Where Everybody's Crazy

I'm trying to work on a Christology essay, comparing two passages about Christ. Fine. So I do what the good Bible college student does, and get out the commentaries and see what these passages actually mean.

Like that's likely to work.

This verse begins a new section, linked to the preceding with a "Therefore". Immediately we encounter disagreement. Barrett discovers only "a loose relation" with the preceding and Käsemann refers to "a break in thought", whereas Lenksi speaks of "a close connection" and Boylan sees what follows as "an inference from the section, vv1-11". Lenksi and Boylan are surely right.

Let me get this straight: I'm trying to compare the meaning of two passages, and yet the biblical scholars can't even agree on what Therefore means, and I'm expected to side with Lenski and Boylan about the meaning because Morris tells me to? I thought this was supposed to be the word of God, not the word of Morris. Sure, I can look in another commentary - and discover there another set of disagreements and frustrations.

This is why I'm rapidly getting frustrated with the whole evangelical view of exegesis - it's one thing to claim that you have a high view of Scripture, but you cannot then at the same time claim that the meaning of that Scripture is determined by the intellectual view of whichever modern scholar you prefer, and dammit, there are enough views to choose from.

So ad fontes I cry and go back to the original commentators, the Church Fathers, expecting to find agreement there. How naive I am. I don't know why this is a surprise, I've read Sic et Non, I know the Fathers hardly speak with one voice either. Abelard used this to justify applying your brain to Scriptural interpretation, but looking back over what it's produced, it just seems to turn the Scriptures into the object and us into the subject, and it rapidly degenerates into intellectual playing with words to justify what we want the Scriptures to say all along. I know that this essay expects me to evaluate the opinions of the scholars and come up with my own intellectual take on what the Bible actually means. Frankly, I don't want to play that game.

Now do you see why I want a magisterium? What the heck is the point of having a Holy Scripture if there's no way we can know what it means?