A couple of weeks ago my Pastor wrote an excellent post about the recent Papal Visit to the United States. He noted that there were several positive thing that he observed during the visit. Among them he noted that the Pope was theologically engaging, showed humility, denounced evil, encouraged young people to follow Christ, and in his final mass ” much of what the pope said there could just as well have been said by Billy Graham.”
Pastor Dieter also noted that the while the Pope spoke of unity, he spoke of it within the bounds of scripture and tradition.
Catholics believe that the declaration of what is truth and what is correct teaching is a privilege reserved to the “Magisterium” i.e. the teaching authority of the church. In other words , individual catholics do not have the right to decide for themselves what is sound doctrine and what is not. And truth is determined not only from Scripture, but Scripture AND tradition, which takes into account the body of teaching of the church, as handed down from generation to generation. So when the pope says that unity can take place only in the context of truth, the question arises, truth by whose standard?
The protestant reformers on the other hand appealed to scripture alone, not holding scripture and tradition as being equally important. My thoughts that I shared with Pastor Dieter were this:
I do wonder however if as Protestants we are more dependant upon tradition, community and culture than we are willing to admit. The Bible is not always unambiguous. You can show the same passage to a Baptist and a Methodist, or a Baptist and a Pentecostal, and get quite different interpretations depending upon the theological and traditional underpinnings of the reader.
When we read our Bibles we read them as part of a community, and interpret them as part of a community. I am free to have a different interpretation as the rest of the community, but if it is core doctrine, then I am no longer able to express that differing opinion with in that community.
An even greater influence is our culture. Much of what we read and understand is really coloured by the lens of culture. Our consumer-driven society looks so different to the society of Jesus’ day that it is sometimes very difficult to seperate off our cultural bias when doing biblical interpretation.
So here then as a Protestant is how I see scripture and tradition working together. We hold scripture in a higher place that tradition, with the understanding that tradition has a huge influence (whether we are willing to admit it or not) on how we interpret scripture and put it into practice.
Michael Bell
Joshua Hearne
Tim Melton
Joel Black
