It’s all about right interpretive reason, about knowing how to move from sacra pagina (holy Scripture) to sacra doctrina (holy teaching). The issue is not whether but how the Bible exercises its authority despite its historical and cultural distance. We can eliminate the two extremes: that what the biblical authors say has antiquarian interest only, and that everything the biblical authors say is transculturally normative. What we need are biblical principles for discerning the Word of God in the words of man, the theologically normative from the anthropologically relative.
