One of the issues that I've been wrestling over with my Episcopalian friends during the last year has been the relationship between Scripture and the church.

Scripture needs to be interpreted they say so who says which interpretation is the right interpretation? The church of course! So the authority of the church must be prior to the authority of the Word. The revisionists in the Episcopal Church, they say, are simply good spirit-filled protestants who interpret Scripture according to their own consciences. Evangelicals, they argue, can't really complain. Catholicism is the only legitimate response.

I was reading the new Cambridge Companion to Evangelical Theology the other day and Daniel Trier in his chapter on Scripture and hermeneutics made some interesting comments on the Protestant view of Scripture and its relation to church and tradition. It may be just a little more dogmatically sophisticated than my episcopalian friends would have us believe.

"Evangelicals understand themselves as confessionally orthodox Protestants oriented to piety that is personal. Therefore they claim to embrace not only the Trinitarian and Christ-centred biblical doctrine expressed in the Nicene Creed, but also the basic understanding of Scripture's authority that was held by the church fathers - in a Protestant way.

The Eastern Orthodox churches respect the authority of Scripture as a (foundational) subset of the church's great Tradition; the Roman Catholic communion respects Scripture as the ultimate written source of God's revelation in Jesus Christ, but grants to Tradition (via the magisterial teaching office of the church) a decisive role in its interpretation. The Protestant distinctive of sola scriptura, 'scripture alone', rejects the 'coincidence' and 'supplementary' views of the Traditions relation to Scripture in favour of an 'ancillary' view: contrary to popular misconceptions of nuda scriptura, tradition plays a vital role when understanding God's revelation via Scripture, but the role is 'ministerial' rather than magisterial. Scripture is the final authority over, but not the sole source of, Christian belief and practice. Evangelicals have used underlying concepts from the Protestant Reformation to support this theological sufficiency: 'the priesthood of all believers' and 'the clarity of Scripture'. The former suggests not that individual Christians may use the Bible apart from other teachers, as if they were alone with God on an island, but that in the 'due use of ordinary means' they can understand Scripture's basic message centred on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The latter suggests then not only that this basic message is clear, but also that it can be used to interpret more difficult details in particular biblical passages; in fact, by this 'analogy of faith' and 'analogy of Scripture', clearer biblical texts can enlighten others on any given difficulty, at least setting interpretive boundaries.

That these doctrines, while liable to misuse (perhaps especially in the individualistic context of Western democratic ideals), do not neglect or reject the churchly context of biblical interpretation is clear in the early Protestants: they strongly supported and undertook catechesis of their church members, while opposing anti-ecclesiastical forms of 'enthusiasm'; they were only providing the clear scriptural message to believer-priests via translations in the first place - which already involved interpretation by church teachers - and they did so for personal reading but not for public interpretation or instruction.