Commenting on some of the problems of scriptural interpretation attendant to the Reformed tradition (which, in part, can be transposed to other traditions, including a Latter-day Saint framework), John McIntyre, a leading Christologist, wrote:
First, as it is doubtful whether anyone operates with the whole of Scripture as his given, so that this form of the given as authoritative would be valid only for someone who was a completely consistent fundamentalist. As soon as we allow any principle of selection to operate, and there are few people who do not, then we have departed from allegiance to the total givenness, and the single prescriptiveness of Scripture. On this ground, it is not to be assumed that Scripture may not turn out to be the given in some other sense already defined.
Secondly, it has always been an essential part of the Reformed view of Scripture that its true meaning is only rightly discerned through the testimonium spiritus sancti. Whatever else this fairly complex doctrine may mean, it does at least imply that the meaning of Scripture cannot be simply ‘read off’, as one would rightly expect it to be were one dealing with an immediately intuitable and authoritative given. Thirdly, it is very doubtful whether any one of us can now read Scripture except through the medium of the numerous interpretative symbols which the Church has constructed to ensure our right understanding of Scripture. The function of the confessions formulated by the Reformers has not always been fully appreciated in this connection. The confessions have been, of course, correctly regarded as short summaries of the faith to be used as a basis for instructing the young and confuting heretics or unbelievers. But they also had initially a further purpose, namely, that of providing the interpretative structure for the right understanding of Scripture. It is here that our present lack of confessional clarity is proving to be most harmful, in that it deprives our contemporaries, and particularly those who have to teach the young, of the adequate means of catechetical interpretation of Scripture. If, then, we wish to persist with the view that the Scripture is the given, then we have in honesty also to acknowledge that it is a given, which comes to us in an extremely confused mixture of credal, confessional and modern theological additions. (John McIntyre, The Shape of Christology: Studies in the Doctrine of the Person of Christ [2d ed.; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998], 15-16)
