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.