Free The Protestant's Dilemma by Devin Rose Page B

reading comprehension, interests, personality, and transitory moods. Such a scheme would make each Christian his own sole authority, rather than the Church Christ founded and guided. But sadly—and unintentionally—that is where Protestantism’s principles leave us.
     
    THE PROTESTANT’S DILEMMA
    If Protestantism is true, then difficult parts of Scripture should be understandable through careful study, prayerful consideration, and application of other parts of Scripture that are ostensibly clearer. Yet when faithful members of Protestant communities study hard, prayerfully seek God’s illumination, and diligently apply other parts of Scripture, they still arrive at different interpretations—often leading to the founding of a new community or denomination. For a Protestant, sola scriptura makes him, and not the Bible, the final authority.

13: INTERPRETIVE AUTHORITY
     
     
     
     
    IF PROTESTANTISM IS TRUE,
    All we have is fallible opinions about infallible books.
     
    At the root of the endemic divisions within Protestantism lies the absence (and by definition, the impossibility) of an interpretive authority for Scripture above that of the individual Christian. Protestants cannot accept that any person or group has this power, because the Bible itself has to be the ultimate authority. Ideally, Protestants would be united in their interpretation of the Bible; but as we have seen, from the beginning of Protestantism this has not been the case. This lack of unity leads inevitably to the principle of private judgment, which makes each believer the final interpreter of Scripture. Just as inevitably, each believer’s interpretation will be at least partly wrong, because no believer is infallible.
     
    A Catch-22
    A valid question to ask a Protestant is: How do you know that your interpretation of the Bible is correct, against the (perhaps contradictory) interpretation of any other Protestant? The short answer is, he doesn’t know for sure. And he would probably consider it dangerously cult-like to claim otherwise. But why would the Holy Spirit guide different Christians to different interpretations?
    Recall that Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli taught conflicting interpretations of the Bible with regard to the Lord’s Supper and how, exactly, Christ was “present” in the Eucharist. Luther believed that Christ was truly present in the Eucharist, while Zwingli thought his presence was figurative. Anglican scholar Alister McGrath analyzes this situation and the problem it poses for Protestantism:
     
It will be obvious that these represent totally different readings of the same text. Luther’s interpretation was much more traditional, Zwingli’s more radical. Which was right? And which was Protestant? We see here the fundamental difficulty that the Reformation faced: the absence of any authoritative interpreter of Scripture that could give rulings on contested matters of biblical interpretation. The question was not simply whether Luther or Zwingli was right: it was whether the emerging Protestant movement possessed the means to resolve such questions of biblical interpretation. If the Bible had ultimate authority, who had the right to interpret the Bible? This was no idle question, and it lay at the heart of Protestantism’s complex relationship with its core text. For this question to be answered, an authoritative rule or principle had to be proposed that stood above scripture—the very idea of which was ultimately anathema to Protestantism. The three leading Reformers—Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin—all recognized the importance of the question; significantly, each offered a different answer. 44
     
    We see from McGrath’s history of the Reformation that, due to the disjointed reform movements independently springing up in different countries in the 1520s, Protestantism started out in disunity, lacking an authority that could decide whose biblical interpretation was the correct one. Not only that, but the very