Blake Huggins in a post at Emergent Village is rallying the emergies to embrace what has been dubbed prima Scriptura. The need for a successor to sola Scriptura comes, Huggins explains, as a result of the sola’s congenital flaws.
Whether we realized it in the past or not Sola Scriptura has never been possible. It just can’t work. Because the moment I say that all I need is Scripture alone, I’ve assumed that I occupy some sort of void space, when in fact neither I nor Scripture exist vacuum. I can’t simply read Scripture (or anything for that matter) for what it is without biases or lenses. My position as an urban, white, American, male influences my reading more than I will ever know. The same could be said of the writers of Scripture. Even the notion of Sola Scriptura itself is conditioned by a cultural lens and a certain interpretation albeit an increasingly outmoded one. To read is to interpret; all our readings are always already interpretations and all our interpretations are always already situational. To me, that is inescapable.
So, admitting the immanent end of Sola Scriptura is not a categorical rejection of Scripture as much; rather, it is a coming to terms with our own limitations and finitude as human beings and adopting a certain humility about our readings.
To replace this mistaken attempt to ground authority in Scripture alone, Huggins suggests what he calls “Prima Scriptura.”
Scripture is without a doubt our primary authority and primary source for theological reflection, but is not and cannot be our sole source. We are more complex than that. Scripture is our prime witness to God’s interaction with God’s people, beckoning them/us to join in God’s divine endeavor of restoration and renewal.
Is Huggins’ giving us a proper read on what sola Scriptura meant to Luther and the other early reformers here? As I read these paragraphs, it sounds to me like he is describing a position staked out much later. Luther defended scripture as a final authority against which all doctrine and practice would have to be justified, but I do not think he ever argued for such post-Enlightenment ideas as objectivity and cultural neutrality.
Alister McGrath’s very readable history of Protestantism, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, makes the point that as early as 1520 Protestants were struggling with how to handle the theological diversity unleashed by the rejection of Roman Catholic teaching authority in favor of Scripture read by individuals. Even as they rallied behind the cry of sola Scriptura, the Reformers knew all too well that their principle would not produce a single, timeless, and objective reading of Scripture – which is phantom claim that Huggins’ appears to be attacking.
Indeed, the point of the Bible’s authority was not an attempt to establish it as a rival god – as so many critiques of sola Scriptura seem to argue assume the princple tries to do. A McGrath writes:
At its heart, Protestantism represents a constant return to the Bible to revalidate and where necessary restate its beliefs and values, refusing to allow one generation or individual to determine what is definitive of Protestantism as a whole. … While some very conservative Protestants do treat the Bible as if it were the Christian Qu’ran, the majority are clear that the Bible has a special place in the Christian life on account of its witness to Jesus Christ rather than its specific identity as a text. For Martin Luther, the purpose of scripture was to ‘inculcate Christ,’ who is the ‘mathematical point’ of the Bible.
And later:
Over the years, each strand of Protestantism developed its own way of understanding and implementing the sola Scriptura principle. Each accorded primacy to scripture yet recognized a number of additional resources – tradition, reason, and experience – that might serve in connecting scripture with the intellectual and experiential world of every generation.
We Methodists should recognize those additional resources in our much debate Wesleyan Quadrilateral.
In other words, Protestants and even Luther himself hold exactly the position that emergents are saying we need to adopt. It turns out that the “new” thing that excites so many people is just the old thing that we have either forgotten or allowed to be hidden from view.
Over the years, words such as “sola Scriptura” and even “Christian” have been co-opted by segments of the Protestant community. In the face of these semantic victories, it seems, there are many who choose to quit the field and seek new ground. So, we have groups of people who choose to call themselves Jesus followers or some similar name rather than Christian. And we have people declaring the death of sola Scriptura and seeking a new word.
Rather than trying to formulate new vocabularies and labels for old ideas, why don’t we fight for the old ideas themselves?
NOTE: I wrote on this topic – in some ways more coherently – back in January as well. If you are not sick of my thoughts on this, you check out that post here.
John Meunier 
Thanks for offering up your thoughts, John. You are right in suggesting that I am rejecting a later movement. I really have no problems with Luther vis-a-vis the Reformation. I think the problem is our allowing that sentiment to be taken to an extreme, crusting over into dogma.
That being said, I don’t really have any vested interesting in fighting for the old Sola idea because in my view to do so now, in our current situation, would be to roll back the clock on the Enlightenment. Prior to that, Sola would’ve been just fine, but I find a return to it now after our evolution of thought and understanding to be untenable. Yes, it has been co-opted by various groups, but even if it had not I don’t think it would be feasible given our situation. So I’m of the opinion that we should maintain the spirit of the Reformation (and the Enlightenment) and always be reforming (and being enlightened). Which is why I posit Prima Scriptura.
You write that: “Luther defended scripture as a final authority against which all doctrine and practice would have to be justified, but I do not think he ever argued for such post-Enlightenment ideas as objectivity and cultural neutrality.” Indeed. He could not have argued otherwise because he had not experienced the full breadth of the Enlightenment as we have. Those are our problems to deal with now, and we can’t deal with them in the same manner that Luther dealt with his problems. So I am suggesting that we utilize all the sources we have at our disposal while maintaining that Scripture remain primary amongst them and that our interpretations are fallible and open to revision. To me, our history of “reading” Scripture is indicative of that fact. To read is to interpret. That is an idea Luther didn’t have to mess with, we do. Which is why I don’t think a return to some sort Reformation Romanticism is really all that helpful.
So a quadrilateral-esque idea is really what I am submitting. Now, I am not of the school that suggests that reason, tradition, and reason be made equal to Scripture. I am offering that Scripture is primary and that the other three serve as a sort of hermeneutical triad. And I don’t claim that this is new (though it may be new to some emering/gents who are recovering from “sola abuse”). Far from it. I see this beginning with Luther and evolving up to our own time. I’m no innovator here.
I think that was just a really longwinded way of answering your question. When it comes to this old idea, I just don’t think it is tenable or viable — in its original, unmolested form or otherwise — in our situation and therefore not worth fighting for. And, for what it’s worth, I think we Methodists have a leg up on other Protestant traditions in exploring something different.
Thank you for the time and thought, Blake.
I’m not interested in going back to 1520. But I don’t think you have to go back to “an old idea” of what sola Scriptura means. I think sola Scriptura means pretty much now what it did then. We are just blinded to that fact because a certain line of argument has carried the day.
Giving in to semantic hijackings like this and coming up with new terms is retreating where we should be standing firm – like Mr. Luther. Or, if you prefer, like Jean-Luc Picard in First Contact (they invade our space …)
I guess I think the Enlightenment did not change as much as you do. I do not view sola Scriptura as reading the Bible as a fundamentalist. It did not mean that before the Enlightement and does not mean that now to a great many Christians.
Because that is true, I do not favor abandoning the term. But, of course, my opinion on this matter will not buy you much.
Thanks so much for the reply.
I really wish I could engage you more in depth here, but as it happens I will be hopping a plane early in the morning to make it to Annual Conference in Oklahoma. So I’ll have to keep it short.
I certainly wouldn’t call it “semantic hijacking” nor would I agree that it is “retreating” as you do. To me, it is simply being honest about our situation. We cannot approach Scripture alone. In my view that is impossible because there are always already other things clouding it up. Now, that may not be what Luther meant (I’m not so sure about that point, I’d have to do some research, for now I’ll just say that I am suspicious his intentions), but that’s what most people mean (or understand it to mean) now and I think it has accumulated to much baggage to be worth messing with.
But even if we bypass — though I don’t think we really can if we are honest with ourselves — all the interpretive nuance that myself and others like to bring up and take Luther’s original notion, that Scripture alone should be used to justify doctrine and practice, I think we still run into problems. That is why I affirm along with McGrath and Wesley, that other sources are at work.
The crux of the matter for me, though, will always come down to interpretation. I guess that is why I reject Sola, because it simply seems logically impossible from a interpretive point of view.
But, as you say, that is only my opinion and it surely won’t buy you much either.
Have a good flight.
This is where I think we are closer, and my verbal clumsiness is clouding things. Luther was very strong in his views about scripture, but in practice he was much looser. More importantly, from the first instant Protestantism fractured and fragmented.
So, what I mean to say, is that sola scriptura was always and still is the idea that scripture is indespensible to Christian practice and doctrine. What is not found in scripture cannot be insisted upon. What is found there cannot be ignored – although it can be explained.
This is much looser than Luther would have written, but it has been in practice what he and every other Protestant has done with the principle of sola scriptura. What you see as flaws in the claims of sola, I see as the true nature of it. As a piece of epistemology or logic, sola was always wrong as you say, but as a practice it literally gave rise to a new way of being a Christian.
It is what Protestants did with the concept that matters not what they claimed for it in polemical writings and high flown rhetoric.
Scripture has never been as plain or straight-forward as we want it to be.
But, insistence on its unique role – its sole claim to the status of indespenisble authority – in Christianity has united all the various Protestant movements for 500 years. From the very beginning – even Luther said he needed to be convicted by scripture and plain reason – no one has argued that scripture absolutley on its own without human reason or interpretation would disgorge pure Christianity.
Sola scriptura – and perhaps I am wildly wrong here – has always been about which authority the Christian must ultimately reconcile with his or her conscience. Is it the church (the pope) or is it Scripture? Or is it something else?
Protestants say that you must finally be able to reconcile your practice and your faith with the testimony of scripture. Reason, tradition, and experience are helps in that effort. But they are no substitute for scripture.
This is what I understand as at stake in saying it is by scirpture alone that we determine how to live and worship as Christians. I hate to throw out the idea.
My reference to semantic hijacking is not aimed at the emergents. It is aimed at the fundamentalists who have seized the most restrictive sense of the term and championed it against 5 centuries of practice.
The emergents – if anything – stand in the broad river of the development of sola scriptura. I don’t want to cede to the fundamentalists the meaning of the term. So, I argue for keeping it and fighting to interpret it for the community of faith.
Anyway, thanks for the conversation. Enjoy Oklahoma.
Notably, scripture herself tends to point to EXPERIENCE as primary (or am I being too Methodist here?). Adam and Eve (and Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob) knew God without a scripture. The gospels are “witnesses”…experiential testimonies…to Jesus Christ. Pauline letters, very generally speaking, interpret what Paul experiences in Christ.
Just a thought.
I would agree that if a burning bush in your front yard told you to go to Egypt, you should pay attention to it.
Scripture does not invalidate other forms of revelation. Indeed, the testimony of scripture is that God does use other means of revelation.
But – to speak in a Wesleyan way I hope – scripture is an ordinary means by which God’s revelation is made available to us.
As someone will point out, scripture does not claim for itself primacy. But the experience of the church does. Indeed, the need for scripture led the church to create the canon.
And we know full well how important scripture – the Hebrew Bible – was to Jesus, Paul, Peter and all those other early Christians. Indeed, on Pentecost, when Peter wanted to explain what was happening that day in Jerusalem, he went to scripture.
I take your point about experience. But I – at least – find the revelatory experiences of scripture not exactly like the day-to-day experiences I have. So, I am grateful to have this ordinary means of coming to understand God.