(The Scripture of the Church)

Hey Dad. Well, it may be months before you even make it through my last epistle, but while the iron is hot I wanted to write a sort of updated comment on the last part of my little essay.

I'll get back to you about the place of prepositional truth in this subjective metaphysic. Still need to think about some stuff with that one but here's some thoughts about the necessity of the church:

Essentially, I have begun to realize that the church is absolutely crucial to the process of "discussion" or interaction with the Biblical text I have been talking about, and, ultimately, with God himself. In fact, I don't believe you can separate the two.
It is, I think, part of the core of our faith that God glorifies himself through the weakness of imperfect man. This is certainly played out in the composition of the scriptures. His people, collectively, have been involved in the creation of scripture from beginning to end. Unlike many other religions where a single person has supposedly received a direct revelation over a short period of time from the mouth of angels or some such, our scriptures' authorship span as much as a thousand years; there are many authors, none of whom can be considered infallible or the voice of God in themselves or all the time; and only a few of whom have written direct words from the mouth of God for us. Apart from this, particularly if we look at the NT (but I know the Jewish people had to put their scriptures through a similar process), the church has always been responsible for deciding what is and isn't to be scripture and in what order they should be presented and even how we ought to divide them up. Also, naturally, how they ought to be moved from one language to another. We never say that any of these subsequent steps are "inspired", however, to my mind some of them carry almost as much weight as the actual sentences of scripture themselves (not the order or division of course, but certainly the canon). Also, the interpretation of the scripture has always been the work of the church collectively – and interpretation is clearly no simple, lightweight matter.
So, I think it is misleading the way we have begun to speak about scripture as if it is somehow not integrally tied up in the church through the ages – as if it has some self-evident meaning that is not brought out through our long and ongoing discussion amongst ourselves guided by the Holy Spirit. Without the church, the scripture has no life – conversely, of course, the church is lost and equally dead without the scriptures. Therefore, this dialogue with scripture that I was discussing earlier cannot take place outside the context of the church both now and throughout history – and not only the church, but also the Jewish people before it. In some ways, I am saying that there is no knowing God ultimately without the plurality his people as a body bring – the so-called "dialogue" cannot take place at all without it.
I just want to clarify that the “discussion” I am talking about is not merely a continual adding on to our knowledge of scripture and its meaning but, more than that, the ongoing "rubbing together" of persons.
The difficult question is, of course, where does the "authority" of the church begin and end? There are many branches and periods of the church that are full of heresy and error – how do we determine who is right and wrong? I don't have a complete answer for that, but I suspect that, again, it’s a case of wrong perspective. Whenever we say unequivocally, "You're wrong and we're right," we are instantly and arbitrarily ignoring all our own short-comings and deciding that we have landed – incredibly – on the meaning God has in mind. Instead, we have to keep thinking of it in terms of persons rather than goals of knowledge – even when the church has gone wrong this way or that it has added to the discussion. And we would be incredibly arrogant to assume that our branch and time doesn't have to listen to and engage with the church of the past and the rest of the church today. It doesn't mean we're all “inspired”, it means that God has always met with us and revealed himself through our clumsy, stumbling humanity. I think he has instigated the diversity in the church and his word for that very reason – as in any discussion we can't all grasp everything at once.

If we trust his Spirit we can trust that the church will go on knowing God – that the church will go on being that second party that is necessary for meaning and the conveyance of truth. And if we abandon the church we have abandoned our hope of continuing in the relationship.

peace

chad