The Hall of the Fathers

The valley below the Citadel was full of voices.

Inquirer heard them as soon as they started down the road that morning. They weren’t loud, and they weren’t squabbling the way the voices in the Forest of Syntax had been. They were low and steady and a great many, like a huge congregation reading aloud together in a dozen languages, with every so often a single voice rising over the rest and then sinking back. And underneath it all, like a bass note, came the sound of pages turning.

The Hall stood in the middle of the valley, and it was immense, bigger even than the Citadel, long and high, built of honey-colored stone with stained-glass windows. The glass didn’t show saints with haloes. It showed people reading: an old man bent over a scroll in a cave, a bishop in a pulpit with a crowd below him, a monk writing by candlelight, a man in a black cap and gown at a desk with a great Book open in front of him and a quill in his hand.

Over the great doors, in letters worn smooth by more hands than anyone could count, were the words: Seeing We Also Are Compassed About With So Great A Cloud Of Witnesses.

But there was something odd about the Hall. It had two great doors side by side, not one.

The left-hand door was dark ancient oak studded with iron, so heavy and old it seemed to have grown out of the stone, and over it hung a banner of faded purple with one word embroidered on it: Always.

The right-hand door was glass and bright steel, very new, polished and gleaming, and over it hung a banner of brilliant white printed with one word: Now.

Between the two there was no door at all, only a narrow strip of plain stone wall with a small low arch set into it, barely big enough for a man to get through stooping. Somebody had carved over it, very small: To The Law And To The Testimony.

The three pilgrims stood in front of them.

“Which way?” said Plain-Sense.

Before anybody could answer, both great doors opened at once.

Out of the left-hand one came a giant, ancient and enormous and slow, in heavy purple and gold, with a tall miter on his head and a crozier in his hand. His white beard fell to his waist, and his face was grave and heavy and full of sorrow. He moved like a great ship coming into harbor, and the ground shook a little at every step.

Out of the right-hand one came another giant, young or young-looking, lean and quick and restless, in a sharp grey suit, with his hair cropped very short and very bright eyes. He was carrying a slim glass tablet that glowed, and he moved like a man always late for something important.

They came out at the same moment, saw each other, and stopped, and on both their faces Inquirer saw the deepest, oldest kind of hatred.

“You,” said the old giant.

“You,” said the young one.

Then, at the very same moment, they both turned to the three pilgrims, and both smiled.

“Welcome, children,” said the old giant, in a voice like an organ. “I am Old-Only. This is my Hall, the Hall of the Fathers, the Hall of the ancient faith of the Church, held always, everywhere, by all. Come in by my door. Here you’ll find the true meaning of the Book. Not your own private opinion, which is worthless, but the meaning the Church has always given it. The Fathers have settled everything. The Councils have decided everything. You need only receive it. Why trouble yourselves reading the Book with your own eyes when the Church has read it for you?”

“Ignore him,” said the young giant quickly. “I’m New-Only. And this is my Hall, actually, or it will be when I’ve finished clearing out the junk. Come in by my door. In here we’re done with all that dead stuff. Two thousand years of old men in robes telling everyone what to think. We read the Book fresh. Today’s eyes, today’s questions, today’s scholarship. Everything those old fellows thought is suspect. They were patriarchal, pre-scientific, pre-critical, products of their time. We’re free of all that. Why look back when you can look ahead?”

“Products of their time!” thundered Old-Only. “And what are you, child, but a product of yours?”

“At least my time’s now,” snapped New-Only. “Yours ended a thousand years ago!”

And they were off. Their voices went up and up until the whole valley rang. They had obviously had this argument a great many times before.

The three pilgrims looked at each other.

It was then that Inquirer noticed something he would grieve over for a long time afterwards.

Analogy was looking at the left-hand door, at the dark old oak and the faded purple banner and the dim candlelit glimpse beyond of shelf on shelf of ancient books. And he had the same look on his face he’d had in the Mirage, the look of a man seeing everything he’s ever wanted.

And Plain-Sense was looking at the right-hand door, at the bright steel and glass and the white banner that said Now. His mouth had set hard and his chin was up, the way a man looks when he’s tired of being told to wait his turn.

“Analogy,” said Inquirer.

“Think of it,” said Analogy softly. “All of them. Every reader who ever was. Two thousand years of them. If they all agree on a reading, how could it be wrong? I’ve spent my life making cross-references by myself in a little shop, and here’s a hall full of everyone who ever read the Book, all agreeing.” He took a step toward the oak door. “I wouldn’t have to work it all out on my own any more.”

“Plain-Sense.”

“He’s right, you know,” said Plain-Sense, without taking his eyes off the steel door. “The young one. I’ve always thought so. I read the Book plainly, by myself, with my own eyes. That’s my gift. My mother taught me that. I don’t need a lot of dead bishops telling me what it says. I can read.” He took a step toward the glass door. “Why should I bow to them?”

“Wait!”

But the two giants had stopped arguing. Each had seen a pilgrim coming toward his door, and each, at the same instant, put out an enormous hand.

Old-Only took Analogy gently by the shoulder and drew him in through the dark oak door. New-Only took Plain-Sense briskly by the arm and pulled him in through the steel and glass.

Both doors slammed.

Inquirer was standing alone in front of the Hall of the Fathers between two shut doors.

He didn’t know what to do. He tried the oak door and it wouldn’t budge. He tried the glass door and it was locked. He hammered on both and shouted, and nobody answered.

In the end he sat down on the step between them, in front of the low arch, and put his head in his hands.

After a while he realized somebody was sitting next to him.

He looked up. It was a tall, spare man in the black gown of an old minister, with a single worn Book under his arm, its pages soft with use. His face was grave and kind, and there was something in his eyes that wouldn’t be moved, the way a rock isn’t moved by the sea breaking on it.

“You,” said Inquirer. “You said you’d meet me on the road.”

“I said I walk all of it,” said the Herald Sola-Scriptura. “I’ve been beside you more often than you knew. In the Copyists’ house. On the Ferry. In the Citadel. But it’s here in this valley I’m needed most. More pilgrims are lost at these two doors than anywhere else on the road, except perhaps the Exchange.”

“They’ve taken my friends. One in each door. And I don’t know how to get them out.”

“I know. I saw. Come on. We’ll go in the right way.” He stood up, stooped, and went in through the low arch in the stone wall between the two doors, and Inquirer followed.

Inside, he found the Hall of the Fathers wasn’t two halls but three.

The low arch led into the central nave, the heart of the building, long and lofty and lit by a thousand candles. And it was full of people.

They were the readers of the Book from every age, sitting at long tables and standing at lecterns, arguing in corners and praying in alcoves. There were men in the robes of the early bishops and women in nuns’ habits, scholars in academic gowns and preachers in black, and farmers and weavers and soldiers in the clothes of every century there’s been. Each one had a Book open in front of him. They weren’t all in the same language. Inquirer saw Greek and Latin and Syriac, German and Dutch and his own tongue, and scripts he couldn’t read at all. But it was the same Book every time.

At the far end of the nave, on a raised platform, stood a single lectern with the Book lying open on it. It was set higher than any other book in the Hall, and every face in the room turned toward it now and then.

“This is the Hall of the Fathers,” said Sola-Scriptura. “The real one. The church reading the Book in every age, under the Book. They aren’t the Book. They aren’t over it. But they’ve read it longer and harder than you, and a good many of them better, and you owe them a great debt. You should listen to them carefully, and be very slow to say all of them were wrong and you alone are right. But you never bow to them the way you bow to that.” He nodded at the lectern. “Come and meet some of them.”

He took Inquirer down the long nave, pointing out readers as they went. He didn’t call them by their own names. He called them by what they’d done.

There was an old bishop from the far west of the Roman world who in the second century had answered the heretics of his day, who claimed a secret knowledge hidden from ordinary believers. He had answered them by pointing to the Rule of Faith, the plain summary of the Gospel every church had received from the apostles. He had taught the church, Sola-Scriptura said, to read each part of the Book in the light of the whole, and against private secret meanings.

There was a small, fierce, dark-skinned bishop from Egypt who had stood almost alone for years against the whole world, emperor included, when the world wanted to say the Son of God was a creature. He’d stood on the plain words of the Book, the Word was God, and been exiled five times for it. “He was right,” said Sola-Scriptura simply, “and the world was wrong. That’s worth remembering whenever Mr. Consensus starts talking.”

There was a golden-tongued preacher from the great city of Antioch who had preached through whole books of the Bible verse by verse and held out for the plain historical sense against the people who turned everything into allegory.

There was a great North African bishop with a troubled, brilliant face, who had written more than any man could read in a lifetime. He had taught that the obscure places must be read by the clear ones, and that no reading could be right which didn’t build up love of God and neighbor. “He allegorized too much sometimes,” said Sola-Scriptura. “The Good Samaritan’s inn as the church, and so on. You ran into that in the Province of Forms, I think. But he saw grace more clearly than anybody for a thousand years. Read him. Weigh him. Love him. Don’t follow him blind.”

There was a stout German monk with a hammer at his belt who had found the Gospel in Romans after years of terror, and put the Book into the language of the ploughboy, and said the plain sense was the Spirit’s sense.

There was a thin, pale, tireless Frenchman in a black cap who had written commentaries on nearly the whole Book in what he called lucid brevity. He said the first business of an interpreter is to let the author say what he says, instead of putting into his mouth what we think he ought to have said. And he had taught that the same Spirit who spoke by the prophets has to get into our hearts to persuade us that they faithfully delivered what God commanded.

And at a long table near the front sat a company of men in black, Scots and English, with a great many papers in front of them, patiently wrangling line by line over a document.

“The Assembly at Westminster,” said Sola-Scriptura. “They wrote the Confession whose words you’ve been hearing all down the road. Perspicuity quoted it on the Stair, Master Witness in the Copyists’ house, Faithful-Rendering on the river. A good map, as maps go. One of the best. But listen to what they wrote about themselves.”

One of the men at the table, a lean, gentle Scot, looked up and smiled at Inquirer and read aloud from the paper in front of him.

“All synods or councils, since the apostles’ times, whether general or particular, may err; and many have erred. Therefore they are not to be made the rule of faith, or practice; but to be used as a help in both. And,” he turned the page, “The supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined… can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in the Scripture.”

He looked up again.

“We wrote that about ourselves. We knew we might be wrong. We wanted every reader to test what we wrote by the Book and throw out anything that didn’t stand. That’s what makes a confession worth having. It points away from itself.”

There was one more room Sola-Scriptura showed him before they went looking for his friends: a narrow gallery behind a curtain along one side of the nave, hung with portraits.

They were portraits of the readers in the Hall, a good many of them the same people Inquirer had just met. But under each one, instead of a list of the man’s achievements, there was a list of his mistakes.

Under the North African bishop: Allegorized freely. Grew harsh toward dissenters in his old age. Under the German monk: Spoke shamefully of the Jews in his last years. Under a famous preacher of a later age: Taught that the Lord would return in 1843. And under one portrait, of a very stern man in black: Approved the burning of a heretic.

“Why is this here?” said Inquirer, troubled.

“So you won’t turn them into Old-Only. Every one of them was a sinner and a reader, just like you, and every one of them got things wrong, some of them badly. They’re helps. Some are very great helps. But they aren’t the rule. When you read them, read them the way a son reads his father’s letters, with love and respect and a willingness to be taught. But with the Book open beside you.”

Inquirer stood a long while in front of the portrait of the stern man in black. Then he turned away.

“And the other door? The new one?”

“That,” said Sola-Scriptura, “is the other half of the lesson. Come.”

They went through a side door from the nave into the right-hand wing, New-Only’s wing.

It was all bright white light and glass and steel, very clean and very new, with no candles and no old books. Instead there were glowing screens on every wall, and young men and women in sharp clothes sitting in front of them typing fast. Fresh readings of the Book scrolled past on the screens, every one labelled New. Groundbreaking. Revolutionary. Never before seen.

Plain-Sense was sitting at one of the screens with his plain Book shut on the desk beside him, frowning at the scrolling words.

“Plain-Sense.”

He looked up. “Inquirer!” He seemed glad, but distracted. “Look at this. New-Only gave me a desk. I’ve been reading all the new readings. They’re… they’re very strange. Look at this one. Breakthrough reading: Jesus was not truly God, but the greatest of God’s creatures, adopted at His baptism. Isn’t that new?”

Inquirer looked at the screen, and then at Sola-Scriptura.

“It’s sixteen hundred years old,” said Sola-Scriptura quietly. “The little Egyptian bishop in the next room spent his life answering it. Back then its name was Arius.”

Plain-Sense stared. He scrolled down. New insight: humanity is not fallen; each person is born innocent and can choose good by his own power. “And this?”

“Fifteen hundred years old. The North African answered that one. Its name was Pelagius.”

Radical new reading: the God of the Old Testament is not the God of the New.

“Eighteen hundred. Marcion. You met his shadow on the Covenant Highway, I think.”

Plain-Sense sat back slowly in his chair. His face had gone pale.

“They’re all old. Every one of them. They’re not new at all. They’re the same mistakes over again.”

“New-Only doesn’t read the Fathers,” said Sola-Scriptura gently, “so he doesn’t know that most of his new readings were tried long ago and answered and found wanting. Every generation that won’t listen to the past is doomed to make its old mistakes all over again and call them discoveries. That’s the price of chronological snobbery.”

Plain-Sense looked down at the plain Book on the desk.

“I thought,” he said slowly, “that because I could read it plainly I didn’t need anybody else. I thought it was just me and the Book.”

“Scripture alone is the rule,” said Sola-Scriptura. “But you aren’t alone. You never were. The Spirit has been teaching the church for two thousand years. Scripture alone doesn’t mean my reading alone. It doesn’t mean nobody else’s reading counts. It means every reading, mine and yours and the Fathers’ and the Councils’, is judged by the Book. You can stand on their shoulders and still look past them to the Book. But a man who won’t stand on anybody’s shoulders never sees further than his own height.”

Plain-Sense picked up his Book and stood up.

“Take me to them. The Fathers. I want to read them.”

Analogy was harder to find.

The left-hand wing, Old-Only’s, was dark and close and smelled of incense and old parchment. There were no windows; it was lit only by candles. And it wasn’t a reading room. It was a vault. Its shelves didn’t hold Books but volumes of the Church’s decisions, councils and decrees and traditions, stacked to the ceiling. In the middle of it all, on a great throne with his miter nearly scraping the vaulted roof, sat Old-Only himself.

At a little desk at the foot of the throne sat Analogy.

He had his great Book of cross-references open in front of him, but he wasn’t reading it. He was copying references from the volumes on the shelves into its margins in his neat red hand. Where it used to say see also Romans 3, he was writing see Council of such-and-such, canon 12, and so the Fathers have always held.

“Analogy.”

The old bookbinder looked up, blinking in the candlelight. “Inquirer. You got in. Good. Look.” He waved at his margins. “It’s all settled. Everything. Every hard passage, every disputed reading. The Church has decided. I don’t need to compare Scripture with Scripture any more. I just look up what was decided and write it in.”

“And when the decisions disagree with each other?” said Sola-Scriptura.

Analogy hesitated. “They don’t. Old-Only says they don’t.”

“And when they disagree with the Book?”

Analogy looked at his margins. He looked at the great Book of cross-references he’d kept forty years. He looked up at Old-Only on his throne.

“They can’t,” he said, unsure of himself. “Can they? The Church can’t err.”

Old-Only leaned down off his throne until his great sorrowful face filled the candlelight.

“Of course the Church cannot err, my son,” he said in his organ voice. “The Church is the pillar and ground of the truth. The Church gave you the Book. How can the Book judge the Church that gave it?”

And Inquirer saw Analogy waver. It was a strong argument, and Inquirer had a feeling he’d heard something like it before, far back on the road. Mr. One-Manuscript had said something not so different, in the House of the Copyists. This is the Book. My father’s Book. I don’t compare. I don’t weigh.

Sola-Scriptura didn’t argue with Old-Only. Inquirer had never once seen him argue with anybody.

Instead he went to the door between the west wing and the nave and opened it wide, and then to the door between the nave and the east wing and opened that wide too. He went up the nave, past all the readers of every age at their tables, lifted the Book from the high lectern at the far end, and carried it very slowly back down the length of the Hall until he was standing between the two open doors, where Old-Only could see it from his throne and New-Only from his screens.

Then he opened it and read in his grave plain voice, and every reader in the Hall stopped to listen.

“Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition.”

In the west wing Old-Only flinched as if he’d been struck.

“Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein.”

In the east wing New-Only flinched as well.

“Remember them which have the rule over you, who have spoken unto you the word of God: whose faith follow.” He turned a page. “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.” And another. “These were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, and searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.”

He shut the Book.

“The Bereans,” he said, into the silence, “heard the Apostle Paul himself. An apostle. And they went home and checked what he said against the Scriptures, and the Book calls them noble for it. If Paul himself is to be tested by the Book, then so are the Fathers, and so are the Councils, and so am I. And so are you,” to New-Only, “and you,” to Old-Only. “The church doesn’t stand over the Book. It stands on it. It’s the pillar that holds the truth up for the world to see. It isn’t the truth’s author. The church didn’t make the Book. The Word made the church.”

Then something happened that Inquirer told me he could never quite describe.

The two giants began to shrink.

Not fast, and not to nothing. But while the Herald stood there with the open Book between the two doors, they got smaller and smaller. Old-Only’s miter came away from the vault. New-Only stopped towering over his screens. They kept on shrinking until they were the size of ordinary men, and then they came, slowly, almost against their will, out of their two wings into the nave, and stood on either side of the Herald, and looked at each other.

Old-Only was an old man now, stooped and white-bearded, in a plain cassock. New-Only was a young one, eager and nervous, in an ordinary coat.

“You see?” said Sola-Scriptura to Inquirer and his friends. “They aren’t tyrants at all when they’re the right size. That one,” the old man, “is Respect-for-the-Past, and he’s a very good servant. He keeps you humble. He reminds you that you aren’t the first to read the Book and that many who came before you read it well. And that one,” the young man, “is Fresh-Eyes, and he’s a good servant too. He reminds you that every generation has to read the Book for itself, and that the church is always to be reformed by the Word. Every age has its blind spots, even the best ones, and every age needs to go back to the source and look again.”

He put a hand on each of their shoulders.

“They only turn into tyrants when one of them sits on the throne that belongs to the Book. Then they swell up and hate each other. Put the Book back in its place and they’re brothers again. That’s what it means to be Reformed. Not to hate the past and not to worship it, but to bring it under the Word, and the present along with it.”

The old man and the young one looked at each other, and after a moment, rather awkwardly, they shook hands.

Analogy had come out of the west wing with his great Book of cross-references under his arm. He stood in front of Inquirer with wet eyes.

“I nearly did it again, didn’t I. The Mirage, and now this. Always hunting for something to do my thinking for me. A rule, a pattern, a council.” He took out his red pen and looked at it. “I’ll have to go back through my margins. All the ones I wrote in there.”

“You can keep some,” said Sola-Scriptura. “The Fathers are worth citing. Just cite them as witnesses, not as the judge.”

Plain-Sense had found his way to the long table in the nave where the black-gowned Assembly sat, and was reading over the lean Scot’s shoulder, completely absorbed.

“Come on,” said Inquirer gently. “We’ve got to go on.”

Plain-Sense looked up. “I could stay here a year.”

“You’ll come back,” said Sola-Scriptura. “Every time you open a commentary, or read a creed, or ask an older Christian what a passage means, you’ll be in this Hall. But the road goes on, and there are two stages left.” He looked at the three of them. “You’ve learned to read the Book now, every passage, by every means the road gives you. You know what it meant. Now comes the question the people in Mine-Own-Meaning always wanted to start with and never earned. What does it mean for us?”

He took them out of the Hall through the low arch into the evening. The road ran on east down the valley toward a great river, very wide and very deep, and even from that far off Inquirer could see a bridge across it.

“The Bridge of Then-and-Now,” said the Herald. “Everything you’ve learned so far has been on the Then side. The other side is your own world, your own life, your own church, your own kitchen. The bridge is how you carry what the Book meant over to what it means. A good many people have built bridges there, and most of them fall down.”

“Will you come with us?”

“I’m always with you. But you’ll cross that bridge on your own feet.” And he went back in through the low arch to the Hall, where the thousand candles were burning and the readers of every age were turning their pages under the open Book.