THE ARTICLES RECONSIDERED: HOLY SCRIPTURE

At every ordination service in the Episcopal Church, the person to be ordained swears, “I solemnly declare that I do believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the Word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation.” This declaration is a fascinating window into the Episcopal Church’s doctrine of Scripture. Indeed, some are surprised to learn that the Episcopal Church has doctrine of Scripture at all, never mind one that calls Scripture the Word of God! But I’d like to draw your attention to a particular feature of that declaration: we see in it an echo of a document otherwise relegated to the Historical Documents section of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer: the Articles of Religion.

In this piece, I continue my occasional series for Earth & Altar, “The Articles Reconsidered.” Last time I took up the Articles’ discussion of church authority and evaluated its promise for contemporary conversations about ecclesiology. This time, I will discuss the Articles’ doctrine of Scripture, found in Articles VI, VII, and XXI. Once again, I will argue that the Articles’ teachings – of Scripture as following from the doctrine of God, of Scripture’s sufficiency, and of Christological, harmonizing principles of interpretation – are a vital resource for Christian preaching and theology today.

So what do the Articles say about Scripture? Article VI’s crucial claim is this: “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation,” and as a result, only things proven from Scripture can be required to “be believed as an article of the Faith” or “thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” Scripture is sufficient for the purpose God established it: teaching us what we need to know to be saved, “able to instruct [us] for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 3:15). We need look nowhere else. Indeed, the Articles will say that the authority of the creeds (Art VIII) or of councils (Art XXI) rests on their Scriptural nature, not any independent or alternative source of authority. Now, against certain conservative Protestant accounts, this does not mean that the Bible tells us everything we might wish to know, or provides us precise instructions for regulating all parts of the church. The fact that the Bible does not explicitly describe the use of instrumental music in Christian assemblies does not mean that we must not use it, and we are not bound to the liturgical structure of worship that St Paul sets out in 1 Corinthians 14. There are any number of matters not necessary to salvation where we can look to the Bible and other sources as well. Indeed, in such matters, extra-Scriptural tradition need not be rejected. The earlier 42 Articles promulgated under Edward VI declare that such traditions are “sometimes received of the faithful as Godly and profitable for an order and comeliness,” and while this line did not make it into the 39 Articles, it is consonant with their teaching. Nor, for that matter, does it necessarily rule out extra-Scriptural revelations from God of the sort one finds throughout church history and in charismatic and Pentecostal church bodies today. But such matters cannot be necessary for salvation. For saving faith is not determined by ecclesial decree or individual revelation: it is Scripture alone where we are to look for saving knowledge of God. For the particular purpose for which it is appointed, Scripture is entirely sufficient.

And what counts as Scripture? Here, the Articles take something of a mediating position. The sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible are the “Canonical Books,” those “whose authority was never any doubt in the Church.” But the Deuterocanon or Apocrypha are still to be read in the church, albeit for “example of life and instruction of manners,” not to establish any doctrine. This distinction, taken from Jerome, preserves the ecclesial use of the apocryphal books while giving them a somewhat different status than the properly canonical ones.

The Articles not only tell us what Scripture is and what it is for, but they provide us with principles for interpreting it. Two key principles are elaborated in Articles VII and XXI, which together teach that Scripture is to be interpreted as a unity pointing to Christ. Article VII argues that the content of the Bible is salvation through Christ: “both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ.” Article XXI declares that the church, as the authorized interpreter of Scripture, is forbidden to “so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.”

It is hard to find two principles of interpretation more opposed to the historical-critical models of interpretation that most mainline clergy learn about in seminary. The notion that the Old Testament is about Christ is treated as poor exegesis at best, and toxic anti-Judaism at worst. Furthermore, historical criticism is grounded upon careful attention to textual differences and discrepancies, to using a variety of interpretive strategies for picking out different authors, agendas, and theological viewpoints of Biblical books. The idea that the Bible is to be interpreted as a unity is treated as the imposition of totalizing theologians riding roughshod over history, erasing difference and diversity.

Of course, there are modes of Christological reading of the Old Testament which deny any integrity to the Old Testament text in its own right or assume that, say, Isaiah or Micah had Christ specifically in mind when they made their prophecies. And there are ways to arrive at a unified meaning of the Bible which do indeed ignore difficulties in the text, collapsing multiple Biblical voices into a single voice that often sounds suspiciously like the interpreter’s – in essence using the Bible like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

And yet! I am convinced that the principles that the Articles hold out to us for Scriptural interpretation are precisely the ones we need in our churches today. Reading the Old Testament in a Christological manner may have its challenges, but abandoning such a reading is simply disastrous. When we do this, we run into all sorts of trouble. How often do we end up acting as though the God of the Old Testament is cruel and vindictive, and the God of the New kindly and gentle? How often does our preaching and teaching convey that Old Testament is bloodthirsty and narrowly nationalistic, the New universalist and peaceful? Indeed, how often does the conviction that the Old Testament is either worse than the New or somehow inappropriate for Christians to theologize from lead to us essentially ignoring Old Testament entirely, except for certain social justice-oriented passages that we like? This derogation of the Old Testament is something that the Articles are clearly concerned about; Article VII insists that the Old Testament is not concerned with “transitory promises” alone, but with eternal life just like the New. The Old Testament, like the New, is about the Gospel – about Jesus. This Christological reading is, for the Christian, a matter of faith. We cannot claim that it is somehow an objective, tradition-independent reading of the text, and should not be surprised that our Jewish neighbors disagree. But if we really believe the claims that Jesus makes about himself, that he is the fulfillment of the law and prophets (Matt 5:17), that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) is about him (John 5:46), that Abraham looked forward to Jesus’ coming (John 8:56), it is inescapable!

One might say a similar thing about Scripture’s unity. An overemphasis on Scriptural discrepancy and disagreement can lead people to believe that Scripture does not really govern our faith and action at all. Instead, engagement with Scripture becomes a matter of finding the particular theologies within it that we like and ignoring the rest. But this too leads us into trouble. It prevents God from challenging our preconceived notions of who he is and what he calls us to do and be. It makes Scripture our instrument, baptizing our own commitments and desires as God’s will and design. Are we confident that we are so sanctified that we can safely take only from Scripture that which accords easily with our preexisting views and leave the rest? I am certainly not. Far better to see Scripture as something standing apart from us, over and against us, calling our judgments into question. Far better to say that Scripture is not just a disparate collection of ancient persons’ experience of God but rather God’s chosen instrument of self-revelation. While a human creation, it is also divine, chosen and sanctified by God for the purpose of creating saving fellowship with us. And while we can freely admit that Scripture contains discrepancies and disagreements, we must affirm that Scripture in its totality nonetheless effectively points to God and God’s saving work for us. Yes, Scripture is a library of ancient writings written at many different times from many different perspectives. And indeed, one might reasonably think that Article XXI says a little bit too much in forbidding in all circumstances expounding Scripture passages as repugnant to each other. But we must remember that Scripture is also God’s sufficient instrument for us, as 1 Timothy tells us. And the Church must interpret it as such: not to deny its authority, not to pick and choose what bits it likes based on preexisting commitments, but to set forth Christ and him crucified that we may come to faith in him and be saved.

So what is it that the Articles teach about Scripture? They teach that Scripture is God’s sufficient self-revelation for the end of our salvation by faith in Jesus Christ. This means that we need look nowhere else to find out what is necessary to salvation; the content of saving faith is not hidden from us in private revelation or determined by ecclesiastical fiat. And they instruct us in Scripture’s interpretation. Against those interpreters both early modern and contemporary who would prise apart the Old Testament and the New and pile up supposed Biblical contradictions, the Articles declare the Bible is to be interpreted as a unity, concerned with eternal life through Christ. We in the mainline sometimes often seem to be unclear about what we are supposed to do with the Bible, stuck as we are between conservative Protestant accounts of Scripture which ask it to do more than God appoints for it on one hand, and secular academic approaches which threaten any notion of Biblical authority on the other. I believe that the Articles’ doctrine of Scripture helps us navigate between this Scylla and Charybdis, providing a way to articulate Scripture’s sufficiency, unity, and Christocentricity in a way as vital and compelling today as it was in the sixteenth century.