The Gospel Coalition

 

Reading Scripture with the Reformers

Timothy George | Interview by: John Starke

Protestant seminaries proudly celebrate programs in Reformation studies. Thanks to Calvin's 500th birthday, we have a glut of biographies about the Genevan reformer. And if Luther had an opinion about something, no doubt it is print. We are certainly not lacking insight into the people and times of the Reformation. Still, we sometimes overlook how the reformers influenced the way we read the Bible. Thankfully, Beeson Divinity School founding dean Timothy George has written an exciting and insightful new book, Reading Scripture with the Reformers, showing us how a fresh return to Scripture instigated Reformation. I corresponded with George about these matters and more, including the effect of the printing press on Bible reading and the reformers' formative influences.

 
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The title of your book, Reading Scripture with the Reformers, made me initially think this book was devotional. I quickly learned that was a bad assumption. Can you explain the project?

Your assumption is not as bad as you may think. What we call “the devotional reading of the Bible” is presupposed by the reformers’ doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture and their insistence that all of God’s people should have unfettered access to God’s written word. Reading Scripture with the Reformers tells the story of how the Bible came to place such a central role in the renewal of the church at the time of the Reformation. It unpacks the notion of sola scriptura, the interpretation of the Bible, and the role of preaching in the ministry of the church. This book is an introduction to the Reformation Commentary on Scripture, a 28-volume series (the inaugural volume is Galatians, Ephesians by Gerald Bray) of 16th-century exegetical comment. The purpose of this series is to provide an important new resource for pastors and teachers charged with proclaiming God’s Word today.

What did the invention of the printing press do for Bible? How was Bible reading different before?
 
Bible reading has been a staple of Christian life since the days of the apostles. No one can read the church fathers or medieval figures like Bernard of Clairvaux without realizing this. In the late Middle Ages, there were many Bible-based reform movements including the Lollards in England, the Hussites in Bohemia, the Waldensians in Italy, and the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life who copied, read, and taught the Bible in their many communities throughout Germany and the Low Countries.
 
But there were two new developments that made possible the explosion of biblical translations, commentaries, and preaching during the Protestant Reformation. One of these was the revival of learning associated with the rediscovery of classical texts and the emergence of what might be called “sacred philology.” Until the time of the Renaissance, the Bible was largely locked up in the learned language of Latin. But beginning with Erasmus, Reuchlin, and other scholars, new critical editions of the Bible in the original languages of Greek and Hebrew allowed the Scriptures to be studied and understood with a penetration and depth unavailable in the past. Their motto was ad fontes—back to the sources!—which meant in the first place “back to the Bible!” but also back to the writings of the early church fathers and the unfolding of the apostolic witness in the history of the church.
 
All of this might have remained a small scholarly enterprise had it not been for the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg. His remarkable ditto device spread like wildfire across Europe and forever changed communication and education. The typographical revolution has often been compared to the invention of the computer and the internet in our own day, and I think that is an apt comparison. Luther’s translation of the Bible was the world’s first bestseller. Soon, William Tyndale followed suit in English, and others in French, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, even Arabic, so that the written Word of God resounded from the lecture rooms, debate halls, and pulpits in all parts of Europe. One result of the printing revolution was the phenomenon of silent reading. In the ancient world and up through the Middle Ages, the Bible was most often read outloud. Now, farmboys at their plows or milkmaids at their pails could take the Scriptures in their own hands and read it with their own eyes. John Knox tells the story of a man in Scotland who was so thrilled to have his own copy of the Bible that he left his wife alone in bed at night while he pored over the text of Holy Writ! Talk about reading the Bible devotionally!
 
You ask us to read Scripture with the Reformers. Who did the Reformers read Scripture with?
 
One prominent leader in 19th-century America encouraged his disciples to “read the Bible as if mortal eyes had never looked on it before.” Luther, Cranmer, Calvin, Bucer, Zwingli, Bullinger, Beza, Peter Martyr, and the other great reformers of the 16th century knew better than that. They read the Bible alongside the church fathers, scholars, and reformers who had come before them in the family of faith. They certainly dared to challenge those exegetical traditions in the light of a fresh encounter with the Word of God. This is what made them Protestants. For them, the Bible was norma normans, the definitive norm that normed all other opinions, traditions, and teachings. But they had the wisdom and humility to listen and weigh carefully what other great scholars and teachers of the church had thought and said across the centuries. For example, the priority they gave to the literal interpretation of the text was in keeping with a hermeneutical tradition that went back to Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Lyra in the Middle Ages. The result of all this was not exegetical unanimity among the reformers. Just think of Luther and Zwingli and their disagreement over the meaning of the words of institution, “This is my body.” But those differences, while painful and sometimes even church-dividing, took place within a common exegetical framework that continues to shape the evangelical movement to this day. That framework includes the christological and trinitarian interpretation of the early church, and the material and formal principles of the Reformation itself: the supremacy of Scripture and justification by faith alone.
 
When did we begin to see an emergence of “no creed but the Bible” Christians?
 
Already in the 16th century there were some who wanted to bypass the creeds and councils of the early church and simply repeat the words of the Bible in every case. At first, Calvin himself was attracted to this view. But when he encountered the anti-trinitarians of his day, he saw the importance of adopting creedal language and words such ashomoousios. It was sometimes necessary, as it had been in the early church, to use non-biblical words precisely in order to make clear the teaching of the Bible itself. “No creed but the Bible” can be taken in a good sense when it means “no creed above the Bible.” But for many today, both liberals and pietists, I am afraid that “no creed but the Bible” is a cipher for “neither creed nor the Bible.” 
 
You call the Reformers “proto-postmoderns.” What do you mean?
 
In several important respects, the reformers of the 16th century anticipated some of the insights of the postmodern moment in its radical critique of modernism. I would include here their stress on the importance of the church as a corrective to exaggerated individualism. And while they honored reason as a gift from God, they challenged the autonomous, prideful use of reason that has shaped so much of the historical-critical method of studying the Bible over the past two centuries. The reformers offer us an alternative to a “hermeneutics of glory.” As Kevin Vanhoozer has pointed out, that alternative involves the recovery of a “hermeneutics of the cross.” The Bible is meant to lead us to communion with God. Reading the Scripture with the reformers means reading the Scriptures with humility, as a coherent story, divinely given to us by God himself. This means that the Bible should be read as a non-totalizing but still all-encompassing metanarrative in the light of which everything else has to be understood. As I put it in Reading Scripture with the Reformers: "From the reformers we learn that the true purpose of biblical scholarship is not to show how relevant the Bible is to the modern world, but how irrelevant the modern and postmodern world—and we as persons enmeshed in it—have become in our self-centered preoccupations and sinful rebellion against the God who spoke and still speaks by his Spirit through his chosen prophets and apostles.”
 
John Starke is an editor for The Gospel Coalition and lead pastor of All Souls Church in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. You can follow him on Twitter.


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