The Protestant's Dilemma (9 page)

Let us consider another passage in 1 John: “As for you, the anointing that you received from him remains in you, so that you do not need anyone to teach you. But his anointing teaches you about everything and is true and not false” (1 John 2:27).

The simplest interpretation of this passage would be that we Christians do not need anyone to teach us, because we received the anointing from the Holy Spirit, who will teach us all we need to know. A logical deduction from this passage, combined with the ones
³⁹
that tell us we are all priests, is that we do not need a ministerial priesthood and perhaps no type of pastor at all.

Some Quaker communities do indeed point to this passage as proof that we don’t need
any
human authorities or teachers, claiming that the Holy Spirit teaches us directly. Quakers meet in services with no leader whatsoever, and only when one of the members is “moved by the Spirit” does he get up and speak a word to the others. Most Protestants do not go to that extreme and are willing to accept human authorities, at least so long as they are properly elected or display an agreeable level of spiritual knowledge. But they will still use this passage to claim for themselves a sort of “sanctified intuition,”
⁴⁰
whereby their own thoughts or ideas are all of the Holy Spirit and even superior to their leaders’. Either way, the idea that we don’t need anyone to teach us seems confusing, since other passages
⁴¹
in the New Testament commend us to learn from wiser elders.

When confronted with such a difficult passage, Protestants often recommend that we “use Scripture to interpret Scripture,” promising that unclear or seemingly contradictory verses will be made clear or resolved by looking to other verses. This is a sensible suggestion, and indeed there are times when one passage clearly shines light on another. Perhaps this is the key to interpreting difficult biblical passages?

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

The Bible was not intended to be studied in isolation from the Apostolic Tradition and apart from the teaching authority of Christ’s Church.

We just looked at a few passages that seem contradictory or unclear. (Many more could be produced easily, passages that have led to differences within Protestantism on baptism, the Eucharist, women’s ordination, church structure and governance, justification, and even the Trinity.) We looked at ways that some Protestants try to resolve them. How do Catholics do it?

Regarding the first two verses, on whether Christians continue to sin or not, Catholics draw a distinction between two degrees of sin: mortal and venial.
⁴²
Mortal sin is so grave that the Christian loses the divine life of God in his soul and thus falls from a state of sanctifying grace, putting him in peril of eternal damnation. Venial sin is of a lesser degree and does not cause the Christian to lose sanctifying grace. With this distinction, it is possible to understand John’s words as meaning that no Christian who remains in Jesus continues to sin
mortally
, because to do so is to reject God in a drastic way, signaling his refusal to abide in Christ. Protestants reject that notion, believing all sin is the same, and so they must interpret the passage differently—ironically, for those professing
sola scriptura,
by imposing on it extrabiblical distinctions.

What about 1 John 2:27? Do we need anyone other than God to teach us? Catholics see this verse as needing to be understood in the context of the Church, of which John was a prominent leader. The Church of Christ is the only teacher they need—they do not need to be taught by the wicked men referenced in the previous verses, which is what John was possibly alluding to in saying they do not need teachers.

Even 1 John, which is a short and relatively uncomplicated epistle, contains many passages where the correct interpretations are not obviously clear. Throughout all of Scripture there are myriad others.

Perhaps, as some Protestants say, Scripture interprets Scripture. Maybe those who incorrectly interpret passages like those we saw above are simply failing to apply the other passages that reveal their clear meaning.

Scripture does interpret Scripture—insofar as God’s revealed truth is coherent. However, using this idea as a rule for interpreting the Bible just pushes the question of interpretation back to those other verses. And it’s further complicated by the question of which verses to use to interpret the problematic one. With the New Testament alone containing thousands of verses, how do we know which ones to choose? The Bible doesn’t provide us with a cross-referenced index. And what if we interpret those other verses wrongly in the first place? Then we are left in the sad state of using a false interpretation to interpret another verse, which can only lead to further error.

One Protestant friend of mine belongs to a community called the Plymouth Brethren. The Brethren are dispensationalists, believing that tremendous miracles, tongues, and prophecies ceased at the end of the Apostolic Age, since the books of the New Testament had all been written by that point. They base this belief on Paul’s brief statement that “as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease” (1 Cor. 13:8). The majority of other Protestant denominations interpret these verses to say that these gifts will end when Christ returns in glory, not that they ended when the last apostle died. But the Brethren are adamant about their interpretation of this passage, and it is one of their primary differentiating characteristics. Who is right? We can’t ask Paul what he meant, and either interpretation could fit the text.

The founder of the Brethren, failing to see the existence of charismatic gifts, went with his gut feeling that they must have ceased and found a verse that seemed to support his instinct. And so one single verse, given a novel interpretation by someone 1,800 years after Christ, caused a further Protestant splintering and produced another new denomination.

Evangelical pastor and professor John Armstrong expressed his perplexity at the seemingly endless differences within Evangelical communities, all of which are reading the same Bible and earnestly seeking the guidance of the same Spirit:

The bigger problem was that even evangelical Protestants didn’t agree with one another . . . about many important doctrines: our view of the inspiration of Scripture; how we define faith, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper; church order; the doctrine of the future; the gifts of the Holy Spirit; the doctrine of the human will; and the nature of how God’s grace works in salvation. The more I studied these internal evangelical debates, the longer the list grew. Something was wrong . . . but I still couldn’t see exactly what it was.
⁴³

The problem is with the way Protestants go about trying to know divine truth. God didn’t give us the Bible alone to be subjectively interpreted by every individual Christian based on his own education, reading comprehension, interests, personality, and transitory moods. Such a scheme would make each Christian his own sole authority, rather than the Church Christ founded and guided. But sadly—and unintentionally—that is where Protestantism’s principles leave us.

THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA

If Protestantism is true,
then difficult parts of Scripture should be understandable through careful study, prayerful consideration, and application of other parts of Scripture that are ostensibly clearer. Yet when faithful members of Protestant communities study hard, prayerfully seek God’s illumination, and diligently apply other parts of Scripture, they still arrive at different interpretations—often leading to the founding of a new community or denomination. For a Protestant,
sola scriptura
makes him, and not the Bible, the final authority.

13: INTERPRETIVE AUTHORITY

IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,

All we have is fallible opinions about infallible books.

At the root of the endemic divisions within Protestantism lies the absence (and by definition, the impossibility) of an
interpretive authority
for Scripture above that of the individual Christian. Protestants cannot accept that any person or group has this power, because the Bible itself has to be the ultimate authority. Ideally, Protestants would be united in their interpretation of the Bible; but as we have seen, from the beginning of Protestantism this has not been the case. This lack of unity leads inevitably to the principle of private judgment, which makes each believer the final interpreter of Scripture. Just as inevitably, each believer’s interpretation will be at least partly wrong, because no believer is infallible.

A Catch-22

A valid question to ask a Protestant is: How do you know that your interpretation of the Bible is correct, against the (perhaps contradictory) interpretation of any other Protestant? The short answer is, he doesn’t know for sure. And he would probably consider it dangerously cult-like to claim otherwise. But why would the Holy Spirit guide different Christians to different interpretations?

Recall that Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli taught conflicting interpretations of the Bible with regard to the Lord’s Supper and how, exactly, Christ was “present” in the Eucharist. Luther believed that Christ was truly present in the Eucharist, while Zwingli thought his presence was figurative. Anglican scholar Alister McGrath analyzes this situation and the problem it poses for Protestantism:

It will be obvious that these represent totally different readings of the same text. Luther’s interpretation was much more traditional, Zwingli’s more radical. Which was right? And which was Protestant? We see here the fundamental difficulty that the Reformation faced: the absence of any authoritative interpreter of Scripture that could give rulings on contested matters of biblical interpretation. The question was not simply whether Luther or Zwingli was right: it was whether the emerging Protestant movement possessed the means to resolve such questions of biblical interpretation. If the Bible had ultimate authority, who had the right to interpret the Bible? This was no idle question, and it lay at the heart of Protestantism’s complex relationship with its core text. For this question to be answered, an authoritative rule or principle had to be proposed that stood above scripture—the very idea of which was ultimately anathema to Protestantism. The three leading Reformers—Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin—all recognized the importance of the question; significantly, each offered a different answer.
⁴⁴

We see from McGrath’s history of the Reformation that, due to the disjointed reform movements independently springing up in different countries in the 1520s, Protestantism started out in disunity, lacking an authority that could decide whose biblical interpretation was the correct one. Not only that, but the very principles of the Protestantism made it impossible to formulate a rule that could resolve this conundrum.

The solution proposed by most Protestants is that sin or human depravity causes even Spirit-guided Christians to misunderstand God’s Word. But, as we have seen, they argue that since most Protestants have come to generally similar beliefs on most important issues, the Holy Spirit has managed to create a basic consensus amid the confusion. Imagine many arrows being shot at a target. Though the archers may not have perfect aim, the Spirit corrects their shots in mid-flight and they mostly cluster around the target. We’re resigned to personal interpretation, and that interpretation will be fallible, but God makes sure that together we get the big questions right in the end.

BECAUSE CATHOLICISM IS TRUE,

God wanted all Christians to know saving truth, so he has infallibly guided the Church in its teachings on faith and morals.

Not all Protestants reject the idea of an interpretive authority. Some look at the facts and recognize that it’s a practical necessity. Keith Mathison, a Reformed Protestant author who penned the influential book
The Shape of Sola Scriptura
, offers a frank insight on this subject:

All appeals to Scripture are appeals to interpretations of Scripture. The only real question is: whose interpretation? People with differing interpretations of Scripture cannot set a Bible on a table and ask it to resolve their differences. In order for the Scripture to function as an authority, it must be read and interpreted by someone.
⁴⁵

Indeed, Scripture cannot be asked questions. We can’t put the Bible on the witness stand and tell it to give us the whole truth and nothing but. In Protestantism, who is that “someone” who reads and interprets the Bible with authority? Mathison says it’s “the Church.” And “the Church” is found wherever the gospel is accurately proclaimed. But Protestants determine the meaning of the gospel through their own (fallible) personal interpretation of Scripture, creating a circular argument: The Church has authority over the individual to interpret Scripture, and you find the Church by first finding the gospel, but you find the gospel through your individual interpretation of Scripture.
⁴⁶
And since all Protestants concede the fallibility of their interpretations, the whole scheme is built on thin air and must come crashing down.