The start of it all. . .

Let me state for the record that I have no objection to scholars debating the authorship of Biblical books in which the author is not named within or attributed to someone in another Biblical book.  I suppose it is a n impossibility for the same to resist asking a similar question when the authorship is named or attributed.  It is, for my part, the least interesting of questions but, well, for those who live and breathe a mystery, have at it.  What I do object to is when the starting point of it the inquiry is to disregard or belittle what Scripture does say about authorship. 

If Scripture includes a reference to authorship or if the authorship has been attributed to someone in another Biblical book or if tradition has assigned authorship for good reason to someone, why must the debate begin by picking apart what Scripture says or using so-called science or archeology to insist why the Scriptures or tradition must be wrong.  What is there gained by immediately calling into question the veracity of Scripture or the primacy of tradition well established?  I can only presume that the whole enterprise is designed to raise questions about all of Scripture and not simply authorship.  Frankly, I have seldom been proven wrong in this assertion.

It is certainly one thing to begin with what Scripture clearly says about authorship or other things and to expound upon that using the clear passages of Scripture to illuminate the unclear.  It is quite another to use as your starting point that what Scripture clearly says must be wrong.  Yet that is how we got into trouble until now Scripture no longer has the confidence of many if not most commentators.  Indeed, I fear that the majority of those who encounter the Word of God begin with the presumption that it cannot be the Word of God but just might contain words of God.  Filled with the self-importance of that presumption, it goes one step further and insists that the job of the sophisticated scholar is to tell us which words belong to God and which do not. In this way, they save us poor foolish, superstitious, naive folks from being deluded by what the words actually say and mean.

Instead of paying attention to the remarkable consistency of teaching within the history of Christianity from the earliest days to the present, the scholar today uses every minor difference or fringe figure's dispute to say that there is no such thing as the catholic and apostolic faith at all -- at least nothing we can know for sure so far removed from the Biblical era.  Yet, the same scholars do not hesitate to presume upon Scripture what seems tenable, reasonable, logical, or acceptable in the present moment.  While this is not about same sex relationships, I will use this as an example.  The scholar begins by insisting that what is today (regularized same sex relationships in a nominally monogamous and legal setting) was never known in the Biblical era so therefore what the Scriptures say does not apply to such relationships.  In this way, it is impossible to argue against this.  It is implicit in the mind of the liberal or progressive that once you take what is condemned in Scripture (homosexual activity) and place it within the context of a relationship sanctioned by law and approved by the majority within a given culture, then Scripture has nothing to say about such homosexual behavior.  We could follow the same sort of logic about a thousand different things and end up the same place.  You cannot trust the Bible.

I once had a family interested in membership who insisted that they only believed the Bible and that creed or confession were not important.  So when I asked them if baptism saved or Christ's flesh and blood were really present in the Eucharist or that the pastor had the authority to forgive sins in Christ's name, they insisted the answer was "no."  If it says that, it cannot mean that and what it means must be different than what it says.  In response, I suggested to them that they had the marks of becoming a proud liberal.  They were deeply offended.  Why would I say that?  Because anytime you can begin to set aside what Scripture says because it offends your sensibilities or logic or conception of things, it is the start of questioning everything until little stands except the golden rule and a nice but irrelevant deity.

Over the years I have never met someone who took seriously what Scripture said until he began to believe nothing but I have met plenty of people who no longer took Scripture seriously and ended up believing nothing at all.  In other words, people who believed what Scripture said were less likely to abandon the Word of God but those who began to open the Bible with a question were highly likely to end up abandoning the Word of God.  The Bible cannot say that and if it does it cannot mean that -- this is a sure way to insist that Scripture must prove itself before they will believe any of it.  Sadly, this conversation too often starts with an assertion that we really do not know much at all about what Scripture says of itself and what we do know must be taken with a grain of salt.  

While we love to lump everyone into the fundamentalist camp if they pay attention to what Scripture says as the voice of God, the reality is that Lutherans do not fit the bill of a fundamentalist.  Indeed, the renewal of patrology or the commentary on Scripture as God's Word is a characteristically Lutheran contribution.  The idea that Scripture has some mystery to crack to behold some greater deeper truth (can anyone say Gnostic) seems to be a more Roman and progressive idea.  Rome says leave it to the pope or the bishops while the progressives insist we leave it to the experts.  In this way, despite what Benedict XVI warned of higher criticism, Rome seems captive to those who begin with skepticism while Lutherans begin with confidence.