Tradition’s Useful Relationship to the Scriptures
Written by Dan McDonald
My goal in presenting this
particular blog is to express a defense of the usefulness of tradition
alongside the primacy of the Holy Scriptures.
That sentence probably places me as a Protestant when read by Roman Catholics,
and arouses suspicions when read by many Protestants, especially among some of
my Evangelical brethren. But hopefully I
can make a sane and sensible presentation of why I think such a view essential
to understanding the Christian experience and helpful in developing discussions
of our varied understandings of Christianity between the varying traditions
existing within Christendom. That
sentence also says something. I use
tradition in more ways than one, which can be confusing. There is a Christian tradition, a tradition
resulting from the continual teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit in the Church
of our Lord Jesus Christ. There are
Christian traditions, traditions within Christianity of varied understandings
whether they be Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyterian,
Methodist, Brethren, Charismatic, or any number of modern groups presenting
their understanding of Christianity.
There is also a non-denominational understanding that often just thinks
the rest of us have missed Jesus in the midst of our traditions. Perhaps we have missed Jesus sometimes in a
number of our traditions. Perhaps though
tradition plays a role in our understanding of the faith, and yet tradition itself
needs to be at times corrected and brought closer to the center of the faith
once given unto the saints. (Jude 1:3)
I would like us to think about
something F.F. Bruce asked his readers to think about in an essay which was
part of a book of collected essays written by him entitled A Mind for what
Matters. The book is not in my hands as I write this blog, so I will
paraphrase the scenario he asked his readers to consider. He describes a scenario where Diocletian in
the early fourth century instead of being unable to stamp out the Christian
faith, instead manages to stamp out Christianity and all the known copies of
the Bible are destroyed. I know it is a
far-fetched alternative scenario. F.F.
Bruce knew it was as well. But here is
what he wanted to ask us using that scenario.
What would have happened if in our lifetimes, after living in a world
with no Bibles for more than fifteen hundred years, some Arab shepherd boy
discovered a copy of the Scriptures hidden away in a cave in jars, as some Arab
boy discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in the last century? Would the Bible instantaneously be read and
recognized as the lost Word of God? Or
would it be more treated as a relic of an ancient past and treated mostly as
something to be studied by scholars and talked about by handfuls of people
interested in religious history?
F.F. Bruce suggested that such a
hypothetical scenario helped us to realize that even if we regard the Bible as
the written inspired Word of God, and believe it to be the Church’s sole
authority in matters of the faith, that our relationship to the Bible is in
virtually all instances one in which we came into an existing living church, a
community of faith that already had ideas and understandings of the Scriptures. In each of our various traditions of
Christianity there was a living group of people with a history into which each
of our own individual Christian experiences began to be formed.
The Lord Jesus Christ committed the
Gospel message, the message of his kingdom to the Apostles and those faithful
ministers who would be appointed afterwards to baptize the nations, teaching
them all which he had commanded them.
They went about proclaiming the Gospel, establishing churches,
maintaining the sacraments or ordinances.
Part of the Gospel ministry to which the Apostles were committed was to
train others who would be able to teach and train others so that a living
succession to the apostolic ministry might be formed which would not be
broken. It is probably not as important
that one can trace his lineage of priesthood back to Matthew 28:18-20 through
every Bishop included in his ordination tree, but the truth is if one has been
trained and ordained for the ministry he is part of an ongoing ministry of baptizing,
making disciples, teaching the commandments of Christ to the nations, and
appointing and training faithful men who would be able to teach and train others
also. I may be inclined to believe that
in a perfect world every minister would be able to list the line of appointed “overseers”
who ordained them into the work of the ministry. But in an imperfect world I would not be
surprised if God owns some to be his ministers who lack the right registered
papers of apostolic succession, while God will say to some who have their
papers upon the walls of their studies, “Depart for I never knew you.”
Perhaps it would be helpful if we
were to have an understanding of a framework by which to include the positive
contribution of Christian tradition alongside the centrality of the Holy
Scriptures. This is something that would
not require as much alteration of understanding as some Catholics, Protestants,
and Orthodox might imagine. The
Scriptures are central more in Catholicism and Orthodoxy more than many
Protestants realize. The homilies taught
on any given Sunday are almost universally, composed in reference, as far as I
know to the Scripture texts which serve as the proper texts for the day. Catholics and Orthodox should readily admit
that as important as they believe the holy tradition is, that there is a reason
why Scripture texts are used for proper texts rather than the writings of
church fathers, saints, and venerated religious leaders. It is already a functioning aspect of these
traditions that the Holy Scriptures are a unique feature of the Christian tradition. These are the primary or original documents
which give us an authoritative view of what the Apostles taught. Church tradition brings faithful and inasmuch
as it is faithful authoritative expressions of apostolic teaching but these are
the writings of men subject to apostolic authority following the apostolic era,
and the central focus of a homily is always to be traced back to its original
sources while it may be wonderfully augmented by the sayings of tradition. The minister proclaiming a homily or sermon
must ask himself two questions. He must
ask, is my proclamation faithful to the original apostolic context and am I
relating it faithfully to my own modern context. A right understanding of history will likely
be able to trace in the between centuries how a proper understanding of the
faithful tradition should be able to apply to our modern scenarios. The minister adept in understanding tradition
will discover that though it is probably a mistake to say history repeats
itself, it is almost always true that history progresses with a number of rhymes
offered to its students. So it will be
very often that a capable minister knowledgeable in Christian history will be
able to proclaim the Biblical text of an ancient time in its modern application
helped to do so by someone in an age of the church fathers, the medieval
scholars, the Reformation or even the counter-reformation (as much as I hate to
think it), or from a more recent tradition.
Sometimes as in the last blog the minister will only point back to when
Brother Parker preached last year.
For the Protestant or Evangelical
who imagines he is not treating Scripture correctly to include tradition in his
sermon, I would encourage him to rethink how he understands the Biblical
revelation. The Protestant should think
of the Scriptures as “fully authorized tradition” whereas other tradition is
good and useful when its message is in accord with the Scriptures. Why do I say the Bible is a “fully authorized
tradition”? I say that because the Bible
was revealed step by step over the centuries from the time of Moses to the
times of the Apostles. Each portion of
the Scriptures was presented to the people of God by Moses, by prophets, by
Psalmists, by collectors of history, and then by the Apostles or men close to
the Apostles such as Luke and Mark. The
process took, by some varying estimates, approximately 1500 years. The Bible is itself a revelation consisting
of a tradition being fostered by the hand of God to be recorded piece by piece
and digested piece by piece by the people of God. Finally as the writer of Hebrews says the
last word came to be spoken in the person and work of Jesus Christ as explained
by the apostles. Thus the Bible became
the central piece of tradition by which all other traditions were to be
compared and found faithful or found inferior to the Word of God.
In summary, this tradition existing
between those of us in the Twenty-first century and those of the Apostles’ era
is the living link between the letters of the Apostles and the believing church
of the Twenty-first century in all its manifestations. The Church did not die during the time of
Diocletian. The Bible was not buried
away in Middle Eastern caves to be rediscovered by some shepherd boy. Rather the Apostles found faithful men whom
they trained to teach other faithful men who would be able to teach
others. Thus many centuries later a
minister proclaiming the Gospel proclaimed Jesus Christ as the Savior of
sinners, and an Illinois farm boy came to know himself as a sinner and came to
know Jesus Christ as a Savior. The
Illinois farm boy actually read of the Gospel in a book whose theology was not
all that balanced. That writer’s luster
faded as the boy found the writer to easily cast aside of Christ’s call to
lordship. The boy, by then a very young
man, decided that Christ as Lord and Christ as Savior could not be separated
for even if Christ fulfilled two offices; it was the same person issuing a call
to salvation from the office of Savior and a call to obedience from the office
of Lord. He is both Savior and Lord, he
does not offer salvation to those who reject him as Lord, nor does he give
salvation to those who follow his principles but imagine themselves so
righteous they need no Savior. The
Illinois farm boy, a sort of misfit, went in search of a people with the Book
that seemed to tell him of his sins and of his Savior, and he found a people
gathered in love of the same Savior, the same Scriptures, with a history of how
they had been forged together.
I would not ask anyone to deny their history as a
Christian people. I don’t care if a
reader is Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Presbyterian, Baptist, Charismatic,
Pentecostal, Church of Christ, or any number of Christian groups. I would encourage them to love the history of
their connections to the ancient Apostles and the modern living church. In between is the story of a chain of living
believers who loved Christ and found in Christ a remedy for their sins, and
found in Christ’s people a place to build a home, raise a family, create a
community and to learn to love one another on the way to an eternity where many
things will pass away but love will continue.
I would ask, if in your appreciation for your history between the
Apostles and our modern times, is there is room for you to learn to glance at
another’s history and consider it is an important part of the story of your
brother or sister in Christ? Perhaps
some of the brother’s ways are strange, but does understanding their history
and tradition help you to understand them, although never to fully explain
them, for our histories are never more than a component of who we are. But part of their history is the history into
which they were immersed when they found Christ to be their Savior in their
portion of the living church to which they had been drawn. A stray dog will usually decide to take up
residence where they are fed, sheltered, and loved. So are we sinners who wandered into a faith
community and discovered a Savior, and a people who reached out to us with the
Savior’s love. The stray dog finds
little interest once loved and fed and sheltered in becoming someone else’s
dog, but that doesn’t mean the hound down the street hasn’t found a similar
experience of being loved, fed, and sheltered down the street. So when we dogs meet when we get the chance
to go beyond the boundaries of our cloistered parishes perhaps we can rejoice
in one another’s history connecting Christ and the Apostles with our modern situations
as much as we sometimes want to focus on how one person has too many ornaments
and statues in their yard, and the other tends to let the grass grow too high
between mowing times. There is a time to
compare differences and to suggest that some differences are very important and
seem to be contrary to the original message of the Apostles. But of first importance perhaps is simply to
try to figure out what it is in the home of the other family what the hound
living there thinks is so wonderful, and then the dog living in another home
can choose to remain in his home but will have a new appreciation for the hound’s
family down the street. The many
traditions that seem to separate our churches in Christendom are often when
discussed simply differing traditions and histories of people connected to Christ
as their Savior, and to modern life.
Tradition is the bridge spanning the river of time separating our places
in modern life from the message of the Apostles in ancient times.
I once visited St. Petersburg in Russia. It is a beautiful city, built to be the
capital of Russia during the time of the Czars.
One of the features I most loved of the city was its system of old
bridges. The city of St. Petersburg is
built on a chain of islands in the delta region of the River Neva. Each bridge was built to have its own
character, charm, beauty; and all the bridges were built to serve the same
function. Each bridge was built to enable
pedestrians, carriages, and then later trucks and automobiles to pass from one
side of a stream to another. All the
bridges had the same ultimate function.
To some degree, a large number of Christian traditions have the same
ultimate function. They are bridges
built to serve a modern people to understand an ancient Gospel to travel from
between an individual’s own soul to learn the truth to bring back to neighbors,
friends, and family members in our modern times. Each bridge has the same function, but still
it is interesting sometimes simply to look upon the beauty and charm of the
different bridges and to appreciate their different personalities. In St. Petersburg I marveled at the distinct
beauty of the different bridges. There
was one bridge I found very different. I
told my tour guide how impressed I was by the beauty of the many different
bridges in her beautiful city. But there
was a bridge for a railroad that was quite functional but extremely drab and
lifeless in comparison. It was not built
to be beautiful or to convey a story, it was just functional. That is what a lot of modern people,
including a lot of Christians seem to want; a functionality with neither beauty
nor a story. The Christian tradition is
not like that. In between us and the
message of the Apostles there is always a bridge built across history with a
tradition and a story. It is a wonderful
thing sometime to look upon a beautiful bridge spanning a river and ask someone
who loves the bridge to explain the story of the bridge to you. There is a charm to be discovered when
someone with a love for that bridge lets you in on the stories described of men
and women who walked over this bridge into adventures on the other side. We should imagine that in the stories to be
described from the various traditions of the Christian tradition there are
stories meant to melt cold hearts, and to warm the hearts of strangers passing
by who suddenly feel a bit closer to the one who loves this bridge when a
certain story of a passerby’s adventure into the land beyond is told. I suppose you can have Christianity without a
sense of tradition, but why?
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