Intro:
When Christians - both Protestants and Catholics alike - talk about Scripture, authority, tradition, intellect, and how it is that they have come to view the world in which they exist, how they believe that it began and how they think it will end, and how to live rightly in the face of its seeming unconquerable evil, most Christians will unashamedly and without a thoughtless moment speak that it is only within the ancient pages of the Scriptures that they find their basis for knowledge, reality, true virtue, and ultimately their final hope. In all actuality this reality of reliance upon Scripture is only the result of the goodness and favor of the Lord, for, as confessing evangelicals we believe it is only through his Word that the world is made alive because of the working of the Spirit in the creation through that Word. To that end, it is only with great thankfulness that we approach the Scriptures as the only true eternal revelation, being authoritative over all creation, both humankind and nature. As a matter of fact thousands upon thousands of Christians, from the nominal to the most faithful, have made it their distinct and fundamental business to know (to whatever degree) the teachings of the pages found within the Christian Bible. And not only that, but as a matter of fact, as one author rightly points out, though his reference is limited to evangelicals, that most of those readers of the Scripture seek “to construct [their] theology on the teaching of the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible.”
Most will not see this as a problem. Actually, the opposite is overwhelmingly true - most will see this phenomenon as simply a manifestation of the manifold mercies of the Lord. After all, the common understanding looks at what happened in the Middle Ages, rather should they be called the “Dark Ages,” and indicts the Roman Catholic Church to the witness stand for withholding the Scriptures from the hands of the “common people” and depositing them into the vaults of the “educated elite” of the religious institutions (churches, monasteries, universities, etc.). The result of this holy hijacking was mass biblical illiteracy among the people, who, eventually, because they could not think for themselves, were forced to buy into a system of man-made religious harlotry, all of which the Pope is eternally responsible.
Whether this view of history is actually the case is debated, but nonetheless the Scriptures have been “freed” from their institutional captivity and institutional code languages and have been placed back into the hands of the common people in the common languages. Unfortunately, the case is not that the Scriptures are free. In fact, the Scriptures will never be free. The Scriptures will always be captive to the assumptions, opinions, and approaches of the readers to the text. It can be maintained that the Scriptures have simply found themselves to be freed only to be taken captive again, only this time, their new captivity is the result of the denial of the tradition from which the Scriptures arose and the placing the reading of the text within the prison of methodological walls. The Scriptures are to be read in a fashion, the methodologists maintain, that is faithful to the critical scalpels of the exegetical surgeons, those who are able to gather all the data from their biblical cadaver, appropriate the correct linguistic, historical, and scientific surgical tools, diagnose their findings following strict laboratory procedures, and finally offer the true antidote of only “biblical” interpretation which we can live by and trust. Surely this captivity is no less promising than the Roman captivity, for its allegiances lie outside of the principle of faith and within the principle of humankind’s reason.
Methodology has replaced the confessions within the broader evangelical community's hermeneutical pursuit. The evangelical community will not deny that it carries with it the long standing tradition of Christian history, however it has denied the rightful place of the confessions as being a lens through which the scriptures are read. Fascinations with "objectivism" and "empiricism" has diluted the strength of modern scholarly interpretation. (Though much of that can be attributed to the fact that many modern "interpreters" are unbelievers without the eternal Spirit of God.) The interpretation of scripture in the evangelical community must embrace the confessions in its dialogue with the text as normative.