Scripture alone is the final authority in all matters of faith and practice for the church. This is, in summary, the Protestant declaration of sola scriptura. Final or ultimate authority, however, doesn’t mean the only authority. Scripture being our final authority doesn’t rule out lesser authorities.
This truth tends to get lost on the heirs of the Reformation in evangelical churches. Tradition, those words and deeds that have been handed down from our fathers and mothers in the Faith, are given little reverence and practically no authority over what we do. We have, in many cases, thrown out the traditional baby with the ecclesiastical bathwater. As such, we have despised the gifts of God given to us.
Through the millennia the Holy Spirit has been working in the church, gifting her with teachers who have interpreted the Scriptures for us. Churches have wrestled with issues of doctrine and practice and given us, their children, counsel about what we should believe and how we should live. Though their counsel doesn’t rise to the level of the authority of Scripture itself, God has appointed them to be our fathers and mothers, and they are to be honored and obeyed where their guidance and commands don’t violate the Scriptures.
Not everything that they have given us is to be taken and simply reproduced in our time in history. There are things that we need to do different now because of the new gifts God has given us. There may be ways to formulate doctrines better because we, the Church, have continued to meditate on these truths, and our thinking is being shaped more and more by the Scriptures instead of, for example, Greek philosophical categories. However, whenever we seek to make changes, we should do so always considering what has been handed down to us, not despising our ecclesiastical parents.
Just as with any parents, not only will children who grow up and move on find out that there are better ways to do things in new contexts, but there will also be times when we discover that our parents were wrong about some things. No matter how good and godly our parents are, there are times that they are wrong. Sometimes being wrong is due to the fact that they don’t have all the information they need to make the best decision. They did what was best with the information that they had. As new light is shed on the situation, as we grow and learn new things, we discover that there are better ways to address certain issues.
Sometimes our parents are wrong because they are in sin. They have rejected a clear teaching of Scripture. There are times that this is so because they are swimming in a culture that makes it very difficult to see things another way. They were blinded for whatever reason. It may have been that the truth was proclaimed to them, and they rejected it. Sometimes our parents are in sin. When this is revealed through the Scriptures, we are to correct their errors in our lives while considering where our children might see the blindness we ourselves had in our own generation. Yes, there are areas in our lives as the church today where we are in sin and, for God’s own mysterious reason, he has not been pleased to allow us to see it. Don’t be an arrogant, know-it-all brat that belittles your parents believing you have it all worked out while they were sinful ignoramuses. Maybe they were. But maybe they were striving to be as right and as godly as you are striving to be, but they just didn’t see some things.
Sola scriptura never meant that we were to reinvent everything in each generation, rejecting all the gifts handed down to us from our parents. It meant that everything that has been handed down to us is always under the authority of Scripture and is subject to review. For instance, liturgical practices don’t rise to the authority of Scripture, but our parents have thought through these matters seriously leaving us great treasures. Yes, some practices need changing, but the wholesale ditching of sound liturgical practices for what passes for corporate worship today is a travesty. Instead of growing up, we have become toddlers again because we have jettisoned our traditions. On the whole our music is infantile and our worship order is more like Romper Room than it is the Holy Mountain of God.
Sola scriptura is not the call to reject tradition. To do so would be to deny what the Scriptures themselves teach; namely, that God has given us authorities in the church that are to be followed and obeyed (Heb 13.7, 17). Rejecting tradition out of hand is unscriptural. While we must be careful to keep traditions subordinate to Scripture, we must not dishonor our parents.
