Biblical Authority after Babel

Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity

Kevin J. Vanhoozer

• Publisher: Brazos Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781587434235
• eBook ISBN: 9781493405909
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Christianity Today Book Award Winner
A Jesus Creed Church History Book of the Year

In recent years, notable scholars have argued that the Protestant Reformation unleashed interpretive anarchy on the church. Is it time to consider the Reformation to be a 500-year experiment gone wrong?

World-renowned evangelical theologian Kevin Vanhoozer thinks not. While he sees recent critiques as legitimate, he argues that retrieving the Reformation's core principles offers an answer to critics of Protestant biblical interpretation. Vanhoozer explores how a proper reappropriation of the five solas--sola gratia (grace alone), sola fide (faith alone), sola scriptura (Scripture alone), solus Christus (in Christ alone), and sola Deo gloria (for the glory of God alone)--offers the tools to constrain biblical interpretation and establish interpretive authority. He offers a positive assessment of the Reformation, showing how a retrieval of "mere Protestant Christianity" has the potential to reform contemporary Christian belief and practice.

This provocative response and statement from a top theologian is accessibly written for pastors and church leaders.

1
Grace Alone

The Mere Protestant Ontology, Economy, and Teleology of the Gospel

The promises of God are altogether trustworthy; not so the promises of men, even those invited to deliver the 2015 Moore College Annual Lectures. The introduction made a number of promises. In particular, I claimed that retrieving the Reformation solas opens up a way to counter the fissiparousness that has dogged the Protestant commitment to sola scriptura. I here begin to make good on that bold claim by retrieving sola gratia (grace alone) to rebut the narrative in which the Protestant Reformation serves as the catalyst for secularization in biblical studies and more generally. On the contrary: this brief formula, sola gratia, stands for the all-embracing economy of revelation and redemption that precedes the work of interpretation and in which interpreters live, move, and have their being. As we will see, the grace of God concerns the way the Father, Son, and Spirit share their love, life, and light respectively with those who are not God: “God for us, Christ with us, the Spirit among us—that is the living drama . . . to which theology seeks to bear witness.”1

Although all three persons are involved in everything that God does, we may assign to the Father the ontology of grace, the giving of the love that creates (originating grace); to the Son the economy of grace, the giving of the life that redeems (saving grace); and to the Spirit the teleology of grace, the giving of the light that sanctifies (illuminating grace).2 These three correspond to the ontology, economy, and teleology of the gospel: “The Trinitarian shape of the gospel comes from the fact that God, by grace, gives himself to us by opening that eternal triune life to us.”3 Please note: “grace alone” should not be construed narrowly as a matter of soteriology only, but should be seen “as the very definition of who God is.”4 Grace is the way in which God extends himself to the world so that creatures can come to know and love him. The burden of this chapter is to reclaim sola gratia as the banner under which later chapters discuss what (for lack of a better term) I will call the “economy of interpretive authority.”

Before I begin to fulfill my promises, however, it may be helpful to say something about my premises. First, I am not importing a foreign problem to Protestant theology, as if secularization, skepticism, and schism were invasive species. The sober truth is that the disturbing problem of doctrinal differences leading to church division has been on conspicuous display for some time now. Second, I disagree with critics who blame individual autonomy on the Reformers, even if the blood trail seems to lead back to Luther’s “Here I stand.” On the one hand, as concerns a unified Christendom, the handwriting was already on the wall or, rather, on the printing press, a powerful means for disseminating both opinion and knowledge. Given human nature and the lust for power, it was only a matter of time before the written word would be used to challenge centralized institutional authorities. On the other hand, division antedated the Reformation in the garden of Europe: in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Roman Catholic Church suffered through a second great schism, when a rival papacy was established in Avignon.5 As to individual autonomy, well, it has been around since Adam’s fall, which only a divine initiative can remedy (“There but for the grace of God go we”).

“Grace” is indeed the operative term, and we begin with it in order to highlight the priority of God’s presence, activity, and initiative in creation, redemption, and biblical interpretation alike. As mentioned previously, the Reformers themselves never formulated a complete list of the five solas, nor is there any indication that their successors ranked them in any particular authoritative sequence. There is no authorized ordo sola-tis, as it were. Still, there are good reasons to begin with grace, for arguably there is no better or broader framework for theological understanding than the grace of God expressed in the trinitarian economies of revelation and redemption.

My third guiding premise is that retrieval is not replication but a creative looking back for the sake of a faithful moving forward. Accordingly, each of the following chapters begins with a review of what the Reformers said about a particular sola. I then consider what they were reacting against in their historical context, and the extent to which Protestants today face the same or different issues. While the proximate cause for a sola may have been a negative gesture of protest (which is why Melanchthon could refer to the solas as “excluding expressions”6), at the heart of each sola is a positive insight to the gospel of God and the God of the gospel. Accordingly, the third section in each chapter contributes constructively to the project of retrieval—the appropriation of the solas for today—and in particular to the way in which the solas address the problem of interpretive authority. Each chapter concludes with four summary theses that draw out the significance of the solas for biblical interpretation in the church.

We begin, then, by reviewing what the Reformers wanted to recover by affirming sola gratia. Their primary concern was the economy of grace (God’s unmerited favor to sinners in communicating life in Christ), but we will also examine the ontology and teleology of grace, the presupposition and purpose of the gospel, namely, its origin in the nature of the Triune God and its end in humanity by the Spirit’s incorporation of the faithful into God’s own triune life. We then move forward with creative fidelity by bringing sola gratia to bear on the problem of interpretive authority, especially the problem of determining (1) who has the authority to say what the Bible means and (2) which, if any, of the many interpretations on offer is authoritative, and why.

Sola Gratia: What the Reformers Meant

The Reformation began as a soteriological question (“How can I obtain salvation?”) but quickly led to questions about ecclesiology (“Where is the true church?”). What connects the two is the gospel of the grace of God made flesh in Jesus Christ—the saving Word through which the Triune God shares the divine life and creates the church.7 The specific theological question (“What is the nature of God?”) stayed on the back burner.

Two Theological “Aha!” Moments

EUREKA!

Luther’s “Aha!” moment came thanks to an exegetical about-face in his understanding of Paul’s phrase “the righteousness of God” (Rom. 1:17). In the context of late medieval Catholicism, Luther first understood it to mean the demand to make oneself acceptable to God by improving on the infused grace obtained by virtue of one’s baptism and the sacraments.8 What tormented him was the dread that he had not done enough to make himself sufficiently righteous—that is, rightly related to the God who executes justice. It was a terrible burden. After he wrestled with the biblical text for days, the light finally dawned—“Eureka!” He suddenly realized that God’s righteousness was not a demand but a donation: a divine gift. The priestly word of absolution (“I absolve you”) is not a recognition that a person is deserving of forgiveness but, on the contrary, a speech act that accomplishes what it declares, “an effective, accomplishing Word.”9 Luther reports that he felt himself reborn, as if he had “gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Grace Alone
• 2. Faith Alone
• 3. Scripture Alone
• 4. In Christ Alone
• 5. For the Glory of God Alone
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover