The Bible and Tradition
Partly in response to a comment made on an earlier post of mine, and partly just because I've been thinking about this issue recently (see Keith Mathison's The Shape of Sola Scriptura), here is a little bit of a Christian History article on "The Bible Alone"?:
January 17, 2004 09:28 AM[T]he very Reformation teachers who created the principle of the supreme authority of Scripture?sola scriptura?not only recognized this need for a strong, churchly tradition of Biblical interpretation, they embraced it. They were just as convinced as we are that the Bible ought to speak to every aspect of life (heavens, they stood on the shoulders of a millennium-long Christendom tradition of church-state alliance!) But they knew that in addressing both churchly and worldly questions, if you wanted to find the "Christian Way" you had to hold a conversation with pious interpreters from past ages
...
"The Reformers use the Fathers all over the place. We know Calvin read Augustine, and we discovered recently that Luther read Jerome?he had copies annotated in his own hand. The index of Calvin's Institutes is filled with an enormous number of quotations from the Fathers. And in the first preface to that work, addressed to Francis I, Calvin did his best to show his teachings were in complete harmony with the Fathers.
"The Protestants did this because they were keen to have ancestors. They knew that innovation was another word for heresy. 'Ours is the ancient tradition,' they said. 'The innovations were introduced in the Middle Ages!' They issued anthologies of the Fathers to show the Fathers had taught what the Reformers were teaching.
