The Rule of Faith and Biblical Interpretation: Reform, Resistance, and Renewal

By Robert C. Fennell

Among the dizzying array of approaches to reading the Bible, the oldest, most revered interpretive tool rises above the rest: the Rule of Faith. Faithful interpretation of Scripture in the postmodern context has much to learn from this ancient principle. Deeper engagement with the sacred text flourishes with the assistance of the Rule of Faith. That engagement in turn renews the Body of Christ.
 
This book explores the interpretive practices of great reformers and renewers of the church, including Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, who kept up a lively dialogue with the ancient authors of the Christian movement. In that dialogue, they discovered a dynamic guide to better exegesis. Robert C. Fennell provides a compelling account of faithful interpreters from the past whose example inspires contemporary readers as they seek to understand the Bible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Feb 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781498299626

Robert C. Fennell

Rob Fennell is Associate Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Atlantic School of Theology in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is editor of Intercultural Visions: Called to be the Church (2012) and co-editor of Three Ways of Grace: Drawing Closer to the Trinity (2010). His life-long delight in C.S. Lewis continues to grow year by year.

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The Rule of Faith & Biblical Interpretation

Reform, Resistance, and Renewal

Robert C. Fennell

2008.Cascade_logo.jpg

THE RULE OF FAITH AND BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION

Reform, Resistance, and Renewal

Copyright ©

2018

Robert C. Fennell. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

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paperback isbn:

978-1

-

4982-9961

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9

hardcover isbn: 978-1

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4982-9963

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3

ebook isbn: 978-1

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4982-9962

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6

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Names: Fennell, Robert C.

Title: The rule of faith and biblical interpretation : reform, resistance, and renewal / by Robert C. Fennell

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books,

2018

| Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: ISBN

978-1-4982-9961-9

(paperback) | ISBN

978-1-4982-9963-3

(hardcover) | ISBN

978-1-4982-9962-6

(ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Bible—Hermeneutics. | Bible—Theology. | Rule of faith.

Classification: LCC BS

476

F

3 2018

(print) | LCC BS

476

(ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

09/17/15

All biblical citations in English are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

A portion of chapter 6 is adapted with permission from a previously published article: Robert C. Fennell, ‘The Bible Will Bring Us to Christ’: C.S. Lewis as an Interpreter of Scripture. Touchstone: Heritage and Theology in a New Age, Inc. 31, no. 3 (Oct 2013) 14–21.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Ruled Readings

Chapter 2: In the Beginning Was the Rule

Chapter 3: Martin Luther

Chapter 4: John Calvin

Chapter 5: John Wesley

Chapter 6: Rejection and Resistance

Chapter 7: The Rule of Faith in the Late Modern/Postmodern Church

Bibliography

To my family, with love and gratitude.

Preface

This book is about learning from our spiritual ancestors how to read the Bible. The main argument is straightforward: faithful reading of the Bible is best accomplished in community, following the Rule of Faith. This will take a dose of humility, because we have to begin with the presupposition that we do not already know everything about interpretation. That only seems right because humility is always the best posture for the theologically inclined. The self-revelation of God, and the book that points toward that revelation, are far too wonderful for us to grasp, but we can approach with wonder and gratitude.

I approach the Bible canonically, as an integrated whole, unified not by time, space, genre, or style, but by content. The unifying content of Scripture is its witness to a loving, saving, and reconciling God. I approach the biblical text in every case, then, as a written word expressing the divine, living Word. It is the focused form of God’s gracious self-communication. As a result, I exercise a ruled reading—an interpretive stance that explicitly seeks to be shaped and governed by the Rule of Faith.

In exploring the ways in which our Christian ancestors read the Bible within the Rule of Faith, I hope we can discover again the value of theological reading. I am convinced of the importance of this. For about 1,800 years, this was the usual way that Christians read the Bible. If we take seriously the faith claim that we are within a communion of saints, as the Apostles’ Creed calls it, then we do well to honor our brothers and sisters who have gone before us, and to listen to how they understood the sacred text that is now handed along to us. There is an uncomfortable hubris among postmodern and late modern people when we imagine that we can work with the Bible quite apart from these theological readings our ancestors wrestled over.

Finally, I am convinced that we interpret more faithfully when we read together. The Rule of Faith presses interpreters toward reading in community and not merely as individuals. Although the Western world in this era is marked by a preference for individualism, there is significant merit in coming together to discern the voice and will of God. The great project of the Christian way has always been intended as a communal reality, directed toward the common good. Biblical interpretation should be patterned accordingly, within the same communal spirit. Learning to read in a ruled way, as our forebears did, will assist faith communities on their way to greater faithfulness and effectiveness in God’s realm of justice, joy, peace, and bread.

Acknowledgments

I am sincerely grateful to the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion and to the Association of Theological Schools for grants that enabled me to research and write this book. Pine Hill Divinity Hall and Atlantic School of Theology graciously provided funding to hire research assistants, all of whom were invaluable: Heather Ferrier, Rosemary Godin, Michael Harris, Chris Hughes, Wendy Kean, and Dave Puxley. Warm thanks to each of them as well.

The Triangular Theologians also have my gratitude—David Deane, Paul Friesen, George Westhaver, Fred Krieger, Ross Bartlett, and Daniel Driver—who read drafts of these chapters and offered constructive feedback, as do Professors Diarmaid MacCulloch, Randy Maddox, Alister McGrath, Charlotte Methuen, and David Steinmetz for their insights during the early phases of my research. The insightful critiques of two anonymous reviewers helped to make this a better book. I am grateful to my many teachers, including my students, especially those who have shared in the adventure of the Theological Hermeneutics seminars at Atlantic School of Theology.

Finally, but not least, I am daily filled with joyful thanks for the graces of my family—Sally, Dexter, and Noah—who have generously and patiently shared time, space, and much laughter with me so that this book could be completed.

Introduction

Why Is Reading the Bible So Difficult?

Among Christians, the Bible is upheld as the greatest of all earthly treas­ures, a gateway into the mind of God, the premier source of revelation about Jesus Christ that has transformed millions of lives. It has been called the greatest story ever told. Yet the Bible remains a complicated book to read and understand. It provokes endless controversy, and while Christians long for clarity and concord when they read and discuss it, disagreement is just as likely to arise. It is harder still for persons of other faith traditions (or none) to grasp what the Bible is saying.

So what makes interpreting this ancient book so complex? Or, more to the point, why do good and faithful people get into so much conflict about the interpretation of a book they all regard so highly? In many denominations (including my own), conflict about biblical interpretation has become deeply divisive and even destructive of community. In some cases the crises over how to read the sacred text have become profound.

This book will not set out all the possible ways to resolve such dilemmas, nor provide a survey of interpretive options. Rather, I present a mode of interpretation that all Christians use, consciously or unconsciously. I am convinced that dialogue about that interpretive approach will help heal the fractiousness of debates about interpretation itself. Applying that approach will help to renew and reform Christ’s church as each new generation serves God’s mission in the world.

So what is this mode of interpretation that holds so much promise? It is not new. Indeed, it is the most ancient of all approaches to interpretation: employing the regula fidei—Latin for the Rule of Faith. From the earliest era of Christian history, and even during the composition of the second (New) Testament, the Rule of Faith was the normative pattern of interpretation that unified most Christians in their reading and understanding of the Bible. It continued to be the pattern most commonly used throughout the medieval and Reformation eras. Today, the Rule of Faith as a mode of biblical interpretation is receiving new attention after a period of rejecting it during the modern era. This book investigates a few case studies of biblical interpretation through the ages to see how a few significant Christian thinkers—church-shapers, reformers, and renewers—applied the Rule of Faith. The Rule functions heuristically here: it is a lens through which we can see things that we would not otherwise notice. It is a template placed over the work of theologians in this study in order to reveal distinctive elements of their interpretive approach: what they value, affirm, and discount. Noticing those interpretive moves then guides us toward the last section of the book, where we will think about how to apply the Rule in contemporary contexts.

The Rule of Faith, from antiquity to the present, was not and is not a single thing. It is a constellation of sources, norms, texts, prayers, practices, faith commitments, and convictions. It is expressed through documents, creeds, confessions, liturgies, hymns, and more. Together, these factors embody knowledge and wisdom about the Christian faith. When they operate together, they powerfully expand the possibilities and identify the boundaries of how the Bible may be faithfully read. The Rule defines and delimits, expands and exposes, opens up and declares out-of-bounds a host of understandings and interpretations that arise from encounters with Scripture.

How to Approach This Book

This book is for individuals and communities of faith seeking a way through the minefield of biblical interpretation, for those seeking to help the church to be renewed and transformed in mission, and for those wanting to learn more about how our ancestors in faith were empowered by wrestling with the Bible. The most important claim of this book is that renewal is possible through an informed and disciplined rediscovery of Scripture. This is, as Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain called their related project, an exercise in theological remembrance and retrieval, seeking to recover the habits of theological thought and argumentation belonging to older confessional dogmatics.¹ Mining the riches of the past—by exploring the practices of biblical interpretation among outstanding teachers, reformers, and renewers of the church—will provide a lexicon and a set of patterns for engagement with Scripture that is faithful and transformative. Reading the Bible within the Rule of Faith is part of the work of the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit who is able to bring life out of death.

To understand how the Rule of Faith worked and works in terms of biblical interpretation, I will offer a brief tour of some of the theological gold mines of the past. The Christian story is filled with countless treasures of faith. From those vast resources, we’ll begin with the interpretive approach taken in the ancient period of the Christian movement. Next, three specific figures come under the lens. All were dramatic transformers of their faith communities as well as faithful interpreters of the Bible: Martin Luther and John Calvin were sixteenth-century revolutionary reformers, and John Wesley was an eighteenth-century evangelical who cofounded an international revival movement. Each of these leaders turned first and always to the Bible to find the resources they needed to renew and reform the church. Their witness invites us to do the same today. Each of them was deeply rooted in communities of reading, communities whose norms shaped them profoundly. Their use of the Rule of Faith propelled them into teaching and action that renewed, even revolutionized, their faith communities.

The distinctive thread that draws Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and us together across time, geography, and varying traditions is the use of the regula fidei, the Rule of Faith. Seeing distinctive uses of the Rule is the only way to grasp how it actually works, in the same way that the grammar of a language only makes sense once you begin to speak it. Regula fidei is an ancient practice of apprehending Christian faith and life as an integrated whole. It is a disciplined and deeply spiritual approach to thinking about and living out what Christians believe. The Rule is a comprehensive and broad rubric that allows for tremendous flexibility, while still drawing clear boundaries for belief and providing guidance for biblical interpretation.

Outline of Chapters

Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the Rule of Faith in preliminary terms. Here I make the case for understanding all Christian reading of the Bible as ruled. The normatively communal engagement of Scripture, coupled with our personal histories and structures of belief, necessarily shape and condition interpretive practices and results.

In chapter 2, we’ll survey the most ancient period of the Christian movement, including the period of the composition of the second (New) Testament. Through specific case studies, we’ll see how the Rule of Faith was identified and implemented. Even as it became explicitly articulated, it is evident that the Rule was already assumed to be normative. These authors were simply recording that which the community already believed to be true.

In chapters 3 through 5, key theologians who reformed and renewed the church command our attention. The fame and notoriety of Martin Luther (chapter 3), leader of the German Reformation, are justly earned, in that he rejected the authority of Rome but managed to carry out a significant reform of the Christian way. Still, he remained surprisingly catholic in his use of the Rule of Faith and his biblical interpretation. John Calvin of Geneva (chapter 4), building on his humanist education, appropriated the ancient church fathers in a particular way to shape his use of the Rule of Faith. His commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans will provide a focus for our study. John Wesley (chapter 5), the early modern English evangelical reformer, penned many commentaries and a famous collection of sermons, among other writings. Wesley’s interpretation of the Bible employed the Rule of Faith in a way that began to expand what counted as legitimate factors for interpretation, including reason and experience.

Chapter 6 presents a speed bump in this narrative of the Rule of Faith within biblical interpretation, because the modern era brought efforts to stifle and set aside the Rule. The ascendancy of human reason, in tandem with the individualism increasingly prized by Western culture, suppressed the impulses of communal, ruled interpretation. Nevertheless, the Rule persisted, growing like a dandelion through the cracks of the Enlightenment that tried to pave over it.

Finally, in chapter 7, I will suggest some ways to understand and implement the Rule of Faith in the local church context today. The tasks here will be to learn from the interpretive practices of our ancestors in faith, to revisit the normative doctrinal heritage of our own communities, and then to think about how to test our reading of the Bible against that heritage.

As a whole, this book is neither a technical exercise nor a specialist’s guide. It is designed, however, to showcase some of the best interpretive moves made by those who cared deeply about the church, its mission, and its life in the Spirit. The interpretive approaches of ancient authors, Luther, Calvin, Wesley, and a few modern thinkers illustrate, in rich and challenging ways, how the Rule of Faith makes biblical interpretation a disciplined and transformative adventure.

1. Allen and Swain, Reformed Catholicity,

96

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1

Ruled Readings

How the Rule of Faith Guides Biblical Interpretation

Regula fidei— the Rule of Faith—is a term that has been used since the earliest Christian centuries. Irenaeus and Tertullian are its most famous definers, although many used the term and correlative expressions. ¹ The reformers I profile in this book, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, sometimes referred to Paul’s phrase in Rom 12:6, analogia fidei (the analogy of faith), and I will argue that this functioned in a nearly identical way to what was meant by the Rule of Faith. The Rule has never been one single thing for all Christians. Indeed, the same writer in the ancient era might have outlined it in one way in one place, then differently elsewhere. But the core principle was the same: there is a rule (a measuring stick, limit-point, or governing norm) that is grounded in faith (convictions, rather than reason, logic, or history). That rule is not so rigid that it would shatter if bent: rather, it is a flexible and supple instrument that teaches and guides even as it norms and limits. I offer the following definition:

The Rule of Faith is a constellation of the communal beliefs, values, expectations, assumptions, and practices that together express the norms of Christian faith.

That constellation might be recorded in a more or less formal way (as the ancient writers sometimes did); or it might be assumed as a series of unwritten presuppositions; or it might be scattered here and there in a body of literature. The Rule of Faith might include convictions about Jesus Christ, the nature of God, the person and work of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, creation, salvation, and life after death; it could describe or prescribe normative patterns of personal conduct, communal relating, or worship. All such elements were important, for the Rule constituted the list of the things to be believed, what [was] assumed to be the heart of the tradition handed down from apostolic times, the summary of the gospel message.² In short, the Rule outlines the core convictions that matter most, convictions that provide the principal forms and constitutive parameters of the Christian way. When the Rule was written down, it was usually stated in straightforward terms without much elaboration. Detailed explanation came through practices like catechesis (faith formation) and preaching.

One of the better-known expressions of the Rule of Faith is the Apostles’ Creed. It enumerates faith statements that are central to the Christian way, but little elaboration is given: I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord. These are propositional statements that don’t take the time to explicate the content of the terms in which they are expressed (such as Father and Lord). Such terms might be misunderstood, except that they operate within a shared semantic space. That is, they are meaningful terms for and within the Christian community itself, which is shaped and governed by shared assumptions and convictions about what those terms mean. That phrase, shared assumptions, is an important part of my argument: the communal nature of the Rule is part of what defines it. It was assumed by those who shaped the Creed over several decades that a local community would receive the text of this faith statement, explore it, and live it out in the ways they believed to be faithful and consistent with the whole (transgeographic) Christian witness and way.

So the regula fidei is a communal creature. The Rule is never a private, idiosyncratic collection or smorgasbord of things that you or I might personally like to believe or do. Central to the very notion of regula fidei is that it is a shared set of convictions and practices, a shared story if you like, about Christian ways of living and believing. To return to the metaphor of a constellation, the Rule of Faith is like a picture that we agree we see together. Just as there are countless stars in the sky above us, there are countless ways of being religious, countless things to believe or practice. But when we look at the skies and start to see specific constellations among the stars, that is, patterned relationships, a whole picture emerges from the randomness of the points of light. There is coherence in what we see. And—importantly—there is broad agreement among us about that coherence.

Similarly, when we see and agree about patterned relationships among our core convictions, doctrinal norms, and ways of living and practicing the Christian faith, we are constellating them into a vision that is coherent and whole. This is the Rule of Faith. It is a communal reality, then, received and articulated by communities, not just a private view of things. Christians often draw their faith communities into close consultation with other Christian communities.³ Vincent of Lérins in the fifth century even went so far as to speak of that faith which has always been believed everywhere, always, by all, the faith that the whole Church throughout the world confesses.⁴ This is a sweeping claim, and quite foreign to us in the age of postmodern fragmentation. Today it would be hard to imagine that anything could be believed always, by everyone, everywhere. It is easy to think of exceptions. But Vincent was on to something important. We will return to his motto and its significance in chapter 2. For now, the thing to notice is this phenomenon of drawing what we believe and do into a coherent whole, something like a constellation, and then to see how it impacts how we read and understand the Bible.

As late modern or postmodern people, we might be tempted to think of the regula fidei as a thing of the past, an antiquated relic from dead