I will email you within the next few weeks. Thanks for you comments!

A friend of mine brought up this concept to me about some protestants talk of subjecting all tradition (as norma normata) to the test of Scripture (as norma normans). I don’t know where it fits in with sola scriptura.

Shoot me an email [do you have it?], and let me know what you are thinking about. My subject expertise is pretty small but I’d be happy to chat about things.

Ben

Thanks for stopping by and reading through the essay. I was just telling a friend of mine the other day about your dissertation and how I wish I had thought of it first! I hope things are going well for you at Durham. Concerning your questions:

1) Yeah, I definitely do not think that Calvin or Luther would appreciate contemporary Protestant views of the relationship between Tradition & Scripture. You are right when you say that Calvin and Luther were intimately familiar with patristic literature. David Steimetz has a book entitled “Calvin in Context” which speaks of this in the chapter “Calvin and Patristic Exegesis” [I believe he also has a book entitled "Luther in Context" which is similar]. Guys like D.H. Williams at Truett and Thomas Oden are doing a great job to challenge contemporary views. See D. H. Williams’ “Evangelicals and Tradition: The Formative Influence of the Early Church” and “Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism.” The latter of these two has a chapter on Scripture & Tradition in the Reformation and I think he hits on both Luther and Calvin in this chapter. The radical reformers definitely took things further than I think they should have been taken, esp. with regards to views on Tradition and also ecclesiology. This is why I think Anglicanism as a via media is a healthy path. What we have with the radical reformers is, in effect, a commital of the fallacy of accident (or “dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid”). One is not justified in rejecting ALL views of the RC church just because SOME of their views were aberrant. Again, this is why I see great value in the Elizabethan Settlement which established Anglican identity into a middle way. Without any historical ecclesio-anchor, many churches have become a-historical in the name of being true to “Scripture Alone,” which was never what Luther or Calvin would have wanted. Moreover, their cry “Sola Scriptura” must always be kept in context of fighting against a church that they literally thought had become the seat of Satan. This is why in our present context I prefer Prima Scriptura.

2) This is THE question…and it is REALLY tough. In my mind, it seems that more weight should be given to patristic interepretations given their historical proximity to the events themselves. But it is obvious that they did work from a different hermeneutic. So whatever the answer is, I don’t think that it will be unilateral. It seems as though an eclectic approach which takes interpretations on a case-by-case basis is needed. However, here are at least three things we could keep in mind:. (1) Weigh patristic readings against grammatical-historical interpretations and see which reading makes the most sense of what we now know in light of sociology, history, NT criticism, etc. (2) Follow some of the same roads scholars take in interpreting midrashim, intertextuality, etc.-maybe insights can be gleaned for this question from the expanding corpus of literature on Use of the OT in the NT. As an aside, (I was just thinking about this the other day actually), any NT student knows that we have TONS of methods of NT study. Why can’t we have Paleo-Criticism or Patristics Criticism or Tradition-History Criticism ( Excuse my coining of these phrases…maybe another title would be more helpful)? I think if more research was done in the area of use of the NT in the PA (patristic age) then we might be closer to answering this question (maybe it has & I am ignorant). (3) Allow more room for allegory in hermeneutics ( I believe D. H. Williams talks some about this). EVERYONE allegorizes somewhere, the question is when is it ok to do so.

(3) I don’t think this means that texts have more than one meaning anymore than multiple views of the trinity in early church history means that there isn’t one orthodox view. I think that this is where (T)radition comes in as a filter for (t)radition or traditions(s). We can use the “rule of faith” (which in its basic form predates the text) spoken of by patristic authors, and accepted by all Orthodox Christians, as a hermeneutical filter for interpretation. If an interpretation is consonant with the rule of faith, then it is accepted PROVISIONALLY. But then, there will still be the need to adjudicate between these multiple interpretations. And this is where I am lost and do not know what to do.

I definitely appreciate your comment in regard to post-modern interpretation & historical/theological interpretation. I think you are definitely onto something. It is already difficult to know how to adjudicate between readings yielded from just those who approach the text from a historical-grammatical camp. Throw in reading with and through the church and you only further complicate the issues. I think that it can be done, however, but one cannot make the mistake (as many advocacy group interpreters do[i.e.postcolonial, feminist,etc.]) of equating multiple possible interpretations with multiple meanings.

Anyways, I just wrote a lot and I am not sure that I even got close to answering your questions. I hope some of this, at least, is helpful.

By the way, I would love to talk to you sometime about areas that you think might be promising for PhD research that also might interest me.

Blessings
Clint

1) Do you think it was the Reformers themselves that got it wrong or their progeny with the terminology of sola scriptura? Calvin and Luther were both very connected to patristic writers, but their progeny seemed to move further on the spectrum than what their mentors modeled. But, I don’t know reformation history at all, so I could be off with that.
2) What can we do with tradition that is based on much different hermeneutical models than what we would find valid today–e.g., allegory?
3) Related to 3), if there are multiple traditions around a certain text, does that mean that texts have more than one meaning? If not, what criteria do we use to judge whether something is a better or worse reading of the text?

One area ripe with this discussion is that of the world of theological interpretation. They tend to want to read the Bible with the church as a whole, which includes historical writers. However, this also goes hand in glove with a post-modern hermeneutic of multiple meanings. Do you have any thoughts on this area?

Thanks,
Ben