Understanding Church Tradition and Church History

by | Feb 16, 2024 | Articles

A Response to “Pagan Christianity?”

2.2 Finding a balanced understanding of church tradition and church history

 

How then do we understand the tradition of the church, as it has developed after the Apostles? Is any development after the New Testament necessarily a corruption? Need we reject it all, and seek to return to the state of the New Testament church? Or can we make good use of what we have received from our forefathers in the faith?

I am an enthusiastic student of church history.[1] The story of the church is the story of Christ’s gracious and providential preservation of his bride, and a record of the Holy Spirit’s work in the lives of believers across the span of 2,000 years. It is also the story of Satan’s efforts to persecute, infiltrate, frustrate, and corrupt the church. A great many – almost all – of the challenges faced by the modern church, both doctrinal and practical, have been faced time and time again by the church through the ages. She has dealt with these issues each time, sometimes with great wisdom and biblical insight and other times with disastrous error. Either way, there is much to learn, from the good and the bad, and this makes the history of the church an inestimably rich treasure, which we ignore to our great detriment.

It will not surprise you when I say that the Bible is not a systematic theology textbook, nor a manual on church order. Holy Scripture is entirely sufficient, containing all that is necessary for the faith and practice of the church. But we also know that many vital doctrines are not laid out in any one passage of Scripture in a complete or explicit way. The Lord has left it to his church to come to Scripture and draw out its truths by careful study and meditation, in faith and by the illumination of the Holy Spirit. In the formulation of any doctrine, the totality of the canon must be considered, and all its necessary implications carefully drawn out. This is the task of systematising the teaching of Scripture. In the history of the church, we can see the progression of this work, as key doctrines are slowly considered, disputed, and clarified. This work continues to this day. Done rightly, the work of systemisation will add nothing to Scripture, but only represent the church’s clearer and more precise expression of what Scripture teaches. Thus, we should freely admit that not every “development” in the history of the church is necessarily a corruption.[2] This is where church tradition becomes immensely beneficial to us. No Christian, upon his conversion, is called upon reinvent the total sum of Christian doctrine and practice from Scripture on his own. That would be the work of hundreds of lifetimes. Instead, a newly regenerate Christian is providentially placed by God in a community of believers in which he can receive instruction in the faith. He will benefit from the systemisation of Scripture done by others before him, standing on the shoulders of giants.[3] Of course, his teachers are responsible for showing him how their teaching is derived from Scripture, and he is responsible before God to test the teachings of his church by God’s word. He should follow the example of the Bereans, receiving the teaching of his church with all eagerness, and “examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11).

It is perhaps easy for us to value the teaching of our own pastors, or respected men in our own immediate ecclesiastical tradition, but how should we relate to the older, pre-Reformation church? Isn’t that all just corrupt Roman Catholicism? Well, one great truth that was recovered by the Reformation was that Christ’s church was not identical with any outward, visible human institution. There is a distinction between the visible church, being all those that outwardly profess Christianity in some form, and the invisible church, being the true elect of God, the universal church of all those united by faith to Christ. By the 16th century, the visible church in the West had been long dominated by the hierarchy of Rome, presided over by the Pope, wielding great religious and political authority. When he began to publish his concerns about church practice and doctrine, Martin Luther had no intention of breaking with the existing Roman institution. He sought a hearing for his objections and hoped for reform.[4] But Rome as an institution refused reform and doubled down on its many errors, forcing a formal break. Many have tried to frame this as Luther rejecting the historic church of the earlier centuries and starting his own, with other branches of the Reformation following suit. But I think the visible/invisible church distinction helps us have a clearer understanding of what happened. The true, regenerate, invisible church had always existed, often within visible institutions of varying degrees of purity.[5] Outward institutions may accumulate error and corruption over time, to the point that true believers are compelled to separate, but this does not entail a wholesale rejection of the theology or practices of those believers who came before and were part of those earlier institutions that have now been rejected.

In this way, all Protestants can rightly lay claim to the whole history of the church as our own history. We can thank God for the wisdom and piety of true believers in every age of the church, while recognising and lamenting their errors. The Reformers model for us how we ought to do this. Both Luther and Calvin, to use prominent examples, were deeply appreciative of Augustine, often quoting him positively in defence of Reformation doctrine. They also freely differed with Augustine on crucial matters on which Rome would agree with him more closely.[6] To cite another example, in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin extensively quotes Bernard of Clairvaux, a medieval monk, in whose writings Calvin finds much to appreciate, again despite Bernard’s many errors. I find this to be a refreshingly charitable attitude to the past that we would do well to adopt. The Reformers insisted, against their opponents, that their views were not novelties, but deeply rooted in Scripture (first and foremost), and also in historic church teachings. They denied the accusation that they had departed from historic, catholic Christianity, declaring that Rome had done so instead.

We often use the word catholic to refer to modern Roman Catholicism, but I prefer to avoid doing so. We should perhaps follow older Reformed writers and call them papists or Romanists instead (perhaps at the risk of insulting our papist friends). The word catholic simply means “universal”, and from very early days of the church, this word was used simply of the whole worldwide body of orthodox Christians, in opposition to those who departed from the faith into heresy. When the Nicene Creed reads, “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church”, it does not and cannot mean, in its historical context, the future developed institution of Roman Catholicism. Rome, by rejecting the biblical gospel and insisting on maintaining its many doctrinal corruptions and innovations, ceased to be truly catholic in the historic sense.

Historically speaking, Rome and the various protestant traditions share a common ancestry. In the broadness of the ancient Christian tradition, you can find teachings that would fit more comfortably with the Reformation, and other teachings that clearly anticipate the teachings of Rome. The Reformation sought to affirm what was good and right and biblical in the teachings of their forbears, while correcting their errors; while Rome sadly clung to many of those errors and has added still more since.

So, why do I want to commend to my brethren this view of church history? First, it makes much better sense of the historical reality. If you want to see the work of reformation as necessitating a clean break from the historic church, you would be forced to conclude that the Reformation failed miserably. Viola and Barna in Pagan Christianity? apparently take this view.[7] Reformation doctrine and practice is thoroughly infused with rich theology and practice refined and clarified in the tumultuous furnace of church history. This as a good thing, and not a compromise. Second, this view gives us freedom to make use of the good we find in the history of the church, while rejecting the bad. This fits well with our understanding of tradition outlined in the previous section. Sometimes, the tradition we receive is good and should be preserved with gratitude and thanksgiving. On this point, I think particularly of the wonderful technical precision regarding the doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation, that had been reached by the fourth and fifth centuries.[8] At other times, we find much that is dangerously false and contrary to the gospel in the ancient church. In those cases, we must humbly, but vigorously, oppose such teachings, appealing to Scripture as “…the only the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.”[9]

In this light, I do not take any argument seriously if it claims to critique a church doctrine or practice solely on the basis that its development can be traced back to pre-Reformation catholic Christianity. I fully admit that many of our practices are “catholic” in that sense and am not remotely bothered by that fact. What needs to be proven is that any given practice or tradition is wrong, according to biblical principles. This requires a deeper reflection, and we will consider how to do this in the next section.


[1] But by no means an expert!

[2] What I am describing here is very different from modern Roman Catholic view of doctrinal development, which we ought to thoroughly reject.

[3] Calvin writes this in his preface to the 1545 French edition of The Institutes of the Christian Religion: “Although the holy Scriptures contain a perfect doctrine, to which nothing can be added — our Lord having been pleased therein to unfold the infinite treasures of his wisdom — still every person not intimately acquainted with them, stands in need of some guidance and direction, as to what he ought to look for in them, that he may not wander up and down, but pursue a certain path, and so attain the end to which the Holy Spirit invites him.”

[4] See: Barrett, M. (2023). Catholic, Not Roman: Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses of Love for the Church. Credo Magazine. https://credomag.com/2023/10/catholic-not-roman-luthers-ninety-five-theses-of-love-for-the-church/

[5] Prior to the Reformation, there were occasionally individuals or groups who formally separated from church institutions for the sake of conscience, and were often badly persecuted. We might regard these as heroes, but we should not assume that anyone in those times working within existing church structures were necessarily unbelievers.

[6] B. B. Warfield famously observed, “For the Reformation, inwardly considered, was just the ultimate triumph of Augustine’s doctrine of grace over Augustine’s doctrine of the Church.” Quoted from: Warfield, B.B. (1956). Calvin and Augustine. Philadelphia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company.

[7] See Question 5 of the Q&A with Frank Viola and George Barna in Pagan Christianity? (Kindle location 264)

[8] Consider the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and the Chalcedonian Definition.

[9] Quoted from the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith, 1.1.


Next Section: 2.3 The regulative principle of worship

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