The doctrine of sola Scriptura has long been contentious, for any number of reasons. In the early American period, with a Christianity greatly influenced by populism and democratic ideals, it served as a license for people to interpret the Bible free of any traditional authorities such as ordained clergy and confessional standards. To put it bluntly, it gave them a license to do whatever they wanted. Nathan O. Hatch, in The Democratization of American Christianity, observes this:

Any number of denominations, sects, movements, and individuals between 1780 and 1830 claimed to be restoring a pristine biblical Christianity free from all human devices. 'In religious faith we have but one Father and one Master,' noted the Universalist spokesman A. B. Grosh, 'and the Bible, the Bible, is our only acknowledged creed-book.' 'I have endeavored to read the scriptures as though no one had read them before me,' claimed Alexander Campbell, 'and I am as much on my guard against reading them to-day, through the medium of my own views yesterrday, or a week ago, as I am against being influenced by any foreign name, authority, or system whatever.'

Protestants from Luther to Wesley had been forced to define carefully what they meant by sola Scriptura. They found it an effective banner to unfurl when attacking Catholics but always a bit troublesome when common people began to take the teaching seriously. For the Reformers, popular translations of the Bible did not imply that people were to understand the Scriptures apart from ministerial guidance. Thus when dealing with a scholar such as Erasmus, Luther could champion boldly the perspicuity of Scripture, its clarity for all: 'Who will maintain that the public fountain does not stand in the light, because some people in a back alley cannot see it, when everybody in the market place can see it quite plainly?' Yet when confronted with headstrong sectarians, he withdrew such democratic interpretations and admitted the danger of proving anything by Scripture: 'Now I learn that it suffices to throw many passages together helterskelter whether they fit or not. If this is the way to do it, I certainly shall prove with Scripture that Rastrum beer is better than Malmsey wine' (179-180).

Abraham Kuyper once wrote, in his Encyclopedia of Sacred Theology, that it would be foolish for someone to attempt to hike through the mountains of Switzerland without the help of a guide or a map. That is analogous, of course, to saying neither is it wise for someone to take up the Bible and attempt to interpret it apart from the wisdom of the Church throughout the ages. "In its rich and many-sided life, extending across so many ages," Kuyper wrote,

the Church tells you at once what fallible interpretations you need no longer try, and what interpretation on the other hand offers you the best chances for success. On this ground the claim must be put, that the investigator of the Holy Scriptures shall take account of what history and the life of the Church teaches concerning the general points of view, from which to start his investigation, and which paths it is useless to further reconnoitre.

Kuyper's sentiments are entirely antithetical to most of American Christianity, both past and present. As much as democratic ideals have done good things for America as a political entity, insofar as people have allowed those ideals to shape the Church in America, they have done a great disservice. Like I said in my last post, God grants authority to the Church, not the individual. He gives Scripture to His covenant people that it may reveal their Lord and shape and govern their life according to His will. To be sure, the individual must appropriate Scripture for himself (Deut. 6:4-9; Psalm 119; 2 Tim. 3:16-17, etc.), but never in a vacuum.

Our identity as Christians is not primarily that we are individuals saved by Christ. This is true, but it is not primary. What is first is that God has called a people to Himself, has redeemed them and brought them into a covenant relationship with them. Individual believers consitute that people, but not atomistically; their corporate identity as the body of Christ is at the fore. It follows here, then, that our reading of Scripture is to be done in this covenant community and not apart from it. This is not to say individuals should not read their Bibles on their own, of course, but that when they do so they should read it through what Kuyper calls the "consciousness of the Church." The Bible is, after all, God's covenant document with the Church.

When I was in college, Albert Wolters once said something like, "Don't worry, you can't come up with any new heresies. They've all been tried already." I'm not sure if that was intended to comfort us, but the point was that if we set ourselves some theological boundaries and recognize that the Church throughout history has already tried a myriad of interpretations, approving some and disapproving others, we have ourselves a pretty reliable guide as we travel today.

History matters, tradition matters, and the Church matters. They are gifts. Lean on them.

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In my spare time—well, actually when I should doing schoolwork—I have been reading some on the history of Anglicanism. Having known very little about the tradition, I wanted to get a better picture of its roots. It was only recently that I learned of the great influence some of the continental Reformers had on Anglicanism during its most formative time, like Peter Martyr Vermigli and Martin Bucer, who both spent many years there, and John Calvin, whose influence spread through his writings.

The most notable Reformer in the English tradition is Thomas Cranmer. Church history classes I have taken in the past have touched on his life and work, but my knowledge of him was rather limited. One of the books I have been reading is Stephen Neill's 1958 study, simply called Anglicanism. Early on, discussing Cranmer's influence in the English Reformation, he writes the following:

It is to be noted that Cranmer, like the other Reformers, had fallen in love with the Bible. But his love took a particular form. He believed that the Bible was the living word of God to every man, and that it comes with the greatest power when unaccompanied by any human gloss, comment, or exposition. He was convinced that, if his fellow countrymen could be induced to read the word of God, or, if illiterate, to hear it read, it would in course of time make its way into their hearts and consciences.

Neill writes that the composition of the Book of Common Prayer was, without measure, the most significant contribution Cranmer made to the Church in the Reformation era. Whereas the genius of men like Calvin lay in their theological contributions, for Cranmer it was formulating a liturgy saturated with Scripture. Neill continues:

It was only in the next reign [of Edward VI] that Cranmer was able to provide his Church with a lectionary; when he was able to do so, he made the Church of England in a day the greatest Bible-reading Church in the world. In no other Church anywhere is the Bible read in public worship so regularly, with such order, and at such length, as in the Anglican fellowship of Churches. In making such provision, Cranmer was laying heavy demands on his Englishmen, and reposing great confidence in them. But in that too he was the typical Anglican—Anglicanism is a form of the Christian faith that demands and expects a great deal from ordinary people.

In those churches which still use the Book of Common Prayer, Cranmer's influence lives on. It is quite something to worship with an Anglican congregation and see how Scripture saturates the liturgy, and to know that this was the work of Cranmer himself. I find it quite significant that Neill sees the Anglican tradition defined by its worship, as opposed to a tradition like my own, which is characterized much more by its theology.

And so Neill writes, "We have no English Luther or Calvin...[instead] we have as our chief reformer the man who had a greater genius for liturgical worship than any other of whom we have record in the whole history of the Church."

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I found the chart you see below in an essay by Walter C. Kaiser, Jr., in the first volume of Readings in Christian Ethics, edited by David Clark and Robert Rakestraw. Kaiser's essay focuses on how Christians can derive contemporary ethical principles from the specific commands of the Old Testament law. This, of course, has always been quite a debated issue among Christians. Well some are eager to argue that the Old Testament law is no longer binding on us, Kaiser rightly argues that "Old Testament law is not so esoteric or so culturally bound that it cannot aid contemporary Christians with their [ethical] problems" (198).

The laws of the Old Testament, he writes, derive their moral and theological principles from the Ten Commandments, summed up in the two greatest commandments (Matt. 22:36-40). As a result, "the interpreter of Scripture must search for that legal principle, usually embodied in a text like the Ten Commandments, before applying this principle to a new and contemporary situation" (199). His example is that which you see below, Paul's argument that preacher's are worthy of their pay (1 Cor. 9:11-12), derived from the Old Testament prohibition on muzzling an ox (Deut. 25:4). Kaiser writes that the original intention of this specific law in the Mosaic administration was not just to be kind to your oxen, but to recognize the duties moral beings have to each other.

Kaiser employs the term "ladder of abstraction" to refer to this process of working from a low level of generality to greater degrees of specificity. He recognizes the need to exercise a great deal of caution in applying this methodology. To begin with the general principle may be profitable on a theoretical level, but it will leave people wanting in terms of concrete applications. To start from either end of the ladder, however, may cause us difficulty in determining the general principle. Nonetheless, the process of working through an ethical issue in this way, though often difficult, is beneficial—and, I would add, essential.

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One more time around with Kuyper, and to provide further context to an aforementioned quote:

As it would be the height of folly, on one's first arrival in Switzerland, to make it appear that he is the first to investigate the Berner Oberland, since common sense compels him on the contrary to begin his journey by making inquiry among the guides of the country, the same is true here. In its rich and many-sided life, extending across so many ages, the Church tells you at once what fallible interpretations you need no longer try, and what interpretation on the other hand offers you the best chances for success. On this ground the claim must be put, that the investigator of the Holy Scriptures shall take account of what history and the life of the Church teaches concerning the general points of view, from which to start his investigation, and which paths it is useless to further reconnoitre.

...The investigator does not stand outside of the Church, but is himself a member of it. Hence into his own consciousness there is interwoven the historic consciousness of his Church. In this historic consciousness of his Church he finds not merely the tradition of theologians and the data by which to form an estimate of the results of their studies, but also the confessional utterances of the Church. And this implies more. These utterances of his Church do not consist of the interpretation of one or another theologian, but of the ripest fruit of a spiritual and dogmatic strife, battled through by a whole circle of confessors in violent combat, which enlightened their spiritual sense, sharpened their judgment, and stimulated their perception of the truth; which fruit, moreover, has been handed down to him by the Church through its divinely appointed organs. It will not do, therefore, to place these dogmatic utterances on the same plane with the opinions of individual theologians. In a much deeper sense, they provide a guarantee for freedom from error, and he who belongs to such a Church has himself been moulded in part by them. This gives rise to the demand, that every theologian shall, in his investigations, reckon with all those things that are taught him by the history of the churches concerning well and badly chosen paths in this territory to be investigated; and, also, in the second place, that he shall take the dogmas of his Church as his guide, and that he shall not diverge from them until he is compelled to do this by the Word of God. Hence, one should not begin by doubting everything, and by experimenting to see whether on the ground of his own investigation he arrives at the same point where the confession of his Church stands; but, on the contrary, he should start out from the assumption that his Church is right, while at the same time he should investigate it, and only oppose it when he finds himself compelled to do so by the Word of God (576-577).

And to that, I have nothing to add.

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Sometimes when I am teaching or speaking about something, I just assume that people are going to understand what I am talking about. But, as was the case Sunday morning in our adult Sunday School class, that does not always happen. To be fair, part of it was probably owing to a lack of clarity on my part, but based on the feedback I was receiving in the discussion it was evident that popular misconceptions were at work as well.

Essentially, what I was attempting to teach on was the Reformed tradition expressed in our confessional documents, and specifically what authority we give that tradition. However, when people hear the word “tradition” their immediate thought is to use it as an adverb—traditional worship, high church liturgy, ritual and symbolism, and so on. Most of the people who attend Sunday School do not come from Reformed, and especially confessional, backgrounds, and thus it took a bit of work to define tradition in the sense I was using it. But once they started to understand, we had a more fruitful discussion.

In the last few weeks we had been talking about worship, and while we consistently went back to Scripture to form our understanding, we also kept looking at portions of the Westminster Standards in particular. By doing so, I was implying that the Standards carried some authority. Realizing two things—first, that as modern evangelicals, most of them were going to be of the mindset that “me and my Bible” was a sufficient authority for determining faith and practice; and second, that they might think I am putting the Standards on the same level as Scripture—I wanted to spend some time discussing the place of our confessional documents in the life of the church.

Anyway, enough about context; here are some of the points I made:

1. We don’t live in an historical vacuum. I’ve made this point recently, and so won’t spend a great deal of time on it again. It is just important to note that we don’t live in a vertical “here-and-now” but that we are part of something much bigger than ourselves; we are part of a story that begins with creation and will climax at the consummation. As such, the Church of today does not stand alone, separated from the historical Church. What has come before us has shaped us in every way, and we ought to recognize all the implications that go along with that, including theological ones.
2. Our tradition carries authority by virtue of the fact that our theology and doctrine were cultivated in community. When a body of believers sets themselves to the task of pursuing biblical truth, they are guided by the Spirit in their work. As I mentioned above, the “me and my Bible” mentality so prevalent in the church today is insufficient. While we certainly confess the ability of the individual to understand Scripture, the individual also becomes part of a community of faith when he becomes a believer. It is to that community, the Church, that the deposit of truth is entrusted. I used the example of Martin Luther to illustrate this point. When he first discovered the hallmark doctrine of justification by faith, he spent a great deal of time in anguish wondering, "Could I really be right about this?" He was convinced of the authority of the Church, and struggled immensely with standing in opposition to her teaching.
3. Abraham Kuyper once wrote that in doing theology, we should begin with the assumption that the Church is right, and largely for the reasons I just mentioned. The Church, though certainly not standing in a realm of total objectivity and greatly influenced by a host of different factors, nonetheless holds an authority of a much more objective nature than we as individuals do. God has entrusted His truth to a people, a community, and we should be wary of assuming that we can discover the fullness of that truth outside of the body.
4. Finally, I wanted to emphasize to the class that our confessions form the grammar for how we speak in Reformed and Presbyterian churches. One who is familiar with confessional documents such as the Westminster Standards would begin to understand the depths of the Reformed tradition a great deal more than if he merely attended worship services on a Sunday morning. I encouraged the class to spend some time reading and studying them because the confessions help form a theological basis that would otherwise be very difficult for an individual to formulate on their own. They give orientation and direction, and a solid foundation to stand on.

In no way do I want to take away from the primacy of the authority of Scripture or the need and importance of studying the Word of God. Absolutely not! What I wanted to demonstrate was simply that it is impossible for us not to approach Scripture from an angle; and because of that, it is helpful to begin with a frame of reference which has been cultivated among a body of godly and devoted believers wholeheartedly committed to the Gospel, to the authority of Scripture, and to the pursuit of truth and the furtherance of Christ's Kingdom.

As is likely evident here, I told the class that I myself was working through some of the things I was trying to get them talking about. At this point it is hard to say what they took away from it, but my hope and intention was to give them a new understanding and appreciation for the idea of tradition, and specifically our Reformed heritage (although that probably deserves another lesson—or two, or three—on its own).

At any rate, I post this here because I want to engage you as well, readers. Any thoughts about all of this?

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