true? Most Protestants have argued that it should not. It is a poetic statement, pointing to the exultation of all of nature at the redemptive action of the creator.

While this point might seem straightforward in theory, it is rather more problematic in practice. Who decides what literary genre a given section of the Bible belongs to? Protestants often find themselves in disagreement over how to categorize a section of the Bible. For example, is Genesis 1 to be understood as history, myth, or poetry? Each position has found its advocates within the Protestant tradition, with important implications for how the passage is interpreted, especially in relation to the Darwinian theory of evolution—a point of no small importance to which we shall return in a later chapter.

New Testament Commands: Universal or Specific to the Original Audience?

A third problem concerns the intended audience of a biblical passage. Earlier, we saw that for its first two centuries Protestantism tended to interpret the “Great Commission” as a mandate delivered to the apostles, not their successors (Matthew 28:17–20). As a result, Protestants saw little reason to pursue missionary work—until the end of the eighteenth century, when the passage in question was “read” in a different way. The passage clearly demanded that the gospel be proclaimed; its interpretation was not in dispute. The debate concerned who was being commanded to proclaim it—the apostles at a specific period in history or all Christians throughout history?⁴¹

The same issue occurs repeatedly throughout the Bible. One issue that has caused some division within Protestantism is the ministry of women. In 1 Corinthians 14:34, Paul states that women should be silent in church: if they have theological questions, they should ask their husbands when they get home. Is this meant to be a universal principle, binding on all Christians at all times, or a specific instruction to the Corinthian church at that specific moment in its history, given the particular difficulties it was known to be experiencing?

The text can be interpreted in very different ways. Some might argue that it demonstrates that women cannot exercise any ministry, and therefore they interpret it as a universal ruling. Others see it as illustrating the problems at that specific juncture in the church’s history on account of the newfound freedom that women then enjoyed through the rise of Christianity. On this reading, married women were disrupting the service by asking questions of their husbands, so they were instructed to wait and ask their questions at home. Which is right? Both sides of this debate are well represented within Protestantism’s ample girth.

Perhaps the most significant case of such a question concerns the question of spiritual gifts, a cause of much comment in Paul’s letters, especially the Corinthian correspondence. Paul affirms the importance of such gifts, while at the same time urging restraint and caution in exercising them—an attitude neatly summed up as “Cool it, don’t kill it.” But were those gifts given for all time, or were they specific to the apostolic era and so have now died out? Was the pattern of spiritual gifts that was shown, for example, on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2) specific to the needs and opportunities of the first years of the church—or was it valid for all time? The New Testament offers no unequivocal answer, although its interpreters have been known to suggest otherwise.

The belief that such gifts had died out (known as “cessationism”) was widespread within mainline Protestantism from the sixteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. There was no reason to think otherwise, in the absence of any significant evidence of such spiritual gifts being experienced within the church. The outbreak of charismatic phenomena—such as speaking in tongues—on the first day of the twentieth century in the United States, followed by sustained global growth in such phenomena, raised questions about cessationism and convinced many that such spiritual gifts remained at the disposal of the church. Here, the decisive factor in changing the corporate mind of Protestantism over the best part of a century was not a new way of interpreting the Bible but renewed experience of something that had been believed to be extinct. Experience forced revision of existing ways of reading and interpreting the Bible.

Biblical Values and Ethics: Culturally Contingent or Universal?

A fourth area of debate in biblical interpretation concerns whether the cultural norms assumed within the biblical narrative were endorsed by the biblical writers. The case of slavery is of particular importance, and we consider this in more detail later. This question has been particularly significant in recent discussions about Christian attitudes toward homosexuality. Although the Bible makes surprisingly few unequivocal references to homosexual practices, those that can be identified are uniformly negative: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” (Leviticus 18:22). While Jesus of Nazareth makes no reference to the subject, Paul explicitly condemns homosexual practice in his letter to the Romans (Romans 1:26–27). So how are these verses to be interpreted?

A traditionalist reading of these texts holds that they represent unequivocal, clear, and unambivalent condemnations that are therefore valid and binding on the church for all time. A liberal reading argues that it is important to discern the intention that lies behind these prohibitions and to distinguish this intention from the actual condemnations, which reflect issues in the culture of the ancient world (for example, the influence of paganism) that do not apply today.⁴²

This brief account of four of the issues that have arisen in biblical interpretation—some of which have played a significant role in shaping the present form of Protestantism—helps explain the historical and contemporary diversity within Protestantism. It also leads us to reflect on an important consequence of the dangerous idea at the heart of Protestantism, an issue to which we now turn—namely, who decides what is orthodoxy and what is heresy.

THE PROBLEM OF HERESY FOR

PROTESTANTISM

“Heresy” is one of the most ominous terms in the vocabulary of Christendom. The Christian usage of the word can be traced back to the New Testament itself, where it is used to designate a sect, faction, or grouping (see, for example, Acts 24:5; 28:22). Similarly, the great Jewish historian Josephus applies the term (airesis) to the three religious sects prevalent in Judea in his day: the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenes. At this stage, the term did not have the strongly negative associations that later developed; these, however, were not long in emerging.⁴³

By the second century, “orthodoxy” and “heresy” were emerging as significant ideas.⁴⁴ The term “heresy” was used to designate deficient, and potentially vulnerable, understandings of the Christian faith that were to be rejected.⁴⁵ The identification of heresy was seen as a corporate judgment by the church that rested on a consensus that such views were unsatisfactory, fallacious, and misleading. Yet it is essential to appreciate that heresies were ultimately unacceptable interpretations of the Bible.

This can be seen by considering the fourth-century movement known as Arianism, widely seen as the most important early Christian heresy.⁴⁶ Arius and his followers held that Jesus of Nazareth could not be regarded as divine in any meaningful sense of the word. He was “supreme among God’s creatures,” but a creature nonetheless. This doctrine was severely criticized by writers such as Athanasius of Alexandria for undermining the internal coherence of the Christian faith. Yet both Arius and Athanasius based their ideas on substantially the same biblical texts, which they interpreted in different ways.⁴⁷

The essence of heresy can therefore be located in flawed biblical interpretation. But who decides which biblical interpretations are flawed and which are orthodox? If all Christians have the right to interpret the Bible as they see fit, how can heresy be identified, let alone combated? If the Bible alone is the supreme rule of faith, how can any authority beyond that text be recognized as its authoritative interpreter? It is at this point that the distinctive approach of Protestantism encounters a seemingly formidable obstacle, in that it seems to undermine the very idea of an authoritative interpretation of the Bible—in other words, the notion of orthodoxy.

This already significant problem was made acute by the unusual social and intellectual conditions of the sixteenth century, catalyzed by the spirit of inquiry of the Renaissance. This era of scientific and intellectual restlessness was marked by a determination to explore new options and reevaluate old ones. Some of these were local heterodoxies, whose ideas had little impact at the time, even though they may have caused frissons of intellectual anxiety.⁴⁸ Among those, we may include the Italian village miller Domenico Scandella from the mountain village of Montereale, who took the view that the world arose from chaos, just as “cheese is made out of milk, and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.”⁴⁹ A surge of alternative viewpoints emerged, posing a powerful challenge to the religious and political stability of late Renaissance Europe. The authorities, political and religious, did what they could to limit their impact by branding such ideas as magic or heresy. Among these new movements, of course, was Protestantism itself—or perhaps we should say, many of the various tributaries that flowed into its vortex.

From its outset, Protestantism was branded as a heresy by the Catholic church. Protestants responded with indignation, retorting that they had recovered orthodoxy from its medieval distortions. What was Protestantism if not the recovery of the orthodox faith of the early church?⁵⁰ Yet Catholics had little difficulty in arguing that, while Protestantism might be perfectly capable of recovering earlier biblical interpretations, it lacked the means to determine whether what it had retrieved was orthodox or heterodox. And lacking any such capacity to discriminate between such interpretations, Protestants were obligated to repeat the judgments of the Catholic church on these matters. In their turn, Protestants argued that, since they were committed to restoring the authentic teaching of the early church, this naturally extended to its views on orthodoxy and heresy. In the end, the arguments were not decisive. However, the debate highlighted the potential danger for Protestantism arising from competing biblical interpretations. Who had the right to decide which were orthodox and which heretical?

This led to a further difficulty as divisions emerged within Protestant constituencies. Itself partly a consequence of the intellectual ferment of the Renaissance, Protestantism found that it could not check this innovative and critical tendency within its own ranks. It had merely been relocated, not neutralized. One particular difficulty was the rise of anti-trinitarianism in Italian Protestant circles, a movement that rapidly gained a following in northern Europe.⁵¹ For Juan de Valdés and others, the doctrine of the Trinity was simply not to be found in the Bible, nor could it be defended on biblical grounds. Protestants who were faithful to the Bible not only were therefore under no obligation to accept this doctrine but had a responsibility to challenge it as a distortion of biblical truth. Forced out of Italy by the Inquisition, many anti-trinitarians settled in the independent republic of the Grisons in southeast Switzerland, where their influence upon Reformed Protestantism began to grow.

In this case, Protestantism was able to deal with such heterodox trends by appealing to the consensus of faith of the church, as set out in the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. Christianity as a whole had declared such teachings to be heretical; Protestantism thus endorsed this pattern of traditional teaching and, in doing so, rejected anti-trinitarianism as heretical. But what of other dissident voices within Protestantism that urged teachings that had never been declared heretical in the past by the church as a whole but were nevertheless regarded with intense animosity within certain sections of the movement?

For instance, the major controversy that arose over the doctrine of predestination led to a fundamental bifurcation between Calvinism and Arminianism.⁵² Each accused the other of being heretical. Yet in reality, each was a coherent interpretation of the Bible that happened to differ substantially from the other, both in terms of basic ideas and implications for the Christian life. There was—and is—no higher Protestant authority that can declare one or the other to be in the right. In the end, the only means of deciding the question was a vote within the constituency in question—as, for example, at the Synod of Dort, which established the boundaries of Calvinist orthodoxy. Orthodoxy thus ran the risk of being defined as the theology with the most votes within a given constituency, and heterodoxy as the minority voice.

The problem here is that “heresy” is ultimately a teaching judged unacceptable by the entire church; the term is not properly applicable to either Calvinism or Arminianism, which are each subdivisions of one constituency of Protestantism. One can certainly speak of heresy arising within Protestantism—for example, the revival of Arianism in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Anglicanism.⁵³ In this case, ideas that the entire church regarded as heretical made a reappearance. Yet the nature of Protestantism makes it very difficult to use the term “heresy” to refer to divergent schools of thought within that movement, unless they reproduce ideas that the church as a whole has agreed are unorthodox. The problem is that of competing orthodoxies, each with its own grounding in the Bible, its own understanding of the internal dynamics of faith, and its own parameters of adjudication as to what is acceptable and what is not.

The problems that Protestantism faced here were famously set out by John Dryden in his satirical poem Religio Laici (1682). In this poem, whose title is best translated as “A Layperson’s Religion,” Dryden argues that the great Protestant emphasis on the Bible has merely led to the proliferation of heresy, owing to the absence of any universally acknowledged authoritative interpreter. The dangerous idea that underlies Protestantism, for Dryden, not merely leaves it powerless to resist heresy but actually encourages its emergence, through its naïve idea that ordinary Christians will be led, inerrantly and inevitably, to the gentle uplands of orthodoxy as they browse its pages. In a swipe at more radical Protestant approaches, he comments that the spirit gives the “doctoral degree” that qualifies believers as biblical authorities.

The Book thus put in every vulgar hand,

Which each presumed he best could understand,

The common rule was made the common prey,

And at the mercy of the rabble lay. (400–403, 406)

Dryden points out that orthodoxy and heterodoxy are both merely interpretations of the same text, which each regards as its own orthodoxy.⁵⁴ The text of scripture was open to all, but what of the rule by which it was to be interpreted? Protestants agreed on and respected a common authority, but they had no shared notion of meta-authority.

Dryden invites us to imagine an orthodox Protestant, convinced that the Bible clearly teaches the divinity of Christ, yet disturbingly confronted with another Protestant who interprets those same passages purely in terms of Christ’s humanity—the Socinian heresy, a subtle reworking of Arianism.

We hold, and say we prove from Scripture plain,

That Christ is God; the bold Socinian

From the same Scripture urges he’s but man.

Now what appeal can end th’ important suit;

Both parts talk loudly, but the Rule is mute? (311–15)

Scripture did not disclose, clearly and unambiguously, the rule by which it was to be interpreted. And as there was no authority higher than scripture, how could Protestantism discriminate between orthodoxy and heresy? It was a dangerous vulnerability, and many believe that it remains at best incompletely resolved.

This naturally raises a question that merits further exploration. What place is there within Protestantism for “authority” figures who claim to offer definitive, orthodox, or reliable interpretations of the Bible when many feel overwhelmed by “option overload”? We consider this question in what follows.

THE GUARDIANS: AUTHORITY WITHIN PROTESTANTISM

One of the most important findings of modern social psychology concerns the mechanisms by which ideas and values are absorbed and assimilated so that they appear “natural,” despite actually being nothing of the sort. It is widely conceded that the plausibility, legitimacy, and coherence of belief systems are created through social and cultural means.⁵⁵ For religious believers of any persuasion, their faith engenders a sense of what is “natural” or “real” that structures their engagement with and understanding of the world. Yet the transmission and validation of religious ideas depend on a complex process of socialization in which certain institutions, authorities, and networks of relationships shape the way in which people think about and engage the world. It is impossible to understand any religious movement, including Protestantism, without exploring at least some aspects of this socialization and the mechanisms it involves.

Any movement—whether religious, political, or cultural—has both its “standard bearers” and its “scouts.” The standard bearers are those who see themselves as charged with the responsibility of maintaining traditional values and ideas; the scouts are those who are anxious to explore new frontiers and develop new ideas. Both are necessary, in that no movement can retain its core identity by freezing its ideas and values; there is a need for dynamic review in which the creative work of discernment of earlier ages is continued in the future. Paradoxical though it may at first sight appear, to stay the same, a movement must change. So what are the dynamics of this process within Protestantism? Above all, who are the “guardians” of its ideas and values?

We have already noted the fundamentally democratic nature of Protestant theology: it is an enterprise that may be undertaken by any person, on the basis of a publicly available resource—the Bible. There is no question of any one interpretation being “privileged” or of any secret additional sources of divine knowledge that are accessible only to the initiated and upon which salvation ultimately depends. Nor is there any idea of a spiritual elite: no group of believers has the right to impose its views, whether on account of academic qualifications (the German Lutheran writer Martin Kähler described this as “a papacy of the professors”) or institutional seniority. Protestantism is adamant that the officeholders of the church are accountable to the church’s members for the interpretations of the Bible they offer in their preaching and teaching and that they may be challenged and corrected on its basis.

This approach is subversive of the authority of individual preachers and theologians, no matter how venerable, in that it insists that their views must be judged in the light of the Bible. Protestantism ultimately grounds itself in the Bible alone, not in any specific interpretation of the Bible. Perhaps anxious that some might come to regard Martin Luther as an infallible guide to Christian doctrine, Lutherans drafted the “Formula of Concord” (1577), which insists that no interpretation of scripture can be defined as normative. “Other writings, whether of the fathers or more recent theologians, no matter what their names may be, cannot be regarded as possessing equal status to Holy Scripture. All must be considered to be subordinate to it, and to witness to the way in which the teaching of the prophets and apostles was preserved in post-apostolic times and in different parts of the world.”⁵⁶

So how can any Protestant claim to speak with “authority” when Protestantism subverts that claim by insisting that all Christians are priests and that no case can be made for the present existence or future emergence of any kind of “spiritual elite” who are placed above others? The Protestant understanding of the place of the Bible in the Christian life is utterly and irreconcilably opposed to placing any human figure, agency, or institution above it. This would seem to lead to the conclusion that Protestantism is a democratic faith: because the views of every believer are of equal value, it is impossible for authority figures to emerge.

The logic may be sound, but the reality is somewhat different. In practice, authority figures play an important role in Protestantism. The denominations in which the “priesthood of all believers” is most vigorously upheld as a matter of principle, such as the “Open Brethren,” tend to lie outside the mainstream of Protestantism. The Open Brethren movement does not recognize an ordained ministry, although the New Testament offices of elder and deacon are retained. “Gifted brothers” and “gifted sisters” play an important role in the leadership of these communities, but these persons are not understood to be ordained. Yet even in such a denomination, certain figures emerge and come to be regarded as authoritative by others.⁵⁷

In the next section, we first of all consider who these authority figures are, and second, how they emerge.

INSTRUMENTS OF AUTHORITY: CREEDS AND CONFESSIONS

Protestantism regards itself as Christian and thus accepts the two great creeds of the Christian church—the Apostles’ Creed, which dates from the eighth century in its final form, and the fourth-century Nicene Creed. These creeds, which are both minimalist, set out fundamental landmarks for Christian belief—such as the “two natures” of Jesus Christ—while merely affirming other areas of faith or leaving them altogether undefined. For example, the creeds set out no doctrine of the church or sacraments.

While regarding such creeds as fundamental, each Protestant grouping has its own statement of belief—often referred to as a “confession of faith”—that supplements the brief statements of the creeds and sets out a precise statement of that group. Such confessions, many of which were drawn up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, often include both affirmative and negative elements: they set out the beliefs of the group while criticizing those of other groups that the group regards as unacceptable. The Thirty-nine Articles of Faith, set out by the Church of England in 1572, spells out the distinctive beliefs of Anglicanism while criticizing Catholics and Anabaptists on a number of points.

So what is the status of these confessions? Protestantism regards the Bible as being of supreme authority and understands the creeds to be reliable, communal statements of faith that are subordinate to the Bible. The creeds set out the beliefs of Christianity; confessions set out the distinctive beliefs of a specific form of Protestant Christianity. In terms of a hierarchy of authority, the situation can therefore be represented as follows: Bible ? creeds ? confessions.

The confessions are regarded as defining the shape of the form of Protestantism that created them. They serve as important historical benchmarks and theological points of reference for determining whether a given belief is typical of, or acceptable to, that form of Protestantism. Whereas all Protestants regard the Bible and creeds as authoritative, they do not extend such recognition to the confessions of other Protestants. Thus, Lutherans do not regard the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles, nor Anglicans the Lutheran Augsburg Confession, as having any particular authority within their own community.

Whereas Lutherans regard only one confessional document—the Augsburg Confession (1530)—as having particular significance, most other denominations, such as the Baptists and Methodists, define themselves with reference to a multiplicity of confessions. The Reformed churches have produced more confessions of faith than most churches. Each region that adopted a form of Calvinism expressed its fundamental themes in ways adapted to its own situation, often with subtle theological variations. Some were written by single authors, others by committees.⁵⁸ The most important such regional Reformed confessions are the following:

Although several of these confessions had their origins in regional Reformed churches, they were so well regarded that they began to be used elsewhere. The Second Helvetic Confession, for example, was widely used in many parts of Germany. The Westminster Confession of Faith, drawn up by the assembly of Puritan divines during the period of the Commonwealth, found wide acceptance in Presbyterian circles in North America and throughout the English-speaking Protestant world.

As Karl Barth rightly observes, these confessions were provisional, spontaneous, and practical documents that came into being as a direct response to a challenge of the moment.⁵⁹ They were the product of local Christian communities that took the view that confessions of faith were far from having absolute authority and were subject to review and revision by succeeding generations. For Pierre Maury, confessions “are given by the Holy Spirit out of the pressure of a living, historical situation” that raises certain questions that demand answers. In 1966 the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declared that it “could not treat as absolute any of the structures and confessions which we inherit,” but that it must be prepared to “go wherever the Spirit leads, even if it be through that death that leads to new life.”

As the original confessions recede into the past, some Protestant denominations have found themselves debating their continuing role in a significantly changed social and cultural environment. The Church of England, for example, has seen sustained internal debate since about 1850 over whether the Thirty-nine Articles should continue to have a significant role in determining and communicating Anglican identity.⁶⁰

PERSONS OF INFLUENCE: THEOLOGIANS AND PREACHERS

Protestantism has been shaped to no small extent by individuals who rose to prominence and influence and became accepted and recognized as leading interpreters of its traditions. In the formative phase of Protestantism, theologians such as Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, Philip Melanchthon, John Calvin, Theodore Beza, Thomas Cranmer, Balthasar Hübmaier, and Menno Simons played leading roles in shaping and articulating the ideas of the emergent Protestant groupings. The rise of new forms of Protestantism in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries brought Puritan writers such as John Owen, Richard Baxter, and Jonathan Edwards to prominence, alongside Pietist thinkers such as John Wesley.

Since the eighteenth century, the increasing professionalization of academic theology has opened up a widening gulf between academic theology, as taught in a university context, and a theology oriented toward the mission and ministry of the church. More recent Protestant theologians to have exercised significant influence within Protestantism as a whole have included F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Jürgen Moltmann.

Yet it is important to appreciate that Protestants are stimulated and guided in their reflections about faith by writers who are not traditional theologians. The centrality of the Bible for Protestants has given particular prominence to the biblical commentator. One of the most widely revered commentators in recent Protestant history was William Barclay (1907–78), whose commentaries were hugely popular and influential in both conservative and liberal Protestant circles. Barclay was professor of New Testament at the University of Glasgow and a minister of the Church of Scotland. Although his academic credentials were impeccable, his reputation rested on his ability to communicate and explain—qualities that endeared him to millions of readers.⁶¹ The seventeen volumes of his “Daily Study Bible” became an authoritative guide to the New Testament for many.

Yet Protestantism’s most influential authority figures have been the preachers. For Protestantism, the sermon is a means for opening up the biblical text and exploring its rich intellectual landscape in order to make connections with issues of spirituality and ethics. As a result, preachers have played a critically important role in shaping Protestantism’s sense of identity and advancing its theological, social, ethical, and political agendas. An excellent example is provided by the great Victorian Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon, who established himself as the foremost pulpit orator of his age.

At the age of twenty, Spurgeon became pastor of New Park Street Church, one of London’s most important Baptist churches. As his reputation as a preacher grew, the expanding congregation was forced to move to increasingly larger premises, before moving permanently to the newly constructed Metropolitan Tabernacle in 1861. Widely distributed in pamphlets and books, Spurgeon’s sermons were of huge importance in shaping Baptist identity in the nineteenth century. Though many of his admirers, especially in North America, were puzzled by his love of cigars, Spurgeon’s reputation and influence remained enormous for a generation after his death, consolidated to no small extent by the founding of Spurgeon’s College, London, designed to mold future preachers after his likeness.

How did these persons come to have such influence over Protestantism? How did they rise to such positions of prominence? These individuals were not imposed upon Protestantism; nobody had to go to hear Spurgeon preach, or read the commentaries of William Barclay. They developed their influence partly through being excellent communicators, but more fundamentally through being trusted and respected by their audiences, who recommended them to their friends by word of mouth.

Protestantism’s fundamentally democratic nature was easily translated into an essentially consumerist approach to matters of theology, spiritual direction, and pastoral care: individual Protestants followed the teachings of those whom they believed were worthy of trust and respect. The figures in question—Spurgeon, Barclay, and countless others too numerous to list—often had surprisingly little authority within their own denominations. Their influence, however, was all the more powerful because it was seen as personal, not institutional. Personal authority carried with it the capacity to transcend denominational and sectarian boundaries. Spurgeon was read and admired by many who were not Baptists, just as Barclay was loved and respected by many who were not Presbyterians.

The best theoretical model to account for this development—which remains fundamental to Protestantism—is Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the “organic intellectual.”⁶² Although a Marxist, Gramsci found the Protestant idea of the “priesthood of all believers” to be a powerful conceptual foundation for mobilizing political activism. Gramsci drew a sharp distinction between an “organic intellectual” and a “traditional intellectual,” the latter generally being someone who is imposed upon people by an external authority and is seen to be linked with the preservation of the interests of that authority—for example, bishops in the Catholic church. In marked contrast, the “organic intellectual” is one whose authority emerges from within the community as a consequence of the growing respect and trust in which he or she is held. The community comes to accept this individual as its representative and spokes-person. The organic intellectual is not imposed upon the community; rather, having discerned that person’s merits, people choose to submit to his or her authority. This point is of fundamental importance in understanding the emergence of some highly influential personal ministries that have reshaped Protestantism during the twentieth century.

It would be impossible, and not a little irresponsible, to discuss the Protestant approach to authority without noting the considerable dangers that it creates. In his essay “The Sociology of Charismatic Authority,” Max Weber noted that when traditional power structures seem to be in decline or confusion, people are disposed to seek out authority elsewhere.⁶³ When society seems confused about its moral values, or traditional academic institutions seem muddled over questions of truth, people look for—and find—those who speak with a clear voice and offer crisp, neat, and authoritative solutions. Protestant preaching of the form we have noted in this section owes some of its power to the force of its conviction—that is, perhaps it is not so much the views held by the preacher, or the doctrines preached, but the conviction and authority with which they are held and preached. This sort of preaching is clearly open to abuse, running the risk of becoming manipulative and exploitative.⁶⁴

The dangers of such a Protestant personality cult were explored by Sinclair Lewis in his famous novel Elmer Gantry.⁶⁵ The central figure of the novel is an evangelical preacher whose highly profiled public posture of self-righteousness and virtue masks an inner life of deception and fraud. Lewis’s novel spawned the popular image of TV evangelists that has become a cultural cliché of our time. Protestantism as a whole is vulnerable at this point, needing to ensure accountability on the part of its authority figures so that such influence is always exercised responsibly and carefully.

Yet Protestantism already possesses the resources it needs to deal with this difficulty, which is bound to arise from time to time given Protestantism’s loose and fluid authority structures. The problems really start to arise when such “guardians” see themselves as the masters, rather than the servants, of the people of God and come to regard themselves as divinely appointed judges in matters of doctrine and morality. The doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers” reaffirms the central place of the community of believers, extended over time and space, who are guided by both scripture and the Holy Spirit and serve as a theological jury to whom all judges are ultimately subordinate.

This theme is found in the writings of most major Protestant writers but was set out with particular clarity in a lecture given in Paris on April 14, 1934, by the great Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth. Barth stressed the importance of theology in safeguarding the vision and identity of the church. Positive, yet critical, theology serves the church and keeps it faithful to its calling. And who is authorized to “do” theology? Barth had no hesitation in reaffirming the great Protestant theme of the democratization of faith:

Theology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study for pastors. Fortunately, there have repeatedly been congregation members, and often whole congregations, who have pursued theology energetically while their pastors were theological infants or barbarians. Theology is a matter for the Church.⁶⁶

NETWORKS: THE POWER OF ALIGNMENT AND ASSOCIATION

One of the most important tools for shaping Protestant identity emerged in England and America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the voluntary society. We have already noted its significance in developing a mission agenda. This same mechanism came to be of major importance in shaping Protestant identity. A group of like-minded individuals would come together to promote a shared concern or interest—for example, to encourage the spread of the gospel in Oceania, to promote the King James Bible at a time when other translations were gaining the upper hand, or to ensure that the ideas of premillennialism were more widely understood. These often became pressure groups that lobbied churches and seminaries in order to persuade them to change their policies on certain issues. They gathered support from like-minded individuals and, as a result, were able to exercise greater influence.

The pattern is familiar from many areas of life, particularly the political sphere. Yet the voluntary society has played a particularly significant role in the shaping of Protestantism in that this form of Christianity has been particularly supportive of entrepreneurialism. An excellent example is provided by the Dallas Theological Seminary, which was founded in 1924 as the Evangelical Theological College by the Presbyterian Bible teacher Lewis Chafer (1871–1952). Chafer’s objective was to establish an institution that would promote dispensationalism—a specific way of interpreting the Bible—thus ensuring a supply of pastors who would preach this approach.

There can be no doubting the success of that vision, given the subsequent growth of the Dallas Theological Seminary and the impact of its alumni. The important point to appreciate is that the same fundamental pattern can be seen throughout Protestant history since about 1800. There has been a surge of organizations, networks, seminaries, and other institutions dedicated to advancing a particular emphasis or doctrine within Protestantism. At times, critical observers have expressed concerns about these developments, suggesting that they are about naked political power. Yet it is an important reality of Protestant life that needs to be understood—without necessarily being endorsed—if the development of the movement is to be understood.

In this chapter, we have explored how Protestantism has understood its relationship with the Bible and how this affects its life and thought. Yet we have only begun to explore the many questions raised by this symbiotic relationship of people and book, faith and text. In the next chapter, we explore the impact of the Protestant emphasis on the Bible on its worship and preaching.

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