Where Everybody's Crazy

I mentioned earlier that I was going to write something about the "Scripture interprets Scripture" school of hermeneutics. I may not succeed, but I'm going to try to see if I can explain some of the problems I have with it.

First, and I'm being very postmodern here, but I have problems with it because it is an authority claim. It is, in short, propaganda, in at least two ways. First it's propaganda because it implies an infallible choice of hermeneutic method. Of course it's best that Scripture interprets Scripture. How could there be a better way to read the Bible? And some people stop the argument there, without considering that nowhere in the Bible does it say that Scripture interprets Scripture. Indeed, when characters in the Bible make use of other Bible passages, they often do so in an obtuse and allegorical way. Paul wonderfully reinterprets "You must not muzzle your ox when it is treading grain" as "Give money to missionaries." Jesus uses the verse "the testimony of two men is true" to mean "I'm right because I have God on my side", an example he set which hundreds of fundamentalist preachers have since copied.

Now I'm quite in favour of both of these interpretations - particularly the first - but I'm still not convinced that they demonstrate the Scripture-interprets-Scripture ideal. Indeed, Paul and Jesus were taking familiar bits of Scripture and riffing off them to come up with completely new ideas. That is how they handled Scripture; they did not take two bits of Scripture to explain and expound each other, but took a bit of Scripture and a bit of imagination and came up with something new. And since we're not inspired by the Holy Spirit in quite the same way they are - oh, we have the same unchanging and eternal Holy Spirit, of course, but it's somehow different - we aren't permitted to do that.

The classical evangelical Scripture-interprets-Scripture idea is not found in the Bible, and reflects nothing more than yet another hermeneutical choice amongst many. But because it is dressed up in this authoritative truth-claim, it is made out to be the best, if not the only, choice on the market.

Second, I think that as propaganda it's a dangerous and insidious lie because it attempts to hide the agent. We are supposed to believe that Scripture interprets Scripture. This is not true. Take a copy of the Bible. Put it down on a table. Observe it for a while. What does it do? Does it write a commentary on Galatians? Does it exegete some of the trickier passages in Romans? No. That's what we do. We use Scripture to interpret Scripture, but Scripture, on the whole, just sits there. But the idea of "Scripture interprets Scripture" attempts to hide the "we". And as well it should, because if you believe that Scripture is infallible truth, then Scripture-interprets-Scripture gives you nothing but infallible truth squared. The moment that we are reminded that the whole process revolves around human involvement, the aura of infallibility is dispelled.

We use Scripture to interpret Scripture, and we choose the verses that we will use to play off against other verses. We've chosen this particular means of hermeneutics and further we choose how we go about it. And the choices we make reflect not the eternal will of God but our own thought processes and our theology. If we want Romans 5:18 to mean that everyone gets saved whether they believe or not, we interpret it in the light of 1 Timothy 4:10; if we want it to mean that not everyone gets saved, we interpret it in the light of John 3:18. In both cases, we're using Scripture to interpret Scripture. In both cases, we make the choices about how that Scripture ultimately gets interpreted. And I've been playing this game long enough to be able to play both sides, and that's what really shown me that Scripture-interprets-Scripture is a farce.

I think the main problem is that the whole idea rests on the concept that Scripture is this one grand unified whole, a self-consistent treasury of doctrine ready to be mined for new material. This view is, needless to say, unBiblical. The Bible is a series of books written by Jews, and as the old joke goes, ask two Jews a question of theology and you will get three opinions. Luke said that Jesus was tempted by the Devil; James said that anyone tempted is enticed by their own desires. Paul in Romans 2 says that anyone who condemns others also condemns themselves; Paul in Galatians 1 condemns anyone who disagrees with him. I could go on. If you believe in the Bible-as-theological-gestalt, then I get to watch you do exegetical acrobatics in order to claim that actually these things are consistent all along.

But a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and the Bible was written by greater minds than ours. The epistles generally contain what is necessary for the particular church situation to which they are written, and while we can derive some timeless principles from each letter, the very fact that other letters may directly contradict them should remind us to hold our theology lightly. The letter to the Galatians was written to those who did not have enough freedom in Christ; the first letter to the Corinthians was written to those who had too much. To attempt to collide one verse from one with another verse from another in a facile manner completely fails to respect the intention of the author and the situation on the ground.

This is why I have a pragmatic view of doctrine. My understanding of Scripture is not based on "what timeless truths can I mine from this passage - and those other passages to which I may decide, in my infallible wisdom, to link it?" but "how was this put into practice then and how should I put it into practice now?"

Scripture-interprets-Scripture tends to ignore why the passage was written in its relentless focus on what was written. Liberal criticism, of course, tends to go too much the other way, and look so much at why the passage was written that it sidesteps what was written. But both schools of hermeneutics are two sides of the same coin: an essentially human approach to divine revelation.

Biblical interpretation, if it is to be faithful to the Bible, has to hold both the why and the what in tension, and seek from those not merely to read, but also to obey.