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Let the
reader understand... A
statement Developed at the request of the Bishop of New York in response to actions of the Lambeth Conference 1998 Philip asked the Ethiopian, "Do you
understand what you are reading?" He replied, "How can
I, unless someone guides me?" Members
of the
Copyright - 2002.
The Diocese of New York of the Episcopal Church January
2002 Richard
F. Grein, Bishop of
New York, Retired
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| Principles
of Interpretation
1 The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are "the Word of God" and "contain all things necessary to salvation." They are called the Word of God by the household of faith, not because God dictated the biblical text, but because the Church believes that God inspired its human authors through the Holy Spirit and because by means of the inspired text, read within the sacramental communion of the church, the Spirit of God continues the timely enlightenment and instruction of the faithful. |
The
Oath of Conformity and the VI
Article of Religion, the Book of Common
Prayer (American), pp. 538, 868
An Outline of the Faith, the Book of Common Prayer (American), p. 853, the Holy Scriptures |
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| 2The Holy Scriptures are the primary constitutional text of the Church. They provide the basis and guiding principles for our common life with God, and they do so through narrative, law, prophecy, poetry, and other forms of expression. Indeed, the Scriptures are themselves an instrument of the Church's shared communion with Jesus Christ, the living Word of God, who uses them to constitute the Church as a Body of many diverse members, participating together in his own word, wisdom, and life. | The XIX Article of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer (American), p. 871 | ||
| 3 The Scriptures, as "God's Word Written," bear witness to, and their proper interpretation depends upon, the paschal mystery of God's Word incarnate, crucified and risen. Although the Scriptures are a manifestly diverse collection of documents representing a variety of authors, times, aims, and forms, the Church received and collected them, and from the beginning has interpreted them for their witness to an underlying and unifying theme: the unfolding economy of salvation, as brought to fulfillment in Jesus Christ. | The
XX Article of Religion, the Book of
Common Prayer (American), p. 871
ﾓYou
search the Scriptures because
you think that in them you have
eternal life; and it is they that bear
witness to me.ﾔ John
5:39
Commentary 1, Some Notes on Principles Three and Four, Tobias Haller Commentary 2, Oikonomia: The Divine Plan, Richard Norris |
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| 4 The Scriptures both document and narrate not only God's saving acts but also the manifold human responses to them, revealing that God's unchanging purpose to redeem is fulfilled, not by means of a coercive, deterministic system, but through a divine plan compassionately respectful of human freedom, adapted to changing historical circumstances, cultural situations, and individual experience and need. In reading the diverse texts of Holy Scripture, the Church seeks an ever-growing comprehension of this plan and of the precepts and practices whereby believers may respond more faithfully to it, walking in the way of Christ. | See Acts 11:1-18, 13:46-48 | ||
| 5 The New Testament itself interprets and applies the texts of the Old Testament as pointing to and revealing the Christ. Thus, the revelation of God in Christ is the key to the Church's understanding of the Scriptures as a whole. | Matthew
26:54; Luke 4:21, 24:27;
Acts 8:35, 18:28 ﾓThe Old Testament is not contrary to the New: for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to Mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and Man, being both God and Man.ﾔ The VII Article of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer (American), p. 869 |
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| 6 Individual texts must not, therefore, be isolated and made to mean something at odds with the tenor or trajectory of the divine plan underlying the whole of Scripture. | The Church has no right ﾓso [to] expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.ﾔ The XX Article of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer (American), p. 871 | ||
| 7
It must be concluded that the words of a
scriptural text or texts, however compelling,
may not in every circumstance be
received by the Church as authoritative. Even if
the Church has no authority to abrogate --- commandments which are called Moral .... unlike its jurisdiction in "ceremonies and rites" --- the true moral significance of any commandment is not simply given but must be discerned. |
Commentary
3, Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity I.XV.3, Richard Hooker
The VII Article of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer (American), p. 869
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| 8 Thus, for the Church's judgment of the morality of actions and dispositions to be authoritative, it is insufficient simply to condemn those things that are condemned somewhere in Scripture, or to approve those things that are somewhere approved. | Commentary 4, Applications of Principles of Interpretation, Tobias Haller | ||
| 9 Faithful interpretation requires the Church to use the gifts of "memory, reason, and skill" to find the sense of the scriptural text and to locate it in its time and place. The Church must then seek the text's present significance in light of the whole economy of salvation. Chief among the guiding principles by which the Church interprets the sacred texts is the congruence of its interpretation with Christ's Summary of the Law and the New Commandment, and the creeds. | The
Book of Common Prayer
(American), p. 370
ﾓUnto the word of God, being in respect of that end for which God ordained it perfect, exact, and absolute in itself, we do not add reason as a supplement of any maim or defect therein, but as a necessary instrument, without which we could not reap by the Scriptureﾒs perfection that fruit and benefit which it yieldeth.ﾔ Hooker, Laws III.8.10 Matthew 22:37-40; John 13:34 |
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| 10 The Church's interpretation of Scripture is itself part of the human response to the economy of salvation, an essential means whereby the Christian faithful understand God's actions in their lives and experience and therein know God's power and purpose to judge, redeem, liberate, and transform. | See ﾓA Note on Experienceﾔ at the end of Commentary I | ||
| 11 Yet precisely because the Church's members are human, their reading of Scripture is contingent and fallible, even in matters of faith and morals. In reading its Scriptures, the historical Church remains always a wayfaring community using discernment, conversation, and argument to find its way. | The XIX Article of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer (American), p. 871 | ||
| 12 Interpretative security rests not in an indefectible community or infallible magisterium but in the tested deposit of the baptismal faith and, above all, in the covenant God who is faithful to a people who err. | See Luke 24:41-49 | ||
| 13 To affirm the "sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for salvation" is to enlarge the sphere of human liberty by acknowledging limits upon what may be required in matters of faith and morals. Taken in this way, the Scriptures do not lose their authority but on the contrary fulfill their ultimate intent, which is to bring all people to the blessed liberty of the children of God, whose service is perfect freedom. | The
VI Article of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer (American), p. 868 |
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|
Some
Notes Tobias Haller |
Commentary 1 | ||
|
pSanhedrin 4.2 | ||
| God's plan or strategy for humanity --- that human beings should love him and one another --- subsists outside of time, but the implementation of this plan must necessarily take place in time. God's will is eternal but his acts are temporal. The human response to God also takes place in time, and God allows people to grow and change in relation to him. Indeed, God forbids the substitution of fixed and lifeless forms (idols) for the dynamic, vital and mobile presence of God in their midst as flame and pillar of smoke, free to descend upon and depart from the holy habitation as he chooses. God forbids his people from making graven images and bowing down before them, but chooses instead to be worshiped in song and story. | The relation between plan and
implementation is similar to that
between strategy and tactics, or mission
and ministry.
See
Exodus 13 and 20, and |
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| Even the Law itself, though subsisting in fixed letters written on stone tablets, is imbued with a living spirit as the people of God engage in understanding it. The Scriptures witness to this process. God appears (from a human perspective) to "change his mind" as circumstances change. | 2 Corinthians 3:3-11 | ||
| In Genesis 2, God first creates Adam as a solitary creature, and then perceives that this solitude is not good. God then creates the animals, but for Adam no true companion can be found. Only then does God create Eve from Adam's substance, and he leaves it to Adam to pronounce that this is the acceptable solution. | |||
| Later, the book of Numbers records a change in inheritance law, each time issued as the direct command of God through Moses, but clearly changing to meet a changed situation, an apparently unforeseen eventuality. The Hebrew Scriptures also witness to a significant tension between the priestly and prophetic traditions on the question of sacrifice. | Numbers
27:1-11 and 36:2-9
Compare
Leviticus 17:8-9 with Amos |
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| In the New Testament, Jesus expands and reinterprets the Mosaic Law in his Sermon on the Mount, and sets aside (or is understood to set aside) the dietary laws. Acts and the Pauline epistles show us the Church engaged in this same process of reinterpretation, setting aside one of the most solemnly delivered of all laws, the covenant of circumcision. | Mark 7:19 | ||
| To attempt to turn the Scriptures themselves into an unchanging "thing" rather than approaching them as the story and song and case history of which they largely consist, is to come very close to a form of idolatry. The Scripture, like the Sabbath, exists for the good of the people of God, and it is they who have the right to engage it and understand it in each succeeding generation. | |||
| A
note on Experience Experience is not a source of authority, but --- like Reason --- is a "necessary implement" without which the Scripture itself cannot be comprehended. For example, the Church's decision to admit Gentiles to its fellowship rested initially not on Scripture, but on Peter's vision of the sheet let down from heaven and his experience with Cornelius' family when the Spirit descended upon them. Only later did the Church come to recognize that Isaiah's prophecy in Scripture was thus fulfilled. Similarly, it is only the experience of the Risen Christ (in person or in the preaching of the Good News) that empowers understanding the Scriptures that were there all along. |
Peter
offers his ﾓwitnessﾔ
in
Acts 11:1-18
Acts 13:46-48
John 20:9,20; Luke 24:25-29, 41-49; Acts 8:30-39, 13:46-49 |
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|
Oikonomia: Richard Norris |
Commentary 2 | ||
| Ephesians
1:9-10 says that God "has
made known to
us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will,
according to his good pleasure which he set out for
us in [Christ] for the sake of his plan with view to
the fullness of time, to sum up all things in him"
The word
"plan" here
translates the Greek
oikonomia, a term that originally and literally
meant "the
art of running a household," and
which here
refers to God"s "policy" with
--- God's
way of
managing --- God's
own household, the creation. It
means, one might say, "what
God is up to" with
the
creation.
This idea of a divine oikonomia, thus introduced (at least as far as the word itself is concerned) by the author of Ephesians, became crucial for orthodox Christianity in the 2nd-century debate with Marcionites and Christian Gnostics. These movements, different though they were in some respects, had at least one thing in common: they taught that the God and Father of Jesus Christ was distinct and different from the God of the Mosaic covenant --- from, that is, the Creator God of Genesis and the Lawgiver of Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. This contention they defended largely on the basis of texts in the Pauline letters and in the Gospels --- texts that in one way or another contrasted the values and teachings of Jesus and his apostles with those of the Mosaic dispensation, and depicted the former not only as novel but also as intrinsically superior to the latter. The orthodox --- people like Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen --- were by contrast committed to the belief that the God of the Pentateuch (and for that matter of the Psalms and the other prophetic writings) was the very same God who had sent Jesus Christ and raised him from the dead. They nevertheless saw and admitted significant differences between Torah and Gospel: there was, they thought, a genuine novelty, a "new thing," to be discerned in the dispensation whose focal realities were the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Word of God and the gift of the Spirit. The question, therefore, that they had to answer was, How it was possible to conceive of a God who did and said different things at different times? It was as an essential part of the answer to this question that Irenaeus deployed the idea of a divine oikonomia. |
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| The question, therefore, that they had to answer was, How it was possible to conceive of a God who did and said different things at different times? It was as an essential part of the answer to this question that Irenaeus deployed the idea of a divine oikonomia. | For
all this see Against Heresies 4.20.4-7 |
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| On this view the divine "plan" is governed by a single, unchanging aim that is pursued and effected by means adapted to the changing circumstances --- and the relative maturity, Irenaeus would say --- of those to whom God is revealed by the Word. Or, to put the matter in another way, God's salvific activity seeks one end for all but "fits" itself to the circumstances of those whose liberty it seeks to turn to love of God and neighbor. There is a certain relativism --- indeed an historical relativism --- implicit in the very idea of God's "household management" of the cosmos, and hence different circumstances may call for changed modes of obedience to the Word who speaks the same truth in a variety of adaptations for the sake of its utility to human creatures whose circumstances and understanding themselves change. | |||
|
The
Mutability Richard Hooker |
Commentary 3 | ||
|
[Laws] being instituted are not changeable without
cause, neither can they have cause of change, when
that which gave them their first institution
remaineth for ever one and the same. On the other
side, laws that were made for men or societies or
Churches, in regard of their being such as they do
not always continue, but may perhaps be clean
otherwise a while after, and so may require to be
otherwise ordered than before; the laws of God
himself which are of this nature, no man endued
with common sense will ever deny to be of a
different constitution from the former, in respect of
the one's
constancy and the mutability of the other. And this doth seem to have been the very cause why St. John doth so peculiarly term the doctrine that teacheth salvation by Jesus Christ "an eternal Gospel;" because there can be no reason wherefore the publishing thereof should be taken away, and any other instead of it proclaimed, as long as the world doth continue: whereas the whole law of rites and ceremonies, although delivered with so great solemnity, is notwithstanding clean abrogated, inasmuch as it had but temporary cause of God's ordaining it. |
The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I.XV.3 | ||
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Applications
of Principles Tobias Haller |
Commentary 4 | ||
| Introduction As Principle 8 states, "for the Church's judgment of the morality of actions and dispositions to be authoritative, it is insufficient simply to condemn those things that are condemned somewhere in Scripture, or to approve those things that are somewhere approved." This insufficiency is evident in that the Church has come to oppose or forbid acts mandated or tolerated in Scripture, and to allow acts or behaviors forbidden there. Examples of the former include levirate marriage and polygamy; examples of the latter include remarriage after divorce and intercourse during menstruation. |
There is scant unanimity within the universal Church on most of these matters ﾗ nor on the Canon of Scripture itself. So when a national or particular Church makes a judgment, it should have confidence in its competent authority to do so, tempered by the humility to acknowledge that it might be mistaken. In the absence of any universal and authoritative body representing all the baptized, all decisions of particular Churches can only have authority within those particular Churches. Finally, even if there were such a universal synod, it might still err. (Articles of Religion XIX, XXI) | ||
| In
making such determinations, the Church applies
interpretative principles similar to those outlined in
this report, asking, Do the mandates or prohibitions
rest on the isolated letter of the text alone, on inner
consistency with Scripture taken as a whole, or with
some accepted guideline such as the Summary of
the Law (itself scriptural)? Are the regulations held
to be eternal and absolute, or temporary and relative
to human society and the situation?
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The simplest consistency is demonstrated by citing an identical or similar prohibition or mandate in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. However, the situation is not always quite so simple. For example, when Jesus forbade divorce (and remarriage after divorce in even stronger terms, as equivalent to the capital crime adultery), he acknowledged that Moses allowed it, but rested his own prohibition on another text of the Pentateuch, thereby pointing out an inconsistency even within texts at that time attributed to Mosaic authorship. Until this century, Churches for the most part accepted Jesusﾒ prohibition as binding. Recently some who oppose the ordination of homosexual Christians have publicly repudiated the abrogation of Jesusﾒ teaching on divorce within the Church ﾗ though they stop short of calling for the resignation or deposition of divorced and remarried clergy. | ||
| The
eating of blood In both Genesis creation accounts God restricted human beings to a vegetarian diet. After the flood, God granted humanity (through Noah) all birds, fish, and animals that move as food, with the proviso that eating their blood was forbidden. This prohibition was repeated in the Levitical Code, which forbade eating blood to Jews and sojourners alike. In the New Testament, the Jerusalem Council upheld this law as binding upon Gentile converts. |
Genesis
1:29, 2:16-1
Genesis 9:2-4 Leviticus 17:10-14 Acts 15 |
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| Early Church canons continued the ban, and it is maintained in the Eastern Churches: "If any bishop, or presbyter, or deacon, or indeed any one of the sacerdotal catalogue, eats flesh with the blood of its life" let him be deprived; for this the law itself has forbidden. But if he be one of the laity, let him be suspended. "If anyone henceforth venture to eat in any way the blood of an animal, if he be a clergymen, let him be deposed; if a layman, let him be cut off." Eusebius records the defense of a Christian against accusations of infanticide: "How," she said, "could those eat children who do not think it lawful to taste the blood even of irrational animals?" | While
the Eastern Orthodox collection of church law, the Pedalion ( ﾓRudderﾔ ), includes this prohibition, it is doubtful as to whether it is observed with great strictness even in the East. Constitutions
of the Holy Apostles The
testimony of the martyr Biblias, |
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| As noted, the East continues to hold these regulations "on the books." The West, from a fairly early period, has sought formally to set aside the Apostolic injunction. This was done primarily by noting the surmised purpose for the Apostolic regulation, to allow for fellowship between Gentile converts and Jewish Christians who observed the prohibition on eating meat with its blood in it, and who would have been scandalized by such actions. | |||
| Augustine
of Hippo is among the first to argue that
since the Church has become overwhelmingly
Gentile in constitution by his time, the regulation of
the Apostles has lapsed. Calvin much later made the
same argument and held that the law could lapse as
circumstances changed (Institutes IV.10.20) ---
that
the purpose of the Jerusalem edict was "charity"
rather than
cultic regulation. The Lutherans (Conf.
Aug. II.7. [29]) had taken a similar approach,
emphasizing that the ordinance was for charity and
quietness' sake,
and no longer binding: "The
Apostles commanded to abstain from blood. Who
observeth that nowadays? And yet they do not sin
that observe it not." Anglicans
went further and
simply held the Jerusalem Church to have erred.
(Article XIX)
But the matter still engendered debate long after the Reformation. Witness this citation from John Wesley's journals: |
Contra Faustum 32.13. The entire chapter 32 of Contra Faustum presents an interesting mirror for our own debates. Faustus criticizes Christians for simultaneously embracing the Old Testament as divinely inspired while ignoring its mandates and prohibitions (not because Manicheans wanted to follow it themselves, but because they wanted to do the same with the New Testament). Augustine responded that the Church is able both to embrace the Old Testament as divinely inspired and reject certain of its provisions as temporary mandates for the ﾓ ld dispensationﾔ and as ﾓbeing symbolical to us of truths in which they still have a spiritual use, though the outward observance is abolished.ﾔ Thus the Churchﾒs application of interpretative principles to the letter of the text is productive of meaningful governance for the Christian life. | ||
|
Wesleyﾒs Journals, October 29, 1745 | ||
| This raises an important question: even if the Council was held to have erred, or its regulations to have lapsed by virtue of a change in circumstances, how does one address the clear prohibition given to Noah? Though the Mosaic Law included the prohibition, the Jerusalem Council did not hold it to be on the same level as the dietary regulations that they believed to have been set aside by Jesus. Even Paul, while he disagreed with the Council on the matter of food offered to idols (witness the Corinthian correspondence) is not recorded as having contested the matter of meat with blood in it. Augustine only argued for setting aside this commandment under Christ's general rubric, "that which is outside does not defile," as an afterthought. | Ironically, Augustine uses Noahﾒs ark as a type for the apostolic Church, including both Gentiles and Jews, in the very passage in which he discounts the relevance of the commandment given to Noah concerning blood. | ||
| However, to this day some particular Churches and communions still forbid the consumption of blood or red meat (or even blood transfusion ---understood as a form of "eating blood" among Jehovah's Witnesses) on the basis of the Noachide commandment or the decision of the Jerusalem Council. This has not prevented the vast majority of the western Churches from setting this commandment aside through the application of interpretative principles. | |||
| Slavery The institution of chattel slavery is mandated in the Hebrew Scriptures and tolerated in the New Testament. Interestingly enough, Scripture also traces slavery back to the time of Noah. After Ham sinned against his father Noah, Noah cursed Ham's son Canaan to slavery. Leviticus 25 set out the rules for slaveholding to be practiced by the Israelites, and slavery became and remained a well-established institution. The New Testament shows remarkable toleration for slavery as a part of the social fabric, and while Paul called for good treatment of slaves, he nowhere suggested that slavery in itself was sinful (though he did speak against voluntary enslavement). He called upon slaves to be obedient and compliant, and personally returned a slave to his master. |
Ephesians
6:9, Colossians 4:1
1 Corinthians 7:23 |
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| As an institution, slavery was an intrinsic part of most Christian cultures, a crucial element of the social fabric, and the Church defended it from attacks by humanists. Very rare instances of moral opposition to slavery exist in the patristic era, Gregory of Nyssa being one of those exceptional voices. For the most part, as long as slaves were well treated, no moral issue was raised. That is, slavery was held to be morally neutral in itself, and only cruelty to slaves was deemed culpable. | See
Against Eunomius. Gregoryﾒs opposition would hardly qualify as ardent.
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Roman
Catholic opinion in the post-Tridentine era
ran along these lines:
|
Leander,
Quaestiones Morales Theologicae, Lyons 1668-1692, Tome VIII, De Quarto Decalogi Praecepto, Tract. IV, Disp. I, Q. 3.
This was Augustineﾒs
opinion in |
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| Scripture was often cited in support of slavery. Rabbi M.J. Raphall, of Congregation Beth Jeshurun of New York, in an address delivered on January 15, 1861, expressed his personal distaste for slavery, and his embarrassment at appearing to speak in its defense, but was nonetheless forced to acknowledge --- as a teacher in Israel --- that the Bible did not declare slavery to be sinful. In his most vehement protection of the divine prerogative, he cited the final law of the Decalogue (Exod 20:19), and challenged those who set it aside: | |||
Episcopal Bishop of Vermont John Henry Hopkins, writing that same month, similarly rejected the notion that slavery was a moral sin, while he acknowledged it could be a "physical evil." |
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Both the Rabbi and the Bishop felt that the division of the Union was a far greater evil than the continuance of slavery, as unpalatable as slavery might be. And since the Bible did not say slavery was a sin, it was purely (and presumptuously) human judgment to declare it so. |
A
Scriptural, Ecclesiastical, and Historical View of Slavery, from the Days of the Patriarch Abraham to the Nineteenth Century, 5
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| On the other side of the issue, those who opposed slavery did so predominantly on the grounds of human rights, citing such general texts as the Summary of the Law and the Golden Rule and declaring slavery to be inconsistent with these more fundamental principles. Some, such as Rabbi Raphall, responded that if this argument was correct then most of the Church for most of its history, Saint Paul included, had been working at cross purposes with God's will. | Anglicans, because of the crucial admission that the Church can and has erred even in matters of faith and morals, can admit this possibility freely. | ||
| However, as is evident, the interpretative principle of consistency with the Summary of the Law and the Great Commandment eventually carried the field, and today few would seek to defend the institution of slavery, even armed with the explicit texts of Scripture, against a broader understanding of moral law informed by growing respect for individual human rights in the light of the Gospel. | |||
| Conclusion Briefly, then, it is clear that the plain text of Scripture alone, without the interpretation and authority of the Church in response to the needs of the world, does not serve well as a simple rule-book for right and wrong, and, more importantly, has only rarely been employed in this way. Moreover, upon many occasions in which Bible texts have been employed to "settle the matter," the decisions reached are judged --- in subsequent generations --- to have been erroneous or worse. The morality of homosexual acts, and the even further removed ecclesiastical issues of the ordination of homosexual Christians or the blessing of their relationships, are not readily ﾓsettledﾔ through the simple application of a handful of texts. The Scriptures tell us little about ordination or marriage, and even less about homosexuality. However, this is not a rejection of the resort to Scripture for guidance. On the contrary, the whole tenor of this paper concerns the importance of interpreting the Scripture and the method by which the Church does so. It is our purpose rather to advise caution, care, and consistency in the exercise of sound judgment, and to defer or resist the temptation to act as if these matters must have final solutions to be imposed universally rather than interim provisions to be applied locally, as we continue to "see as through a glass darkly." |
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