When Protestants say they affirm the ‘authority of Holy Scripture,’ they are doing nothing more, or less, than being good stalwart Protestants. The Protestant Reformation at the end of the day was an authority protest; and the Reformers believed that all authority reposes not in the Catholic church (or any church), but in Holy Scripture instead. They took the paper of Scripture to be the instrumental 
medium between God and humanity rather than the Church simpliciter. Some have claimed, including Heiko Oberman, that Protestants ended up having a ‘paper pope’ rather than a pope with an address (my paraphrase). Be that as it may, the Protestant ‘Scripture Principle’ is at the center of what it means to be a Protestant Christian; the Christian in this frame looks to Scripture Alone (Sola Scriptura) as their authority coram Deo (before God), rather than a magisteria of cardinals under papal regency. But this begs a certain and significant question; one not lost on Catholic critics of Protestants, viz.: whose interpretation of Scripture is the Protestant going to follow; or: if there is a multiplicity of interpretations of Protestants then given such diversity how is the Protestant to know whose interpretation is most proximate to the reality versus the others? Yet, I don’t really think this gets the Catholic off the hook so much; they suffer from the same sort of ‘pervasive interpretive pluralism’ that they claim the Protestants do. It is just that the Catholics have identified their papal oversight to be Roman, whereas Protestant oversight has the potential to simply posit multiple ‘popes’ based upon the interpretation of Scripture they deem most faithful to the Gospel reality. So, maybe the papalists have a certain sort of rightful critique of Protestantism, but it is a double-edged sword; and all it really does is help identify a ‘problem’ that all Christian people (and people in general) have. All Christian people, in particular, have a hermeneutical problem; viz. we all our subjects spatially located under conceptual pressures framed by whatever period of history we find ourselves embedded within. In other words, we are sinful creatures who live in and from sinful epistemic realities that serve as a real challenge for ever arriving at an ultimate capacity to know with absolute certainty what is the reality and what instead might just be our own self-projections onto reality.
If the above is the case: Paper and Papal both suffer under the same hermeneutical and epistemic problems that all creatures do. True, Christians have the Spirit of God, and of course this is the point of departure, ecclesiologically between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics have institutionalized and collapsed the measure of the Spirit into the Catholic Church and magisteria itself; whereas, Protestants have institutionalized and collapsed the shedding abroad of the Spirit into the collective of elect peoples wherever they might show up. Either way, in on a positive note, what becomes manifest is that Christians, no matter what tradition, are reliant upon the Spirit of God if they have any hope of actually being able to claim that they have a concrete knowledge of God and self. Without an extra nos (outside of us) experience of the Holy the Christian remains a hopeless beggar without the possibility of receiving Apostolic ‘silver and gold.’ But, and note the adversative force of this ‘but,’ we do have the Spirit; and by God’s Grace in Christ, we do have the capacity to know God and ourselves. We are not limited by our locatedness, because God is not so limited. God in Christ has broken into the spatial realities of our world, culturally situated as they are, and continue to be, and Deus dixit (‘God has spoken’); and He continues to speak!
With the aforementioned considered, what I think this bespeaks is a need for humility while engaging in the theological task. There needs to be a recognition that we are at the sole mercy of the living God to speak to us where we are. We can, at a very basic level, come to the realization that the incarnation of God in Christ shows us that God is not limited by the heavens; instead the soil of this earth has become resplendent with God’s glory in the shed blood of the Lamb slain before the earth’s very foundations. God is able to speak under variant pressures, and transpose us from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of the Son of Love afresh and anew. God is stable, we are not; and so we look to His perduring voice, and understand that in His wisdom He has made His voice available to us even under the pressures set forth by our 21st century context and conceptuality. In other words, God is able to speak in the 1st century just as clearly as he is able to in the 21st. What becomes of issue then is a matter of ‘translation.’ God doesn’t change; His reality is everlasting and eternal; and yet even with that as the case, He is happy to speak to us in a language we understand. This was an insight that Luther understood well; with his emphasis on the vernacular for the common people, in regard to the translation of Scripture, this, in principle remains an important reality for the doing of theology today. We have a 21st century Anglophone vernacular in North America that the Gospel is able to penetrate from above (outside of us), and ‘commandeer’ its language for purposes of communicating the transcendent tongue of the heavenly Gospel in the glossilia of the peoples of the nations all throughout the global world.
Because I reject the ‘genetic fallacy,’ I am not afraid to share things from people I largely disagree with; that is, when they provide important insight that can stand independent, in certain pretextual ways, from their larger theological or what have you projects. In this instance I am thinking of Bultmann and Kasemann. They both offer some important insight on the reality of translation as the premise of Christian theology.
The translation of the New Testament demands scientific work. Not only because every translation produced is imperfect and needs to be revised critically in accordance with the original text, but above all because even the most accurate translation needs to be translated again in the next generation. For language is alive and has its own history. Conceptualities change, and scientific research on the New Testament has the task of communicating the text in the language and conceptuality of each particular present.[1]
And Ernst Käsemann:
Bultmann was entirely right to pose this catchword that so terrified and infuriated his opponents. There must be demythologizing. . . . Without question God does not intend that we wander around as living mummies of the ancient world, everywhere presupposing and utilizing for ourselves the technology of our time, but spiritually and religiously setting ourselves back 1,900 years. Faith must be lived today, and this means it must think today and given an account of itself. The dry bones of the past remain ghosts if there are no living witnesses facing the present to take up their message.[2]
Without committing myself fully to either Bultmann or Käsemann, and recognizing that they have proverbially swung the pendulum to another extreme, what they uppoint for us is helpful. It recognizes, at the least, that we are time conditioned creatures that need to hear the Gospel afresh and anew. It recognizes how translation is indeed present in the theological task, precisely because of our locatedness on the historical spectrum. What they fail to recognize, and this is deleterious to their broader projects, respectively, is that it’s possible to excavate from the past in order to help in the translation and inculturating project of the present. They are too committed to evolutionary advance, in linear fashion, ironically, thus failing to grasp that God’s voice can and has been deposited for the fulgent present. In other words, they place so much emphasis on the existential moment as decisive, that they seem to get lost in Lessing historical ditch, consequently disallowing for the possibility to realize that our present is part of a continuum that keeps on giving. They seem to forget that the linguistic dialects that we traffic in presently have a historical prius that furnishes the present with its own linguistic living room; indeed manufactured from the conceptual matter of the past.
All of the above noted to simply state: theology is not a static thing. We have extremes on all sides; whether that be a desire to slave ourselves to the schoolmen of the scholastic past, or to cohabitate with the ‘modern’ Teutonics of the present. No matter, theology is the task of translating the Gospel into language and conceptual apparatuses that most proximate the Gospel’s transcendent and immanent reality in the incarnation of God. Theology that fails at this task isn’t a theology worth its name.
Catholics and Protestants, not to mention the Orthodox all have to deal with this same hermeneutical problem and eventual task. We cannot simply fall back into the safety of our confessional towers; we are called to go outside the city walls with Christ, and give our lives daily as living sacrifices well pleasing to the living God whom we serve. Soli Deo Gloria
[1] Rudolf Bultmann, “Theologie als Wissenschaft,” ZTK 81, no. 4 (1984): 447-69, at 459-60 cited by David W. Congdon, The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortess Press, 2015), 566.
[2] Ernst Käsemann, In der Nachfolge des gekreuzigten Nazareners: Aufsätze and Vorträge aus dem Nachlass, ed. Rudolf Landau and Wolfgang Kraus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 97-98 cited by David W. Congdon, The Mission Of Demythologizing: Rudolf Bultmann’s Dialectical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortess Press, 2015), 569.
All good points. For many years now I have appreciated how large the hermeneutical issue is when we as groups of Christians (in my case of the Evangelical tradition) gather to read and learn from the Word of God, by the Spirit. In the article you mention your eschewing of the Genetic fallacy. So be it. As do I. Does your article include any notion to which the Postmodernists would raise? In other words, the idea that the hermeneutical problem is grossly affected by our own cultural lenses?
Thanks, Quistian. Oh yes, the PostModernists are onto something like this with their hermeneutic of suspicion and tool of deconstruction. But in my view PoMo is simply an extension of, or logical conclusion to the seeds of modernity. In my article, as I’m riffing off of David’s work, the critique is more theological; indeed, Christological. I think PoMo has its roots in philosophy, and actually, because of that doesn’t ultimately have the capacity to lead to anything but a normative relativism; even if the ‘spirit’ of their work is to underscore how superficial the modern project actually was. In their work, though, I think they end up only living into and out of the premises of the turn to the subject. What is being proposed by David (i.e. Bultmann) is a critique of that by appealing to the ‘extra nos’ outside of us reality that the Kerygma represents. Even so, I don’t really think Bultmann ends up offering the sort of theological resources, particularly theological anthropological wise, that gives us the sort of critical distance we need to escape from our ‘subjects.’ Instead he only ends up reinforcing the self by placing the ultimate emphasis on the existential encounter rather than on the One who is initiating the encounter (i.e. God). I think Bultmann ends up presenting us with a hermeneutic that becomes so self-bound, and unconcrete in history, that we ultimately aren’t left much better off than the PoMo deconstrunctionists. If that makes sense.