HOW DID THE CHURCH APPROPRIATE  THE "SCRIPTURE PRINCIPLE?" 

Because of the role that Scripture has played in Christian theology, we need to ask ourselves, "how did the Church appropriate the Scripture principle?" Did the Church just take over the "Scripture principle" from the Jewish faith?  Did the Church appropriate it because it felt that it was a necessary component of its witness and proclamation?  Did it adopt it because they believed that God wanted it to be part and parcel of its dogma?  

The answer to those questions will depend on how one views the nature of Scripture and also how one views the importance or non-importance of Scripture in the formulation of doctrine and theology.  At some point, our answers will be based on retrospective reflection, i.e. examine and adopt what the Church did in the past.  At other points, our answers will be contingent on how open we are to ongoing revelation as opposed to a revelation that has been given and transmitted "for once and for all." 

Our answers can also depend on where we think the locus of final authority lies.  Does it lie in the Bible itself?  Does it lie in the authority of the Church and its leaders?  Does it lie in individual interpretation of the Scriptures?  Whose hermeneutic (interpretation) is the "correct one?"  

Although as an offspring of Judaism, the early Christian community inherited the Jewish scriptures and soon produced a collection of its own, it did not necessarily have to adopt the scripture principle.  In fact, through the first century and a half of its existence, a certain tension can be discerned over precisely this issue (Edward Farley and Peter C. Hodgson in "Scripture and Tradition," p. 67).

For one thing, the Scripture principle appears to have been modified in certain respects.

1.  Even though at first the Christian community faced a struggle to maintain its identity over against both Judaism and Hellenistic religious syncretism, the primary internal threat was not cultural assimilation but a multiplicity of conflicting interpretations within an already diverse cultural community consisting of Jews, Greeks, Romans, Syrians, North Africans, and the like. Thus what was called for was not community regulation and social maintenance, but community confession. Besides, scripture was not the vehicle of duration for primitive Christianity that it was for Judaism. The ecclesial community had a norm other than scripture, namely, the living presence of the Lord, and a nucleus tradition of early testimony to him (Ibid.). 

2. The functional genre of Christian scripture shifted from Torah to Gospel, and then to doctrine.  Its function was to witness to the Christ and announce to the world the salvation accomplished in Him. But given the controversy between rival Christian traditions, the writings came to function primarily in the settling of doctrinal disputes. Thus they served not to provide authority for regulating social and cultic life, but to authorize right teaching, belief, and confession, and their unity was not law, but a gospel message as true (Ibid.).

3.  In adopting the Jewish scriptures, as its own, the Church relativized them, for it recognized the law to be valid only for Israel and interpreted the writings primarily in terms of the motif of prophecy and fulfillment.  A reperiodization of salvation history laid the groundwork for a two-part scripture consisting of old and new covenants, with provisional validity being accorded the old covenant (Ibid.).

4. The new community of the Messiah was drawn from all nations to form not a new nation but a universal religious community transcending all provincial understandings of divine presence,  whether localized in a people, land, temple, book, or set of doctrines (Ibid., pp 67-68). 

Given these modifications, the axioms of the principle of identity would appear no longer to be valid.  The person-event of Jesus of Nazareth, who they believed to be the Christ, becomes the new focus of divine-human identity, which cannot be extended to any written representation, either primary or secondary.  A collection of scriptural writings could serve as a control on tradition running rampant, distinguishing between early writings produced by the community of faith and containing testimonies to the founding event, and later, extracommunal imitations where the historical referent exercises little or no control. But this is not yet the scripture principle, and it does not comprise a canon or official collection of sacred scripture.  In the second place, the focus on the Gospel with its referent to the Christ is incompatible with the axiom of leveling in which every literary unit takes on the character of a divine communication. Moreover, since the content of Christian scripture is authoritative only insofar as it is universalizable, contents appropriate only to specific social, cultic, or ethical situations cannot be accorded redemptive significance.  Finally, the fact that the Jewish scripture is retained as "old covenant," implying relative and provisional validity, rules out the axiom of immutability (Ibid.). 

Despite these modifications called forth by the essentially different character of the different character of the Christian Gospel itself, the mainstream of Christendom ultimately adopted the scripture principle and the apparatus associated with it: a canon of officially recognized authoritative writings, atomistic exegesis and proof-texting, and the establishment of revelation as the foundation of theology contained in human-historical deposits regarded as inspired and infallible.  Under the pressure of conflicts with heresy and in the context of the institutionalization of the new religion, it was all too easy to fall back into those practices.  Moreover, the Christian movement never abandoned the royal metaphor for God and God's relation to the world. The logic of sovereignty, which presumes that God employs whatever means are necessary to ensure the successful accomplishments of the divine will, eventually pervaded the total criteriology of Christendom. For the very Word of God to continue to be salvifically present in the Church, there must be a trustworthy reduction of the event and person of Christ to verbal testimony, a sacred deposit to be preserved and handed on by a succession of authoritative representatives (Ibid. pp. 68-69).

An account of the presuppositions and axioms of the scripture principle, and of their appropriations by the early Christian community, should in no way be construed as a history of the interpretation and use of Scripture during the patristic, medieval, and Reformation periods. This history is rich and variegated, with many high and low points, and we cannot summarize it (Robert H. Grant, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible, and Frederic W. Farrar, History of Interpretation).

We should attempt to uncover the theological and methodological presuppositions lying beneath the surface of the actual uses of Scripture in liturgy, piety, and teaching.  Often these uses, and the specific ways that scripture was appropriated in relation to theological proposals, stood in tension with the way in which scripture itself was intended as an authoritative deposit of revelation.  Frequently, a theologian's insight into the meaning of scripture transcended the formal scripture principle in terms of which that same theologian would have articulated the doctrine of scripture (Farley and Hodgson, op. cit., p.69).

Origen, for example, was a theologian of great imaginative and speculative insight whose knowledge of the Bible and contribution to its interpretation were unrivaled in the patristic period. His use of scripture in his systematic exposition of the Christian faith was richly textured, ingenious, and daring. But at the same time, he was convinced that every clause of the Bible is infallible, supernatural, and divinely dictated. Because the literal sense of many texts is demonstrably erroneous if not repulsive or unedifying, each passage must also be construed in moral and in mystical or spiritual senses in order to arrive at the divinely intended meaning.  This opened the way to allegorical interpretation with Origen and Clement of Alexandria as the first great Christian exponents (although they borrowed heavily from Alexandrian Judaism, notably Philo).  Allegory interprets all the details of a story or text as having a figurative meaning different from and encoded with the apparent literal meaning. The task of allegory is to "decode" a text by making explicit the higher meaning of each and every unit.  This procedure was necessitated by the scripture principle in order to save the principle of identity and its axioms, especially  the leveling and immutability, and it had the effect of reading extraneous, excessive interpretations into texts under the control of a theological norm such as Christology (Ibid., pp. 69-70). 

In Augustine, as in Origen, a tension is evident between a rich and imaginative use of Scripture in theology and an unsound exegetical method, allegory, which he applied in accord with two interpretative criteria: the law of love (the Christological norm for deriving the figurative meaning of texts), and the rule of faith (the universally accepted truth of the Catholic faith).  The same tension is found in most of the great theologians of the Church down to the time of the Reformation.  Martin Luther was perhaps the first seriously to challenge the allegorical method, replacing it with a "spiritual" interpretation that introduced a degree of critical freedom into scriptural interpretation, thus challenging, at least implicitly, the main elements of the scripture principle. By contrast, John Calvin, in many respects a more rigorous and brilliant interpreter of Scripture than even Luther, would not allow any challenge to the Scripture principle. There was therefore a considerable tension between his exegesis and his adherence to the principles of divine authorship, plenary inspiration, infallibility, supreme authority, and the like.  In the period that followed, Protestant scholasticism hardened those principles even further, so that what had been implicit in the Church Fathers took the form of explicit dogma (Ibid. p.70).

So, the questions for us today are as follows:

1. Does the Christian Church as a whole still follow the "Scripture principle?"

2.  Is adherence to the Scripture principle operative primarily in denominational and sectarian Protestant groups?

3. Is it still necessary for us in the 21st century Church to continue adhering to the Scripture principle for the formulation of constructive theology?

4.  If we discard the Scripture principle in the construction and formulation of theology for our times, what do we then replace it with?  

We will continue this discourse in the pursuit of investigating the importance of the role of Scripture in Christian theology.

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary