The Teacher Under the Word

Ten minutes into the hour a woman raises her hand and asks, politely, how you know that.

Not hostile. Genuinely curious. You have just told the class what a verse means, and she wants to know where the meaning came from.

Most teachers, asked that, reach for one of four answers without thinking, and three of them are bad.

Because that’s what it says — when it plainly does not say that; you have added something and not noticed.

Because that’s what I’ve always been taught — which is an account of your upbringing, not of the text.

Because Pastor said so in a sermon two years ago — closer, but you have just made a man the ground of a claim, and if he was misremembered the claim goes with him.

Because Luther says — and now a sixteenth-century German is doing work that only Scripture can do.

The fourth is the one this chapter is about, and the good answer is available and unglamorous: because of these three verses, read together, and here they are.

That answer is not humility. It is the actual state of affairs. You do not have any authority in that room that did not come from the text. Not from your preparation, not from your appointment, not from having read more than anyone else present. This chapter is about how a teacher lives inside that fact — which turns out to be less restrictive and more freeing than it sounds.

Borrowed authority

Start with the thing the last chapter established and push it one step further.

You were entrusted with a class. That entrustment is real: it means the congregation has handed you a churchly task, and the people in front of you may reasonably expect that what you teach is what this church teaches. So there is authority in the room.

But look at where it comes from. The congregation did not make you an authority on the letter of James. It gave you responsibility for an hour. The authority operating in that hour is the text’s, and it reaches the class through you the way water reaches a garden through a hose — which is a humbling image only if you were hoping to be the water.

Paul puts it in the language of household staff. He and Apollos should be regarded as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God, and what is required of a steward is that he be found faithful. A steward manages what belongs to someone else. His competence matters — an incompetent steward wrecks the household — but competence is not ownership, and no amount of it converts the goods into his.

Two things follow, and they run in opposite directions, which is why teachers usually get one and miss the other.

Your opinion is not authoritative. Not because your opinions are bad, but because they are opinions. The moment you say I think this passage means and the class receives it as this is what it means, something has gone wrong that neither of you intended, and it will not correct itself.

But the text’s authority actually is yours to use. This is the half that gets lost when a teacher becomes preoccupied with his own smallness. When you say what the text says, you are not offering a suggestion. You are handing over something that has claims on the people hearing it — and you may do that plainly, without hedging, without the apologetic throat-clearing that makes a class doubt whether anything said in the room is worth their Tuesday.

The teacher who understands borrowed authority is more confident than the one who does not, not less. He simply knows what he is confident about.

The hierarchy, and why it is short

So what actually governs a claim in your classroom? Four levels, in order, and the order is the whole point.

Scripture governs. It norms everything else and is normed by nothing. When a claim can be shown from the text, it stands; when it cannot, it does not, regardless of who made it.

The Confessions confess. The creeds, the Small Catechism, and the Unaltered Augsburg Confession are what this church has publicly said the Scriptures teach. They are subordinate — under Scripture, always — and they are also accountable, meaning public and checkable.

And here is something worth going and looking at. Find your congregation’s constitution and read the article on confession. In an AFLC congregation it will say something close to this: that the Scriptures are the only source and rule of faith, doctrine, and life; that the congregation accepts the three ecumenical creeds and, in addition, the unaltered Augsburg Confession and Luther’s Small Catechism — and then a sentence you should not read past. All preaching and teaching in the congregation shall conform herewith.

Not preaching. Preaching and teaching.

You are inside that sentence. The hour you teach is not a private arrangement between you and the class; the congregation has already said, in its governing document, what is taught in its rooms. That is not a restriction someone is about to impose on you. It is the ground you are already standing on, and it was there before anyone asked you to teach. A congregation that has subscribed to them has told the world what it will teach, and a teacher standing in its classroom is standing inside that promise.

The old theologians had a precise way of putting the relationship, and it is worth having even without the Latin. Scripture is the norm that norms and is normed by nothing. Everything else in the church — creed, confession, sermon, commentary — is a normed norm: it may carry real and binding authority, but the authority is borrowed, granted only as it faithfully says what Scripture already said. The Confessions do not stand alongside the Bible as a second authority. They kneel underneath it and point up.

The Confessions say this about themselves, which is worth knowing. The Formula of Concord opens by stating that the prophetic and apostolic writings are the only judge, rule, and norm by which all teachings and teachers are measured — and then says the creeds and confessions are not judges in that way at all, but witnesses: faithful testimony to how the Scriptures were understood in the church against error. A word about that citation. The Formula is not part of the AFLC’s subscription and is not binding in this congregation; it is named here because it states the ordering with unusual clarity and because a reader who goes looking will find it. Everything in this chapter stands without it.

So a confessional Lutheran holds Scripture as the infallible rule and, at the same time, subscribes wholeheartedly to the creeds and the confessions — because they agree with Scripture, not merely insofar as they might.

That distinction looks pedantic and is not. To subscribe because is to confess: this is what the Scriptures teach, examine me by it. To subscribe insofar as is to reserve — I affirm this up to the point where I decide otherwise, and I keep the right to relocate that point. The second commits a man to nothing and protects nobody. He binds himself to the confession precisely as a way of binding himself to the Word it confesses.

Everyone else advises. Luther. The commentary on your shelf. The teacher whose podcast you like. Your own pastor, when he is explaining rather than exercising his office. These are enormously useful and none of them is a ground. A commentary is one careful man’s reading, offered for your consideration, and the honest way to cite it says exactly that.

And notice who the second level actually protects. A binding confession sounds, to modern ears, like a restriction on the laity. It is the reverse. Consider the alternative — not in theory, where it sounds like freedom, but in practice. A congregation without a fixed confession is not one where everyone interprets Scripture freely. It is one where the operative confession is unwritten, unaccountable, and located in whoever currently holds the microphone. Doctrine still gets defined. It simply gets defined by charisma and headcount rather than by public documents anyone can read.

And the layman in that congregation has no ground to stand on. He cannot open a book and say you are teaching contrary to what this congregation confesses, because the congregation confesses nothing stable enough to be contradicted.

You can. That is what the second level is for. It is a public, fixed, examinable account of what this church believes the Scriptures teach — short enough to read in an evening, and available to measure everything you hear against, including what you yourself say at the end of the table.

And in some congregations the protection is stronger than you would guess. Keep reading past the confessional article to the one on amendments. You may find that everything in the constitution can be changed by the congregation — the boards, the meetings, the property, the officers — except the confession, which cannot be changed at all.

Sit with what that means. The people who wrote it were willing to let a future congregation restructure nearly everything about itself, and unwilling to let it vote on what the church believes. They did not trust themselves with it, and they were right not to. A confession that a majority could amend in a bad year is not a floor; it is a preference with a procedure attached.

So when you stand up to teach, the ground under you was not merely written down. It was, deliberately, put out of reach.

Your experience illustrates. It can make something clear. It can never make something true. A teacher who argues from what he has seen has left the only ground he had.

Now the guardrail, because this is where the hierarchy gets misused. Putting Scripture on top is not the same as clearing the table. Scripture alone does not mean the Bible and nothing else — no creeds, no confessions, no teachers, no history, just me and my open Bible. That posture sounds humble and is not. A man who arrives at a text with no church, no creed, and no one who has read it before him is not being careful; he is proposing to derive the faith from scratch by his own lights, and the results are visible in every direction. The Bible above everything else, not the Bible and nothing else.

Notice how short that list is, and notice what it does for you. You are only responsible for the first level. You do not have to have read everything. You do not have to adjudicate between two commentators. You have to be able to show, from the text, why you said what you said — and where you cannot, to say so.

And this works only because Scripture is clear enough to be worked with. Not every verse is easy — Peter said as much about Paul. But in everything necessary for salvation, the Bible is plain enough for an ordinary believer to understand, which is exactly why the highest authority in the church is not locked in an office you can never inspect. It is lying open on your lap. A teacher can go to the source, and so can the class.

The discipline of “the text says”

Now the practical part, and it is a set of habits rather than a principle.

Read it before you characterize it. If you are going to tell the class what a verse means, read the verse first. Out loud. This sounds too obvious to write down, and it is violated constantly — a teacher summarizes a passage he has not read to the class, and nobody can check him, including himself.

Distinguish four things, out loud, every time:

• The text says — actual content, and you are about to read it.
• The text implies — your inference from it, which may be right and is still yours.
• The Confessions say — the church’s public confession, and you can point to the article.
• I think — clearly labeled, sparingly used.

A class that hears a teacher make those distinctions for six weeks has learned to read. That is worth more than any single lesson’s content, and it costs four words.

Paraphrase accurately or not at all. Paraphrase is legitimate and often better than reading a long passage. It becomes dishonest at the point where the paraphrase carries something the text does not. The test: could the class check your summary against the verse and find it fair? If you are not sure, read the verse.

Quote in context or leave it. A citation that would embarrass you if the class read the surrounding paragraph is not a citation; it is a prop.

Cite to illuminate, not to intimidate. A reference exists to let the class see what you saw. If it is functioning to establish that you have read something they have not, drop it. The test is whether the class could go look it up and be helped — or whether the citation’s job was to end the discussion.

And say the uncomfortable sentence when it is true: I don’t know, or that’s a fair question and honest readers differ, or I told you something last week that was wrong.

That last one deserves a moment. Correcting yourself in front of a class feels like a loss of standing and is the opposite. The class already suspects that teachers protect themselves. Watching one not do it teaches them something about the Christian life that no lesson on repentance will teach, and it makes everything else you say more believable, not less.

When sources differ

Sooner or later two things you trust will disagree, and a class will be watching how you handle it.

Sort the disagreement first, because three kinds get confused.

Sometimes the text is genuinely difficult and faithful readers have landed in different places. Say so. Give the strongest form of each reading — not a caricature of the one you reject — say which you find more persuasive and why, and move on. A teacher who does this once buys enormous credit, because the class learns that when he says a thing is clear, it is clear.

Sometimes a source is simply wrong, measured against Scripture and the Confessions. Say that too, without heat and without making a career of it. The commentary is a man’s opinion; it does not become true by being printed.

And sometimes the disagreement is over what the Confessions actually teach — and that one is not yours. You may say what the article says. Settling a disputed reading of it, for the congregation, belongs to the office. The honest sentence is short: the Confession says this much; beyond that, I’ll ask Pastor and come back to you.

Then actually come back. A teacher who says that and does not follow through has taught the class that the promise was a way of ending a conversation.

One composite, because this is where teachers most often overreach. A class is working through a passage on baptism and someone asks whether a person baptized in a church that teaches nothing about what baptism does has really been baptized. It is a serious question, it is being asked by someone whose sister is in exactly that situation, and there is an answer — but it involves the validity of another church’s practice and it will be repeated at a family dinner.

The teacher’s honest move is not to duck. It is to say what he can show: what the Catechism says baptism is and does, and that the Word attached to the water is what makes it baptism rather than the understanding of the people present. And then to stop, and say that the rest of the question — what to do about her sister — needs the pastor, and to offer to make the call.

Nothing was withheld. The doctrine got taught. The part that exceeded the assignment went where it belonged.

What this frees you from

End where the chapter started, with the woman who asked how you know that.

The answer because of these three verses is not a retreat. It is the strongest position available to you, and it has three consequences worth noticing.

You do not have to be the expert. Your job is to show the class the text and what the church confesses about it. When you have done that, you have done the job — even if someone in the room has read more than you, and someone usually has.

You cannot be argued out of your ground. A teacher whose authority rests on his competence can be beaten by a better-read student. A teacher standing on the text cannot, because the argument is no longer about him. He can say: let’s look at it. Show me. And if the student is right, the teacher has learned something and the class has watched him learn it.

And you are not carrying the weight of being believed. The Word does its own work. It is not made effective by your preparation and it is not made ineffective by your bad Sunday. What you owe the class is accuracy and honesty. What happens after that is not on you, and a teacher who has understood this sleeps better than one who has not.

So: this week, in the passage you are preparing, find the one place where you were about to say this means and check whether the text actually says it. Some weeks you will find nothing. The week you find something is the week this chapter pays for itself.

Which raises the next question, and it is a large one. Standing under the text is a posture. It is not yet a method. How do you actually read a passage — how do you get from words on a page to something you can honestly say the text says about?

That is the work of the next chapters.