Historic confessions and creeds protect the Church from foolish “cereal aisle” autonomy. The Spirit who authored Scripture has through the years drawn the Church to understand it, and the great Church confessions greatly aid us in employing faithful hermeneutics. We are not advocating a paper pope, but a biblically grounded confidence in the historic analogy of faith. God is able to reveal clearly in his Word precisely what he wishes – not only to this generation, but consistently over the entire life of the Church.

The grocery store cereal aisle has become a common metaphor for distinguishing the West from the rest of the world, and rightly so. Just after we moved to Eastern Europe years ago, my family and I began the hunt for cereal in our city. In due course, we found three cereal options. Yes, three. First we were disappointed, then resentful. Really? Only Honey Nut Cheerios, off-brand corn flakes and Muesli?

Yet our internal pushbacks did not last for long. Oh, not because our (children’s?) yearning for Cocoa Puffs and Tony the Tiger got completely snuffed, but something even more satisfying and freeing took over. Limitation birthed newfound freedom, a liberty far preferable to our former cornflake cornucopia. We discovered the clarity and joy of simplicity. No longer was the cereal aisle an enemy of contentment, but in its simplicity we discovered a peaceful, non-confusing, isle of contentment.

When we returned for visits to the United States, we found ourselves simply undone, even freshly disgusted by the cereal attack. Too many choices. Rainbow-colored boxes of all sizes–complete with nutritional charts, cartoons, crossword puzzles, and chances for free vacations at Disneyworld–launched their crusade against our souls. Which cereal should we buy? Whose label do we trust anyway? Who can possibly decide which cereal is the legitimate breakfast of champions?

A message lies behind the plethora of choices. It is actually quite simple. Cereal choice is completely up to me. I really am Cap’n Crunch. I am Count Chocula.

Yet there is a problem. So is everyone else. And who decides when each member of the family reigns as King Kellogg and leads as General Mills? Family feuds can even erupt over which flavor of Cheerios to buy. War ensues and, in the end, no one finally wins the Lucky Charm.

Cereal choice produces cereal chaos, because serial choice produces serial chaos. Despite the relentless rhetoric to the contrary, unlimited choice does not free us; it binds us. Autonomy at work does not bless, it curses. To put it more contextually, the unalienable rights of Americans are not the unalienable truths of Scripture.

In a manner combating the “cereal aisle” of contemporary thought, Scripture puts us in a distinct place, and it is not a place of autonomy or sovereignty. We are created, not Creator. We are servants, not masters. We are stewards, not owners. We are dependents, not independents. We are the children, not the Father.

These categorical truths, which dominate the pages of the Scripture, must take their rightful place in our study of it. We are recipients of Scripture’s meaning, not creators of it.

Historic categories of the doctrine of Scripture include authority, sufficiency, necessity, and perspicuity (clarity). Many in recent years have argued that the real battle for the Bible is more about its sufficiency than its authority. With thanks to Kantian thought construction which deems the Bible irrelevant to science and many other fields, surely biblical sufficiency needs fresh and ongoing address.

Yet today something even more basic than biblical sufficiency suffers. The Bible’s sufficiency, necessity, clarity and even authority as commonly expressed, do not get to the bottom of the current crisis of confidence in Scripture.

In a 1975 visiting lecture at Westminster Theological Seminary, James I. Packer addressed the formulation of a faithful and useful doctrine of Scripture for the coming ages. Contending that the bifurcation of biblical and theological disciplines had practically ripped Scripture’s essence from its interpretation, he insightfully (even prophetically) argued for integration.

As he imagined it, the way forward in a positive articulation of the doctrine of Scripture was to draw our doctrine of Scripture explicitly together with hermeneutical method. I think he nailed it. What Scripture is must determine what we do with it. In addition, who we are (dependent creatures, children) must determine how we treat the Word of God.

The virtually ubiquitous contemporary alternative – a doctrine of Scripture divorced from the implications of that doctrine – has effectively neutered orthodox claims about the Bible. Some former evangelicals, to be sure, have openly abandoned biblical inspiration and inerrancy.

Other evangelicals profess a “high view” of Scripture, but their “high view” floats lightly above their exegesis, never touching down on the ground of actual interpretation. When what we claim about Scripture disengages from what we do with it, our high view of Holy Scripture becomes a wholly irrelevant view. Confession of biblical inspiration loses all clout, all meaning.

As it is, contemporary infatuation with choice dominates biblical interpretation. “Ours, it is fair to say, is a ‘hyperhermeneutical’ age. Most readers do not need to be reminded how in recent decades issues of interpretation have burgeoned in an overwhelming, almost unbelievable fashion and taken on unprecedented dimensions.” (1) The field of biblical studies has become its own “cereal aisle,” with the hermeneutical options menu claiming a life of its own.

The options now come in all sizes, shapes, and flavors. After all, not everyone has the same tastes, likes and goals. The selection aisle is wide and long; the options seem endless. But one thing remains constant. You get to choose. You pick your hermeneutical box or boxes.

Resulting problems abound. As D. A. Carson has pointed out, “it cannot follow that every reading is equally valuable or valid, for some of the interpretations are mutually exclusive. The tragedy is that many modern ‘readings’ of Scripture go beyond inadvertent bias to a self-conscious adoption of a grid fundamentally at odds with the text–all in the name of the polyvalence of the text and under the authority of the new hermeneutic.” (2) Despite Carson’s and others’ well-articulated protests, we have seen little relenting in the creation and advocacy of new interpretive approaches.

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