It occasionally happens that a passage of Scripture comfortably familiar from youth comes back much later to haunt us with an unfamiliar severity. This can especially be so when rereading those teachings of Jesus typically cashed out in childhood as "sword drill" verses and Sunday school songs.

"The wise man built his house upon the rock … The foolish man built his house upon the sand … "—I can still hear the rollicking pentameter and anticipate the final, thunderous clap and clomp which nearly shook down the lights of our Baptist church when "the house on the sand went flat (splat)."

But before me now, in a somewhat more tentative middle age, is the whole text, the concluding sentences of the toughest teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:

"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!' Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; And it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock. But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall."

Now, the cheerful singing of my childhood notwithstanding, I have to admit that I have been one of those who from the time I learned that song until now have said "Lord, Lord" quite a lot and heard his sayings many times but have put them into obedient practice far less often than counts in this tough text as "wise." When now I read or remember that last sentence, it's not the church hall lights that get to shaking.

Anyone who teaches for a living notices further that it is the matter of authority which immediately sets the teaching of Jesus apart for his first hearers: "And so it was, when Jesus had ended these sayings, that the people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes" (Matt. 7:28-29). Attempting both to acknowledge and assuage my guilt when teaching this passage to the mostly cheerful pagans in my erstwhile secular university, I sometimes mischievously paraphrased this last as "He taught them as one having authority, not like our professors." The students' typically generous laughter indicates, their appreciation of both points: they had already learned about the gap between first-order and second-order discourse, and, without being taught it, that many who practice the second kind, in their second-hand fashion and self-interestedness, have lost what little authority they might once have had. As with the scribes in Jesus' day, lost authority has become a fact of contemporary life—in our universities as in other public institutions.

Even in the church.

Teaching now at a historically Christian university still rooted in the Baptist tradition, I have found the loss of authority in general an occasion for frequent reflection. Recently, as a background for our consideration of the modern British novel (from Joyce and Wilde to Rushdie and Julian Barnes), my students and I read and reflected upon Hannah Arendt's Between Past and Future (1961). Famously in this book Arendt declared that, as a viable concept, "authority has vanished from the modern world." She defines authority as "that which implies obedience in a context of freedom," not of coercion. What Arendt concludes about modernity is that foundations, or tradition, have little or no power to constrain either anarchic impulse or pragmatic temporizing; we have divorced ourselves from mutual obligations to objective, mind-independent realities wherever possible. As a lamentable result, we know a great deal about power and very little of authority.

Confusion of authority with power persists with a vengeance in our putatively postmodern world. But when we still speak of "authority figures" we dutifully echo Freud, and typically mean to identify persons whose tacit or explicit standards, or censure, are perceived to constrain or critique our absolute personal freedom. That is, we are not much different from early moderns like Samuel Butler (1835-1902), author of the (appropriately enough) posthumously published semi-autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh (1903). Butler's rebellion against his parson father and his father's religion is, summarily, the story of his life. For him, rebellion grew readily into hatred, first for his father and his faith, then for even those prominent intellectuals whose resistance to Christianity he first shared and whose favor he often shamelessly curried (e.g., Sydney Smith, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold). In the end, Butler even turned on his greatest hero, Darwin, with such vehemence as to prompt one of his biographers to observe of him what could be said of many moderns, that "his attitude in fact was as authoritarian and narrow as his father's, only exercised upon a different set of prejudices."

Rebellion against authority, symbiotic passion that it is, remains an almost intractable feature of our fallen condition. But in our time it has come to be regarded as a virtuous condition, even the signature of what it means to be authentically modern. The Death of the Father (Freud), the Death of the Author (Barthes), and the Death of God (Nietzsche) are, after all, projections of a single impulse—a desire for the elimination of any authority that might constrain or inhibit our personal freedom, perhaps especially our sexual freedom, but also our "freedom" to make "truth" what we want it to be. That the concept of truth thus suffers from the same syndrome as the concept of authority is clear enough.

Truth is, effectively, authority, and nowhere more explicitly synonymous than where biblical religion is the context. This is so obviously the case in a proto-Reformation reflection such as John Wyclif's De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae that translators are understandably divided as to whether Veritate in the title should be translated "Truth" or "Authority." In Wyclif's understanding, these were in respect of Scripture practically indistinguishable in the term.

Among the Reformers a century after Wyclif, resistance to ecclesiastical and magisterial authority was construed as obligation to still higher authority, or truth, which the institutional church was, with some warrant, no longer perceived as serving (Luther, Tyndale). Intermediation of the authority of the Church in restriction of access to the sources of the Church in Scripture had become at last an exercise of raw, sometimes brutal power. Resistance here too became rebellion (and divorce) and because it was "of the Church" its implications were far-reaching indeed. To the degree to which the Reformation celebrated the shift from the authority of the institutional Church to the authority of the individual ("Hier stehe ich") it liberated an individualism previously unknown and unanticipated. But this too, in its turn, has occasioned further confusions of authority and power.

Protestants in general have usually presented individualism—even in biblical interpretation—as pretty much an unmitigated good. John Bunyan's conviction that the Bible by itself is far better mental furniture than the entire libraries at Oxford and Cambridge without it became a sentiment both shared (and narrowed) among his evangelical and Baptist successors; his conviction that freedom to interpret Scripture by and for himself was the purest form of access to the truth was to be no less warmly embraced by that wing of the Reformation most successful in America.

Now, with radical individualism and the autonomous interpretation of Scripture having grown to proportions of anti-authoritarianism, general biblical illiteracy, and theological incoherence no Tyndale or Bunyan could have imagined, there is at last some evidence that Christians in the evangelical tradition are willing to reconsider the role of authority in relation to biblical interpretation. What was already clear enough to a thoughtful Puritan like Richard Baxter is apparent now to the most modest reflection of anyone who is willing to think about it: loss of authority of the Church, de jure, has led inexorably, on these lines, to the de facto loss of authority of Scripture.

To put it as plainly as possible, the hackneyed adage among some adversaries of the faith, that Christians can make any verse of the Bible mean anything they want it to, is almost perfectly mirrored in the proclamation of some believers that the highest religious good is their right to interpret Scripture in whatever way they see fit. (This most unbiblical notion strikes me as a kind of churchy equivalent of the general tendency in our culture to behave as though personal sexual freedom were the highest possible public good, and it is probably just as pernicious.) When an insistence on absolute interpretative independence is coupled, as increasingly it is, with an almost staggering loss of biblical literacy among its champions, then the actual authority of Scripture can become so negligible as to make any claim to a biblical foundation either comic or tragic, depending upon your point of view.

All of these factors make the governing ideas about biblical interpretation and the life of the Church before the Reformation of timely interest, and help to account for the recent turn of a hallmark Reformed and evangelical publisher like Eerdmans to their remarkably rich production of major works of Catholic theology and hermeneutics. Along with other signs of the times, such as the heavy emigration of educated evangelicals to Anglican (Episcopalian), Orthodox, and Catholic churches and educational institutions, Eerdmans's Ressourcement series, mostly translations of formative French Catholic theologians of the mid- to late-twentieth century, in its "Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought" is a kind of voting with the feet by which the felt need of credal Christians of evangelical as well as Catholic heritage is perceptibly taking new direction—a retracing of steps back to the fork and the road not taken.

In the first two translated volumes of Henri de Lubac's magisterial Medieval Exegesis, we can measure the advantages of this retracing of our common journey, and not just as children of the Reformation. For Catholics still more profoundly this scholarship is a retracing of steps, and it has led, perhaps especially because of the work of de Lubac and those biblical scholars influenced by him, to a dramatic revival in biblical scholarship and biblical teaching among Catholics today.

In fact, as Pope John XXIII, Vatican II, and most recently Pope John Paul II himself made clear in his encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth, 1993), it is by means of such careful rehabilitation of the teaching of Scripture in the historic Church that the Catholic magisterium of today (as notably evidenced in his own writing) has become so remarkably articulate about the centrality of Christ, "the decisive answer to every one of man's questions," for "it is He who opens up to the faithful the book of the Scriptures and, by fully revealing the Father's will, teaches the truth about moral action."

Whatever we choose to make of it, while many evangelicals were doing their utmost to be "seeker-sensitive" and, in the Church of the Blessed Overhead Projector, "moving on" to a kind of piety lite, prominent Catholic biblical scholars and theologians were retracing their own way back to the fork in the road. It was they who saw more clearly, ironically, the necessary interconnectedness of the authority of Scripture and the authority of the Church. (It is worthy of note that Danielou and de Lubac were elevated to the rank of cardinal, de Lubac in 1983.) Eerdmans's Ressourcement series, and de Lubac's volumes in particular, are an indispensable guide for those who would wish to meet them on the road, so to speak, because they have as their common goal the recovery of Scripture's authoritative voice in the life of the Church.

As Susan Wood demonstrates in her lucid and helpful companion study, Spiritual Exegesis and the Church in the Theology of Henri de Lubac, for the group of Catholic theologians of whom de Lubac (1896-1991) was a member, the road first forked for Catholics not at the Reformation but earlier. In the rise to preeminence of scholastic theology with Bonaventure and Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and the subsequent shift away from the direct study of Scripture to a more abstract philosophical theology and the analytical study of systems of reflection on the Gospels such as Peter Lombard's Sentences, Catholic theology had moved away from the scriptural rock to a less secure, though impressive, philosophical foundation. Aquinas ruled. Whereas medievalists like de Lubac, Louis Bouyer, M.-D. Chenu, and Jean DaniÉlou might thus have been expected to follow in the dominant neo-Thomist tradition of their guild, in fact they surprisingly joined forces with Henry Brouillard and the younger Hans Urs von Balthasar to go back behind the thirteenth century to the early church and patristic writers in particular. (One wishes that Wood had told us more about their promptings.) What they discovered there was a vitality in relationship to Scripture itself which renewed for them also the life of the liturgy.

The key to the intimacy of Scripture and worship in the early church and in the Fathers was, for de Lubac and his colleagues, the vital place of spiritual exegesis in their practice as readers of the Bible. Here is how it is explained by Bouyer:

Spiritual exegesis, which is supposed by the whole liturgy, is an exegesis dominated by two principles. The first principle is that the Bible is the Word of God, not a dead word, imprisoned in the past, but a living word addressed immediately to the man of today taking part in the celebration of the liturgy. The second principle is that the Old Testament is illumined by the New, just as the New only discloses its profundity once it is illumined in the Old. We must be still more specific: the bond between the two is determined by allegory in the precise sense given to that term by antiquity.

The rehabilitation of allegory in the hermeneutic of de Lubac and his confrÈres, so far from displacing the foundation of the literal and historical sense of Scripture, gives back to history the charged sacramental resonance it had for Augustine, Ambrose, and the early Church. As Wood shows, de Lubac cites authorities from Clement of Alexander to Scotus to show that for the whole tradition:

Scripture is neither an exposition of abstract doctrine, nor a collection of myths, nor a manual of interiority, but the narration of a series of events which really happened. It is essential that these events really happened since revelation not only took place within time and history but has, itself, a historical form.

The allegorical sense, rooted in history and seeking no referent apart from God's action in history, simply points all of that history to Christ. Allegory is preeminently the application of Scripture's meaning to the life of the Church, moving through the ages, looking unto the end, awaiting the Bridegroom. What was needed for a true revival in contemporary worship, de Lubac reasoned, was not so much continual dogmatic insistence upon Thomist and post- Tridentine formulations as a return to the Source, Scripture itself, and a reestablishment of continuity with the pilgrim company of its great interpreters.

Accordingly, when de Lubac published his four-volume ExÉgÈse mÉdiÉvale in 1959, it was truly an epoch-making moment, even as Fr. Joseph Lienhard, s.j., has suggested, for the "life of the Church" in the fullest sense. Among other things, ExÉgÈse mÉdiÉvale continued de Lubac's rehabilitation of one great ancient interpreter of the Bible whom Catholics had long dismissed as heretical, a rehabilitation begun with his earlier Histoire et Esprit (1950). Origen (c. 185-254), first supported by St. Jerome and later opposed vehemently by him (yet always supported by Gregory Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom), was as much through misinformation as anything else condemned by the Second Council of Constantinople (in 553). This dismissal was sufficient to perpetuate his oblivion until de Lubac's careful and remarkable rectification of the misinformation and hence judgmental misunderstanding.

It turns out that works were sometimes attributed to Origen that were written by someone else, while all along and "much more often, Origen [has been] copied, summarized, amplified, adapted, or plagiarized, sometimes in the most massive way" by persons whom political skills had made more successful and yet were only too glad to have secretly an advantage in interpretative acuity borrowed from the out-of-favor Origen. Thus, a scholar of Scripture whom de Lubac shows to have been extraordinarily insightful, powerfully instructive, and almost overwhelmingly orthodox, by reason of the dishonest appropriation of many, was unjustly maligned and obscured. The story, painstakingly yet beautifully documented by de Lubac, is broadly instructive.

In the first volume, de Lubac sets out to show us, however, something of still greater significance, namely, that the interpretation of Scripture in communio was the principal educational activity in the life of the pre-Scholastic Church. Before the twelfth century there was no such thing as systematic theology—all theological erudition was concentrated on exegesis. Hermeneutics, the establishment of method and coherent ruling principles for interpretation, became the basis of organization for all other systems of education.

This is particularly evident in the cathedral schools of the twelfth century which were midwife to the rise of Christian universities. Hugh of St. Victor, who was first an exponent of Scripture, made principles of biblical interpretation (grounded in Augustine's On Christian Doctrine) foundational both to his theology of the sacraments (De sacramentis) and his philosophy of education (Didascalicon); in Hugh, each are in turn so natural an application of hermeneutics as to make the modern Christian educator regret our loss of what our medieval forbears called disciplina. For Augustine the Christian life itself was "the discipline of Christ," a student was a disciple to "the Lord's discipline," the teacher to the "discipline of the Church," to "evangelical and apostolic discipline." This set the standard.

De Lubac does not overstate the matter when he writes that all the great theologians "acknowledged that it would be sheer vanity to suppose that one could become holy without submitting oneself to disciplina, or that one could achieve sanctity by resisting the 'goad of discipline.' " The word evoked both good morals and practical virtues perfected by mutual submission, in communio, to the teaching of Christ. In his twelfth-century Didascalicon, Hugh applied the term to the divisions and methods of academic study—now far removed from their foundation in the principled reading of Scripture—and here the term has stuck. That is, at least in our academic disciplines there persists some notion, however diminished, of self-transcending interpretative authority.

For Bonaventure and Aquinas, the terms "sacred Scripture" and "theology" were still to be regarded as synonymous. With them as for St. Augustine, knowledge of the faith amounted to knowledge of Scripture. This did not imply a narrow view of Scriptures, but the contrary: as with the various levels of interpretation (generically "historical," "moral," "allegorical," and "anagogical"), pluralism is justified where all interpretation is, in the final analysis, directed at the same object—a text possessed by and authoritative for all. Polysemeity is Scripture's way of mediating God's abundant truth to the myriad members of the Body; it is, as Aelred of Rievaulx says, therefore "capable of harboring innumerable modes of thought." But all find their coherence in the whole together, the common Body, the Church independent of any merely synchronous manifestation of it. The "four senses" are thus Scripture's way of mediating what happened once in time to all times and all places spiritually, and it is the Church reading Scripture attentively together, against and across time, which keeps the errata of any given moment—its politics and fallen, self-justifying motives—from eclipsing the authority of the Truth for all time.

The famous "four senses of Scripture" thus may be acceptably understood, as does Rabanus Maurus in his commentary on Galatians, as having just two greater aspects: historical interpretation and spiritual understanding (cf. Gal. 4:22-27). As later in Alexander of Hales (thirteenth century), the three spiritual senses are "understood and comprehended under the literal sense," and only predicated upon them. Vol. 2 of Medieval Exegesis is dedicated to showing how this great pedagogical schema was worked out in the teaching of the pre-printing press Christian Church. Clearly and exhaustively, de Lubac's magnificently learned recollection shows how the foundation of early Christian exegesis is the text as history, how allegory becomes the "sense of the faith" or self-understanding of the Church as Body of Christ, how the moral understanding is not only a matter of practical ethical instruction but of charismatic, mystical experience, and that, finally, anagogy, the "upward leading" sense of the text, is the framework of the Church's eschatological intuition.

The translations—in vol. 1 by Marc Sebanc, the novelist, and in Vol. 2, by E.M. Macierowski, are, though slightly differently cadenced, both fluent and readable. As one who read these volumes first in the French in 1965 and for whom they have been a frequent resource ever since, I can say that in their way the translations are about as good as one might hope for—de Lubac is not only densely scholarly, magisterial in his own knowledge, but lexically and stylistically complex in the way one associates with the compression of prodigious learning. Thus, it is not just in the great good judgment of publishing them in English that Eerdmans is to be commended; the translations themselves are no small triumph. Vols. 3 and 4, yet to come, will take anglophone readers through the scholastic age to Erasmus; all who cherish the work of Scripture in the historical life of the Church will be eager for a speedy completion by the translators of this genuinely magnificent history of pre-Reformation interpretation.

Magister, magisterium—the teacher and the community of interpretation from which each teacher derives a greater authority: here is an idea about the Church in its largest sense, and hence about the normative trajectory of faithful contributions to our understanding of Scripture which is well worthy tracking once again. Individualistic interpretation always runs the risk of being shallow, for it is necessarily partial. Interpreting in conversation with the wider Church—reading the Sermon on the Mount, for example, with Augustine, Chrysostom, and Martin Lloyd-Jones—can by its inculcation of disciplina lead to much deeper, better grounded reading and practice in any of us.

For the sake of its constraint of excessive individualism alone, de Lubac's work is of value for evangelicals; for a rehabilitation of authority both for Scripture and for its community of interpretation in the Church, it is of value for every Christian. The foundation alone for both Church and Scripture, that rock of wisdom which is the actual teaching of Christ—seems sometimes in grave risk of being ignored in these trendy times, and not only by our scribes and Pharisees. As we scrabble to build our various edifices upon easier and easier stuff, we should maybe think again of the old Sunday school song in its full scriptural context. In the end, that second kind of house still goes "splat."

David Lyle Jeffrey is University Professor and associate provost at Baylor University.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.