When The Bible Is Not Enough

I love the Bible. I’ve studied it for over forty years; preached it over thirty. I have a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctor’s degree from institutions that instructed me in it. My wife and I lead a class on teaching church congregants how to study it for themselves. Let the record show, I’m big on the Bible!

But there are times when the Bible is not enough.

Say you and friend from church do your respective devotionals at the same coffee shop. While seated at opposite ends of the cafe, you both order the same pumpkin spice lattes, read from the same Bible translation, and serve in the same student ministry. But one morning, your buddy excitedly sits down at your table informing you that in recently studying the Scripture, he’s come to the conclusion that Jesus was created by God. Your “heresy alarm” triggers. When you ask how your friend came to this conclusion, he defends his interpretation by rattling off passages like John 14:28, Colossians 1:15, and Acts 2:36 among others. You counter with verses like John 1:1 and John 8:58-59 demonstrating that Jesus isn’t a creation but God in the flesh. Nevertheless, your compatriot is unmoved. Now what do you do? He has his Bible verses, you have yours. Whose interpretation is the right one? You’re at an impasse. It’s a Scriptural stalemate. Unfortunately, this is where some Evangelical Christians feel like they have no recourse except to say, “Our interpretation is better just because!” Fortunately, in looking to church history (i.e., theological retrieval), we discover the early church appealed to an additional authority which guided her interpretation of Scripture: Apostolic Tradition.

The “t-word” spooks many modern Protestants because they’ve been taught to see tradition as a dirty word – only representing the extrabiblical, man-made accretions that have no bearing in Scripture, like the Roman Catholic dogmas of papal supremacy or the assumption of Mary. And while we do see a rebuke of man-made traditions in the New Testament (e.g., Col. 2:8), it doesn’t mean all tradition is bad. On the contrary, the New Testament affirms the oral teachings and practices which were handed down by the apostles to the churches, who subsequently passed on those traditions to future generations. In 2 Thessalonians 2:5, Paul commands, “So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.” He says to the Corinthians, “Now I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I delivered them to you” (1 Cor. 11:2). The same spirit is found in 2 Timothy 2:2, “And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also.” This is the good, biblical kind of tradition: Apostolic Tradition.

Former Baylor University patristics professor Dr. D.H. Williams defines this Tradition as the core preaching and teaching of the early, apostolic church which have passed down the essence of mere Christianity that every branch of the church would affirm.¹ Apostolic Tradition wasn’t merely the message of the faith but how that faith was deposited, preserved, and transmitted by the early church.² Dr. Williams’ helpfully summarizes, “In the final analysis, then, the Tradition denotes the acceptance and the handing over of God’s Word, Jesus Christ and how this took concrete forms in the apostles’ preaching, in the Christ-centered reading of the Old Testament, in the celebration of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and in the doxological, doctrinal, hymnological and creedal forms by which the declaration of the mystery of God Incarnate was revealed for our salvation. In both act and substance, the Tradition represents a living history which, throughout the earliest centuries, was constituted by the church and also constituted what was the true church.”³ Thus, Apostolic Tradition gave the church an authoritative guide to faithfully interpret the Bible. Put another way, the Scripture was historically understood through the church’s rule of faith, not outside it.⁴

This is where Evangelicals knees start to shake fearing this somehow violates the Protestant principle of Sola Scriptura. But Sola Scriptura means the Bible is the church’s only infallible authority. It doesn’t deny the existence of other authorities in Christianity: the church, creeds, councils, confessions, etc. The difference is that any one of those can err whereas the Scriptures cannot. Scripture alone (“sola”) is infallible and, as such, is the highest rule of our faith and to which the other authorities must submit. Yet, with that said, Protestants should remind themselves it’s Sola Scripture not Solo Scriptura, which erroneously claims the Bible is our only authority. That’s simply never been true. It wasn’t true in the early church. It wasn’t true in the Protestant Reformation! If it were, then we’re back at the coffee table in a Scriptural stalemate as everyone claims their interpretation is the best. Williams offers a historian’s wisdom to those who think all we need is the Bible, “Scripture can never stand completely independent of the ancient consensus of the church’s teaching without serious hermeneutical difficulties. To assert that it is self-interpreting may be true for the most immediate aspects of the gospel. Yet only a brief review of the history of biblical interpretation demonstrates that the piling up of biblical data offers no guarantee of a faithful interpretation of Scripture, much less a Christian doctrine of God. The issue, then, is not whether we believe the Bible or whether we will use the Tradition–the real question, as the patristic age discovered, is, Which tradition will we use to interpret the Bible?”⁵

Lest there be misunderstanding, to engage in theological retrieval with the past isn’t to lionize the early church as unfailing. Hardly. Remember, Scripture alone (“sola”) is infallible, the church on the other hand can be very fallible. But being fallible doesn’t equal not being authoritative. If you think about it, every authority outside Scripture, from the U.S. Supreme Court to little league baseball umpires to parents, is fallible and yet are real authorities.⁶ Dr. Williams adds: “This does not mean that everything the early Fathers (or Mothers) taught is immune from ancient influences or practices which Christians would no longer endorse today. I’m not proposing an idealized portrait of that period. But appealing to the Bible alone and the personal enabling of the Holy Spirit, however central these are, do not ensure orthodoxy (they never have), since these cannot function in isolation from their reception and development within the ongoing life of the church. Dividing Scripture from the Tradition or from the church creates an artificial distinction which would have been completely alien to the earliest generations of Christians.”⁷

That’s why when the early church fought against heretical interpretations of Scripture they used the Bible and Tradition. They leveraged the “living history” of how the apostles and their church plants had sung, preached, and taught about Christianity over the generations. In short, Apostolic Tradition broke Scriptural stalemates. So, if your friend at the coffee shop says Jesus is a created being, the early church would refute his teaching as heretical by not only appealing to the same Bible but also the authority of the Tradition to demonstrate how the church interpreted the Scripture in line with the apostles who gave it.⁸ This is what it means to read the Bible with the church. For the record, this practice isn’t uniquely Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. It’s robustly Protestant as well. It’s just many, if not most, Evangelicals have little sense of their own history. For example, while Baptists tout the priesthood of the believer and the authority of the local church, most theologically-mature Baptists realize you can’t believe anything you want and still call yourself Baptist. They adhere to this or that Baptist confession (e.g., The Baptist Faith and Message [pick a year]). Anglicans have the Thirty-Nine Articles; Lutherans, the Book of Concord; Presbyterians the Westminster Confession. It’s clear each branch of Christianity uses some kind of ecclesiastical understanding of the gospel to interpret the Bible. They believe in reading the Bible with the church.

This one-two punch of Scripture + Apostolic Tradition is something Protestants have forgotten to their detriment. How many silly “takes” on the Scripture could we prevent from by simply looking to how the church interpreted those passages throughout her history? How many times could we avoid the pseudo-spirituality of “the Holy Spirit is individually telling me what this Scripture means” by engaging in a little theological retrieval? One of the gifts that the early church bestows upon those who listen and learn is that when it comes to whose interpretation is the right one, the Bible is not enough.

It’s Sola Scriptura, not Solo Scriptura.

1. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants, Eerdmans, (1999), 67.
2. Williams, 36.
3. Williams, 36.
4. Think of the Apostles’ Creed as one way the early church summarized the Apostolic Tradition, which predates the completion of the New Testament.
5. Williams, 234.
6. My appreciation to Gavin Ortlund for these examples.
7. Williams, 13-14.
8. The heretical teaching that Jesus was a created being is from Arius who is represented in the title graphic.