Protestants and the Authority of Church Tradition

One of the major principles of Protestantism is sola scriptura, that is, “Scripture alone.”^[1]The other two Protestant solas are sola fide (“faith alone”) and sola gratia (“grace alone”).  Many Protestants take this to mean that we can safely ignore and discard all church tradition.  After all, if Scripture “alone” is our theological authority, then doesn’t this mean that church tradition has no authority over us?  Thus, many Protestants seem to think that we should just read our Bibles and forget about the teachings of church tradition.  Such a perspective is an incoherent and dangerous distortion of Protestant Christianity.

Church Tradition and the Bible

Many Protestants simply take “the Bible” as a given, as if it were a single book that God handed to the church from heaven.  However, the historical reality is much more complicated than that.  The Bible is not a single book.  It is a collection of 66 different books (39 Old Testament and 27 New Testament) written by dozens of different authors over the course of centuries.  Only gradually were these various writings circulated, collected, and codified by the church into the set collection of writings that we today call “the Bible.”  We can say that the Bible alone is our only authority, but we must recognize the fact that the Bible is not handed directly to us by God; it is handed down to us by the tradition of the church.  Whether we acknowledge it or not, our belief that the writings that make up the Bible and these writings alone are Scripture or God’s word is based on the authority of church tradition.

Some Protestants attempt to get around acknowledging the authority of church tradition in telling us which writings are or are not Scripture by speaking of the “self-authenticating” nature of Scripture.  According to this idea, God’s word does not need any external authority to tell us that it is God’s word; it authenticates itself.  Thus, any Christian who has the Holy Spirit and reads the Bible will simply recognize that it is God’s word, and this is the only basis we need for determining what is and what is not Scripture.  

There is, however, a major problem with the idea of a “self-authenticating” Bible: the early Christians disagreed on exactly which writings were and were not Scripture.  While the four Gospels and the collection of Paul’s epistles, along with some other epistles, were widely accepted very early on, there were other New Testament writings that were disputed: Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation.  Additionally, there were some writings that did not ultimately become part of the New Testament, such as the Shepherd of Hermas, which many early Christians considered to be Scripture.  In fact, Christians did not achieve universal agreement on exactly which writings should and should not be part of the New Testament Scriptures until the end of the fourth century, three centuries after the New Testament writings were written.  

If we say that any Christian who has the Holy Spirit will simply recognize which writings are and are not God’s word, then, logically, we must condemn any early Christian who had a slightly different list of New Testament writings than we do as a false Christian who did not have the Holy Spirit in them.  This would include many great and important early church fathers, saints, and martyrs.  That would be quite simply absurd.  History shows us that it is simply not true that any one who is a genuine Christian will simply recognize which writings are and are not God’s word.

If the Scriptures are not simply “self-authenticating,” then we must recognize that we accept the collection of various writings we call the Bible as God’s word on the basis of the authority of the tradition of the early church.  We should have no problem with this.  It is perfectly reasonable to acknowledge the authority of tradition, and we all do it in various aspects of our lives.  The early Christians lived in close historical proximity to the apostles and access to many apostolic traditions that we do not have.  It is perfectly reasonable to accept the consensus of the early church about which writings are Scripture as authoritative.

Church Tradition and Sola Scriptura

How does all this relate to the Protestant principle of sola scriptura, though?  Doesn’t “Scripture alone” mean that we must reject any authority other than the Bible?  While many Protestants today think of sola scriptura in this way, that is not what the Protestant Reformers meant by it.  If the Protestant Reformers really thought that we should discard all church tradition and just read the Bible in isolation, they would not have made many citations of the early church fathers in their writings.  The Protestant Reformers did not want to completely reject church tradition; they just wanted to reject those parts of church tradition that were contrary to God’s word.  

The Protestant principle of sola scriptura was not about completely rejecting the authority of tradition, but about clarifying the proper relationship between the Authority of Scripture and the authority of tradition.  The Catholic Church had elevated the authority of the teachings and traditions of the Church to being equally authoritative to the teachings of Scripture.  The Protestant Reformers objected to this, arguing that Scripture alone is the church’s supreme Authority, while the teachings and traditions of the Church have a secondary role.  Thus, Church tradition can never be used to ignore or trump the teachings of Scripture.  Church tradition is important and is authoritative to some degree, but its authority is always subordinate to the supreme Authority of Scripture.  

The Importance of Church Tradition

The belief of some Protestants that we should completely reject the authority of church tradition is incoherent, and contradicts the best of the classical Protestantism.  It is also dangerous.  When we decide to read the Bible in isolation from church tradition, this can be highly problematic, and sometimes has disastrous consequences.

None of us reads the Bible in a vacuum.  Rather, each of us reads the Bible from a very particular perspective, shaped by our historical context, culture, personal idiosyncrasies, personal theological preconceptions, and so forth.  Thus, it is unreasonable simply to assume that whatever the Bible seems to me to be saying is what it is actually saying.  Each of us should have the intellectual humility to recognize that our personal interpretation could be wrong.  If we want to achieve a better understanding of the teachings of Scripture, we must compare our personal interpretation of Scripture with how Christians in different times, places, and cultures throughout church history have interpreted it.  If our personal interpretation of Scripture is in discontinuity with the consensus of the Christian tradition, then it is highly unlikely that we are correct, and we should probably rethink our theological conclusions.

There are many bad examples in church history where the church could have avoided going down a dark and destructive path if it had been more devoted to holding to the consensus of the church’s tradition.  Christians in the fourth century who began to accept the union of church and Empire, and the use of violence against the enemies of the church, were acting in radical discontinuity with the consensus of the teachings of the early Christians.  Their unfaithful decisions have had devastating consequences for the credibility of the Church’s witness to the gospel that continue to this day.  The early modern Christians who revived slavery for the sake of colonial empires were acting in radical discontinuity with a millennium of church tradition.  Their unfaithful decisions brought suffering to countless slaves, and gave rise to racist ideologies we are still struggling to overcome.  

Today, many Christians are similarly all too eager to reject the consensus of millenia of church tradition in favor of what is popular and fashionable in their own culture at the present time.  It is of course possible that the consensus of church tradition could be wrong.  However, if we are going to depart from the teachings of church tradition, the burden of proof must be on us to demonstrate clearly that tradition is wrong, not the other way around.  The wisdom of church tradition is an invaluable resource for helping us to remain faithful to the teachings of God’s word.  It can help prevent us from repeating the egregiously unfaithful mistakes of Christians who contributed to the Church moving down a path towards greater unfaithfulness.