Recently a segment of evangelicals has been pushing for the abandonment of sola Scriptura in favor of a theological approach that relies on both Scripture and Church Tradition.

D.H. Williams is a key figure moving some evangelicals this direction. Here’s a quote that captures some of his concerns and hints toward his proposed solution:

Despite the recent attempts of a few evangelical writers to inculcate a theory of sola scriptura as the real intent of the early church, there was no question in believers’ minds that Scripture could or should function in the life of the believer apart from the church’s Tradition. Were it to do so, there was scarce assurance that an orthodox Christian faith would be the result. While many parts of Scripture were inherently perspicuous and able to be understood with little outside assistance, post-apostolic Christians would have anathematized the principle set forth in Buswell’s systematic theology, ‘The rule is then give the Bible an opportunity, in you own mind, to interpret itself,’ as setting the stage for heretical aberrations.

D. H. Williams, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 98

The October 2008 issue of First Things contains an article which reveals the difficulty of using tradition rather than Scripture as the touchstone of orthodoxy. Richard John Neuhaus’ article, “What Really Happened at Vatican II” evaluates two books about Vatican II that present different visions of the council.

Included in the article is this section which focused on a quote from Benedict XVI about the council:

The question is one of hermeneutics, says the pope. There are, he suggests, two quite different ways of understanding the council: ‘On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call ‘a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture’; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the ‘hermeneutic of reform,’ of renewal in the continuity of the one subject, the Church that the Lord has given us. She is a subject that increases in time and develops, yet always remains the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.”

p. 25

This of course raises the question: If the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church struggles over the interpretation of a church council, how can it solve the problem of rightly interpreting Scripture. Or to put it another way, how does an authoritative interpretation of Scripture help when people can’t agree on the interpretation of the interpretation.

A new issue of Themelios is out, and it contains an excellent article about Machen by Carl Trueman.

See also the editorial by D. A. Carson.

This temper of mind is hostile to precise definitions. Indeed nothing makes a man more unpopular in the controversies of the present day than an insistence upon definition of terms. . . . Men discourse very eloquently today upon such subjects as God, religion, Christianity, atonement, redemption, faith; but are greatly incensed when they are asked to tell in simple language what they mean by these terms

J. Gresham Machen, What is Faith? 13-14 cited in John Piper, Contending for our All, 135.

There are places here where I have gone out of my way to be provocative, mischievous, and unclear reflecting my belief that clarity is sometimes overrated, and that shock, obscurity, playfulness, and intrigue (carefully articulated) often stimulate more thought than clarity.

Brian MacLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, 22-23.

But, it will be said, Christianity is a life, not a doctrine. This assertion is often made, and it has the appearance of godliness. But it is radically false, and to detect its falsity one does not even need to be a Christian. For to say that ‘Christianity is a life’ is to make an assertion in the sphere of history.

. . . . . . . . . .

About the early stages of this movement [that is, Christianity] definite historical information has been preserved in the Epistles of Paul, which are regarded by all serious historians as genuine products of the first Christian generation. The writer of the Epistles had been in direct communication with those intimate friends of Jesus who had begun the Christian movement in Jerusalem, and in the Epistles he makes it abundantly plain what the fundamental character of the movement was.

But if any one fact is clear, on the basis of this evidence, it is that the Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It was based, not upon mere feeling, not upon a mere program of work, but upon an account of facts. In other words, it was based upon doctrine.

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Eerdmans, 1923), 19, 21.

Machen on why liberal concessions to naturalism were wrongheaded:

In trying to remove from Christianity everything that could possibly be objected to in the name of science, in trying to bribe off the enemy by those concessions which the enemy most desires, the apologist has really abandoned what he started out to defend.

J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, (Eerdmans, 1923), 7-8

The Jonathan Edwards Center notes a new book, The Preaching of Jonathan Edwards, by John Carrick of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

Carrick has also written a helpful “theology of sacred rhetoric,” The Imperative of Preaching. This along with a lecture posted at the GPTS website provides a helpful balance to an over-reaction by some to the moralistic approach to Scripture critiqued recently (and rightly) by Mark Ward.

A common objection against the practice of separation from brothers in Christ is that separation implies the brother is in sin and no true Christian can remain in sin. If the fundamentalist (here defined as an orthodox Christian who practices the doctrines of separation from both false teachers and persistently disobedient brothers both within and beyond the local church) grants this objection, he is forced either to concede that his evangelical brothers’ failure to practice separation is not sinful or he is forced to conclude that evangelicals are, in fact, not truly brothers at all.

While this objection must be (and can be) met on exegetical and theological grounds, parallel situations in church history often helpfully shed light on present debates.

An example of this may be found in the discussions about unification between the northern and southern Presbyterian churches after the Civil War. In these discussions B. B. Warfield recognized both that different sins required differing levels of responses and that in certain situations a sin may require ecclesiastical separation without casting doubt on the professed salvation of those separated from.

Note this letter from Warfield to a fellow Presbyterian pastor in 1887:

I must confess to you that I am one of those whom you perhaps consider grossly inconsistent, who heartily accord with both the deliverances of 1818 & 1845. I do think slavery a gigantic evil & entirely inconsistent with the spirit of the Gospel & a sin in the slave holders: & I do not think it a disciplinable offense or a fit test of communion. It is possible ‘to sin against Christ’ & yet not be subject to exclusion from his table (1 Cor. viii. 12, compared with the context & the parallel in Romans xiv, e.g. Ro xiv 3). . . .
. . . That the Southern Church has not repented of its sin in regard to slavery would be no bar to my union with it: I could unite with it in a free conscience tomorrow. But that it is not awake to its duty to the Freedman & that organic union with it would injure if not destroy our work among them makes me deprecate & pray against reunion in any near future.

Cited in Bradley J. Gundlach, “Warfield, Biblical Authority, and Jim Crow,” in B. B. Warfield: Essays on His Life and Thought, ed. Gary L. W. Johnson (P&R, 2007), 163.

In other words, Warfield insisted on remaining ecclesiastically separate from R. L. Dabney, but he was not casting doubt on the intransigent Dabney’s regeneration.