“The Scriptures as Objective Reality for Pastoral Ministry”
Presented by Rev. David Nevergall at the request of Bp. Marcus Lohrmann on the occasion of a Day of Prayer and Reflection • Nov. 18, 2003 • First Lutheran Church, Findlay, Ohio

The assignment given me for this Day of Prayer and Reflection was two-fold: to articulate my core understanding of the Lutheran hermeneutic of scripture and to reflect on how that understanding shapes my preaching and ministry. When Ray Gottschling conveyed Bishop Lohrmann’s request, I was quick to say “yes”…confident that I indeed had a core understanding to begin with, and that it was somehow being applied through my ministry at Grace.

What I discovered was that giving voice to that understanding is a daunting challenge. I don’t know about your congregations, but we don’t throw around the word “hermeneutic” much at Grace; and I don’t often take time, however valuable and appropriate it might be, to intentionally evaluate my ministry in terms of some over-arching interpretive principles of Scripture. I suspect that for most of us these things are sub-textual, i.e. they are expressed quietly in and through the daily work of preparing and preaching, of listening and admonishing, of comforting and challenging those saints who routinely gather in the places we are called to serve. Thus, we may be more comfortable approaching this topic from the outside in…interpreting back from our pastoral practice the presumptions which guide us…as though the routines we have established for ourselves are indeed reliable and faithful.

Bishop Lohrmann has asked us, however, to focus first on intentionally defining that inner core so that we might better understand what it is that we share through our Reformation heritage, and so that understanding might inform our work of ministry in a church that struggles, sometimes desperately, for solid footing amidst the debates of this present age. For that reason, I have entitled my presentation “The Scriptures as Objective Reality for Pastoral Ministry.”

Lucky for you, I have been given just 15 minutes to do this. So we will look briefly at the Word of God both as a biblical construct and in relation to the authority we claim for Scripture; we will explore the dynamics of that Word as law and gospel; and finally, we will speak to the Word made visible in the experience of pastoral ministry. Many thanks to Bishop Lohrmann for challenging us to engage our appointed tasks with a theological integrity that befits this Word we are called to proclaim.

Wrapping our minds around the meaning of this Word, then, is the first question. Carl Braaten asks it this way: “How do we come to know the mind of Christ…the Word of God’s truth for us?” And the answer lies in our Lutheran presumption that the fundamentals of biblical interpretation start with the Bible itself. So: “Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son… He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being…”

These words from the beginning of the letter to the Hebrews are an indicator of just what is at stake when we take up the notion of biblical interpretation. As in its cognate in the prologue of John’s narrative, we are reminded by the writer of Hebrews that the Word of God is larger than the Holy Writ which bears it witness, for fundamentally, the Word is not an object but the action of God’s self-disclosure before the created order. “In Jesus’ words and actions, God is reflected” so the Word of truth that we seek is no less than “God’s self-disclosive history [come] to climax in Jesus of Nazareth insofar as the end of all events is anticipated in his fate.” To take up the Word of God, then, is to take up the living reality of God’s participation, both historical and eschatological, among and for us.

And while that is an important concept to acknowledge, we still haven’t made much progress towards an interpretive framework for encountering that living reality. Indeed, it may only raise our anxiety level should we stop long enough to consider what or rather who it is we are dealing with. So the question becomes (Braaten again): “Where do we have the trustworthy medium of God’s self-communication?”

Now I suspect we have entered familiar, human territory, for in this regard the church, including our own tradition, has spoken again and again throughout its history. Luther’s insights, summarized finally in 1577 by James Andreae and his compatriots and published in the Epitome of the Formula of Concord in 1580, point us once more to the Bible. “Holy Scripture remains the only judge, rule, and norm according to which as the only touchstone all doctrines should and must be understood and judged as good or evil, right or wrong.”

There it is…clarity at last. And in the midst of the controversies that surround us, some might be tempted to turn out the theological lights and go home. The reformers said it; I believe it; that settles it. Except that even Luther, who was certainly a Biblical literalist by the interpretive standards of his day, would not let well enough alone. On the one hand, Luther argues that the Scriptures must be interpreted in “the very simplest sense which we call the literal, ordinary, natural sense” …this in opposition to the allegorical interpretive tradition which, with the exception of Aquinas and a few others, had borne the mainstream of biblical thought since Origen. But on the other hand, Luther also promulgated a “canon within the canon,” not abandoning the tradition of the sixty-six books received by the church, but identifying the distinctive nature of their witness by submitting them to the “litmus test” of the Reformation: the gospel of God’s free grace and justification through faith alone. “And that is the true test by which to judge all books, when we see whether or not they inculcate Christ.”

Thus, the authority of Scripture is established in our tradition in a uniquely middle way. By insisting that scripture interprets itself, Luther frees the church from its dependence upon the teaching office of medieval Rome as well as the ecstatic experience of a few enthusiasts. But by setting the standard of this interpretation as the Gospel content of the text’s ability to witness faithfully to the living Word in Jesus Christ, Luther circumvents the entire argument surrounding verbal inspiration and inerrancy…a distinction long lost in Protestant fundamentalism. Hence our answer to Braaten’s question: the trustworthy medium of God’s self-communication is the canon of Holy Scriptures….the understanding we have received as sola scriptura…read via the cruciform lens of sola gratia et sola fide.

A good many scholars through the centuries have argued that Luther’s logic on this point is invalid…essentially a circular reference. How can the Word of God be employed to interpret the Word of God? One might suppose it is a bit like asking a car dealer if he thinks you need a new car. Such a situation demands that one be made vulnerable to the truthfulness of the one being asked…certainly risky business in a sinful world. But in this case the one of whom we inquire is God, the great I Am whose covenant faithfulness is unfolded in centuries of blessing for Israel and manifested at the last for all creation in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Has God been trustworthy? And if we can agree that God is indeed faithful, then can we also agree that the revealed and written word of God is faithful in its witness to that God?

Assent on these points does not mean that the tradition of the church or the techniques of modern critical analysis are without place in our discussion. The tradition not only grounds us in the experience of the whole body of Christ with which we stand, but encourages us to remember that this Word is a dynamic and living experience to be appropriated faithfully in every age past, present and future. Likewise, the variety of critical analytical methods help shape our understanding of the text by opening its context and derivation. But neither tradition nor analytical methodology must be allowed to mute the message of salvation by grace through faith. Neither do they excuse the intrusion of personal, social or cultural agendae into the doctrinal life of the church. We are not free to re-invent the Word. Rather we are called and guided by the Spirit to discover, to proclaim, and to live its great truth for us as we are given insight and ability to do so.

Our discovery, our proclamation and our life makes plain, however, that this Word’s presence with us is multi-form. We encounter it as gospel…as the good news of God’s liberation to new life. But we also are confronted by the Word as law…the judgment and condemnation which are the forgone conclusion of human sinfulness. “While God’s grace rules supreme, a negative reaction to that grace does not remain without consequences.” The divine Word both kills and raises us, tearing us away from the presumption of our misplaced trust in self so that we might be born anew by the power of God’s Spirit to become by grace the fully human creatures God intended from the moment of creation.

This law/gospel dialectic is also the paradigm within which the Word is expressed in pastoral ministry. In preaching, teaching, and pastoral care we are called to speak honestly of the uselessness of that whole range of human constructs which via their religious, social, civic and private expressions seek to convince us of the necessity of our own efforts for salvation and of the necessity of whatever comparative goodness we are able to achieve versus our neighbors. Into this morass, H. Richard Neibuhr reminds us that we are must not “preach a Christ without a cross, salvation without wrath, and a kingdom of our own desires,” for where we cannot speak the reality of our brokenness neither can we recognize our dependence upon God’s grace in Jesus Christ. At the opposite extreme, neither are we to re-establish the law for its own sake. By Luther’s standards, it’s primary use is never civil or parenetic, but that it drive us to the realization of God’s mercy and forgiveness. So neither legalist nor antinomian, we are called as theologians of this cruciform Word to speak the intertwined truth of God’s love and God’s conviction: We suffer as a result of our brokenness, and yet that is where God chooses to meet us.

In this task, the Holy Scriptures are the pastor’s guide, comfort and partner in ministry…an objective reality calling humankind to trust in a trustworthy God…warning us of the consequences, both individual and communal, of our willfulness…encouraging our own faithful response to grace, and pointing us in hope towards that eternal life which is ours to share through the Christ who is its first fruits.

At Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in Elmore, Ohio, this engagement between pastor, people and Scripture requires a patience and steadfastness of purpose that probably looks a bit conservative and plodding to folks in other, more sophisticated places. It means being called to love people that you don’t always necessarily like…and being thankful to God that for whatever reason they are willing to return the favor. It means speaking with confidence to one another of a God that you may not always understand, but whose witness to us is remarkably consistent in spite of the untold thousands of story tellers, reporters, authors, editors, and copyists through whom it has been transmitted. And it means clinging, sometimes stubbornly, to the Scriptures…not for the sake of the words themselves but for the sake of the saving Word they reveal among us.

Thanks be to God for that Word. And thank you for your kind attention.