Thread by @mattswaim

A question I never really asked until my mid-20's: If the Bible was supposed to be so important, what mechanism did Jesus put in place to make sure it would one day get compiled into a single book?

I realized that whatever that mechanism was, I needed to be in communion with it.

And of course, looking around my American protestant landscape at the time, I wondered: if the Bible wasn't yet a book, which present-day denomination could I trust to make sure it became one? Would the Methodists, Baptists, etc. of today come up with the same table of contents?

In order for there to be a consensus on what the Bible's table of contents were to be, there had to be a consensus on what authority could legitimately put out that table of contents.

Of course, the answer that no Protestant (least of all myself at the time) wants to admit, is that the Catholic Church, under the approval of the Papacy, was that authority.

Which of course, led me, and leads all who get to this point, to a major dilemma:

1. Either the Catholic Church got lucky when it put together the Bible, and God used the illegitimate authority of the papacy to establish the legitimate authority of the Bible, or...

2. The same Catholic Church that was right about which books should be in the Bible was also possibly right about how those books should be interpreted. And even scarier, they might be right about some other things too.

Now if you're a casual student of history like me who's just trying to invoke some of this stuff to bust up the Calvinists and Fundamentalist Christians in your life, that's all good and well up to a point.

But there comes another point, a terrifying but also exciting point, at which you realize that you can't un-know what you now know. And that you're responsible for that knowledge, not only today, but when you one day stand before Almighty God.

You get so used to living in a world where personal interpretation and individual will are everything, that you don't realize that "sola Scriptura" has made you a relativist, and you've made your own interpretation of Scripture even more authoritative than Scripture itself.

Suddenly, the authority in your life is no longer "The Bible," but "My interpretation of the Bible." And if you're like me, you thought that was a freeing thing for a long time. But it's also an oppressive thing. You have to bend everything in Scripture to fit your theology.

When this all hit me, as I looked around my Protestant landscape and saw the rampant relativism that was the direct fruit of "sola Scriptura," I realized I was now faced with a few different possible conclusions, but two main ones:

1. Either the relativism and wildly variant takes on the Scriptures in denominational Christianity were evidence that the Bible wasn't actually a legitimate authority, but the whole thing was hogwash, and Jesus was just a guy, and maybe there isn't even a God. Or...

2. There really is one solid, definitive, authoritative way to interpret the Scriptures. And it was preserved by the apostles, who taught it to the people they personally mentored, who passed it on, and so forth. A few people might have heard it wrong, but most got it right.

Sure, there were Arians, Manicheans, Gnostics, Docetists, and so on in the early years of Christianity; some who differed greatly on the divinity of Jesus and other matters. But the real Christians? They acted and worshipped like Catholics.

They baptized as if it really meant something, as Scripture also testifies. They took Jesus at his word when he said "this is my body." And they followed the successors of St. Peter and the Apostles.

And they heard the words of Scripture at every worship service, as interpreted by the people who learned to interpret Scripture from the apostles and the people they mentored. And one day, THAT worshipping body, that Church, knew it was time to put all that stuff into one book.

So with the legitimate leadership that the apostles themselves passed on, the Church that believed communion was truly the body and blood of Jesus, and that baptism actually did something, sought the Holy Spirit's guidance and compiled the Bible.

They never compiled it to be read in a vacuum. They compiled it to be read as it had always been read: in the context of the believing community, the Church, who had preserved its interpretation as passed on directly from the apostles themselves.

As I said before, when you think it's just you and the Holy Spirit interpreting the Bible, there's a false freedom, tainted by the pressure to figure the whole book out on your own. When I discovered I could rest on this 2000 year old authority, I had an unexpected reaction.

I had always been under the impression that submitting to the authority of something like the Catholic Church would be crushingly oppressive, full of arbitrary distinctions and cold, rigid, dead doctrines. But what I found instead was light, freedom, warmth, and excitement.

It's really hard to explain this to anyone who hasn't gone through this process. But to summarize, I'll say that before, when I saw the Bible as the sole rule of faith, I had isolated it and suspended it in a midair, and all the pressure was on me to interpret it.

But when I discovered that there was a key that could unlock the whole thing (the historic, continuous authoritative interpretation of the Church), it was like everything clicked and locked into place, and passages that never made sense before now made perfect sense.

Essentially, I came to this conclusion: if we couldn't have the Bible without the Church in the 3rd and 4th centuries, what makes us think we can have the Bible without the Church now?

And as I mentioned earlier, for a decent Protestant like myself, this started out as a terrifying and gut-wrenching realization, but became an exciting and liberating one.

Suddenly you find that you're no longer in some corner of the U.S.A., bound by your own geography and culture and stuck with your generation's myopic take on the Bible. You're surrounded by a communion of every tongue, tribe and nation, around the world and across time.

And when you read the Bible, you're reading it in communion with THEM, not sitting in your room alone trying to figure out how some passage from the Gospels is supposed to be convicting to people you disagree with and ignoring the parts of Scripture you don't really get.

In conclusion: I'm not saying everyone has to follow the same lines of logic that I did, because I'm wired in a certain way, and I've framed it as it made sense to me based on what I was wrestling with. But I hope it helps people understand where I'm coming from.