The Spirit and the Interpreter

1 Corinthians 2:6-16 is the passage most often produced to show that spiritual truth is closed to outsiders and open to insiders. Read from 1:18 it is doing something more specific. Paul is confronting a congregation impressed with wisdom and eloquence, and his argument is that the cross is unrecognisable as wisdom to anyone committed to the world's measures of wisdom and power. That is why the rulers of this age, who had every advantage of education and position, crucified the Lord of glory (2:8). The contrast is not between the educated and the simple, nor between the naturally perceptive and the dull. It is between two standards of judgment, one of which cannot see God's decisive act as anything but failure.

Then comes 2:14, and it must be quoted whole, because its second half is the part most often left off: 'The natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.' (The Greek anthropos is the generic word for a person, so 'man' here means human being.) The first verb is one of rejection, does not accept, which suggests a set of categories in which the cross registers as foolishness rather than a shortage of data. But the verse goes on to say he cannot understand, and that is a statement about capacity, and anyone who wants to read this passage as describing a refusal has to say something about it rather than stop at the comma. The available answer, and it is an answer rather than a proof, is that the inability follows from the refusal: what cannot be assessed by a standard is what will not submit to being assessed differently, so the incapacity is real and is the consequence of the prior commitment rather than a separate defect of intelligence. That reading has to be argued, and a reader who prefers to take verse 14 as a plain claim about native incapacity is not doing violence to the words. Note in either case where the passage lands: 'we have the mind of Christ' (2:16), first person plural, said of the community and not handed to an individual as a trump card.

The sentence that should govern the whole use of this passage is the next one after that, because chapter 2 ends at verse 16. 'Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual, but as worldly - as infants in Christ' (3:1). The very readers who might have taken 2:15 as a certificate are told, in the next breath, that they do not qualify. And the word Paul uses of them, sarkinos (literally of flesh, rendered 'worldly' in the BSB), is a third category alongside the natural and the spiritual, which means the tidy two-box scheme built on 2:14-15 falls apart the moment you read on. Whatever this passage does, it does not license one Christian to classify another as unspiritual and close the conversation.

John 16:13 is the second verse, and its context is the upper room on the last night. 'However, when the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all truth. For He will not speak on His own, but He will speak what He hears, and He will declare to you what is to come.' The next verse says he will glorify Jesus by taking what is his and declaring it. Two chapters earlier the same promise is more specific still: the Spirit 'will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have told you' (14:26).

So the promised work of the Spirit in these verses is derivative and Christ-referring by definition. He does not speak on his own. He declares what is Christ's. He reminds them of what Jesus had already told them. Whether the primary reference is to the apostles and the apostolic witness that became the New Testament, or extends directly to every later reader, is a genuine difference between traditions and we will come to it. What no reading of these verses supports is the idea that the Spirit supplies private meanings unavailable from the words. That is the thing being claimed when someone says the Spirit showed them what a verse means, and these are not the verses that authorise it.

The classical vocabulary for the distinction is worth learning. Revelation is God making truth known. Inspiration is the Spirit's work in the production of scripture, which is finished. Illumination is the Spirit's work in the reader, and the tradition has consistently said that it adds no content: it removes the resistance, grants recognition and produces submission to what is already there. John Owen's treatment in his Pneumatologia and Jonathan Edwards' sermon A Divine and Supernatural Light both press the same point, that the change is in affection and apprehension rather than in the supply of new facts.

The doctrine of the clarity of scripture, usually called perspicuity, is regularly stated by its friends in a form its authors would not have recognised, and attacked by its critics in the same form.

Luther set it out in The Bondage of the Will (1525), answering Erasmus, who had argued that scripture is obscure at many points and that the Church must therefore decide. Luther's reply distinguished two clarities. External clarity is the clarity of the words themselves, their grammar and their subject matter, and he insisted that in scripture's central matter this is genuine and public. Internal clarity is clarity in the heart, and for that, he said flatly, the Spirit is required; without the Spirit no one understands a syllable of it savingly. He also conceded that particular passages remain obscure through our ignorance of vocabulary and grammar, and said that this is no argument against the clarity of the subject matter.

The confessional statement is more careful still. Westminster Confession 1.7 reads: 'All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.' Read it slowly. Not everything is plain. Not everything is equally clear to everyone. The claim is restricted to what is necessary for salvation. And the whole thing is conditioned on the due use of the ordinary means, which in that document's world meant reading, preaching, catechism, the sacraments, prayer and the ministry of teachers.

So the claim was this: the saving message of scripture is clear enough that an ordinary believer, using the ordinary means, can grasp it; therefore scripture belongs in the language of the people; therefore the church's teaching is answerable to it. The claim was not that every passage is clear, which 2 Peter 3:16 itself denies of Paul's letters. Not that teachers are unnecessary, since the same men wrote catechisms, preached lifelong expository series, and founded schools. Not that private judgment is infallible. And not that tradition is worthless, since they quoted Augustine and Chrysostom on nearly every page. Anyone who cites perspicuity to justify reading without teachers, without the church, or without study is citing something the doctrine never said.

There are two ways to get the Spirit's role wrong, and almost every Christian tradition warns loudly about one of them and hardly at all about the other. Which one you were warned about probably depends on who taught you, so take both seriously.

The first failure is the claim that the Spirit has revealed a meaning the text cannot bear. It sounds like this: I know that is what it says, but the Lord showed me it means something else. Or a verse detached from its subject and applied to a private decision. Or a date for Christ's return, which has been announced with the deepest sincerity many times and has been wrong every time. The structural problem is that the claim is unfalsifiable and therefore unanswerable; it removes the text as a court of appeal in the very act of honouring it. And the check on it is internal to the doctrine rather than imposed from outside: the Spirit who inspired the words does not contradict the words, so a reading that cannot be shown from the text is not a claim about the text at all. It may be a hunch, a memory, a good idea or a bad one, but it should not be dressed in borrowed authority, because the cost of being wrong is paid by whoever believed you.

The second failure is quieter, more respectable, and just as real. It is the reader whose method has become a substitute for prayer and obedience. The person who can parse the Greek of a command and has not the least intention of doing it. The student for whom the Bible has become a field of problems, interesting and difficult and entirely safe, because a problem makes no demands on anybody. James 1:22-25 describes the man who looks in a mirror and walks away unchanged, and it is a warning aimed precisely at hearers who are good at hearing. Scripture is not neutral data awaiting analysis, and treating it as such is not neutral either. It is a decision about what kind of thing you are handling.

The Reformers, who are often invoked to justify the second failure, would not have recognised it. Luther's formula for how a theologian is made was oratio, meditatio, tentatio: prayer, meditation and the trial of being tested by what you have read. Calvin held that certainty about scripture rests on the inner testimony of the Spirit rather than on argument, and he wrote a commentary on nearly every book. The earlier monastic practice of lectio divina had made slow, prayerful, obedient reading the frame within which study happened. The idea that rigour and prayer are rivals is modern and it is a mistake on both sides of it.

So hold the two failures together. One reader has a Spirit without a text and cannot be corrected. The other has a text without the Spirit and does not intend to be changed. A course like this one, being a course, is far more likely to produce the second, which is why it is being said here rather than left implied.

If illumination does not supply private meanings, the question of who teaches becomes unavoidable. Three answers have been given, and each is stated here as its own defenders state it, not as their opponents summarise it. Each also gets the same thing from this lesson: its own statement of the caricature it is tired of, and its own answer to that caricature.

The Protestant account holds scripture to be the norm that norms and is not itself normed by anything else, and that is the whole of what sola scriptura asserts. Tradition, in the classical Protestant formulation, has real but ministerial authority: it serves, instructs and constrains, and it can be corrected by scripture, which no other authority can be. Protestants who press this appeal to Heiko Oberman's distinction between a single-source tradition, in which the church's long exegetical inheritance is the medium through which scripture is read, and a two-source tradition, in which tradition supplies content scripture does not; the Reformers, they argue, held the first. The caricature they want cleared away is the individualist one, and they clear it from inside the doctrine: sola scriptura has never meant reading alone. Keith Mathison has argued at length that the popular version, one believer and a Bible with no creed, no church and no teachers, is a different doctrine and a defective one. The Reformers wrote confessions, recited the Nicene Creed, appointed teachers, and appealed constantly to the Fathers. A Protestant who claims the right to overturn the consensus of twenty centuries on his own reading is not exercising sola scriptura; he is doing what the doctrine was formulated to restrain. The claim underneath it is that an authority which cannot in principle be corrected by the text has put itself beyond the reach of God's word.

The Roman Catholic account, set out at the Second Vatican Council in Dei Verbum (1965), holds that scripture and tradition flow from the same divine source and together form a single sacred deposit of the word of God. Of interpretation it says that 'the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ', and immediately adds that 'this teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully'. That second sentence is where Catholics locate their answer to the caricature they most often meet, that the Magisterium manufactures doctrine or stands above scripture: the office is defined in the same breath as a servant, bound to hand on what it received, and development is held to be an unfolding rather than a reversal. The same document urges wide access to the scriptures for all the faithful, which answers the other caricature, that Catholics do not read the Bible. Catholics then press a historical point: the same church whose judgment recognised which books were scripture is the church whose judgment about their meaning is now treated as dispensable, and that is inconsistent.

The Orthodox account resists being stated as a rule, which is itself part of the position. Scripture is the Church's book, given within the Church, read chiefly in the liturgy, and understood within the whole life of the community that receives it. The criterion of a right reading is the mind of the Church, expressed in the ecumenical councils, in the consensus of the Fathers, and in the worship through which the faithful actually meet the text. The caricature to clear away here is that tradition is a second, competing deposit of information bolted on to scripture, and Georges Florovsky answered it directly: tradition is the witness of the Spirit, the Church's continuing life, within which the scriptures are read and by which they were recognised as scripture at all, not a rival body of content. The Fathers are consulted as witnesses to that life rather than as an authority displacing the text, and the further charge that Orthodoxy neglects the Bible mistakes the medium, since the services are very largely composed of scripture. Writers such as John Behr and Andrew Louth press two things in particular: that there is no juridical office issuing verdicts, so the Orthodox answer is not the Catholic one in other clothes, and that there is no possibility of reading well in isolation from the community whose faith the scriptures express.

Each account faces an objection its defenders answer and its opponents do not find answered. Catholics are asked how a living office can be genuinely bound by a text that it alone authentically interprets, and whether a servant who is sole judge of his own instructions is bound in any checkable way; they answer that it is bound as a servant is bound, that unfolding is not reversal, and that the deposit constrains what can be taught. Orthodox are asked what happens when the consensus of the Fathers is not in fact unanimous, which on a good many questions it is not; they answer that the Church's mind is discerned in her life and worship rather than tallied like votes, and that the absence of a mechanism is not the absence of a criterion. Protestants are asked to account for the fragmentation their principle has accompanied, and whether an authority every reader may contest is an authority at all; they answer that a visible unity purchased by an office which cannot be corrected is not the unity scripture asks for, and that division is a lesser evil than an uncorrectable error. A student should be able to give all three objections and all three answers before deciding anything, and should notice which of the three answers they find it easiest to wave away.

Now the thing that is usually left out, and that this course will not leave out. The Spirit's help in interpretation is claimed, sincerely and prayerfully, by parties who read the same text and reach opposite conclusions. This is not an abstract worry. It is the documented history of the church.

In October 1529 Philip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together at Marburg to settle their differences. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles. On the fifteenth, the Lord's supper, they could not agree, because Luther would not move from the plain sense of four words, this is my body, and Zwingli would not accept a reading he thought absurd. Two men of formidable learning, deep prayer and enormous personal cost, both appealing to the clarity of scripture, parted without agreement, and the Protestant churches have been divided on that table ever since. Whatever perspicuity means, it did not resolve Marburg.

The pattern repeats. The magisterial Reformers and the Anabaptists both appealed to the plain text and the Spirit's leading on baptism, and some of the Reformers drowned some of the Anabaptists over it. In the American slavery debate, described in the previous lesson, both sides prayed, both sides preached, and both sides believed they had the mind of God. Christians today who disagree about the teaching ministry of women are, in the main, equally prayerful, and each side can produce people whose lives commend their reading.

No tradition has solved this, and each one's solution founders in a way its own members can see. The Orthodox answer, scripture read within the mind of the Church, has to say which Church, since the Catholic claim is structurally comparable, the two have not been in communion for a thousand years, and Orthodox jurisdictions have broken communion with one another within living memory. The Protestant answer, scripture judging every authority, produces precisely the plurality of confident readings the objection describes, which is what Marburg and everything after it demonstrates, and the Protestants who take the doctrine most seriously are the readiest to call that a real cost. The Catholic answer, an authoritative living office, meets the same relocation from the other side, and a difficulty of its own besides, since Catholics disagree in practice about what the teaching office has actually settled and about how much of it is irreformable. Each tradition has a reply, each reply is serious, and none of the replies has persuaded the others in five hundred years or, in the older case, a thousand.

What follows from that is neither despair nor relativism, but it is a change of posture. The Spirit's help is real and is promised; it is not a shortcut, it is not a credential, and it cannot be produced as evidence in an argument with another Christian who claims it too. The only things you can actually offer a brother who disagrees with you are the text, your reasons, the history of how it has been read, and a demonstrated willingness to be corrected by any of the three. That is less than you might have wanted. It is a great deal more than nothing, and it is what the discipline in this track is for.