Column: Mortal Remains
Not as the Scribes
by S. M. Hutchens
It was a defect of my seminary training, I am sure quite unintended by my professors, that by the time I graduated and was expected to preach, the view of the Scriptures I had carried to the school from my earlier life had undergone a transformation from "the Word of God, understood, but partially, and with varying degrees of clarity," to "the Word of God, understood partially, but now as a set of questions to be worked through with the aid of honest, conservative scholarship."
The text that upon graduation confronted the young preacher no longer seemed to be something from which he could even dream to imitate the Lord in "speaking with authority, and not as the scribes." For he found himself a subaltern in a scribal hierarchy that had the professor of New Testament at the top, so that, in order to preach faithfully and truly, he had to check his work in as much detail as he could find time for against the opinions of the masters of his guild. Their claims to authority, like those of their counterparts in liberal Protestantism, were founded principally in the text science by and through which they read
the Bible.
A friend who graduated from a mainline Protestant seminary told me that one of his professors had, with remarkable candor, told him—and here I am reconstructing from memory—"When someone comes to this school, as many do, with simple faith in the truth of the Bible and the Christianity that they have carried in from their little church in Iowa, we break them down during the first year, destroying that faith, and while they are still reeling from this, we begin the process of rebuilding it along more rational lines. By the time they graduate, they are committed to this new faith and regard it as part of their mission to enlighten those churches to which they are now returning as pastors. For some, the job we have done here does not hold [this is what happened most famously in the case of Karl Barth], and they revert to their natal fundamentalism, but most remain largely oriented toward progressive Christianity, and stay within our sphere of influence for the rest of their lives."
Make no mistake; there is no small difference between these two situations. The first is essentially orthodox Christianity; the second is not Christianity at all, but the church of Antichrist. What they have in common, however, is the subjection of the minister in all his work as a preacher and teacher to the results of modern scholarship, that scholarship in the latter case being of liberal provenance, in the former, conservative and Evangelical.
Three Merging Streams
Standing in the pulpit of the mainline Protestant church of which I became pastor, I had a very uneasy conscience, for while I was called to preach the gospel with authority—and God knows my congregation needed it—and the liberal gospel was no gospel at all, the Evangelical gospel, while on the right track because it affirmed the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, lacked depth. It also tended to stray doctrinally because of its professed interest in "communicating with the culture" and its lack of interest in the witness of the historical Church. Thus, it was not of sufficient authority to preach or teach with full and consistent conviction.
The Scriptures still stood before me as a series of problems that needed to be worked through, the end of which was to be competent exegesis of the text, which was the Word of God. Such exegesis was delivered with the help of the Holy Spirit, who was expected to fill in any exegetical cracks by making up in the hearers for scribal deficiencies in the preacher. I admit this is a crude way of putting it, but not, I think, an inaccurate one, and if ever there were a better example of the teaching of the scribes (i.e., Bible scholars), with no more than the equivocal scribal authority that the people of Jesus' day recognized as such, I don't know what it would be. Something wasn't right here.
Beginning at about this time, what had been three relatively independent streams began to merge in my own mind. (I must emphasize that I think very slowly. It takes many years to come to even preliminary conclusions on matters I perceive as important.) The first of the merging streams was C. S. Lewis's presentation of the concept of mere Christianity, not simply as a helpful description of the Protestant view of the Church, to which I still hold, but as an aid to thinking about the problem of authority. The second was a more intense awareness of, and greatly increased respect for, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy as plausible. Both possessed long histories and deep theologies, superior (but in very different ways) to anything I had found in Protestantism, and neither of their mutually exclusive claims to being the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of the Creed could easily be written off. The third stream was simply my gradually increasing store of learning and critical reflection.
The merging of these into a single stream that has now become the main channel of my thought life—which is slower than ever—has had a profound effect on my own confidence that I can now speak with authority, for it has moved my center of reference from the scribal schools to the faith of the Church, described in the Vincentian canon as that which has been believed at all times, everywhere, and by all Christians. Reading the Christian writing of the ages has exposed me to all the disagreements that I knew were there, and more, but it has also shown me the existence of a royal road of agreement among the saints who can reasonably be nominated as teachers of the Church. Taken as a whole, their writings constitute a self-disciplining expression of mere Christianity as recognized by Lewis, even within churches that only recognize Christianity in themselves. (I believe that when those who respect their authority speak of "the Fathers," they make reference to this road, for while the ancient writers so denominated do not agree with one another in all things, they are unanimous at the core of their witness.) What they do not disagree upon is a great mass of teaching and interpretation which leads from the scribal traditions back to the Scriptures themselves, from which one can preach and teach in all Christian churches with the highest level of confidence.
What the increase of learning has done is to confirm that the same path has been trod by John Bunyan and Basil the Great, by Hieronymus and Billy Graham, by Thomas Aquinas and Vance Havner, by C. H. Spurgeon and Bonaventure, by William Law and Benedict XVI, by Maximos the Confessor and John Wesley, by William Tyndale and Thomas More. Coming to know the path itself helps one recognize both deviation from it and the real places of disagreement to which the preacher, recognizing them as such, may or may not feel bound to go. But the common path, the common teaching, the Rule of Faith, the common ethic, the Creed in which all believe, the Great Canon, all descending in a right line from the prophetic and apostolic word in the Scriptures, is so filled with abundant agreement that here at last is the Archimedean point from which one can teach with authority, and not as the scribes.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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