I’d like to follow up on the discussion of how a postmodern theology might deal with the “sola scriptura” concept. I’ve mentioned Grenz and Franke’s Beyond Foundationalism as one source of vigorous discussion about the authority of scripture in the context of postmodern theology. To follow up on that reference, I’ll try to summarize the argument in Chapter 3 of that book, titled “Scripture: Theology’s ‘Norming Norm'”. This post will contain some brief thoughts, and hopefully I’ll be able to flesh out some more details in later posts. (In the interests of brevity, I’m not giving page cites, but the chapter is only about 30 pages long.)
Grenz and Franke’s thesis, as I understand it, is that postmodern concepts of how communities read and interact with texts can be useful in a protestant understanding of revelation. They take as one of their starting points Article 1.10 of the Westminster Confession of Faith:
“The Supreme Judge, by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of counsels, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spirits, are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other than the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scipture.”
They note that
“[t]he declaration that the Spirit speaking in or through scripture is our final authority means that Christian belief and practice cannot be deterined merely by appeal to either the exegesis of scripture carried out apart form the life of the believer and the believing community or to any supposedly private (or corporate) “word from the Spirit” that stands in contradiction to biblical exegesis.”
This means that the Biblical text is not merely a repository of propositional truths. Instead, “the Spirit speaks to succeeding generations of Christians through the text. Traditionally, this ongoing divine work has been known as ‘illumination'”.
The Christian tradition as well as the Christian community, then, are important aspects of how the text is understood and applied in any context. The text doesn’t exist only in the foundationalist sense of an independent entity waiting to be discovered. In real ways, the text is given meaning as the Spirit works within the life of the Church.
The question Matt asked in one of his comments to my prior post is a good one: if all postmodern theology is seeking to do is understand the text, why not stick with the time-tested “sola scriptura” formulation? For me at least, that isn’t the right question. It’s not, at least for me, that there’s any desire to jettison the concept of “sola sciptura.” Rather, it seems that the concept, and the related concepts of “inerrancy” and “verbal inspiration,” have become encysted against the ongoing work of the Spirit. In some ways (being myself not a Charismatic), I see some of these “pomo” theological ideas as a bridge between the crusty doctrinalism of propositional traditions and the unbounded emotionalism of charismatic and pentecostal traditions. In short, at least to some extent, I see it as a useful way of obtaining better balance.
3 replies on “Postmodern Theology and Sola Scriptura”
But doesn’t the Scripture itself make rather propositional statements about truth?
The statement you quote above affirms that “Christian belief and practice cannot be determined merely by appeal …to any supposedly private (or corporate) “word from the Spirit” that stands in contradiction to biblical exegesis.” If the Bible makes a clear propositional statement about something, it seems to me hard to reject that that statement is in fact true as a propositional statement.
David, thanks for the comments. I agree with you. I certainly don’t think propositional statements should be abandoned, nor I do the authors of Beyond Foundationalism as far as I can tell.
These kinds of propositions, however, are second-order statements; they aren’t scripture themselves (a proposition to which I’m sure most evangelicals would give at least lip service). The question is the proper place of propositional statements in relation to the scriptural text and the community to which the text gives life.
It seems that we evangelicals sometimes make the propositions themselves functionally equivalent to the inspired text. So, we spend lots of time arguing about things like the precise meaning of “inerrancy,” trying to tease out a precisely tuned statement on predestination and free will, and other such exercises in systematic theology, but in the process we perhaps sometimes miss what the Spirit is saying to the community about more fundamental questions concerning our relationships to each other and to the world.
I guess there are some in the “emerging” church movement who would want to abandon propositional truth altogether. I’m not in that camp. Really, I can’t even claim to be in the “movement” — I’m just kind of exploring it right now.
Thanks for clarifying.
I’m well aware there are many who want to abandon the idea of propositional truth altogether. I’m glad to hear you’re not in that camp, as I think it’s rather ludicrous. Paul commends the Bereans for testing his teaching against the Scripture, suggesting we can determine whether a proposition is or is not true by testing it against what Scripture says.