De Regula Fidei

From Jonathan Pennington's Reading the Gospels Wisely:

"The church recognized the need for a 'ruled reading', or regula fidei, that guided the proper reading,
even of canonical texts."

In a recent video interview, Dr. Russell Fuller, a former colleague with Dr. Pennington, commented on this statement:

"In the context where you're reading there, he's talking about when the orthodox have had a controversy with heretical groups, and he goes, 'Hey, they both had the same Bible, so the Bible couldn't determine between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in that situation, so there needed to be some kind of confession, some kind of 'ruled reading', that would determine the meaning of Scripture.' What he's doing is he's making confessions constrain our reading of Scripture... that's why it's more like catholicism."

Dr. Fuller objects to the use of a regula fidei.

Some Questions

1. What specific confessions does Dr. Fuller believe Dr. Pennington is using to "constrain our reading of Scripture"?
2. Is there anything in those confessions that Dr. Fuller finds objectionable?
3. In controversies with heretical groups that claim to have Scripture on their side, is it necessary for each Christian to repeat the history of exegesis and produce a personal confession to explain the error of the heretical opinion?

De Regula Fidei

It seems that Dr. Fuller and his interviewer are suspicious of the term regula fidei.

Here's what Richard Muller's Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms has to say about that phrase:

"regula fidei: rule of faith; in the early church, the creedal expansion of the baptismal formula used to define the apostolic tradition of faith against the gnostics; in the medieval church it was sometimes extended to the canonical Scriptures (e.g., Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae, q.1, a. 9). In the age of the Reformation and Protestant orthodoxy, the early church usage is known and sometimes used, but the expression typically references the canonical Scriptures themselves."

An Additional Consideration

On Dr. Pennington's view of regula fidei, note this exchange from his conversation with Dr. Fred Sanders on the YouTube show Cars, Coffee, Theology: 

Sanders: "If you have too atomistic a view of what God's propositional revelation is, you're going to get it down to word studies or single sentence claims that are taken in isolation from each other, whereas what’s also important is the overall sense. You need the words, you need the sentences, but you also need to have a grasp of this holistic sense of how they cohere."

Pennington: "And that’s what the regula fidei is: historically provided, and maybe we would say creeds now, even confessions, and the doctrinal statements."

Sanders: "Especially if you’re understanding those things as an attempt to see what’s in Scripture and say it."

Pennington: "Right, good." 

An Observation

It does seem that Dr. Pennington is using regula fidei more in the way that the early church used the term than in the way it was most commonly used in "the age of the Reformation and Protestant orthodoxy". But notice that Dr. Pennington uses the phrase "guided the proper reading", whereas Dr. Fuller uses the phrase "determine the meaning". These are not the same. One may believe that the Abstract of Principles (a document that both Dr. Pennington and Dr. Fuller have signed) is a faithful summary of what the Bible teaches, and that (as a faithful summary) it can guide readers in considering the proper reading of certain biblical passages. However, no one thinks that the Abstract, written so many centuries after the Bible, determines the meaning of the Bible. If Dr. Fuller or anyone else thinks Dr. Pennington DOES believe that, then much more proof needs to be offered to show Pennington's error on this point.