Private Interpretation...

...the Licona-Geisler Controversy grinds on.

Mike Licona's recent book offered an allegorical interpretation of Matthew 27's odd story of the saints rising after the crucifixion.  Evangelical doyen Norm Geisler felt that this was a denial of inerrancy and has been leading a jihad against Licona ever since.  Apologianick offers this summary:

Here is what Geisler has done in the issue.

He has issued a petition behind the scenes for people to vote on about whether Mike is violating Inerrancy or not.

He has been instrumental in causing Mike to lose a job twice, including personally contacting people to warn them about Mike.

He has caused further financial loss to Mike by getting him uninvited from speaking engagements and has done the same to two supporters, Paul Copan and Gary Habermas.

Apologianick also notes:

What I am most concerned with what I see in the blogosphere is unthinking. Now someone has complained that the Geisler video made some people look like drones. In all honesty, when I go to the Geisler Facebook page, a lot of people do a really good job of demonstrating that. For some, it’s simply the case of “Geisler has spoken. The case is closed.”

I honestly wonder if some might take the Mormon hymn of “Praise to the Man” and simply change it from Joseph Smith to Geisler.

In fact, I have a difficulty in some ways with Paul saying he is my fan. I often realize the position that I hold and a lot of people will take what I say very seriously and think “I want you to really study what I tell you.” I often do this trick at work where if someone tells me their birthday, I can tell them what day of the week they were born on. So many customers upon seeing this say “I believe you!” I don’t like that. I want them to check me first. Make sure what I’m saying is true instead of just being willing to believe me immediately.

I fear when I go to Geisler’s page, I see a lot of “yes men.” These are the ones that think “Well Geisler said this in response and that settles the issue.” That is not a position that should be given to any man save Jesus Christ. It should not be given to Geisler. It should not be given to Mike. It should not be given to me. I understand Paul is not doing this with either of us, but are we in danger of following another man instead of Jesus? Do we not remember 1 Corinthians? “I follow Paul. I follow Apollos. I follow Cephas.” It should be for all of us “I follow Christ.” Oh we’d all say we do, but are we following Christ but necessarily through the lens of a mortal man?

This affair is obviously quite serious for Licona. It also serves as a warning to others who might offer theological speculation that would cross Geisler or other powers in the Evangelical world.

But where is "private interpretation" in any of this?  Alister McGrath calls private interpretation "Christianity's Dangerous Idea" and the fountainhead of all modern virtue, but in this dispute we don't see any adherence to this supposedly quintessential Protestant virtue.  What we see are lines drawn in the air enforced by excommunication and people who are following a de facto magisterium of one self-appointed person.

Ironically, this particular fight wouldn't be happening in Catholicism. Catholicism is comfortable with the idea that scripture may be read symbolically as well as historically.  In The Death of the Messiah, Raymond Brown writes:

"When one appreciates the symbolic, poetic, and popular apocalyptic character of the four lines of 27;15b - 52b with the phenomena they describe, they offer no major problem.  They are clearly attached to the death of Jesus on Friday afternoon, when the ominous judgmental tone that precedes the raising of the holy ones."

Does this mean that the saints didn't rise on Friday afternoon?  No, not necessarily, but this approach does permit a diversity of understanding in that it is willingness to accept a tension to exist between symbolic and literal truth.  As Christian Smith observes:

58. Distinguish between formulations of truth and the truths that the formulations express. This step follows from the previous one. For evangelicals, things say what they mean and mean what they say. Lines are drawn, people get clear on where they stand, and clarity and consistency throughout is paramount. That is its literal, either/or, univocal approach at work again. That view also reflects Protestantism’s central emphasis on the word. As Protestant pulpits replaced Catholic altars, as printed Bibles displaced icons and devotional practices, Protestantism made words—discrete written and spoken units of language—the medium for grasping and conveying Christian truth. Correct words, for Protestants—particularly for evangelical rationalists—are therefore nearly themselves sacred, because Christian truth itself is represented directly in the right words.18

Catholics also care very much about right words. But their approach to words is a bit different in a way that turns out to make a big difference. Catholicism, in short, recognizes a gap between words and what the words express or represent. For Protestants, the words are the truth. That is why one must get them exactly right. For Catholics, by contrast, words formulate expressions of truth. There is not in Catholicism a literal, exact, univocal correspondence or identity between words and truth. Much of truth, especially truth that directly concerns God, is in Catholicism a mystery. Ultimately the truth is God. And God is not words.19

So we use words to understand and express those mysteries to the very best of our ability. That is what humans—even those in possession of divine revelation—do. But the words themselves can never fully capture or embody the truth. The words point us to the truth. They are good witnesses to or mediums for expressing truth. But the truth itself does not consist of the assemblages of words.

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (pp. 104-105). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

The willingness to accept this tension is also the willingness to accept mystery.  Christian Smith observes that the antipathy toward mystery is very modern:

For most of Christian history, the material and spiritual world was much more enchanted, thicker with spiritual meaning, and full of greater mystery than modern evangelicalism knows. Modernity suffers a “mystery deficit”—an inability to even conceive of unknowns and realities beyond those accessible to rational understanding. Indeed, that mystery deficit is central to the corrosions of secularization. Evangelicalism participates in that mystery deficit.

Smith, Christian (2011-06-09). How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps (p. 36). Cascade Books, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Private Interpretation - Michael Licona v. Norm Geisler

Parchment and Pen hosts this video of Paul Copan's thoughts on the dispute on how literal Evangelicals must take Matthew 27:

The most important doctrine of Protestantism is "private interpretation"...

...except when it's not.

Alister McGrath wrote a massive tome on "Christianity's Dangerous Idea," which apparently was supposed to be "private interpretation," as part of which every believer had the right to their own understanding of the Bible, and which, according to McGrath, paved the way for democracy, tolerance, progress, science, indoor plumbing and free pizza delivery, i.e., in a word, to the modern world.  The problem with McGrath's grandiloquent theory, in my opinion, is that you can't actually spot it in practice when you look at actual history. What actual history looks like is that each Protestant church/denomination/pastor has its own magisterial authority and is as quick to excommunicate and suppress divergent interpretations as they Protestants to allege against Catholicism, up to and including killing those who disagree with the interpretation preferred by the given Protestant church/denomination/pastor (although, admittedly, not so much in the last 300 years more or less.)

One of the reason why I find the Protestant idea - slogan, really - of "private interpretation" to be so problematic are things like this:

A fiery debate has erupted over a leading Southern Baptist apologist's questioning of Matthew 27. The question: whether Matthew's reference to many saints rising from their graves after Jesus' resurrection might not be literal history.


The theological war of words, spurred by high-profile open letters and retorts on the Internet, has raised questions about the meaning of biblical inerrancy. It has also led to the departure of Michael Licona as apologetics coordinator for the North American Mission Board (NAMB).

At issue is a passage of Licona's 700-page The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, published in 2010 by InterVarsity Press.

"Based on my reading of the Greco-Roman, Jewish, and biblical literature, I proposed that the raised saints are best interpreted as Matthew's use of an apocalyptic symbol communicating that the Son of God had just died," said Licona, former research professor of New Testament at Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. Licona voluntarily resigned from the seminary on October 4 after the print version of this article went to press.

In a series of open letters posted online, Norman Geisler, distinguished professor of apologetics at Veritas Evangelical Seminary in Murrieta, California, objected to Licona's characterizing the passage as a "strange little text." Geisler accused Licona of denying the full inerrancy of Scripture. He also called for Licona to recant his interpretation, labeling it "unorthodox, non-evangelical, and a dangerous precedent for the rest of evangelicalism."

In a 2,800-word blog post, Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, praised Licona's book as "virtually unprecedented in terms of evangelical scholarship" and "nothing less than a masterful defense of the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead."

Yet Mohler devoted most of the post to criticizing what he called Licona's "shocking and disastrous argument" concerning the bodily resurrection of the saints.

Licona replied to Geisler that additional research has led him to re-examine his position. "At present I am just as inclined to understand the narrative … as a report of a factual (i.e., literal) event as I am to view it as an apocalyptic symbol," Licona wrote.

In the wake of the controversy, a number of leading evangelical scholars came to Licona's defense—some publicly, others privately.

"I know a good number of evangelical seminary professors who have privately expressed support for Mike Licona but cannot do so publicly for fear of punitive measures," said Paul Copan, an apologist and president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society.

And this is a good point, and the reason why the claim to submtting to the "bible alone" is a great slogan, but makes no sense in practice:

Daniel B. Wallace, New Testament professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, said he disagrees with Licona's interpretation but considers the issue hermeneutical, not a challenge to biblical inerrancy.


"If we view our own interpretation to be just as inerrant as the Scriptures," he said, "this could ironically elevate tradition and erode biblical authority."

Wallace is both right and wrong. To say that someone, anyone, is wrong in their interpretation of the Bible is to say that your interpretation is right, and, therefore, your interpretation is necessarily the correct interpretation of the Bible and, as such, your interpretation is inerrant and, dare we say it, infallible.  But Wallace is wrong if he thinks that he can ever separate a text from interpretation.  Apart from a trivial claim that they exist as physical structures, texts do not exist except to the extent that they interact with a mind. The purpose of a text is to interact with the mind. If a text is not interacting with a mind, then it is no more a text than a rock is a text.  That means that texts are texts only insofar as they are interpreted.

So, just as "words are not crystals with fixed, invariant meaning; words are the living skin of thought," texts are the living skin of thought, and, therefore, getting the interpretation right is getting the text right. Moreover since we interpret in light of a tradition, getting the interpretative tradition right is important.

Saying that all interpretations equally right in order to avoid elevating tradition means that saying that a text is "inerrant" and "sufficient" is absolutely meaningless. Inerrant how? Sufficient in what way? "Inerrancy," "sufficiency" and "perspicuity" may be great slogans, but in practice if there is no interpretative tradition that is sufficiently trustworthy to make the inerrancy, sufficiency and perspicuity of the text known, they are meaningless words.

According to Christian Smith in "Making the Bible Impossible," Evangelicals find themselves in a state of cognitive dissonance between theory and practice.

n.b. - the actual quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes is -

"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."

Now playing on Facebook - a diatribe about what Private Interpretation is and is not.

... and put here because I don't want to have to rewrite it.

Let's talk about some basic concepts -


Authority - Scripture is authoritative. The Church is authoritative. You can disagree with the latter, but it is supported throughout the texts you accept as authoritative. See e.g., The church is the pillar and bulwark of truth. 1 Tim. 15 - 16. The Church is also visible. See John 17 and other passages.

The notes in the Ignatius study bible are not "authoritative" because they were written by Scott Hahn. Insofar as they have authority, they are authoritative because a bishop of the Church has inspected the notes and determined that they are free from doctrinal error.

That doesn't mean that Hahn's notes are scripture or that they define the only truth. What it means is that are within the range of orthodox opinion.

Private Interpretation - I suspect that Private Interpretation does not mean what you think it does - I suspect that you think that Private Interpretation means "reading the Bible, using your mind, consulting other sources, and coming up with the 'correct' interpretation."

Of course, the devil is in the idea of "correct." How do Protestants come up with the "correct" understanding. The answer is that as a practical matter, they do exactly what Catholics do - they consult tradition and delimit what is "correct" by the answers that their tradition has given in the past.

The only difference between what Protestants and Catholics do is that Catholics are honest about it.

But what "Private Interpretation" really means is that there are no "correct" interpretations. "Private Interpretation" is vaguely defined. I note that Alister McGrath doesn't offer a definition of it in his "Christianity's Dangerous Idea," but he does say that the core of Private Interpretation is that "the interpretation of Scripture is the right and responsibility of every Christian."

What this idea connotes is that everyone has the same shot at interpreting scripture correctly, because if that wasn't the case, then we couldn't say that the interpretation of scripture was the right and responsibility of everyone; rather, we would say that some people should listen to those with the more correct interpretation.

Here you can see why my idea that Augustine might be an abler interpreter of Scripture than a bunch of guys on the internet was attacked with vehemence. I was suggesting that not everyone had the same ability, that Augustine might just be a more worthy interpreter than some dude writing on Facebook in 2011.

Consider the responses that I got. I was told that everyone had the same access to the Holy Spirit - which is nonsense - and that people today had better access to information because of the internet than Augustine - which is equally nonsense, as I demonstrated.

Private interpretation is intellectual nihilism that denies that there is a correct interpretation that we can know with any certainty. If everyone has the same access to the Holy Spirit, and is sincere and diligent in their efforts to understand scripture, and if they come up with radically different understandings, then there is no basis under Private Interpretation to say that one interpretation is right and another is wrong. They are all equally right FOR THE PEOPLE DOING THE INTERPRETING!

Hey, does that sound like the history of Protestantism at all?

Do you deny that?

In fact, does that sound like modernity and relativism at all?

The contrary to Private Interpretation is to say that there is an objectively correct interpretation that can be reached through reason over time as defined by the Church. This doesn't mean that all of scripture is given a single interpretation. That would be impossible because scripture is always succeptible to different interpretations. But it does mean that the Church can define certain interpretations as wrong. For example, it is wrong to deny that the Son is consubstantial with the Father. Generally, so long as that is understood, we are free to interpret subject to that limitation.

So, non-private interpretation does not mean that there is no interpretation. It means that interpretation must be done within the broad guidelines of defined doctrines.

Epistemology - So, having framed this anaylsis, the answer should be clear. How do we know certain doctrines as being true? The exact same way that you and other Protestants know it - because the Church - our church - told us. You don't hold to the Nicene doctrine because you started with the Bible and got there yourself. You accept the Nicene Creed because of a long-series of argument that sought to make sure that the Nicene doctrines "fit" with the rest of Christianity.

We don't have to re-invent the wheel. We can rely on the church which is the pillar and bulwark of truth and which is led by the Holy Spirit into all truth.

The question is, do you trust the Church? I do. I know that my church was founded by Jesus Christ. I can follow an unbroken linkage of bishops back to the beginning. I trust the promise of Christ that the Church will prevail against the gates of Hell.

Since Protestants can't make that claim, they tend to get sucked into a circular argument where Scripture is the only authority because it is Scripture. Of course, why it's scripture or who said it is scripture is simply an issue that gets dropped into a Protestant "blind spot."

Now, I ask you, did I do "Private Interpretation" in accepting the authority of the Church? The answer is "No." I wasn't interpreting the Scripture. I was looking at history.

Once I get to the point of trusting the Church, I now reject Private Interpretation. It is not primarily my right or responsibility to interpret scripture. It is primarily the right and responsibility of the Church to interpret Scripture. My right and responsiblity is secondary to that of the Church. I am not deluded that my interpretation would be better than that of the Church or of the great thinkers of the Church.

Now, reflect back on the CAA diatribe. My point was that whether the Old Testament epiphanies where appearances by God - as everyone seemed to believe - or by Angels - as Augustine argued - was all within the limits of orthodox belief. The church has offered no definition on the subject. So, we can argue about the issue. I offered Augustine as a possible interpretation. Not a single Protestant bothered to read Augustine. Not a single Protestant said, "hey, that's interesting." Why was that?

The answer was that they didn't think they needed Augustine. I was told repeatedly that Augustine might be great theologian, and no one was saying that they were as good as Augustine, but their opinions were really as good as Augustine, ALL WITHOUT EVER READING OR ADDRESSING WHAT AUGUSTINE WROTE!

That is just disappointing from any group that claims to be intellectual. Augustine, as I said, might be right, he might be wrong, but, heck, he ought to have some persuasive authority in an area that is unclear.

Interpretation - As I said, there are places where the Bible is unclear. There are places where Augustine is clear. My questions to you were (a) do you deny that? and (b) if you admit the obvious, what does that do to your claim about needing interpreters to interpret Augustine?