On the website of Otis Q. Sellers’s The Word of Truth Ministry one reads:
As a personal student of God’s written word, he came to his own conclusions after considering all the Biblical material available and any extraneous material that could shed light on the subject under consideration. He studied Hebrew and Greek words in order to bring forth their exact historical and grammatical meanings.
Sellers’s method of interpretation (hermeneutics) was that of the early 20th-century proto-fundamentalist movement in America, the movement that educated him in the Scriptures, but also from which he slowly but surely asserted his independence.[1] Although he rejected most of its doctrines, he retained its grammatico-historical hermeneutical method, which one scholar summed up as follows:
A fundamental principle in grammatico-historical exposition is that the words and sentences can have but one significance in one and the same connection. The moment we neglect this principle we drift out upon a sea of uncertainty and conjecture.[2]
Of course, that principle requires nuance, for a verse’s “one significance” may yield meanings that do not lie on the surface. Sellers gave an example:
As there is in all fields of study, there are principles in Bible interpretation that need to be scrupulously observed. Many of these need to be discovered and established by careful study and comparison, but there is one that is clearly enunciated by the Spirit of God. I, for one, would not want to grieve the Holy Spirit by ignoring a matter that He has distinctly affirmed. Failure to recognize, admit, and abide by this principle could lead to many erroneous interpretations and the misuse of many passages of Scripture.
The principle of interpretation to which I refer is affirmed by Paul in Romans 4:17 where he declares that God “calls those things which be not as though they were.” This is a divine statement concerning how God may act, and we can either be believers and admit that He does it, or be unbelievers and deny that He has ever so acted. It will be an act of faith upon our part if we accept the stated fact that He has spoken in His Word of those things that do not exist as though they existed.[3]
But generally, if one accepts that God spoke to Adam in the Garden of Eden, one rules out the possibility that he could doubt that fact. That is, the ideal of direct, clear, veridical, and successful communication was realized at least there.
Interpreting millennia-old Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, however, is not direct, but mediated. There is an effort to understand, coupled with a responsible awareness of how one might misunderstand, as there was none for Adam. But is it hopeless?
Millions of Christians do not think so, even if their diverse interpretations seem to discourage hope. As they read the story of God’s interventions in history, Christians reflect on their own reception of what they take to be God’s Word.
If they responsibly affirm that they are indeed in receipt of it, they may infer that this Word ought to be fundamental to everything else they do, including their reasoning about history, language, mortality, anxiety, and hopes for a better world. This writer has reached the conclusion that while we may raise these questions from time to time, answers presuppose an absolute frame of reference.
But how can a collocation of molecules (as naturalistic science describes us) assert (let alone assume) an absolute standpoint? Foolishly, that’s how. Unless we accept the idea that God, who is that absolute standpoint, has entered into history’s flux to give us His frame of reference for our utterances, the latter are shots in the dark. Choosing one such shot over the other is, as Cornelius Van Til put it, like choosing hats.[4]
There another issue which can be treated only with brutal brevity: the authority to interpret Scripture.
Let me start with a common solution: an authoritative text without an authoritative interpreter is useless. Therefore (so the argument goes), God must have provided one. It then become our cognitive duty to find it and (if by God’s grace we can recognize it for what it is) bring ourselves under that authority.
If the reader recognizes this bit of Roman Catholic apologetics, I’ll give him points, but also point out that by now, five hundred years after the Reformation, conscious heirs of Luther and Calvin find it difficult to think biblically outside of their confessions. The latter serve as filters, mediators, between themselves and God’s Word (and which themselves have to be interpreted).
Now, Protestant exegetes do not claim an absolutely secure mediatorial position, which is the Roman Catholic conceit. They will, in principle, allow arguments to dislodge them from their confessional commitments. Psychological investment and social reinforcement, however, conspire to make such changes of mind rare events.
I find three problems with this.
(1) It merely shifts the site of the problem. “We say so” replaces “The Bible says so.” Yes, the burning one feels in one’s heart upon reading the Gospel of John might only be heartburn, but that may also be true of one’s reception of any church’s claim of teaching authority. This consideration pertains not only to what truth God meant to communicate in a given Biblical book, but also whether a given text is a Biblical book, and therefore theopneustos, “God-breathed,” inspired (2 Timothy 3:16).
(2) The Roman Catholic affirms the highest revelatory status for the Bible; there are, however, instances where the church teaching seems to conflict with normal interpretations of the Hebrew or Greek text; the seeming is resolved in favor of the teacher.
For example, Matthew 13:55 says Jesus had adelphoi, that is, “brothers.” Now, adelphoi may simply mean what we mean by “cousins” (fourth degree of consanguinity); or, perhaps it does mean “brothers,” in the sense that they were sons of Joseph from a previous marriage (for which there is no evidence).
Why avoid the plain sense of adelphoi? Because Jesus could not have had siblings with a second-degree of consanguinity. And why not? Because His mother near the end of the second century was solemnly declared to be a perpetual virgin, with which dogma that sense is incompatible. It matters little to the guardians of tradition that adelphoi means “males from the same womb”: the magisterium authoritatively resolves any alleged discrepancy, ambiguity, or doubt in favor of what it teaches.
Where the Protestant tradition retains the organizational trunk from which it split off, it engages in and replicates the very traditionalism against which it protests. Protestants can, however, change their minds and keep their self-respect as Protestants. In principle, if not in practice, Roman Catholics do not have that flexibility.
(3) God doesn’t owe his created image-bearers an interpreter. This isn’t a mean trick on His part. It is, however, consistent with His present purpose in grace. God’s prerogative is to conceal a thing; it’s the honor of kings to search it out (Proverbs 25:2). We may marvel at and speculate about (and be grateful to God for) the survival and reproduction the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts and the tools of their translation and interpretation, which Sellers was exemplary in exploiting. There is, however, no direct line of inference from those facts to the need for a living magisterium.
If Sellers is right, we’re living in the dispensation of grace, a divine administration exclusively of grace; revelation is a grace, not something to which we’re entitled. Once we grasp Sellers’s understanding of oikonomia (“dispensation”) and of the character of not only the present one, but also of those preceded it and those that will come after, we may affirm the compatibility of God’s activity and silence in human history. For now, however, His ways are untraceable.
The Scriptures, which equip us thoroughly for every good work, were given by inspiration (theopneustos; 2 Timothy 3:16). Unlike before Acts 28:28, they are now freely available to all nations (Acts 28:28). It is up to us to show ourselves God-approved, unashamed workmen who rightly divide the Word of Truth (2 Timothy 2:15).
Reference Notes
[2] Milton Terry, Biblical Hermeneutics: A Treatise on the Interpretation of the Old and New Testaments. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1974, 205. The Wikipedia entry for the Historical-Grammatical Method gives a concise summary of the method:
The aim of the historical-grammatical method is to discover the meaning of the passage as the original author would have intended and what the original hearers would have understood. The original passage is seen as having only a single meaning or sense. . . . Many practice the historical-grammatical method using the inductive method, a general three-fold approach to the text: observation, interpretation, and application. Each step builds upon the other, which follows in order. The first step of observation involves an examination of words, structure, structural relationships and literary forms. After observations are formed, then the second step of interpretation involves asking interpretative questions, formulating answers to those questions, integration and summarization of the passage. After the meaning is derived through interpretation, the third step of application involves determining both the theoretical and practical significance of the text and appropriately applying this significance to today’s modern context.
[3] Otis Q. Sellers, “The ‘Not Being’ but “As Being’ Principle,” Seed & Bread, No. 121. Undated; probably early 1980s.
[4] “Every system of philosophy must tell us whether it thinks true knowledge to be possible. Or if a system of philosophy thinks it impossible for man to have a true knowledge of the whole of reality or even of a part of reality, it must give good reasons for thinking so. From these considerations, it follows that if we develop our reasons for believing that a true knowledge of God and, therefore, also of the world, is possible because actually given in Christ, we have in fact given what goes in philosophy under the name of epistemology. It will then be possible to compare the Christian epistemology with any and with all others. And being thus enabled to compare them all, we are in a position and placed before the responsibility of choosing between them. And this choosing can then, in the nature of the case, no longer be a matter of artistic preference. We cannot choose epistemologies as we choose hats. Such would be the case if it had been once for all established that the whole thing is but a matter of taste. But that is exactly what has not been established. That is exactly the point in dispute.” Cornelius Van Til, A Survey of Christian Epistemology, 1969, xiii-xiv. (My emphasis.— AF)