[soc.religion.christian] The three-legged stool

hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (06/28/89)

I've been thinking about the three-legged stool.  I'm sympathetic with
what I see as the goal of Anglican theory, namely to avoid extremes of
both Protestant and Catholic interpretation.  But the analogy doesn't
quite do it for me.  I have two problems.  First, it implies more
parallelism between Scripture, tradition, and reason than I see.
Rather than three legs, I see them as maybe a leg, an arm, and a seat.
(No, I'm not going to say which is which.) Second, I think maybe there
should be a fourth: the Holy Spirit.  Expanding on this a bit: I agree
that Scripture, tradition, and reason all have a part to play.
However of these, I see only Scripture as being a real source of
revelation.  I go back to the concept of Christianity as a revealed
religion.  It is based on God's interventions in history.  The Bible
is an account of those events and of the teachings that surrounded
them.  (I'm thinking mostly of the NT.  The OT follows this paradigm
to some extent, but there is perhaps a wider variety of literature
there.) Tradition and reason are for me not independent sources of
revelation, but means used to appropriate what we see in the Bible.
There's no way to inject the Bible directly into my brain.  I have to
use my understanding -- both deductive and intuitive.  So reason is
involved in appropriating the revelation that is present in the Bible.
So is tradition, though in a different way.  Under tradition I would
include both scholarly investigations and other results that come out
of the life of the church.  These provide a check on my own reason:
both informing it and allowing me to correct it.  So my model is that
I gain knowledge of Christ from the revelation reported in the Bible,
which I appropriate using my reason, with the aid of tradition.  To
this formula I must insist on adding one more qualifier: under the
guidance of the Holy Spirit.  That is because I think the purpose of
Scripture is at least as much existential as intellectual.  That is,
we use it not just to learn about God, but to encounter him.  The
Reformers emphasized that Scripture doesn't fulfill its role unless it
is read in faith under the influence of the Spirit.

1) The canon.  I think the most serious attack on the primacy of
Scripture is the argument that the authority of Scripture basically
comes from the Church because the Church decided what books were to be
considered Scripture.  My answer to that is something that many
conservative Protestants may not be not happy with.  It is that I see
the basic authority as being not the book in itself but what we
encounter in it, both intellectually and experientially.  This
includes both events, such as Christ's life, death and resurrection,
and teachings sent directly by God, including God's message revealed
to the prophets and Jesus' teachings.  To me the Bible is important
because it gives us access to those events and teachings.  Indeed in
the first Cent, tradition would have been a real source of such an
encounter.  When first or second generation Christians were around,
hearing about Jesus from them would have been at least as good as
hearing about him through a book.  But we are now many generations
away, and the written material is our only primary source.  I am
frankly not all that concerned about deciding which books are in the
Bible.  As far as I can tell, the books that were in dispute would not
have affected our picture of the events in the Bible noticably one way
or the other.  If Jude and II Peter hadn't made it, does anybody
seriously think this would seriously affect the Christian faith?  As
most readers here know, I don't believe in Biblical inerrancy.  I
believe that the Gospels are competent history, judged by 1st Cent
categories of historical accuracy.  But I still believe they should be
evaluated by the same criteria we would evaluate any other historical
reports.  This means that I don't have to draw quite the clear, black
and white line that some do between what is and what isn't Scripture.
On the other hand, I have looked at a reasonable sample of the
documents that aren't in Scripture, and I certainly haven't seen
anything that looks like it should be in the NT.  About the OT
apocrypha I just don't see a big deal.  I see it as similar to Jude.
There are advantages each way.  But it's hard to see that much
damage is done whether it is included or excluded.  Certainly the
heart of the revelation to Israel is elsewhere.

2) Does Scripture interpret itself?  The Catholic claim is that
Scripture needs interpretation, and that the Church is the authorized
interpreter.  Protestant claims are that Scripture interprets itself,
when read prayerfully through the Holy Spirit.  Thus an authoritative
interpreter is not needed.  I'm still not sure whether I think the
Reformers were being overly optimistic here.  There is one sense in
which I am convinced they are right.  The Bible is a powerful book.  I
believe that anyone who prayerfully reads it will be confronted by the
Gospel and by God's power to save them.  They may come away with naive
views about a number of subjects, but the basic themes needed for
salvation are quite clear.  I think it's very important to preserve
this concept, and to encourage people to read it themselves and react
to it directly.  The question is how far to push that.  Does sola
scriptura mean that everybody should be able to read the Bible, and
regardless of their education and other background they'll all come
away with the same interpretation of everything in it?  I can't
believe that's what was meant.  There is -- and even in the 16th Cent
was -- too much evidence to the contrary.  I don't think sola
scriptura is about not needing assistance.  Rather it's about
encouraging people to grapple with Scripture directly.  There's no
problem with the Church providing education, and help in understanding
the Bible.  As long as each person still encounters the Bible for
himself, help is always appreciated.  It is when the Church tries to
take the place of that encounter, or dictates its results, that we
have problems.  There is a cost to this.  Perhaps the Reformers didn't
realize what the cost was, since the experiment was new to them.  But
now we know.  If we give up the concept of authoritative
interpretation, we are going to have disorder.  People are going to
disagree.  I believe this is a cost that is worth paying.  I would
rather have lots of groups who have encountered God in the Scripture
and who believe they are being led by the Spirit in different
directions than a group who all hold correct views but have given up
the direct encounter.  I'm inclined to think that sola scriptura
should be taken more as an existential statement than an intellectual
one.  It's not that people don't need help in an intellectual sense to
understand it, but that in their faith there should be nothing between
them and the Scripture. 

mls@cbnewsm.att.com (michael.l.siemon) (07/01/89)

In article <Jun.28.05.03.51.1989.23408@athos.rutgers.edu>, hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu writes:
> 
> I've been thinking about the three-legged stool.  I'm sympathetic with
> what I see as the goal of Anglican theory, namely to avoid extremes of
> both Protestant and Catholic interpretation.

I'd say that is more a result, or a disposition of Anglicans, and not a goal
as such.  It's true that we have a certain skepticism about any extreme view.

> Rather than three legs, I see them as maybe a leg, an arm, and a seat.
> (No, I'm not going to say which is which.) Second, I think maybe there
> should be a fourth: the Holy Spirit.

Um...  The idea is that the Spirit breathes through all three, that they are
in fact indistinguishable except in theory.  Scripture simply cannot be read  
without tradition (language and its history of usage are inherently a matter
of tradition) and reason (which is to say, the evaluation of how scripture is
to be taken in a present situation.)  Leaving it at this sounds like _sola
scriptura_ in drag; you should also see symmetrical points about the others --
reason is empty logic chopping (or other intellectual operations) when it does
not address the issues forced on us by tradition and when it operates without
the light of scripture.  I leave it to the reader to make the parallel point
about tradition.

> However of these, I see only Scripture as being a real source of
> revelation.  I go back to the concept of Christianity as a revealed
> religion.  It is based on God's interventions in history.  The Bible
> is an account of those events and of the teachings that surrounded them.

But the events are inherently communal events.  Moses and the Israelites enter
a covenant with JHWH; the prophets passionately confront the Israel of their
day.  Jesus writes no book, but leaves behind him a community of disciples.
Out of the Israelite revelation we have a deposit of scripture, as again we
do from Jesus' actions as the community responds to him.  It seems to me to
be paradoxical to say that once the community has written some part of its
experience down, we can dismiss any other part of its witness.  You go on
to address this below as a matter of "primary source" -- but historians will
use secondary sources when the primary ones don't speak to their concerns.

Scripture is normative in that it is a *fixed* repository that tradition and
reason must acknowledge to derive from the witness of the community that still
had the apostles as living witness.  Since everything human is changeable,
we constantly revert to this fixed witness as a rein on excesses of reason
(or of tradition.)  But *to the extent that we can trust them* the witness
in the Spirit by the community of the Church to what derives from that apos-
tolic community has the *same* status as scripture.  The tragedy of the
Reformation is that half of Europe found that it could *not* trust this
witness on many important points.  Once the trust is broken, there is no
chance at all that it can be repaired -- the Church's faith in apostolic
succession has become a sacramental rather than a practical trust.

> the basic authority as being not the book in itself but what we
> encounter in it, both intellectually and experientially.

But do we not encounter Christ directly in His Body?  And do not the heavens
proclaim the Majesty of God?  Heavy rhetoric aside, I am really not certain
what claim you are making for Scripture that is not equally valid for the
Church itself, as community -- i.e. as tradition.  I agree that reason is the
most useless (for spiritual purposes) of the three legs in isolation; only in
the revealed witness of scripture and church do we have any control on the
self-indulgence of human intellect.

>             As long as each person still encounters the Bible for
> himself, help is always appreciated.

I dunno about that.  I think Charley's point was quite sound -- the net is
witness to lots of people reading the Bible in what amounts to isolation, and
coming up with monstrosities.  (Some readers here may think that I am guilty
of that same charge in some cases :-)  If we could imagine a hypothetical
point midway between Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed readings (and in the
academic realm, I think such a point represents the majority of scholarship)
it seems to me that the more isolated an interpretation is from these specific
communities, the more questionable it is -- on the grounds of tradition and
reason -- as departure from the center of the revelation in Scripture.  And
the further away from that center, the less willing people are to consider
proffered help that isn't already filtered through an isolated understanding. 

>					It is when the Church tries to
> take the place of that encounter, or dictates its results, that we
> have problems.  There is a cost to this.  Perhaps the Reformers didn't
> realize what the cost was, since the experiment was new to them.  But
> now we know.  If we give up the concept of authoritative
> interpretation, we are going to have disorder.  People are going to
> disagree.  I believe this is a cost that is worth paying.  I would
> rather have lots of groups who have encountered God in the Scripture
> and who believe they are being led by the Spirit in different
> directions than a group who all hold correct views but have given up
> the direct encounter.

Thus far I agree ...

>			I'm inclined to think that sola scriptura
> should be taken more as an existential statement than an intellectual
> one.  It's not that people don't need help in an intellectual sense to
> understand it, but that in their faith there should be nothing between
> them and the Scripture. 

But here I'm not sure I really understand what you are getting at.  It will
defeat the purpose of your existential encounter if one comes to Scripture
with a preformed agenda, or a guide that lays out all the answers (with the
implicit presumption that it knows all the questions!)  The Church *can* get
in the way there, as can secular or other-religious programs; but everyone
approaches Scripture already guided by *some* tradition, at the very least
the tradition that teaches whatever language conveys the translations.  It's
ultimately a question of WHICH tradition, and what critical tools of reason,
we will bring with us to this existential encounter with the Spirit.  And in
default of a better answer (I did note the breach in trust that wounds this)
it would seem that a tradition continuous with the community that wrote the
books is highly desireable.  Failing that, I still see a responsibility to
read *externally to* but with as much understanding as possible of that base
tradition.
-- 
Michael L. Siemon			Psalm 82:6:  "I say, 'You are gods,
contracted to AT&T Bell Laboratories	sons of the Most High, all of you;
att!mhuxu!mls				nevertheless, you shall die like men,
standard disclaimer			and fall like any prince.'"

mangoe@mimsy.umd.edu (Charley Wingate) (07/01/89)

Our Fearless Moderator writes:

>I've been thinking about the three-legged stool. [....]  But the analogy
>doesn't quite do it for me.  I have two problems.  First, it implies more
>parallelism between Scripture, tradition, and reason than I see.

I don't think that this is intentional beyond the notion of each as
"essential".  THe idea is that if you try to go without one of the legs, the
stool (representing theological "truth", whatever that is) does not stand.

>Second, I think maybe there should be a fourth: the Holy Spirit.

I would think of It as more like the floor.  :-)  Seriously, I'm not really
sure why the notion doesn't mention the Spirit.  I think I might say two
things here.  First, my comment about the floor; if the Spirit doesn't
uphold *any* of the legs, the stool falls.  Protestantism has tended to
emphasis the Spirit in Scripture explicitly, in Reason implicitly, and in
tradition not at all.  But if Scripture is uninspired, or the reader is
uninspired, or the church is uninspired, then theology departs from His
face, whithers, and dies.

Second, the Stool is simultaneously a theory of theologizing, and a
standard.  The Stool claims to describe *how* people theologize, whether or
not there is any substance of Truth to what they say; in this wise the
Spirit need not be present (and what we get is bad theology).  On the other
hand, as a standard, it insists on turning to reason, to the scriptures, and
to tradition as references.  We cannot turn to the Spirit in quite the same
way.  The Stool does not say that a particular doctrine is true or false; it
only establishes a model of theological reasoning against which any
particular doctrine can be tested-- not to see if it is True, but to see if
it merits consideration as Truth.

I don't think the model which OFM presents in the passage which followed is
inconsistent with the Stool.  It seems instead to subsume the Stool by
explaining out the functions of the four elements in greater detail.

I think the main point of dispute is in the following:

>2) Does Scripture interpret itself?  The Catholic claim is that
>Scripture needs interpretation, and that the Church is the authorized
>interpreter.  Protestant claims are that Scripture interprets itself,
>when read prayerfully through the Holy Spirit.  Thus an authoritative
>interpreter is not needed.

The anglican answer is in two parts here.  First, the Roman claim: we've
been around before how it is inarguable.  Anglicans simply don't believe it.
However, we are forced to accept some of it by the historical observation
that the extreme protestant claim is not borne out in practice; indeed, if
one accepts the notion that (for example) Nicea and Chalcedon were "right",
it seems that heterothodoxy is in direct proportion to one's commitment to
individual, unadvised christianity.  Hence, we are essentially forced to two
negative conclusions: against the Roman church, that reason must be brought
to bear on both scripture and tradition, and against Protestantism, that
tradition is necessary as a tutor to reason as it reads scripture.

It think it is plain that this leads straight to a lack of the kind of
authority that the other two views cited offer us.  I'll be frank: I don't
think such an earthly authority exists.  I think we will just have to learn
to live with the risk of believing wrongly about theology.  SUrely we must
cry to the Spirit for guidance, but just as surely, we must never make the
mistake of identifying our voice as the Spirit's voice.

If you want to reduce this to a slogan, I would say it thusly: "Not
`scripture alone', but `not just scripture.'"

C. Wingate             +   "The Peace of God, it is no peace,
                       +      But strife closed in the sod.
mangoe@mimsy.umd.edu   +   Yet brothers, pray for but one thing:
mimsy!mangoe           +      The marv'lous Peace of God."