by

Clifton D. Healy

The proper place to begin, when looking at and for the New Testament Church, is, of course, the New Testament. But one cannot simply "leapfrog" back nearly two millennia and across oceans and cultures and expect to "get it." That is to say, our modern prejudices and blind spots will get in the way of us adequately understanding what it is the Scriptures have to say. One need only look at the many contradicting beliefs among the Protestant churches to see that we need something else besides human reason or interpretive techniques to get at what the Scriptures meant and mean. Appeal to the guidance of the Holy Spirit is not entirely illegitimate, but it is problematic. Regrettably such appeals have been used to justify all manner of heretical belief and practice throughout the history of the Church.

No, there is something more than reason, hermeneutics or a purported "leading" by the Spirit that is needed. That something, which the New Testament itself shows, is Tradition. Tradition is the full belief and practice of the historic Church in conformity to the Gospel taught by the Apostles and written and preserved for our edification. In other words, the beliefs and practices of the New Testament Church are not found only in the pages of the New Testament, though they are all in conformity to it.

My faith heritage clearly elevated Scripture to a place of primacy with regard to doctrine and practice. Scripture was the Word of God written. It deserved the reverence and respect one gives to the revelation of God and his will. Tradition, on the other hand, was another matter. The synoptic passages and the reference in Colossians 2.8 were brought out to indicate that tradition was a bad thing.

Not surprisingly, then, I was raised with a sort of aversion to "Church tradition". I was taught that Church tradition was that oral teaching which eventually came to contradict Scripture, therefore, Protestant believers couldn’t trust tradition. After all, just look what happened to the Catholics! Baptizing babies, purgatory, limbo, papal infallibility, indulgences, the anti-popes. What a mess. If the Church had only stuck to the clear and simple message of the Scripture.

Modern day North American Christianity, particularly among the mainline Protestant churches, is similarly resistant to Tradition. As I think is rather obvious, this aversion is largely centered around matters of authority: "Who holds it, and if it’s not me, how can I get around it?" So arguments against Tradition normally try to attack its purported unity. That is to say, modern critics of Tradition will posit that Tradition was not a single unity, but rather there were many conflicting traditions in the Church, conflicts which were settled by mere political power. (Which of course means that modern day conflicts can be so solved as well. But that is another matter.)

This critique of the unity of the Tradition, whatever the source of its motivation, however, seems to me to read into the historical record much more than is there. Take, for example, the very understanding of the Trinity. Critics of the Tradition will point to Justin Martyr, or to Gregory Nazianzus, and point out their apparent deficiencies with regard to a traditional theology of the Trinity. They will use the stature of these men of faith in the Church and claim that even such stalwarts as Gregory and Justin had views of the Trinity which differed from Nicea and Constantinople, the first two ecumenical Councils. They will point to the convening of the first Council by the Emperor Constantine and claim that such is evidence of the political nature of how theological disputes in the Church were settled.

But while I will not dispute the troublesome effects of the involvement of the secular power in Church matters, even the mixed blessings of the edict of toleration, still I think such a critical reading problematic, not the least of which is the amount of eisegesis which seems inherent in it. Rather, I think it much more realistic to assume the unified nature of the deposit of the Faith. That is to say, there was a recognizable body of belief and practice to which Christians subscribed as members of the Church. However, those beliefs did undergo testing when certain previously unrecognized ambiguities created problems and allowed for heretical beliefs to come forward.

So, for example, the Church has always believed that God is a single nature or being in which are three Persons. Jesus is God, as is the Holy Spirit, and both are God as is the Father. But it was not always clear to the Church how the three Persons existed together as one God. Various ideas arose as to how this could be. One idea which was later rejected was that God was Father until the Incarnation, then became the Son until Pentecost, and now relates to the world as Spirit. This is a very much simplified view of the heresy of Sabellian modalism. Because there were persons claiming that this was what the Church believed about God, the Church was forced to clarify what it meant to believe in a triune Godhead. But the Church always believed in the Trinity.

Similarly, the Church, has always preached the divinity of Christ, that Jesus was God as the Father is God. But it was not always clear to the Church how Jesus could be both divine and human. Some taught that Jesus was more than a man, indeed, higher than the angels, but still less than God. This was the heresy of Arianism. Others taught that the Christ was not really a man, Jesus, but only seemed to be so, and thus Christ didn’t really die on the cross, only the man, Jesus, did. And there were other heresies. However, that Jesus was both fully God and fully man was never in dispute in the Church’s Tradition. How it was so was a matter that had to be later clarified.

So while the Church was forced at various points to clarify its beliefs, on some matters there had been little conflict. For example, that the Church was to be led by a single ministry of bishops, priests and deacons as an aspect of the priesthood of all believers was apparently an unquestioned assumption since the first century. Similarly, that Christians are to be baptized to become Christians was not in dispute. That Christ is specially present in the elements as the Eucharist is celebrated was another conviction apparently taken as a given. So whether the common understanding had been held since the first century, or whether that understanding had been clarified through the various theological conflicts through the remaining centuries, the fact that the one Church (prior to the Schism in AD 1054) had a common faith, founded on the Apostles’ teaching and guarded by the Tradition, is something with which I, surrounded as I am by competing Protestant "faiths", must come to terms.

In light of the above, it will be helpful to come to some understanding of the New Testament use of the word "tradition" and its related words.

In Matthew (15.2ff) and Mark (7.3ff), the word "tradition" is given somewhat short shrift by Jesus. More specifically, he criticizes the tradition of the Pharisees which effectively countermands God’s express commandments. By the use of their tradition, they were disobeying the explicit will of God. Paul mentions his progress in the traditions of the Jewish fathers in Galatians 1.14, which overall is a somewhat neutral, matter of fact statement. But in comparing his former progress in the Jewish faith as opposed to the new Covenant in Christ, those former traditions are of comparatively little worth. Colossians 2.8 speaks another critical note about the traditions of men which lead us away from the fullness of the faith in Christ.

In Luke 1.2, however, it is very clear that his Gospel is, in significant part, that which had been "handed down" (the verbal root of "tradition" or "that which is handed down"). In Acts 16.4, the decree of the Jerusalem synod regarding the status of Gentiles in the Church was "delivered" ("traditioned") to the churches which Paul had established on the first missionary journey. In 1 Corinthians 11.2, Paul praises the Corinthian church for keeping the traditions just as he had delivered them to the church. Similarly, Paul, in his description of the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11.23ff), indicates that what had been handed down to him, he likewise passed on to the Corinthians. The same is true for his account of the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15.3. In 2 Thessalonians 2.15, Paul exhorts the Thessalonian church to keep the traditions they had been taught, "whether by word or our epistle." In fact, in 3.6, he tells them to withdraw from any believer that does not walk "according to the tradition" which they had received from Paul--again, either orally or in writing.. In 2 Peter 2.21, the author indicates that those who turn from the "holy commandment delivered to them" would have been better off never to have known it. And in Jude’s famous words, he wrote to exhort his readers to "contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints" (3).

From these passages, it becomes clear how important tradition is. First, tradition not based on God’s will or that contradicts his commands, is empty and leads us astray. Not all traditions are godly and pure. Clearly, Scripture is a primary means for discerning whether or not a tradition is in line with God’s will.

So it is interesting that the New Testament speaks primarily of Tradition in a positive sense. Christians are exhorted to keep the traditions which had been handed down to them. Among those traditions are those concerning the status of Gentiles in the Church, the Lord’s Supper, the Resurrection, indeed, the Gospel in general (perhaps those things indicated by the writer of the letter to the Hebrews in the sixth chapter). While it might be helpful to discern from the context of 2 Thessalonians specific aspects of the tradition he had in mind in his exhortation to them, one thing that is clear is that this tradition was delivered in spoken and written word. With regard to those who did not keep these traditions, Christians are to withdraw from them.

One question that some are right to ask: How were the churches guided in their teaching, the worship, their leadership? One can reasonably assume that what Paul said in 2 Thessalonians 2.15, that tradition consisted of whatever had been spoken or written, was in fact the case. Indeed, in the Thessalonian correspondence, one of the issues was that a letter, purporting to have come from the Apostle Paul had been making the rounds and introducing teachings contrary to the Gospel. In the case of the church at Thessaloniki, it was Paul’s spoken words and teachings which would validate any written correspondence. Further, as one begins to understand the appointment of church leaders mentioned in Acts, Paul’s exhortation to Titus to appoint leaders, it becomes apparent that Tradition, delivered by the apostles to faithful men, who in turn delivered it to faithful men--and of course to the Church as a whole--was a guiding and important factor in the life of the Church.

Growing up in the Stone-Campbell churches, and having been inculcated with a certain resistance to tradition, to the extent that I was forced to deal with the positive references to tradition in Scripture, such references were interpreted to mean that Tradition was completely contained in the Scriptures. That is, Tradition is the New Testament. Whatever Paul might have said to the Thessalonians, what he wrote is what we need to heed. Similarly, Jude 3 was interpreted to be a reference to the Scripture (Old and New Testaments), and thus believers were to contend for the proper understanding and practice of what was revealed in God’s written Word.

Obviously, this presumed a naiveté toward, indeed, an ignorance of, Church history. One need not be a radical form or redaction critic, to realize that the Church existed prior to the New Testament. If one could assume a date of A. D. 33 for the year in which the New Testament Church came to be on Pentecost, and if one assumed the early date of A. D. 49 or so for Galatians, or A. D. 50-51 for the Thessalonian correspondence, then one is looking at sixteen to twenty years in which the Church operated without any of the books which now make up our New Testament. They functioned on the oral teachings of the Apostles, handed down by word of mouth. Further, when one considers that the entire New Testament was not completed (at least as we now have it) till the A. D. 90s, nor was the limits of its canon clarified till the fourth century, one has a considerable time span in which churches operated without any or eventually some, part of the New Testament.

So how was it that the Church existed for so long, among its individual congregations, without the complete canon of the Scriptures? How was it that such doctrines as the human and divine natures of Jesus, the Trinity, the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, and so forth, were preserved invariant? More to the point, even Scripture itself was not a guarantee against heresy. Witness the Arian controversy. How was orthodox belief and practice maintained?

These are not just intellectual questions. For example, I grew up with a strong and clear belief in the Trinity. Similarly, I was taught carefully and without any doubt that Christ Jesus was both God and Man. And many Scriptures were given to demonstrate those claims. I heard about other groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses who didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus (in the sense of his being the second member of the Trinity), but I just thought they were a cult who were against Christianity. I later learned that Jehovah’s Witnesses derive their belief that Jesus was just a creature, as did the Arian heretics before them, from Scripture. Or more accurately, from their interpretation of Scripture. Indeed, as I looked more closely at the matter, both historical and contemporary Arianism, I began to see that the one significant difference between orthodox Christian belief and heresy was not the presence or absence of Scripture, but of proper interpretation.

In fact, one of the very blind spots the modern churches have operated with for some time is the notion that each individual Christian is fully competent to interpret and understand Scripture for themselves. My own heritage churches were themselves committed to this understanding. The Stone-Campbell churches were convinced that if Christians would lay aside all their creedal confessions and turn to Scripture alone, reading it with as little human prejudice as could be maintained through various hermeneutical techniques, then the visible unity of the churches would be restored as it had been in the New Testament era.

The difficulty with this view is the very premise of individual competency for each Christian believer. The fact of the matter is, proper interpretation is a very difficult endeavor, which requires much more than a prejudice-free reading of the texts. Very few Christians can read the texts in the original languages, so one is dependent on translations. These translations themselves reflect the doctrinal biases of the translators. But even if one is able to read the texts in the original languages, there are a plethora of historical and grammatical issues to contend with. Should the tense of the present active imperative reflect a continuing verbal force, or merely be understood as a simple present? Frequently the only recourse one has to answer such a question comes not from any clues in the text, but in the doctrinal presuppositions of the reader. What is it about the Nicolaitans that Jesus, speaking through John, would have us understand? Clearly it is important, and the original recipients would definitely have understood what he meant. But as an individual reader of the text, I have little basis on which to understand the reference.

More to the point, the fact of untold thousands of schisms among the Protestant churches should clearly reveal the flaws in the thinking that every believer is competent to read and interpret Scripture for himself. While I will certainly grant that many church splits are sociopolitical matters dressed up in doctrine, still, it is clear that untold thousands of schisms among the Protestant churches have occurred over interpretational differences. Yet if Truth is one, how can it be that there are so many "truths" out there which have been catalysts for division? Perhaps Christians aren’t as competent to interpret Scripture on their own as we’d like to believe. Furthermore, even if we grant that most splits are less about doctrine and more about power, doesn’t this similarly call into question our ability to maintain unity on singular Scriptural interpretation? It would seem almost beyond dispute that something more is needed.

So how does one arrive at the proper interpretation? Tradition. That which the first century Church handed down to the believers of their time, who in turn handed it down to subsequent followers, and so on down through the centuries. It is Tradition which has safeguarded the proper belief about Jesus and God.

Clearly, then, Church Tradition is important, especially in doctrinal matters. But what about the other things? Liturgy and incense, baptizing infants, bishops and priests? Aren’t all those simply man-made add-ons to the purity of the Gospel and the early Church? As will be more clear in subsequent essays, these "additional" matters are as much a part of Christian doctrine as is the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection.

In my investigation, I have been reasonably confident of the unified nature of the teaching and practice of the Church prior to the Schism of A. D. 1054. After that point, with all the growing divisions and contradiction in teaching between East and West, between Protestants and Roman Catholics, and among Protestants themselves, it seems to me much more difficult to adjudicate between truth claims, as all sides want to claim Scripture and the historic Church for the foundation on which their teachings have been built. Prior to 1054, however, I do not see such a problem. Thus, for me, though the Tradition of the Church certainly is alive and well through the ensuing centuries to today, that which must serve as the standard and measure of any subsequent teaching is the Tradition of the Church from the New Testament till at least the seventh ecumenical Council if not up to the eleventh century.

In the end I’m convinced that the Tradition of the pre-Schism Church agrees with Scripture completely, develops aspects of Christian thought which remained unclear but without contradicting Scripture, is contained in its essentials in the canons, creeds, decisions and teachings of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, and is necessary for a present-day church to believe and teach if it is to claim truthfully to be the (or, a) New Testament Church.

© 2002 Clifton D. Healy

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