While Latter-day Saints are often lambasted by Evangelical Protestants for believing God can confirm the truth of the Restored Gospel through the witness of the Holy Spirit, as I have documented elsewhere (e.g., Not by Scripture Alone: A Latter-day Saint Refutation of Sola Scriptura), Protestants do the same exact thing.
Commenting on the debate as to whether the testimony of the Spirit is subjective and/or objective, Kevin Vanhoozer wrote:
Enter the Holy Spirit. Pentecost marks the gift of the Holy Spirit, the ultimate author of Scripture, and thus the ultimate authority of its interpretation. We are discussing sola fide, and for Calvin, “faith is the principal work of the Holy Spirit” (Calvin, Institutes III.1.3). Can an appeal to the Holy Spirit redeem the principle of private judgment? Is it because Luther and Calvin had the Holy Spirit that they were in a position to arbitrate between interpretive options—for example, to decide “when the Fathers conformed to Scripture and when they did not”? Is the Holy Spirit the principle of interpretive authority? Or does appealing to the Holy Spirit simply relocate the problem of the locus of interpretive authority to a different level, leaving Protestants to discern which interpretive community the Spirit is actually guiding? It will be important to keep in mind both levels of the conflict of interpretations: private and public.
According to Bernard Ramm, “the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scriptures . . . is the principle of authority for the Christian church” Ramm contrasts this with what he calls the “abbreviated Protestant principle,” which he associates with William Chillingworth’s famous comment: “The Bible, I say the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants.” It is abbreviated because although it correctly identifies the external principle, it omits the internal principle: the witness of the Spirit. Calvin is the clear hero in Ramm’s The Witness of the Spirit. Calvin avoids both the Romanist error of positing an infallible church and the “Enthusiast” (i.e., radical Anabaptist) error of founding certainty on an immediate revelation of Scripture that was not bound to the contents of Scripture (remember Anne Hutchinson). Calvin’s mediating third way calls for preserving the union of Word and Spirit, and he goes so far as to say that to separate them is “detestable sacrilege”—this in a chapter entitled “Fanatics, Abandoning, Scripture and Flying Over to Revelation, Cast Down All the Principles of Godliness” (Calvin, Institutes I.9.1)
That Calvin’s notion of the internal witness of the Spirit stops short of resolving the problem of interpretive authority becomes apparent when one realizes that or him the primary function of the Spirit’s testimony is to assure us that the Bible is God’s Word (a witness to divine origin). The testimonium of the Spirit does not indicate what of the many interpretations on offer is the correct one (a witness to divine meaning). Calvin says that we recognize the Spirit in his agreement with Scripture: “He is the Authority of the Scripture: he cannot vary and differ from himself” (Institutes I.9.2). Of course, what Scripture means is precisely what is at issue. Geneva, we have a problem.
Kathryn Tanner helpfully sets out the two sides of a “split understanding” of how the Spirit works. Those on one side of the split stress the immediacy of how the Spirit’s work in human subjectivity: “the Spirit showed me”—a claim to self-evident divine validation that is hard for others to refute without getting into a schoolyard dispute (“Did not!” “Did so!”). To claim such divine inspiration of one’s interpretation risks making one’s hearing of the Spirit the trump card, rather than Scripture itself. Appealing to an experience of the Spirit is “an attack on the authority of all communally and socially validated forms of intellectual, religious, and moral achievement that takes their rise from long, slow processes of training and learning.” Direct appeals to the Spirit’s authority are shortcuts that lead back to another kind of abbreviated Protestant principle, where Spirit effectively eclipses Word.
On the other side of the split are those who emphasize the mediate nature of the Spirit’s work in the course of ordinary human history. The Spirit’s authority is not over and above other sources but at work in, under, and through them. Instead of resting in subjective certainty, those who take this view engage in a discerning process: “But test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). Stated positively: this view sees reason, study, grammar books, and so forth as what the Westminster Confession of Faith calls “the ordinary means” the Spirit uses to guide us into all truth (John 16:13) (Westminster Confession of Faith 1.7) And this is the crucial point: determining how the Spirit exercises his authority and leads the church into all truth. Here we may recall Luther’s pointed retort, in his treatise “On the Bondage of the Will,” to Erasmus citing interpretive disagreement as evidence of Scripture’s lack of clarity: “The Holy Spirit is no skeptic.” (Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Biblical Authority After Babel: Retrieving the Solas in the Spirit of Mere Protestant Christianity [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2016], 77-78, emphasis in original)
Elsewhere, Vanhoozer noted:
The first thing faith believes is that Scripture is the Word of God (2 Tim. 3:16); that is, in reading Scripture we are hearing God’s own speech. A Christian “proves” that the Bible is God’s Word not by amassing reams of historical evidence but by attending to its claims. It is as if reading Scripture evokes in the reader a more focused sensus divinitatis: “the highest proof of Scripture derives in general from the fact that God in person speaks it” (Calvin, Institutes I.7.4). Calvin used the term autopistos to refer to Scripture’s self-athenticating testimony that needs no external demonstration, not even from the institutional church, but only the internal confirmation of the Spirit who authored it (Calvin, Institutes I.7.5). (Ibid., 97)
Finally, Vanhoozer, with respect to the illumination of the Spirit and interpretation of Scripture, wrote:
. . . the Spirit illumines our minds . . . for those who have been enlightened, it is impossible to miss the light (meaning) of the gospel shining out from its pages . . . Scripture’s clarity does not mean that reading works ex opera operato, as if simply pronouncing the words magically yields understanding. Nor does clarity mean that Scripture wears doctrines like the Trinity on its sleeve. Rather, it means that those whose eyes of the heart (Eph. 1:18) have been opened by the spirit cannot miss the main story: the good news about Jesus Christ. (Ibid., 112-13)
Vanhoozer made reference to the following volume in his discussion
Bernard Ramm, The Witness of the Spirit: An Essay on the Contemporary Relevance of the Internal Witness of the Holy Spirit (Eerdmans, 1959)
As it appears to be a rather interesting volume, and one that should be of worth to Latter-day Saints, I managed to order a cheap 2nd hand copy. Hopefully one will use some of it for future blog posts.
