My last post, some weeks ago, lamented the end of a journey. I have been able to give some thought to that journey and have reached a few conclusions.
Several years ago, I started down a path inspired by Tom Oden's "Rebirth of Orthodoxy". I may have misunderstood a bit of what he was saying in that book, but here is what I thought was the central thesis:
The "God-breathed" scriptures are alone the final authority by virtue of their inspiration, but the history of orthodoxy is the history of exegesis, and as such is a path toward greater Christian unity.
As I understood Oden, tradition has great value as a guide to the interpretation of scripture, but scripture remains the objective source of Christian truth. Whatever authority is given to tradition is secondary and derivitive and must be rooted in the Biblical text.
I saw in the Anglican doctrinal statement, the 39 Articles of Religion, a beautiful balance of absolute commitment to scripture as the final authority with respect for the history of how the church has understood scripture. Traditon, if one reads the articles in a normative fashion, is never allowed to assert as "necessary for salvation" anything that is outside the limiting boundaries of the Biblical text. This is why I chose one particular path and rejected others. I was never quite willing to reconsider Rome or follow other evangelicals to Eastern Orthodoxy because my evangelical commitment to the authority of scripture would not allow it, no matter how much I respected aspects of the early church that seemed compatible with either. For both Catholics and Orthodox, tradition plays a role that in some way subordinates the written Biblical text. The 39 Articles clearly insisted that whatever role the creeds, the liturgy and tradition may play, the source and limit is always the writte Word.
But the Anglo-Catholic influences, present in Anglicanism since the Reformation and increasingly prevalent since the days of the Tractarian movement, seems to have introduced an understanding of the role of tradition that goes "beyond what is written". Nineteenth century polemicists like J.C. Ryle were harshly critical of the "ritualism" introduced by Pusey, Newman and others, practices which had a place in the history of Christianity, but did not have a clear warrant in the text of scripture. The use of vestments, candles, incense, particular arrangement of church furniture all came under scrutiny as the excesses of the "traditions of men".
