Understanding Conservative Christianity, Part 7 (Still)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.0.

A Digression

In the last essay, I argued that certain aspects of the faith cannot be learned in the abstract. They must be captured in the context of a lived Christianity through participation in a vital Christian culture. Such a culture, when stretched across generations, constitutes a tradition.

This culture or tradition cannot be created ex nihilo. It is not invented again by every generation. Either we receive it from the Christian past, or we shall not possess it at all. In one form or another, sometimes through the most tortuous of channels, sometimes almost obscured but then reformed, it can be traced from the era of the apostolic church downwards.

Some churches pride themselves upon being non- or even anti-traditional. This attitude is facile. Every church without exception works from some sort of a tradition. Churches that will not accept the living tradition of the Christian past will be forced to invent some tradition of their own. They invariably invent their own liturgies and contrive their own definitions of piety, worship, fellowship, and reverence.

The most contemporary traditions (those that trace themselves directly or indirectly to Charles Finney) attempt to form their culture and tradition according to the popular culture that surrounds them. We are now in a position to see the results of this approach. We have preachers that offend the unsaved world with their crudeness and vulgarity, and we have churches that cannot distinguish worship from amusement, joy from chirpiness, love from sentimentalism, or majesty from celebrity.

The problem is not that these churches lack a tradition. The problem is that the tradition by which they guide themselves is one of recent invention, usually one that they or their immediate predecessors have made up themselves. Typically, they accommodate the forms of their Christianity to whatever else they are doing in their lives. And their tradition is transparent to them: they are blissfully unaware that they have exchanged the gold of the Christian past for a stubble of their own reaping.

Ironically, the tradition of contemporary Christianity is often biased against tradition. Those believers who love and wish to conserve the heritage of the Christian past are dismissed as “formal” (as if we could dispense with form), “liturgical” (although every church has its liturgy), or even “Catholic” (as if any appropriation of tradition opens the way back to Romanism).

The last charge is particularly grievous. Does the appropriation and conservation of the Christian past open the door to Rome? Do we place ourselves in danger of reversing the Reformation if we value the hymns, devotions, prayers, and meditations of the Christian past? My answer is that nothing is less likely.

The Roman concept of tradition is entirely different than the one that we are discussing here. In the Roman theory, the apostles not only bequeathed to the church the written Scriptures but also an authoritative corpus of oral teaching. This oral teaching has been handed down and interpreted generation by generation through the church’s magisterium or teaching office. Only the magisterium possesses this oral tradition, and without it Scripture cannot be properly understood. Ultimately, only the magisterium has the right to interpret the Scriptures.

A right view of the Christian tradition does not see it as a rival authority to Scripture. Particularly, the Christian tradition is not a separate source of doctrinal content. Rather, it provides the context within which Scripture becomes applicable to our daily lives. It positions us to receive the Word of God with the ordinate measure and quality of humility, fear, and delight.

Of course, Roman theologians insist that their view of tradition is necessary in order to prevent exegetical anarchy. They point to the diversity of opinion among those who pledge allegiance to Sola Scriptura, and they claim that the diversity is evidence that the Bible cannot be rightly understood without the tradition of the magisterium. This claim rings hollow, however. On the one hand, those who practice Sola Scriptura actually display unanimity over the most important aspects of the faith. On the other hand, the tradition of the magisterium has not preserved it from an equal and perhaps greater measure of anarchy.

From the Counter-Reformation onward, the Roman church was governed by the canons of the Council of Trent. These documents were thought to be the authoritative interpretation and summary of all that had gone before. In the 1960s, however, aspects of Tridentine interpretation were significantly modified or reinterpreted by the Second Vatican Council. The result was jarring for Catholics, to say the least.

So the apostolic tradition was interpreted by Trent, but Trent was interpreted by Vatican II. The problem is that voices of Vatican II were diverse, some favoring aggiornamento and others more interested in ressourcement. So who gets to interpret Vatican II? Who gets to say what the council said about what Trent said about what the apostles and their successors said?

The short answer consists of one name: John Paul II. His greatest work was to become the interpreter of the Second Vatican Council. The output of his magisterium is genuinely impressive. In descending order of authority, he issued the following documents: eleven apostolic constitutions, fourteen encyclicals; fifteen apostolic exhortations, forty-five apostolic epistles, plus numerous messages, addresses, letters, homilies, ad limina addresses, and formal remarks—besides an autobiography, poetry, dialogues, and drama. As John Paul’s biographer said, “The late pope left behind a vast body of teaching, which the church and the world will be digesting for centuries.”¹

A Catholic doesn’t know what the apostles meant until he knows what Trent means. He doesn’t know what Trent means until he knows what Vatican II means. He doesn’t know what Vatican II means until he knows what John Paul II said. And understanding John Paul II is going to take centuries.

For Roman Catholics, the Bible means whatever the latest pronouncement of the magisterium says that it means. But who says what the latest pronouncement means? Only the next pronouncement.

Clearly the Roman view of tradition is not only false and self-refuting but also a radically different theory than the one that I am advocating. What I am suggesting is simply that ours is not the first generation to walk with God. If we need the exhortation and encouragement of our peers, much more do we need the exhortation and encouragement of the past. The prescriptions, conventions, customs, and forms of the Christian past have preserved a set of attitudes and perspectives without which we will struggle to know and please God. The confessions, hymns, prayers, and devotions of the Christian tradition will help to provide us with the context that we need for applying the truths of Scripture to our lives and churches.

1. George Weigel, God’s Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 27.

Times Go by Turns

Robert Southwell (1561–1595)

The loppèd tree in time may grow again,
Most naked plants renew both fruit and flower;
The sorest wight may find release of pain,
The driest soil suck in some moist’ning shower;
Times go by turns and chances change by course,
From foul to fair, from better hap to worse.

The sea of Fortune doth not ever flow,
She draws her favours to the lowest ebb;
Her tides hath equal times to come and go,
Her loom doth weave the fine and coarsest web;
No joy so great but runneth to an end,
No hap so hard but may in fine amend.

Not always fall of leaf nor ever spring,
No endless night yet not eternal day;
The saddest birds a season find to sing,
The roughest storm a calm may soon allay:
Thus with succeeding turns God tempereth all,
That man may hope to rise, yet fear to fall.

A chance may win that by mischance was lost;
The net that holds no great, takes little fish;
In some things all, in all things none are crost,
Few all they need, but none have all they wish;
Unmeddled joys here to no man befall:
Who least, hath some; who most, hath never all.

This essay is by Dr. Kevin T. Bauder, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). Not every professor, student, or alumnus of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.