Why I’m Not Reformed Post 2

A few weeks ago, HERE on ‘Fitch’s provocations’, I put forth the thesis that the theology of the Reformation had not aged well as a theology that could shape the North American church for mission. The theology of the Reformation (in which I include both Luther and Calvin) lifted up certain truths over others, emphasized certain truths to the de-emphasis of other truths, and then expanded on them for the crisis of European Catholicism at the time, providing a theology that made much sense in the context of Medieval Europe. This theology proved powerful as an expression of the gospel and theology for the church of Europe 15^th century. It was contextual theology at its best. But, when transported across the ocean, uprooted from its Christendom context, this theology does not translate well into North America for the multi-cultural post-Christianized world we live in today. As a result, that theology of the Reformation, including more specifically Reformed theology, actually works to malform the church for mission. I’m laying this out with three examples of what I’m talking about, in three posts that follow that first post. So here goes with the first example: The Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura.

The Reformation’s Doctrine of Scripture

The Reformation in Europe placed a new emphasis on the authority of Scripture, with a doctrine sometimes referred to as Sola Scriptura.

Luther, you might say, started it. When Luther was summoned, as a heretic, before the Diet of Worms by Charles V, he responded famously to the demand to recant some of his writings by saying, “I have been subdued by the Scriptures . . . my conscience is held captive to the Word of God, as a result. . . . I cannot and will not recant anything, because to act against my conscience is burdensome, injurious and dangerous. God help me! Amen.”[i] Luther thereby defied the emperor Charles, and the Pope. Not too long thereafter he translates the Bible into German. Thus, one of the central tenets of the Reformation is born. The Scriptures themselves shall stand above the church’s authority and shall (eventually) be made available to individuals apart from the mediation of the church: Sola Scriptura.

John Calvin used words like “infallible rule of faith and practice” and “final authority on Christian doctrine and practice” to articulate this new authority of Scripture.[ii] The Westminster confession, many years later, will elaborate on Sola Scriptura with phrases like: “Scripture is sufficient,” “contains therein all that is necessary for faith and practice,” “nothing need be added,” “Scripture is final in authority, infallible,” “whereas the Pope, the fathers, etc. even the Councils are still fallible . . . Scripture is perspicuous.” These ideas, all contained in the Westminster Confession, shaped a new understanding of Scripture’s authority over the church.[iii] It’s all part of what I see as the expanded doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Over time, this doctrine of Scripture would acquire additional clarity on what this would actually mean in terms of church practice within the Magisterial Reformation. Some guardrails would be established. By and large, except for the renegade Anabaptist groups, things would hold together in Europe.

What Happened Across the Ocean a Few Centuries Later.

Within the boundary of a unified Euro Christendom, this shook Roman Catholicism to its core and brought much change. It renewed a commitment to the study of the Bible and to seeking a new faithfulness to the apostles teaching. All of this was good!! But as this doctrine traveled across the ocean, having been melded together with an enlightenment epistemology, it would soon provide an opening for several new understandings of Scriptural authority including a hardened view of inerrancy, verbal inspiration, and, with the aid of the Spirit’s immediate illumination, perspicuity. In each case, the center of the church, its history and traditions, as arbiter of interpretation of Scriptures was diminished. The interpretation of Scripture became multiple, among the many churches, and all Christians were now freed to choose between them. This I suggest would later malform the church for mission in North America 500 years later.

The Reformation doctrine of Sola Scriptura stood as the corrective to a corrupt church in Europe. This solved one problem for the Reformation (how can a corrupt church be called to faithfulness?), but it left Christians across the ocean with new problems 500 years later, where there was no longer a pre-existing church to correct. Now we are left asking, how do we interpret Scripture faithfully when it has been separated from an authoritative tradition’s teaching office? This was not an obvious problem (there were problems) for Reformed churches and/or Lutheran churches in Europe as these traditions developed various authoritative teaching offices, Synods, Confessions, etc., over time within the magisterial Reformation. But now, 500 years later, in a now pluralist and vastly post-Christianized culture, where the church is navigating new moral issues not confronted previously, where various evangelical expressions of church have manifested no longer attached to the practices of the Magisterial Reformation, the church is faced with pluriform interpretations of multiple texts on each issue. Without a practice of discerning Scripture together for new challenges, churches devolve into multiple disputes over what the Scripture means for sexuality, politics, racism, economics. The very issues we should be engaging for mission become antagonistic spaces where we shake our Bibles at each other. And the culture remains un-engaged by the church. The church’s witness is shut down.

Some versions of evangelical Protestantism in North America, faced with these challenges, rearticulated the authority of Scripture over the church into the doctrine of inerrancy: The Scripture is inerrant, God-breathed, has a literal meaning, perspicuous to all via the Holy Spirit. And so we think the Bible remains authoritative for Christians in all of life and practice.

But this locked churches into modernist frames, seeking a propositional truth via authorial intent. Interpretation of Scripture remains individualized, setting into motion a social dynamic in the churches, so that whenever confronted with new cultural challenges for mission, such as sexuality, racism or politics, the church would now argue as individuals or experts over what the Bible said authoritatively on the subject. In turn, we get caught up in an enlightenment paralysis, stuck in multitudinous arguments, with church members dividing up in groups taking up the interpretation that they most align with. To this day, it is stunning how anytime a renowned New Testament scholar states his or her position on sexuality, the social media platforms of evangelicalism erupt as if the questions have been solved, at least for the one side of the conversation (e.g. Richard/Christopher Hays, Widening of God’s Mercy 2024).

But even worse, this approach to the authority of Scripture – over the church – leads a hardening of our interpretations of the text for issues we are facing. We become entrenched because the Scriptures are inerrant, and therefore our interpretations must be too. Scripture is left to protecting certain entrenched positions as opposed to engaging our culture . We cannot engage the mission because we cannot extend the text and the gospel into the new uncharted territories of mission. We are prevented from unlocking the imagination of Scripture for the challenges of the contexts we live in.

For sure, I am not blaming Calvin for ‘inerrancy.’ But, the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, the lifting up of the authority of Scripture over the church, and its refinement by Calvin and the ensuing tradition, eventually led to inerrancy as Sola Scriptura transferred into the modernist epistemologies of Post WW1 America fundamentalist evangelical protestantism. And we must admit, that this hardened inerrancy, with its habits of seeing Scripture as above culture and/or context, is most prominent among the evangelical inheritors of the Reformed tradition, especially the Neo-Reformed, The Gospel Coalition? Indeed, I suggest these ills have plagued in different even those Reformed and Lutheran churches remain within the practice of “synods” and “Confessional statements” for discerning Scripture for conflictual matters.

We Have No Practice Now

And so here we are, several hundred years later, grand numbers of evangelicals living under the influence of the Reformed doctrine of Scripture, with no practice to mete out the authority of Scripture over the church for the new questions we are facing in mission, except to call on the exegetical expert in the pulpit. And this has left us, more often than not, dividing into groups, arguing over the multitude of interpretations (think sexuality, racism, gender, economics, politics) that come from these places, paralyzed from engaging the places of mission.

This, I suggest, is an unintended consequence of the Reformation’s Sola Scripture doctrine. The church, set lose from Euro-Christendom, now had to look for some objectivity, and authority, in the historical critical method of the university. The historical method promised, that with enough hard work, we could locate the author’s intended meaning in the original context, and from there extract it to then be appropriated for the moment. This served to keep the Bible, the inspired Scripture at the center of church authority and put interpretation in the hands of the seminary trained expert in charge. This opened the gates for interpretation that either succumbed to the defensive agenda of the conservative church or the accommodative agenda of the liberal church. And now, either way, we fail to engage what God is doing and calling us to in the extension of the gospel for mission.

Hauerwas referred to this dynamic when he stated:

[F]undamentalism and historical criticism are but two sides of the same coin—that is, they are both developments of the Protestant stress on sola Scriptura that was transformed into sola text by the printing press. These developments were then given ideological formation through the development of democratic social orders, which created something called the individual citizen that presumed the ability to read the Bible without spiritual formation and moral guidance. As a result, the Bible was separated from the community necessary for it to be read as the word of God—that is, the church. [iv]

As a result, we have a Scriptural hermeneutic with no bite to encounter our cultures, and peoples with the truths of Scripture. Upon each test, each individual gets to make up his or her own mind, or perhaps even worse, each pastor, as he or she preaches, gets to choose which of the three or four options in his/her commentary to get a message across. We have lost the ability to read and interpret Scripture as a practice of the community engaged in a context for the shaping our imagination into what God is doing among us and in the world for his mission.

I do not blame Calvin or Luther for this mess. It is safe to say that Luther at the Diet of Worms, or Calvin in his writings, had no intention of unleashing Sola Scriptura as the “most important historical source of Western hyperpluralism.”[v] But here we are, 500 years later, and we see the unintended consequences of this doctrine in our inability to navigate mission in the waters of post Christendom.

A Neo-Anabaptist Way to Uphold Scripture’s Authority Among Us

In my view, the Anabaptists heritage offers an alternative way to both uphold Scripture’s authority in the church as well as interpret it for a given context for mission. Drawing on streams of Anabaptist history, there are practices that guide our ways of submitting our lives and the church to Scripture. This is not to be confused with current denominational Anabaptism, many of whom could be blamed for following the same trajectory that I am blaming the Reformed crowd for doing in evangelicalism.

This way starts with a local church practice of reading Scripture together, as a community, especially in times of conflict or struggle. The historic practice of the “Rule of Paul” traces its heritage to several early radical reformers.[vi] The church is called to gather together in the reading of a text for a particular contextual issue presented to the community. Following the pattern of Acts 15, we allow space for those recognized as gifted among us to teach, those of other gifts, such as pastoral and prophetic gifts, to speak, and allow the whole gathering to come together and be led in mutual consideration. We carefully examine the influences each of us carry toward an interpretation of the text towards a specific issue.

Scholarship is part of the process. We study the text with the help of the historical-critical details. We let those among us who are teachers guide us. There is a submission to a history, the given traditions of interpretation that we find ourselves indebted to, and the Spirit extends faithfulness into spaces we have never encountered before. The text is not hardened to the point that we cannot consider what it might mean anew, or how this truth might be extended into this new context. We listen to the context. We seek for ways the meaning of this text is laid hold of in the situations we are facing. And we wait carefully, until we can say together, “it seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us …” (Acts 15:28). At its best, this practice combines the historical study of a text, with theological interpretation of the text, with contextual interpretation of the text that extends and broadens the breadth of understanding as to how this text speaks into a situation. In this way the gospel is extended authoritatively into new contexts for mission.[vii]

This reading Scripture is political in nature. By political, I mean that which pertains to a people group’s life together. The Scripture takes life and receives authority not over the church, but among the church, as we read submit to it, with the Holy Spirit. We read and interpret not only for a personal moral challenge or precept, but to learn who we are as the local church, and how we the local church are to be and act as a political body in the world. Scripture becomes the source of shaping our witness in the world, not only my personal life and walk as a Christ follower. Rather than the Bible becoming a proof text to argue over, the Bible becomes God’s Story into which we are to live in our local context. By discerning God’s working among us and around us through Scripture, we become his people extending his story of salvation, healing and renewal into the world as we live this Grand Drama.

The historical-grammatical interpretation serves to keep us grounded in the text. But it can become hardened to an interpretation specific to one context of the dominant group in power at the time. Theological Interpretation keeps us grounded within long streams of tradition which have proven fruitful in people’s lives that have preceded us. We don’t get to make things up. Historical and Theological modes of interpretation keep the church and its mission on the rails of orthodoxy. But it is contextual interpretation that helps us listen carefully to the context we find ourselves in, listen to the languages, concerns, meanings, at work so as to extend its meaning and power anew. Contextual interpretation enables the truths of history, proven down through the ages in traditions, to be illumined in expanded ways, into new territories for mission.

Let Us Shape a Practice

Let us shape a practice of communal reading of Scripture together, as led by pastors, teachers and prophets in a church community, where the historical-critical knowledge of the text is indeed present, but grounded in the Theological Interpretation of text - recognizing both the streams of tradition present in the circle, as well as the importance of faithfulness within the historic streams of interpretation we are a part of. Last but not least, let us practice Contextual Interpretation, the listening and understanding of the language and meanings at work in one’s context, all located together in a community. This practice takes skills and must be cultivated in church leaders for mission.

I could be wrong, (tell me how), but I don’t see many streams of current Reformed theology in evangelicalism as friendly to this direction? I see Holiness theologies (the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, the society meeting, etc), Pentecostal theologies (the Spirit’s authority in inspiring the Word and enlivening it in the gifts), and of course Anabaptist theologies as places for these kind of Scriptural practices. Tell me how I’m wrong?

*And just to be clear, I don’t think anything I’ve said here denies “the inerrancy” of Scripture, even though the term has problematics. I also don’t believe anything I’ve said here diminishes the authority of Scripture in the church and beyond. Quite the contrary.

[i] As quoted in Brad Gregory, Rebel in the Ranks (2017), 83–84.

[ii] Manetsch, Scott M. “Is the Reformation Over? John Calvin, Roman Catholicism, and Contemporary Ecumenical Conversations.” Themelios 36.2 (2011) 199.

[iii] Westminster Confession Chapter 1.VI, VII.

[iv] Stanley Hauerwas, Unleashing the Scripture (1993), 42–43.

[v] An admittedly controversial assessment by Brad Gregory, Unintended Reformation (2015), 92

[vi] See for example John Howard Yoder’s account in Body Politics (1992) ch. 5. I acknowledge with much grief the abusive behavior of Yoder to women he was teaching in his later graduate teaching career. Therefore, when using Yoder as a source, I acknowledge doing so with discernment, especially in regard to any attitudes, directives within his teachings reflecting on gender and sexuality.

[vii] I speak here specifically of the Theological Interpretation of Scripture as expounded by such authors as Stephen Fowl, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (1998); Daniel Treier, Introducing Theological Interpretation of Scripture (2008). Likewise I speak of Contextual Theological Interpretation of Scripture. Here I recommend the most recent book by Bo H. Lim, Contextual Theological Interpretation, (2025).