Since Bart Ehrman, textual critic and former evangelical, has been issuing his broadsides at the notion of biblical inerrancy, two kinds of response have appeared on the American theological scene. On the one hand, it has been correctly noted that Ehrman does not give the benefit of the doubt to the best textual readings of the New Testament (as one would do, following Aristotle, in treating Homer's writings or other ancient texts), and that he suffers from an egregious anti-supernatural bias. The other approach operates, in effect, with the tag "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em": one can approach the textual criticism of the New Testament much as Ehrman does and still hold to historic Christian faith.
The latter seems to be the tack taken by Jeffrey Kloha, associate professor and provost of Concordia Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. In his paper "Text and Authority: Theological and Hermeneutical Reflections on a Plastic Text," Kloha claims that, owing to the progress of contemporary textual studies, one need not’and should not’hold that biblical inspiration occurs as single divine events producing an inerrant, once-for-all original text to be recovered as fully as possible through lower, textual criticism. Rather, says Kloha, just as it took the church some time to arrive at its view of the canon of Scripture, so inspiration itself is a continuing process, and the decisions as to what indeed constitutes inspired Scripture must be made by the church as it is led by the Spirit in the course of advances in textual understanding.
Kloha admits that his approach is diametrically opposite to that of the Lutheran fathers’both those of the Age of Orthodoxy (Quenstedt) and those who formulated the theology of the Lutheran Church’Missouri Synod (Pieper). The present author readily admits that those patriarchs could have been grossly mistaken (errare humanum est). But, if they were, what are the implications of the Kloha recension?
First, the mainline biblical scholarship of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in liberal theological circles eliminated an authoritative text through the application of the so-called higher criticism’subjective determinations of the "real origins" of the text and the relegation of the best text resulting from lower or textual criticism to a product of later editing and revision in light of the sociological and theological Sitz im Leben.
Kloha achieves much the same result by his approach to lower, textual criticism. The Nestle-Aland text, for example, is not to be viewed as a means of arriving as closely as possible to original, inerrant autographs, but as the current state of a "plastic" process that must never be reduced to the status of a propositionally inerrant revelation. To quote Kloha: "We now have a plastic text of the New Testament. It is plastikos: moldable, shapeable, changeable. . . . The transmission history of the New Testament text has . . . forced us to reckon with the 'death of the text.'"
In light of his departure from the Lutheran fathers' approach to the nature of biblical inspiration, how does Kloha see himself as a Lutheran’particularly as a conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran? The answer lies in his promotion of an analogy between the divine/human natures of the incarnate Christ and the divine/human character of Holy Scripture. He criticizes liberal Lutheranism (the ELCA) for overstressing the human side of Scripture, but he is similarly convinced that the classical Lutheran theology, as reflected in the Lutheran Church’Missouri Synod, has committed the equal but opposite error of overemphasizing the divine side of the biblical texts.
The severe theological difficulty of Kloha's reconstruction is, to be sure, not just the mistake of pushing an incarnation-to-Bible analogy much too far (we surely know that the Scripture does not in fact have two natures!), but particularly in his disregard of the fundamental Lutheran teaching of the communicatio idiomatum: the truth that in the God-man the divine nature is communicated to the human nature while the human nature is never divinitized. If one wishes to analogize from living Word to written Word, therefore, one must never allow the human side of Scripture (including the work of the lower/textual critic) to overwhelm the divinely inspired character of it. Scripture is first and foremost God's divine, inerrant revelation to a fallen race; textual activity must operate ministerially, not magisterially, in relation to that fundamental perspective.
Second, in Kloha's view, final theological authority cannot reside in a Bible produced by single acts of divine inspiration. Rather, that authority must lie in the church herself as she continually reevaluates the results of the labors of textual scholarship. The text, like the canonicity question, is never finally closed, but remains an open and continuing task for the church. Writes Kloha: "Who then decides? As always, the gathered baptized, those who hear the voice of the shepherd and follow where he leads. . . .The church decides, but the church has been and continues to be led by the Spirit into all truth as it hears ever again the Word."
Such a viewpoint would work perfectly in a Roman Catholic context, where an "organic" view of revelation prevails, and where the Magisterium is essential for determining the true meaning and theological application of Scripture in the life of the Christian community; this is the church as the "continuing incarnation of Christ in time."
Needless to say, on such a view it becomes impossible to employ the Scriptures as the final authority by which the church is judged’since it is the church that in reality creates the Scriptures by its handling of them. Indeed, the Preface to the Formula of Concord, declaring that the Scriptures are the authority by which "all teachers and writings must be judged," can no longer have any significant meaning.
And one cannot avoid this catastrophic result by arguing dialectically, as do Roman Catholics and Anglicans, that the Scriptures judge the church while the church is judging the Scriptures, for this leaves the Christian community in a logical and practical impasse: which judgment ultimately prevails? Do we really want to return to the notion that the Spirit somehow manages to keep the church on track in spite of there being no objective, propositional revelation by which the church's activity can be evaluated? Had this view been maintained by Luther, how could his Reformation ever have occurred?
Remarkably, though Kloha's specialty is the New Testament text, he does not seem to realize that "the leading into all truth" (John 16:13), like bringing "all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you" (John 14:26), were special gifts of the Spirit bestowed by Jesus on the original apostolic band, and thus the guarantee that their recounting of divine truth would be infallibly reliable’not a general promise to the church that it would function as the vehicle of revelatory truth.
Third, practically, what would the Kloha approach mean in the day-to-day life of the parish? A pastor would never be able to say with assurance "Thus says the Lord" since all of the sacred texts suffer from plasticity. And the individual believer would be unable to have confidence in the text as he or she reads it as a declaration of God's will or as a source of life-giving teaching’since its meaning is subject to the latest decisions of textual scholars (such as Kloha). As for the Lutheran Church’Missouri Synod, it really should not attempt to make theological decisions or pronouncements on issues such as women pastors, for as with one of Kloha's major exegetical illustrations, the plastic text of 1 Corinthians 12-14 may well not at all be prohibiting women to exercise authority in the church but rather may simply be giving advice on the conduct of husband-wife relations.
To say, as Kloha does, that these staggering difficulties can be resolved by making Christ and his gospel central to our hermeneutic is piously moving but of no assistance whatever. It smacks of the "gospel reductionism" of the Seminex movement; but, far more important, if the biblical text is indeed "plastic: moldable, shapeable, changeable," so is the Christ of Scripture and so is his gospel of free grace.
We have nothing against odd theological views; indeed, we have successfully championed religious liberty before the European Court of Human Rights on several occasions. America is a free country, and if one wishes to believe in the Great Pumpkin, that is an available option. But historic Lutheranism is not Roman Catholicism, and the two theologies are mutually incompatible’especially when it comes to the locus of theological authority. A plastic Bible cannot support the theology of the Book of Concord. If we think it can, then we make precisely the same mistake the Seminex professors made when they believed that the higher criticism was compatible with Lutheran orthodoxy. Now it's a question of a new philosophy of lower criticism, but in Kloha's case that's a distinction without a difference.
