Who’s Afraid of a Doctrine of Scripture?

To some Christians the idea of studying a “doctrine of Scripture” is like analyzing the lenses on our glasses rather than looking through them. We may have to polish them off now and then, or have them replaced if they crack, but that is the extent of it. How boring would it be if we rambled on about the properties of those spectacles? No one minds a bit of talk about translations. After all, we have to get the prescription that matches our eyesight. But we would suspect more than vision issues occurring with anyone who takes it beyond that.

Yet I want to suggest that the shoe is on the other foot here when it comes to thinking about what Scripture is and how it functions in the whole of our theology. Upon closer inspection, we will see that there is actually more to the popular misgivings than meets the eye. In fact, many who suspect some foul play in “reducing” the Bible to such a study are themselves only projecting their own guilty motives for moving the lens of Scripture out of sight and out of mind.

Bibliology or Bibliolatry? 

While there are several kinds of objections that have been leveled against the Protestant view of Scripture, I have personally found the Barthian (articulated by Karl Barth1 and diversified by his several brands of followers ever since) objection to be the most enlightening entry point. The charges of the Barthians are like the hub of a bibliophobic wheel around which we can see other similar complaints orbiting.

What may appear at first glance to be very different laments of Roman Catholics, Charismatics, old Liberals and newer Progressives, can actually be traced to the same senses of embarrassment or restriction. In order to see this, we need to get our heads around that central objection.

Where Barth and later Barthians tend to agree is that, somewhere along the line, in the course of seventeenth century Reformed Orthodoxy (which they claimed was a departure from the simpler days of the sixteenth century Reformation)2, the Bible became to the Protestant something of a “paper pope,” and that the whole doctrine of Scripture that emerged around it was placed at the beginning of theology books issuing forth into two deviancies (whether intentional or not). “Fundamentalism’s doctrine of inerrancy” was then conceived to be a natural outgrowth of this. 

But what were those deviancies? If the “Bible-as-an-idol” (hence the term “bibliolatry”) played this role as a new foundation to all Christian thought, it upheld the whole house by the two pillars of control and certainty. In the face of a Christendom no longer unified and a Modernity characterized by unbelief, the Scripture must now be a quick-fix, fact-checking “sourcebook,” that can settle all scores and put out any fires before further division or doubt settle in.

In order to achieve this control and this certainty, it is said, the Bible was commodified. That is, it was turned into a ready-at-hand tool (or even weapon) that could be wielded not so much against the devil as against any of one’s fellow church-goers who stepped out of line in terms of that orthodoxy. 

Before we respond to this, it is worth reviewing the other main criticisms of the Protestant doctrine in this light. In fact, something of a common uneasiness comes to the surface. In our constant appeal to Scripture, critics of the doctrine sense that the walls are closing in on them and all doors have been locked. Now, it just so happens that the Roman Catholic sees those bars protecting each particular mind that claims “private interpretation,” while the modern “free-thinker” is more worried about the external bars preventing him from getting inside his own mind—the Charismatic only fearing the same bars being set around his own heart or experience.

But everywhere the objection turns out to be the same in substance—sure, different nuances, but all reacting to those suffocating fences and arrogant postings that the critics are quite sure that Protestant theologians alone put there.

“Jesus certainly didn’t put them there!”

Of that one thing our Bible-liberationists are certain. “Show me where the Bible itself teaches this or that property of itself!” Suddenly, and with no sense of irony, the Bible-liberationists become hardened biblicists when it suits their cause. Never mind that the challenge could be answered with countless passages (e.g. Psalm 12:6, Proverbs 30:5-6, John 10:34, 2 Timothy 3:16-17, 2 Peter 1:20-21). For our purposes, I would only show how even the objection to a doctrine of Scripture serves to highlight its importance.

The Answer is Bibliology

Of course, our critical friends are cheating. If biblical necessity, canon, inspiration, inerrancy, authority, sufficiency, and clarity, are mere “tools” of a Protestant clerical class, then why should it matter that one produces “proof” from this book that it is a such and such kind of book? That very request assumes all of those properties of Scripture. It would seem that the only scriptural argument against the Protestant doctrine will have to start with the truth of the Protestant doctrine—which is never a good start to any critical argument. The critic is at an impasse where he must choose acceptance of a higher view of Scripture in his own thinking, or else to move further down the path of skepticism. 

Let us also not confuse Christian charity and intellectual humility with that perennial failure of nerve that refuses to name the biggest elephants in the smallest rooms. The plain fact of the matter is that higher views of Scripture make for the most measured models of theology. We do not need to search the hearts of theologians to note the tendencies of theoretical constructs. No doctrine of Scripture means no analysis of the claims of the Word of God upon us; and this translates into an absence of ultimate criteria in all matters of faith and practice. Perhaps that is what the critic desires; or else it is simply the unintended consequence.

A study of the doctrine of Scripture reveals the same interrelatedness of truth that one discovers in every other doctrine. Pull hard enough at one end of the thread and the whole ball of yarn unravels in due time. The difference with the doctrine of Scripture, though, is that, in a way more unique than with the other doctrines, this is one you look through to have the others defined by God Himself. The suspicion of the critics is right in one sense, however. A view of Scripture that is a firm foundation does indeed imply a certainty and a control, but it is a divine certainty and divine control: one that every true believer ought to rest in. 

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1. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol 1.2 Doctrine of the Word of God. Study Edition #5 ed. (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 71-3.

2. Richard Muller, After Calvin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).