Concerning arguments about "going beyond the text" and "stealing second base."

A little while ago, over at Theology for Dummies, I attempted to respond to Russ's buried argument that Aquinas - and other attempts to reason to theological doctrines - were suspect because they "went beyond Scripture":

Likewise, when Russ says that we have to be careful about "going beyond the text" that assumes that we are going beyond the text. As I pointed out on Saturday, no Church Father ever felt that they were "going beyond the text." Aquinas didn't feel that he was "going beyond the text." Rather they, and Aquinas, felt that they were staying within the text by properly applying reason to the the text.


They might have been wrong. Maybe they are going beyond the text. However, saying that we have to be careful not to go beyond the text is problematic because it assumes that the person who says "let's be careful about going beyond the text" is in a privileged position to know where the text ends.

Where a text "ends" depends on how the community that reads the text actually reads the text. This tells us a lot about where a given community says a text ends, but little about the proper reading of the text. Moreover, if we really were going to know where a text "ends" then we ought to give a lot of weight to how the text was originally read, since the best way of knowing what a text means is what its original writers and readers thought it meant. (But this is not always the case since texts can have latent meanings and implications.) This, then, means that if we want to know where a text "ends" we should give weight to the original understanding, which would mean looking at the Early Church Fathers, but, ironically, they tended to say things like that which we have been saying and which Russ says "goes beyond the text."

Over at Called to Communion, the ever-perspicacious Bryan Cross explains the problem with the "going beyond Scripture" argument better than I could ever hope to.

I hear this “over-realized eschatology” claim quite often. The problem with this frequent appeal to “over-realized eschatology” is that the principled basis for the standard for what is “properly-realized eschatology” is usually not provided. So in practice the claim amounts to “anything that goes beyond what I myself get out of Scripture.” For that reason, the standard by which to judge what is “over-realized eschatology” and what is “under-realized eschatology” is in that way subjective and relative, and so is no standard at all. My statement that persons have an unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification has nothing to do with eschatology. My statement follows from the very nature of persons as rational beings. For example, if you ask me to clarify something I have said, and then you still need further clarification, you can ask for it, and, because I can hear you and understand you and have memory and communicative ability, I can provide it. And if you need still more clarification you can ask me for it, and I can provide it. So long as I remain alive and conscious and capable of communication, I can provide interpretive self-clarification. That’s what I mean when I say that persons have unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification. We can get to the point where you say, “Are you saying x?” And I can reply, “Yes”. And that point, with respect to that question, the hermeneutical spiral comes to an end.

Books do not have unlimited potency with respect to interpretive self-clarification. And because books don’t have that, they cannot function as interpretive adjudicator when there are competing interpretations facing the Church: each side can appeal to the book to support its own position, and without a magisterium, the disagreement can be a perpetual deadlock or impasse. But a living magisterium can not only adjudicate an interpretive dispute, it can also provide clarification regarding previous statements or judgments it has made. That is why having a living magisterium does not leave us in the same epistemic quandary that we would be in if we had only a book and no interpretive authority.

This is what has made it possible within the history of the Catholic Church for theological disputes to be resolved. The reason the Church is not still wrestling with Arianism and Nestorianism and Monophysitism, etc. is precisely because she could speak definitively and authoritatively in condemning them. But the Bible alone could not do that. Because the Bible does not explicitly address those questions, persons on both sides could and did appeal to the Bible to defend their interpretation. And so a living personal divinely authorized voice was necessary in order to provide the authoritative interpretive decision in those cases.

As for St. Paul’s statement about seeing through a glass dimly, we (Catholics) understand that to be referring to the Beatific Vision. Faith is the evidence of things unseen. The object of faith is presently unseen, but we have some awareness of it, by way of the gift of faith. So we are neither ignorant of the object of faith, nor do we see the object of faith. But then, in the paraousia, we will see Him face to face, we will see even as we are seen. We do not take this verse to be teaching that until Christ returns we cannot have certainty regarding doctrinal or interpretive questions. In other words, the verse is not denying that we can know with certainty what are the dogmas of the faith and which positions are heretical; rather, it is talking about our present inability to see the object of the faith, and that object is God Himself.

Cross also makes this interesting empirical point about the claim that we don't need a human authoritative interpreter for scripture:

In other words, at this present point in history, almost five hundred years down the road from the start of the Protestant experiment, it seems safe to say that the historical evidence shows that Scripture is not sufficiently perspicuous to maintain unity of the faith, without a divinely authorized teaching and interpretive authority. Apart from the magisterium, Scripture cannot fulfill its authoritative function within the Church, because apart from a magisterium, there can be no unified Church preserved for Scripture to govern and guide. Without a magisterium, the situation necessarily reduces (in principle) and collapses (in time) into solo scriptura. So for these reasons, Scripture functions authentically as the divine word only as divinely interpreted by a living and divinely authorized magisterium. The content of the Sacred Scriptures can be understood only by the same Spirit who inspired them, and thus only with the guidance of those persons to whom Christ gave that gift of the Spirit by which it became true to say, “The one who listens to you listens to Me, and the one who rejects you rejects Me; and he who rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.” (Luke 10:16)