I came across the following assertion today, quite by accident; it was made by a minister from my own heritage in the Stone-Campbell Churches of Christ.
Roman Catholics and Orthodox nuke it out, each claiming the other’s tradition is wrong, while sola Scriptura advocates point them back to the Bible as the only hope for unity! Both Roman Catholics and Orthodox view the other churches tradition as invalid. We merely highlight the fact that, contrary to their claims, “church tradition” does not bring about uniform doctrine and interpretation of scripture.
By my count, the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox brothers have a lot less lack of unity than the several thousand sects which all claim “sola Scriptura” as the “great hope of unity.” When the very “hope” for unity has, over 500 years, produced only continued fragmentation, can it still be touted as the “only hope for unity” by anyone with an ounce of seriousness?
The great hope for unity is Jesus Christ and the Faith that is in Him. The site at which I read the above claim went on to quote St. Basil the Great as proof of the need for “Scripture only”:
Therefore let God-inspired Scripture decide between us; and on whichever side be found doctrines in harmony with the word of God, in favour of that side will be cast the vote of truth.
Along with this quote from St. Basil, the editor of the site said:
What a “flagship passage”! Every Roman Catholic and Orthodox priest should be required to hand scribe this text by Basil on parchment, rolled up and placed in a little clear bottle and hung around their neck!
I wonder if perhaps this Christmas, as a sign of ecumenical fraternity, the editor might supply all our priests with such a little parchment and “little clear bottle” that we might add them to our vestments. We would be happy to return the gesture, perhaps supplying the following “hand scribed” quote, also from St. Basil, with its own “little bottle” for the editor to wear, himself…
Of the beliefs and practices whether generally accepted or publicly enjoined which are preserved in the Church some we possess derived from written teaching; others we have received delivered to us ‘in a mystery’ by the tradition of the Apostles; and both of these in relation to true religion have the same force. And these no one will contradict . . who is even moderately versed in the institutions of the Church… (On the Holy Spirit, ch. 27).
St. Basil was a man of sufficient intellectual and spiritual stature to be able to hold furiously and faithfully to both Scripture AND Tradition, and that precisely because the two are neighboring sides of the same coin. The Fathers recognized what the editor of the above comments has not grasped: the great hope for unity in the Church is the Faith. That Faith holds up the Jewish “Scriptures” and Apostolic Gospels and Epistles as “the Word of God,” and also the Church’s understanding and application of these writings as “true Tradition.” As Orthodox are fond of saying, “Tradition is Scripture rightly understood.” St. Basil would have agreed.
Perhaps that is why St. Basil and his peers were able to pen the Creed which is still recited by millions of united Christians the world over some 1600 years later, and why the descendants of the Stone-Campbell movement still must speak of a “hope” for unity, even as they descend further into the historical reality of continued fragmentation.
Ultimately two things are tempting (bad word choice) me away from the Restorationists.
First, is the effective failure of the doctrine of sola scriptura as a means of Christian unification. Effectively converts from other churches (even from the beginning) affected the prejudices and practices of the day. There’s reasonable cause to say that Campbell “gave in” to the Baptists who were converting in mass on the issue of the essential nature of Baptism. (I’m not saying that I think he should have maintained his previous position, but he took the new position for political reasons.) This is still happening. There is little-to-no “naked” scriptural theology.
Second, the possible clay feet of the premise itself. There are endless debates about hermeneutic. This has led to two bizarre extremes. Either any number of people claim that their theology ough to be taught because it’s derived from scripture and therefore must be correct, or they attempt to develop no theology at all and end up spiritually mute, even bankrupt. They are agnostics in all but name.
David:
The precipitating movement away from the Restoration Movement for me happened about the time that I realized that Restorationists touted the historical-grammatical method as THE method for biblical interpretation, and then turned around and with NO warrant whatsoever, interpreted the passages on baptism with one hermeneutical practice (i.e., “literally”) and the passages on the Lord’s Supper with another hermeneutical practice (i.e., “metaphorically” but in the sense that there’s nothing there there beyond the “symbols”).
And that was my next to last year at Ozark Christian College. So I was coming to a sacramental understanding of the Lord’s Supper before I graduated Bible college and on the basis of a realization of the completely contradictory ways Restorationists handled the two dominical “ordinances.”
Thanks Benedict. That is just one of the many conundrums created by claiming to adhere to that method while still clearly holding to extra-Biblical thinking.
There are thousands of others. Corinthians becomes a mess in a hurry. Restorationists must do all manner of contortions to justify “legalizing” and then “culturally dismissing” even adjacent phrases in the text.
We are currently in a “how to study the Bible class”. And while they point to the value of all manner of implements of serious study commentaries, concordances, dictionaries and such reference material, they admit readily that it appears to them that sometimes the Spirit is just “there” and sometimes it isn’t.
Helpful exegesis, no?