ectypal.net

None of the magisterial Reformers took the slogan sola scriptura ("Scripture alone") to literally mean solo scriptura ("Scripture only"). Scripture was their primary and ultimate authority, but they were committed to reading it in the light of how the church had understood it across the centuries. On the central doctrines of the faith they argued that what they were teaching was what the best of theologians from the past had taught and how they had understood the Scriptures. There was nothing novel, they insisted, in what they were teaching on the central doctrines of the faith. Only when it was crystal clear that what the medieval church believed and practiced patently contradicted the plain meaning of Scripture did they reject any doctrine or practice. What we must recognize is that there is no reading of Scripture apart from a communal understanding of it, apart from tradition. The question is not, do I accept that my communally held beliefs inform my exegesis or not?-they unquestionably do-but, which communal beliefs will I prioritize? The sixteenth-century Reformers, the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Dutch Reformed theologians, and evangelicals today who advocate a return to "the theological exegesis of scripture" in the theological task all hold that the best tradition to inform our interpretation of Scripture is what the best of theologians across the centuries have taught, especially when it is codified in the creeds and confessions of our church. Speaking of the relationship between Scripture and tradition, Kevin Vanhoozer says that twentiethcentury hermeneutics has shown that "exegesis without traditionapart from participation in the history of the text's reception-is impossible." Similarly, the English evangelical theologian A. N. S. Lane writes, "It is impossible to read scripture without tradition, save in the rare example of those with no prior contact with the Christian faith who pick up a portion of scripture. We bring to the Bible a preunderstanding of the Christian faith that we have received from others, thus by tradition."