By Scripture Alone?

In her book The Great Emergence, How Christianity is Changing and Why, (BakerBooks, Grand Rapids, 2008), Phyllis Tickle argues that a wide variety of developments in the modern world have undermined the Reformation’s battle cry of sola scriptura, by scripture alone.  She points to developments such as our culture’s rejection of slavery, its acceptance of divorce, and the emancipation of women (including their ordination) as developments that are clearly un-Biblical and that therefore undermine the Reformation’s notion of Scripture as the sole source of religious and moral authority.  Her comments got me thinking about what the emphasis on experience as the source of spiritual truth that I advocate in Liberating Christianity says about that primal Protestant assertion sola scriptura.  I have concluded that the empirical stress on perception and experience that underlies so much of my book pretty well does away with sola scriptura, indeed, that it undermines that contention about the location of authority in a far more radical way than I perhaps understood when I wrote the book and, therefore, than I expressed in the book. 

Sola scriptura, by scripture alone, became one of the defining slogans of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.  It was the Reformers’ response to the claims of the Roman Catholic Church to be itself the source and location of all authority on matters religious, theological, and moral.  By the early sixteenth century the Roman church had become so corrupt and so worldly that its claims to be the depositum fidei, the depository of the faith, the site and source of all religious truth, rang hollow and lost their power to convince significant numbers of people.   As Martin Luther and the others reacted against the abuses in the Church they also came to question some of the Church’s claims of truth.  Most famously Martin Luther found in the writings of Saint Paul in the New Testament a truth about justification by grace through faith that contradicted the Roman Church’s teaching of justification through works prescribed by the Church.  The Reformers were denying the Roman Catholic Church’s claims about the source and nature of religious authority on the basis of what they read in the Bible.  For them the Bible trumped the church.  They were so convinced of the authority of scripture, and they so needed a source of authority other than the church, that they proclaimed sola scriptura, by scripture alone.

Over time the Protestant reliance on the Bible as the sole source of truth together with broader cultural developments in the West led to the rigid understanding of the Bible as literally true and as the literal words of God that I deconstruct in Liberating Christianity under the term Biblicism.  It remains true however that even in the more liberal, progressive Protestant denominations like my own United Church of Christ any argument on a matter of doctrine, theology, morality, polity, or just about any other subject must be buttressed with quotations from the Bible.  Sola scriptura is deeply seared into the Protestant consciousness even when we reject certain specific scriptural assertions such as, for example, the inherent sinfulness of all homosexual relationships and some of the Biblical statements on the other social issues that Tickle raises in her book.

Yet, as I believe I demonstrate conclusively in my book, scripture cannot be the sole source of our understanding of the Christian faith in all of its aspects.  There simply is, for one thing, too much in the Bible that does not stand up under critical scrutiny.  There is too much that people today simply cannot accept as true and certainly can’t accept as God’s truth.  There are too many contradictions in the Bible.  The Bible does not speak with one voice on most of the issues that concern people today.  Because it does not we must have some other source of authority to help us determine which of the Bible’s voices speaks truth to us. 

In the Roman Catholic Church the identity of that other source of authority is clear.  It is today essentially what it was in the sixteenth century, namely, the teaching magisterium of the Church.  In Catholicism the Church is the arbiter of truth, directing the faithful through the contradictions of scripture to a truth that the Church assures the people is indeed God’s truth.  There is no such authority in Protestantism.  Indeed, Protestantism is radically inconsistent with any such authority.  Protestantism proclaims the priesthood of all believers.  Protestantism advocates individual and group Bible study whether or not a professionally trained and ecclesiastically authorized clergyperson is there to direct the study.  Protestantism does away with the priest and even the church as a mediator between the people and God.  The danger in the Catholic approach is an uncritical acceptance of church teachings regardless of a person’s personal experience.  The danger in Protestantism is an idiosyncratic individualism in which only the person’s personal experience acts as a guide to truth.   Taken to the extreme, neither approach is satisfactory.

Yet we still need another source of authority for truth once we realize that sola scriptura is no longer tenable, if indeed it ever was.  In Liberating Christianity I advocate experience as that other source of truth, although I don't put it in those terms.  My contention that experience is the ultimate authority for any truth is grounded in my conviction that we humans are constituted as subjective beings, and that contention has profound consequences for sola scriptura.  We exist within a self that perceives and experiences a world that seems at least to lie outside of ourselves, and everything we know or think we know necessarily comes to us through our perception and experience.  We have no other way of being in the world.  Objectivity is simply beyond us.  We are inherently subjective beings.  Subjective perception and experience are all we have or possibly can have.  It seems that, given this understanding of the nature of human beings, it would be closer to the truth to say “sola experientia,” by experience alone, than to say “sola scriptura.”

Yet I said above, and I firmly believe, that an idiosyncratic individualism in which only the person’s personal experience acts as a guide to truth is a danger inherent in the Protestant approach to faith.  How do we reconcile that statement of the danger in Protestantism with the reality that perception and experience are all we humans have to go on?  We do it by examining more closely just what it is that we humans perceive and experience.  Among other things, we perceive and experience other humans.  We perceive and experience our faith tradition, of which of course the Bible is a major part.  We can hold our perception and our experience up to the perceptions and experiences of other people.  We can make our experiences and perceptions available to other people to examine and critique.  We can hold our experiences of God up to the experiences of God that the Biblical authors express, for, as I argued in Liberating Christianity, the Bible is more than anything else a record of the faith experiences of its authors.  We can hold our perceptions and experiences up to the myriad perceptions and experiences of God that we find expressed in the writings of the saints and the great theologians of the Christian tradition.  Our own perceptions and experiences may be all we have, but that reality becomes problematic only if we allow our unavoidable subjectivity to lead to an isolated individualism that disregards our experience of other individuals and things.

Our personal experiences then remain the final arbiter of truth for us.  It cannot be otherwise, for we are constituted as subjects perceiving and experiencing what we take (but ultimately cannot know) to be an objective, external world.  Yet our subjectivity need not lead to idiosyncratic opinions that disregard the opinions of the other people or isolate us from the Christian tradition, which we also perceive and experience.  It is precisely our ability to perceive and experience other people as they share their truth with us, whether in our personal encounters with them or in their writings across the ages, that can keep our necessary subjectivity from becoming isolation with all of the spiritual, psychological, and physical dangers that isolation brings.    

Thus, as indebted we are to the profound insights of the Protestant Reformers, we must leave their slogan sola scriptura behind.  It doesn’t hold up in the light of our post-modern understanding of human subjectivity.  The Bible remains a central piece of the Christian tradition that we perceive and experience, into which we enter, and within which we have made the commitment to live our spiritual lives.  Sola experientia doesn’t mean jettisoning the Bible.  It means that we must understand that the Bible, like everything else, is something that we experience.  As with everything else we cannot know that it has objective reality outside of our perception of it.  With postmodern hermeneutics we know that meaning does not reside in the Bible alone but arises in the specific encounter of a particular reader with the Bible, which of course means that any meaning the Bible may have is subjective, as indeed I have insisted all truth and all meaning necessarily are.  It means that scriptura can never be sola, because scripture alone, scripture by itself apart from a specific encounter with a particular reader, has no meaning.  That truth is indeed the real Achilles heel of sola scriptura in the postmodern world.

So we acknowledge our enormous debt to the Protestant Reformers, then move on to a postmodern understanding of human nature, to an empirical ontology and epistemology that is foreign to anyone in the sixteenth century but that is central to postmodern sensibilities, and to an effort to find meaning in subjectivity, perception and experience.  It is not an easy task, but it is an unavoidable task.  May we do it well.

Is Progressive Christianity Viable?

          Perhaps I’m just in a down time, but here’s something that I have been thinking about lately.  I am a passionate proponent of progressive Christianity.  My book Liberating Christianity is, I trust, a positive contribution to the developing theology of progressive Christianity.  I have no doubt that progressive Christianity as I have outlined it in the book and as it is being developed today by many other authors is intellectually and spiritually viable.  Indeed, I believe that the reformation of Christianity that is under way today in the direction of a faith that is mythic, justice centered, and peace oriented is indispensable for the survival of Christianity itself, if indeed the survival of Christianity in the post-modern world is possible at all.  Yet in recent days I have been asking myself the question of the viability of progressive Christianity.  Specifically I have been wondering:  Is progressive Christianity institutionally viable?  Indeed, I have significant doubts about the institutional viability of progressive Christianity. 

My doubts about the institutional viability of progressive Christianity arise from the current state of those institutions that, to some extent at least, contain and support progressive Christianity.  The institution of that type with which I am the most familiar is, of course, my own United Church of Christ; and the current state of the United Church of Christ is not good.  I am not aware that the current state of any other denomination or other institution that to any significant extent embodies progressive Christianity is any better.  The UCC has been losing members and whole churches for decades.  Financial problems have led to institutional reorganizations in the direction of a smaller, less powerful national structure that have done nothing to reverse our institutional decline.  Here in the Pacific Northwest, some parts of which at least are among the most progressive areas in the country, nearly every UCC church is struggling to keep the doors open; and some of them are sure to fail and close.  The culture of the United States turns more and more against progressive thinking in all spheres of life—the political, the social, the economic, the religious.  In order to get elected President Barack Obama had to sever his ties to the UCC and repudiate the progressive positions taken by his pastor Jeremiah Wright.  It is obvious to me both that progressive thought holds the only promise of survival for humanity in the long run and that the cultural climate is turning more and more against progressive thought in every aspect of our national life.

Let me use my little UCC church in Monroe, Washington, USA, as an example.  On the one hand Monroe Congregational UCC is in many ways a vital and vibrant place.  It’s a very small church (average Sunday attendance around 60), but it has roughly doubled in size in the past several years.  It has also become a younger congregation with many children in a church that once had none, and we have grown in a very culturally and religiously conservative area on the outer edge of the more progressive Seattle area.  Many of the people who have come to us are enthusiastic and committed members of our little progressive church.  Yet the long-term survival of Monroe Congregational UCC is at least to some extent in doubt today.  That doubt arises from an apparent disconnect between people’s enthusiasm and their commitment of time and energy on the one hand and their understanding of and commitment to the institutional dynamics of the church on the other.  Simply put, people’s expressed enthusiasm and commitment are not translating into adequate financial support for the church.  It appears at least possible that the church will not be able to maintain itself in its current form for more than perhaps another year.  Specifically, it appears that the church may not be able to support a full-time professional pastor for more than another year.  If the church cannot afford a fulltime pastor there is a real question of its long-term institutional viability, since churches without full-time pastors tend to stagnate if not actually die. If Monroe Congregational UCC were unique or even unusual in that regard I would not ascribe any larger significance to its circumstances, but it isn’t.  It is more typical than atypical of progressive churches in the Pacific Northwest and, I believe, across the country.

Viewed from the outside at least, conservative Christian churches seem to be healthier institutionally, even though I am convinced that their theology is neither healthy nor sustainable in the long run.  Those churches seem to have less trouble attracting new members than do our progressive churches, and the members of those churches, in many cases, simply give more to their church than the members of progressive churches tend to give.  It is important for us to ask why these things are so; and I want to suggest several possible answers to that question. 

To begin let me suggest that perhaps one reason why members of conservative churches tend to support their institutions more generously than members of progressive churches lies in a fundamental difference between conservative and progressive theology.  That difference is that conservative Christian theology is grounded in fear while progressive Christian theology is grounded in grace and love.  Traditional conservative Christian theology maintains that unless a person believes in Jesus Christ, unless a person accepts Jesus Christ as her or his personal savior, that person’s soul will spend eternity in unspeakable torment after that person dies.  That is a theology grounded in fear.  It is a theology that provokes fear as a means of compelling participation in and support of the conservative Christian churches that preach it.  That theology assures those who accept it of a blissful eternity in heaven with Jesus as the reward for conformity with its assertions and loyalty to its institutions.  Progressive Christianity does none of that.  It preaches universal grace.  It is agnostic about an afterlife.  It says that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is about this life and that the Realm of God is located in this world, not in some hypothetical next world.  Conservative Christianity says fear for your eternal soul.  Progressive Christianity says fear not.  Conservative Christianity says we have the only truth that will calm your fear.  Progressive Christianity says that because there is no need to fear you don’t need us to calm your fear.  As a consequence progressive Christianity provokes less commitment to its institutions than does conservative Christianity.  That, I think, is one reason why the institutional viability of progressive Christianity is in doubt.

There are others.  One that may be of particular importance is the disconnect in American culture—and much of European culture—between progressive political and social thinking on the one hand and religion of any kind, especially Christianity, on the other.  A reality that progressive churches today must face is that most progressive people today want nothing to do with organized religion of any kind.  They most particularly want nothing to do with Christianity.  They may call themselves “spiritual but not religious,” but their experience with and understanding of Christianity convinces them, often for very valid reasons, that they want nothing to do with it.  To them Christianity is violent, judgmental, patriarchal, homophobic, and exclusionary.  They haven’t just made all that up.  Christian history and the faith’s current reality provide them with plenty of evidence that leads them to their conclusions.  Indeed, many of us who have devoted our lives to progressive Christianity sometimes wonder if Christianity is not tainted beyond redemption by its history and by its most popular and vocal manifestations today.  To most progressives today Christianity seems like nothing but a vehicle for reactionary social and political policies that promote anything but the peace and justice to which progressive people are committed.  Thus a great many people who might otherwise find a spiritual home in progressive Christianity never will because the mere fact that progressive Christianity is Christian excludes it as an option for them.  The pool of people from whom progressive Christian churches can draw is thus substantially reduced.

Another aspect of contemporary American culture that casts doubt on the viability of progressive Christianity has to do with questions, answers, and certainty.  Americans are uncomfortable with doubt.  Americans are uncomfortable with uncertainty.  I once heard the great British historian/philosopher Isaiah Berlin say that Western culture is characterized by three propositions, namely:  Every question has an answer, every question has only one correct answer, and it is possible to know that answer.  Certainly those propositions characterize the rationalistic, pragmatic nature of American culture.  Americans want answers.  They want certain, clear, factual answers.  Conservative Christianity gives them certain, clear, factual answers.  Beyond that, it gives them the question.  It says that the question we are to ask is:  How am I saved from sin?  Indeed, it asserts over and over again that that is the question that people actually ask.  Then it gives them the answer—by believing in Jesus Christ.  Progressive Christianity is wary of certain, clear, factual answers, and we don’t give people the questions.  We say that we want to live into the questions with them.  We say that no question is out of bounds, and we don’t prescribe mandatory answers.  We want to help people clarify their questions and find their own answers.  Conservative Christianity cites Biblical proof texts to say that believing in Jesus is the only way to salvation.  Progressive Christianity says that there are many different paths to God.  Christianity is one such path, but it is not the only one.  In taking those positions we are profoundly countercultural.  Being countercultural makes it harder for progressive Christianity to be institutionally viable in the culture that it counters. 

So the question remains:  Is progressive Christianity institutionally viable?  There is reason to believe that it may not be, at least not in any institutional form that looks anything like the current Christian structure of local churches and denominations.  I have no idea what some other institutional expression of progressive Christianity might look like, and I hope that I am wrong about the viability of progressive Christianity in its current institutional form.  I have committed my life to that form.  My livelihood depends on one of those little progressive Christian churches.  I know that some people find great support and comfort in that form.  Some people find a community in a progressive Christian church that they find nowhere else.  Some people find a spirituality that they want their children to learn in a progressive Christian church.  Progressive Christianity has an intellectual and spiritual depth that conservative Christianity lacks.  My concern is that all that isn’t enough to sustain the institutional viability of progressive Christianity in the long term given the numerous obstacles that progressive Christianity faces.  Like I said, I hope I’m wrong.  If any of you who read this want to try to convince me that I’m wrong, please post something in the Comments to this post or contact me directly.  I’ll be happy to consider what you have to say.