Readers may know that Lutherans and some other Protestants commemorate October 31 as “Reformation Day,” since it’s the date of Martin Luther’s posting of his 95 theses in Wittenberg. As has happened with a lot of other church feasts and commemorations, this tends to get moved to the nearest Sunday, which falls this year on the Sunday coming up.

One of the most controverted aspects of the Reformation heritage, historically and today, has been the notion of “private judgment.” The idea -stemming from increased access to the Bible due to more vernacular translations, greater literacy, and the printing press – is that each person has the right and duty to interpret the Bible for herself. Luther set the template for later Protestantism in delcaring that his conscience was captive to the Word of God and that he wouldn’t back down from his positions unless their falsity could be demonstrated by biblical exegesis or by reason.

Understandably, Catholics have balked at this notion, seeing it as arrogantly elevating the individual above the witness and wisdom of the Church. It’s also been blamed for the splintering of Protestantism into countless churches, not a few of them claiming to be the “one true church” and anathematizing all others.

What’s perhaps more surprising is that in recent times some Protestant theologians have turned on the idea of private judgment. Stanley Hauerwas, with his characteristic hyperbole, even suggested taking the Bible out the laity’s hands. The worry here is often that Protestantism has bred individualism in opposition to the communal judgment of the church. This is sometimes seen as resulting in captivity to foreign ideologies: without the witness of the church to guide interpretation and doctrine, we’re more likely to tailor our theology to the prevailing cultural or political winds as the “German Christians” did under Hitler and as conservative evangelicals in the U.S. are accused of doing today.

This critique of private judgment seems also to be the outworking of a particular view of rationality and selfhood. Recent philosophy is much more likely than its Enligtenment predecessor to view the self as the product of social, linguistic and cultural influences and not as a rational agent capable of attaining a “god’s eye view” in order to make judgments of truth and falsehood. Theologians have run with this idea in order to situate biblical interpretation and theology firmly within the church community and its judgments.

However, without denying that the Enlightenment view of a universal, context-free rationality is problematic or getting into inter-communion polemics, I think there are still good reasons for upholding something like the traditional Protestant view in the face of objections from neo-traditionalist detractors. I think this is most helpfully seen if we look at the notion of private judgment as a means of protecting the conscience of the individual.

The principle of private judgment depends crucially on two bedrock Reformation assumptions: the sufficiency of scripture and the fallibility of the church. Scripture is sufficient, for the Reformers, in that it “containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation” (Article VI of the Anglican Articles of Religion). Likewise the church, according to the Reformers, has erred in certain respects, which rules out any form of infallibility.

Taken together, these two principles forbid requiring anyone to believe something merely on the church’s say-so and without demonstrating it from Scripture. What this does is to create a “zone of protection” around the individual’s conscience. The Reformers were convinced that even simple laypeople could discern the main thrust of the gospel from reading Scripture and from the preaching and worship of the church, and that nothing beyond the gospel was necessary for salvation.

In his theological defense of political liberalism, Christopher Insole argues that, far from presupposing atomistic self-created individuals, liberalism rightly understood takes full cognizance of the fragility of human selves. This is because it protects individuals from the excessive certainties of others. The Protestant conception of private judgment does something analogous in the ecclesiastical sphere: for the sake of conscience judgments on what is inherently uncertain shouldn’t be enforced. Though in practice Protestants often violated this principle, it’s pretty much built in to their understanding of faith. Faith in Christ alone is sufficient for being a Christian.

None of this means that Protestants have to forego the accumulated wisdom of the church. The Reformers were happy to appeal to the Fathers especially, and the magisterial Reformers accepted the ecumenical creeds as summaries of the gospel. Nor does it mean an individual believer has a “private religion”: in many (even most) cases the traditional understanding of the mysteries of the faith are vastly superior to anything he could come up with on his own. And there is a built in limit to the fissiparousness of Protestantism in that the witness to God revealed in Jesus as recounted in the NT provides the touchstone for its religious life. To step outside of that is to cease to be Protestant (or Christian) in any meaningful sense.