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Journeyman
A Journal for the Inquiring Christian
Vol. 1, No. 2, November 2001
Bible, Tradition, Church and Pope
| Overview: While "the Bible alone" can lead to schism and "all we need is the pope" can lead to the "Magisterium of the moment" — a papacy unleashed from any practical constraints — the church really needs four pieces in their proper places. |
If you listen to some radio preachers you might get the impression that biblical interpretation is an easy and straight-forward thing: all you need to do is pray for guidance and read the Bible with an open heart and you’ll see that the radio preacher’s version of Christian doctrine is correct.
It only takes a little exposure to the breadth of Christian belief systems to realize that it doesn’t really work out that way. Two people can follow the radio preacher’s method with a good and honest heart c at least as far as we can tell — but they arrive at different conclusions. How are we to understand this? Did the one of them fail to ask for the Holy Spirit’s guidance? Or asking, did he resist the Spirit? Is he foolish, or wicked? Or is the Bible unclear?
”Scripture Alone” Can Be a Wax Nose
The convictions individual Christians get from independent Bible study span quite a range. Despite pious-sounding assurances to the contrary, a prayer, good intentions and a Bible simply aren’t sufficient to bring about the Christian maturity God calls us to — “no longer … tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine.” (Eph. 4: 14)
But let’s be straight about one thing from the start. The problem does not lie with Scripture, which is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path. The problem lies is in trying to interpret Scripture in an environment for which it was never intended.
In addition to a good heart, a prayer and a Bible, we need the Christian community, which offers an interpretive framework for the text. Some Evangelicals will agree with this assessment. “That’s right,” they say. “We need good teachers.” But the teachers themselves are individuals, subject to the same problems, and are often cut off — or have cut themselves off — from the larger Christian community. Some may be charismatic enough to get others to sign on to their belief system, but why should we follow such teachers? What makes their version of the faith trustworthy?
The Need for a Larger Tradition
Churches have to deal with problems like this all the time. Each church has its own doctrinal standards, but often individuals or small group Bible studies run off into their own little worlds without reference to the doctrinal standards of the church. To rein in wandering small groups, or to prevent trouble in the first instance, wise church leaders will make sure that the people are fed a steady diet of instruction within the framework of their doctrinal standards. In other words, they restrain extravagant Bible interpretation by keeping it within the bounds of tradition.
That is a good thing, but we all know that there are a lot of different traditions. Lutheran small groups will have to stay within the bounds of one set of standards while Presbyterian or Methodist — or even the so-called “non-denominational” and independent churches — will require adherence to another tradition. This can make the believer uncomfortable because our primary loyalty is not to Methodism or Lutheranism, but to Christ. How do we know that the Lutheran confessions (or whichever) are the best set of standards?
Here we run into the different uses (or abuses) of church tradition. For some, church tradition is simply the wax nose of private biblical interpretation dignified by the fact that it was written by somebody a long time ago. Instead of the charismatic radio preacher, now we have some character from history — he may have been a charismatic street preacher or a successful pamphleteer — who gathered a following and formed a new tradition. Why should the Christian trust that guy any more than the smoothie on the radio?
Tradition and Apostolic Tradition
Thoughtful Christians are often frustrated by all this. Jesus and Paul are quite clear that the church is supposed to be united in faith. (Jn. 17, Eph. 4) But it seems that confessions and church tradition don’t solve the question because we don’t merely want to be faithful to Luther, we want to be faithful to Christ. We know full well that these traditions — Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist — might just be the mess of private interpretation written on a larger tablet.
But there is a deeper tradition.
We need to get past our private opinion, past the guy on the radio, past the confessional bodies that wrote our historic documents, and get to the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). Can it be done? Is there a church tradition that supercedes these denominational traditions?
It doesn’t take much Bible study to realize that Jesus and the apostles taught a lot more than what’s written down in Scripture. (See, e.g., Jn. 21:25, 1 Cor. 11:34, 2 Thes. 2:15.) It doesn’t matter at this point whether those teachings went beyond what is written in Scripture or merely transmitted the same doctrine in a different form. What matters is that Scripture itself was given within the context of this larger body of material, and, in fact, relies on it. For example, 1 Cor. 11:34 shows that Paul’s additional oral instructions clarified his written comments on the Eucharist, and 1 Cor. 11:16 assumes a broader Christian teaching to which the individual churches were to conform. Or to put it another way, the early church knew about the Lord’s Supper and Baptism before they read about it in Scripture. They read the Bible within the context of a pre-existing church tradition.
If the Bible, a prayer and a sincere faith aren’t sufficient to navigate the messy landscape of Christian doctrine — if we need some kind of interpretive guidance to make sure we’re on the right track — perhaps we can track down the apostolic tradition — the teachings of the apostles and the faith of the early church.
Church Fathers — Wax Nose Number Two?
The logical place to look for this early tradition is in the writings of the church fathers. Some contemporary Evangelicals seem to have re-discovered them, and while some people study the church fathers to see what insight they can glean on the life and faith of the early church, it seems that others read them to proof text their pet doctrines. The result is that different people get different ideas from the fathers — just as with Scripture.
It sounds as if this so-called apostolic tradition hasn’t accomplished much, but it’s really not quite that bad. Christians who allow their interpretation of Scripture to be guided by the faith of the early church tend to be much closer to one another than those who ignore (or criticize) the early church. So we’ve made a step in the right direction. Studying the church fathers does lead us toward unity. But we haven’t gone far enough.
Which Fathers?
Ancient Bible students are not immune from the problem of wildly differing theories. While there is some uniformity of belief among those who try to stay within the orthodox tradition, that begs the question, “What is orthodox tradition?” What makes one guy a “church father” and another guy an arch heretic? How do we choose among early writings? Who’s to say which writings preserve the faith of the apostles and which do not?
But … wait a minute. Aren’t we coming to this question a little late? Didn’t the whole inquiry start with certain presuppositions about orthodoxy? After all, we’re talking about the interpretation of the 27-book New Testament, not Tatian’s Diatesseron or the (so-called) Gospel of Thomas.
This leads squarely into the challenge of church government. Are we going to follow in the path that is laid out for us — accepting the 27-book canon, the early councils and the traditional judgments on the reliability of various early church fathers — or are we going to start from scratch and evaluate everything on our own?
If you thought the private interpretation of Scripture led to chaos, just imagine what this would look like.
A Side Note on Private Judgment
Somebody’s going to object, “But everybody has to make up their own mind, so why are you afraid of private judgment?”
I’m not. There are good reasons for believing in the 27-book canon, the early councils and the traditional opinions of the church fathers, and if people come to the right answers by careful study, that’s wonderful.
But let’s deal with the reality of the religious life. Your typical Evangelical convert is dead certain that Ezekiel is the Word of God even though he’s never read Ezekiel and hasn’t the foggiest idea why it was written or to whom. In other words, in the normal course of events we come to the faith standing on a lot of shoulders.
When you believe in Jesus you accept a lot of other things by default, without even realizing it. I’m not saying that private judgment is bad or wrong. I’m saying that we shouldn’t stand on shoulders and pretend that we’re not. The educated Christian needs to know what he’s assuming.
When we pick up a Bible at the bookstore because we want to read God’s word, we’ve already assumed an ecclesiology, although we may not know it, and we may not act that way. We’ve assumed that somebody picked the right books. We also assume that somebody had the authority to designate these particular books as the standard for Christian faith. (Note: the church doesn’t make the books authoritative; it merely recognizes the reliability of the books because they conform to the faith the church received from the apostles.)
The open-minded, intelligent person who investigates all this on his own will come to the same conclusion (generally speaking), but not everybody has the time or the talent to do that. Most people come into the faith trusting the church. The question we have to ask is which church are we supposed to trust.
So Who Are These ‘Fathers,’ Anyway?
The Evangelical Christian has to recognize that when he opens his Bible in the morning over grapefruit and toast, he’s tacitly agreeing with a certain form of Christianity — classic Christian orthodoxy. If he wants to continue to be an orthodox Christian, he has to learn that faith. He has to learn that the Bible is not the plaything of the individual, but that it has to be interpreted within a certain stream of tradition — the stream of tradition that recognizes the 27-book NT canon, the Christological creeds and so forth. Trying to interpret the Bible apart from that historic church is like trying to interpret Beowulf as a commentary on the Backstreet Boys.
So now we’ve made good progress. We’re trying to read the Bible in the context of the faith of the historic church. But there are dangers. Most of the dangers stem from trying to bring along some Evangelical presuppositions while we’re learning to be classically Christian. For example, all the progress we’ve made so far evaporates into faerie land if we start to equivocate on the meaning of “church.” Some people will define “the church” as “the body of Christians that teach correct doctrine,” or something like that. If you’ve been following the argument, you’ll see how that throws us back to “every individual with his Bible.”
But it’s even worse than that, because what Bible does the individual have? If “the church” is the fellowship that teaches correct doctrine, and if the individual doesn’t agree with the guys who selected the 27-book canon, then they aren’t “the church” in his mind. In that case, why does he accept their canon? Why doesn’t he pick and choose books just as easily as he can pick and choose doctrines.
I don’t mean to belittle the process by saying “pick and choose.” A tremendous amount of thought and study might go into it all, but it works out to the same thing in the end: it’s a self-referential system. His standard for Christian truth is not the faith revealed to the church as it is understood in the church. His standard is of his own invention and the only “church” he will recognize is the one that agrees with him. That may be a good thing or it may not, but it’s not the classic Christian faith.
Why Submit at All?
So why can’t we just pick and choose? The modern seeker may well say, “Never mind all this stuff about canon and orthodoxy. I don’t care about all that stuff. Why can’t I just read what I want and believe and do what seems best to me?”
Okay. Do that. Read about Jesus and evaluate His claims. You’ll find them persuasive and you’ll want to join up. Then you’ll want to learn the rules, and one of them is that Jesus doesn’t call you into a mere “personal relationship,” as if it’s just you and Him. He calls you into a community, and that community has certain rules and expectations. But more than that, Jesus promises to bless and be with us within that community and not when we run off as a lone wolf.
So whether we start as an earnest seeker and work our way into the church or start with certain Christian presuppositions about the Bible and orthodoxy and all that, we end up in the same place: we’re called to be members of the church that Jesus started, for it’s within that church that we encounter the full life of faith.
But which church?
I said before that Scripture and Tradition can be wax noses, subject to the whim of the individual’s interpretation. When Scripture and Tradition are used outside their native soil, strange things can happen. But within the faith and life of the church, they are a clear beacon and a sure guide. So how do we pick the right church in the first instance?
Apostolic Succession
If we consult those church fathers again we can see that they answered this question by an appeal to apostolic succession. The apostles appointed trustworthy successors to shepherd the church in their absence (2 Tim. 2:2). If we want to follow the apostolic faith within the church established by Jesus (founded on the apostles — Eph. 2:20), we need to follow the pattern they laid out for the governance of that church.
But apostolic succession doesn’t only mean passing the torch from one bishop to the next. It also means succession in orthodox doctrine within the orthodox community. Taking all these things together, we want to follow the church that (1) has lawful bishops, appointed in lawful succession from the apostles, and (2) preserves the teaching of the apostles as we see it in Scripture and early church tradition.
That should narrow the field considerably, but there are still several options. How do we zoom in on the right church? Or should we consider that there may not be a “right” church?
A Visible Principle of Unity
This is why the church needs the pope. We have to listen to the church because Jesus tell us to (Mt. 18:17), and He promises that the decisions of the apostles will be divinely guided (Mt. 18:18). But what Jesus attributes to the college of apostles in Mt. 18 (the “you” is plural) he attributes to Peter alone in Mt. 16 (the “you” is singular).
When we say that we’re willing to submit to “the church,” we need to know which “church” we’re talking about, and we need some beacon that stands above the vagaries of private opinions. Of course this isn’t an all or none proposition. Churches vary in their faithfulness to the truth and there is some good to be had in just about all of them. But if the Bible is supposed to be understood within orthodox Christian tradition, the closer we get the clearer we’ll see. So, for example, you’re going to understand the Bible a whole lot better among the Lutherans than you are among the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Which brings up a complaint some have raised against the papacy. It’s all well and good to say that the papacy solves this dilemma by identifying the true church, but wouldn’t the Watchtower solve it just as well, or the Mormon High Command (or whatever they’re called)? If I’m supposed to believe that God guides the church under the leadership of an individual, does it really matter who that individual is? After all, if his say-so defines the existence of “the church,” and it’s only in that church that the true faith is found, doesn’t this becomes somewhat self-fulfilling?
If your only goal is to have a final answer to every question, I suppose any individual would do. “Luigi says such-and-so, and that settles it.” The problem is that we’re not playing pick-a-pope. We don’t want to believe in “only the pope” any more than we want to believe in “only Scripture,” “only tradition” or “only the church.” We need all four, interacting together: Bible, tradition, church and pope, so this “principle of unity” for the church must be something we see in all those sources.
The virtue of the Roman Catholic claim is that it is able to make all four work together. Some systems major on the Bible, but they can’t account for tradition or church. Others have an autocratic leader who will gladly answer all your questions, but they can’t justify their claims with Scripture or tradition.
The Roman Catholic Church has the witness of Scripture (“you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church”), history, and tradition, and it is the only system that accounts for all our necessary building blocks: Bible, tradition, church and pope.
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