So far in this series, we have talked about the reason for the Council of Nicaea and its decision affirmed in the Nicene Creed, Constantine’s role in the Council, and the subsequent development of the Nicene Creed. But for Protestants, particularly of the evangelical or low church variety, this raises a question: Why should we care? Don’t we believe in sola scriptura, that Scriptura alone is our source of authority for all matters of faith and practice? What do we need the Creed for anyway?

Protestantism and Tradition

This way of thinking is an all-too-common misunderstanding of what sola scriptura meant to the Protestant Reformers. For example, the major Protestant Reformers incorporated elements of Tradition including the Creeds into their liturgies and made regular use of the Church Fathers and even some medieval theologians in their writings. Calvin and Luther, for example, both regularly cited St. Augustine of Hippo, among many other Patristic sources, and were influenced by the medieval mystic St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

So were they sneaking Tradition in the back door, or was something more happening here?

The easiest answer is that the Protestant Reformers used earlier theologians and creedal statements when they believed they were faithful to Scripture. In other words, they used Tradition when it accurately reflected the teaching of the Bible, but not as an independent source of authority.

That much is true, but it is an inadequate explanation of the Reformers’ attitude toward Tradition. To understand why, we need to take a closer look at two different definitions of Tradition.

Two Kinds of Tradition

The great Reformation historian Heiko Oberman (1930-2001) spent a great deal of his career documenting the connections between medieval thought and the Protestant Reformers. In analyzing the Reformers’ ideas about Tradition, Oberman argued that we need to distinguish two ideas about Tradition.

The first, which Oberman creatively labeled “Tradition 1,” held that only Scripture was inspired and the authoritative source of doctrine. Scripture, however, was to be interpreted according to the regula fidei (the “rule of faith”), most of which was codified in the Creeds. Neither the church nor the regula fidei were considered authoritative independent of Scripture. Rather, the regula fidei functioned as theological guardrails. In essence, it said that if you interpreted Scripture in a way that ran counter to the Creeds, you were getting it wrong.

Sometime around the late fourth century, St. Basil the Great (c.330-379) in the Greek-speaking world and St. Augustine (354-430) in the Latin-speaking world began to hint at a new understanding of Tradition as a second source of revelation that supplements Scripture. Oberman labeled this “Tradition 2.”

It isn’t clear if either Basil or Augustine fully intended this shift, and it took centuries before theologians picked up on the idea and began developing it. Not until the rise of scholasticism in the twelfth century did theologians in the Latin-speaking world begin to shift toward Tradition 2, though Tradition 1 remained the central understanding of the role of Tradition in the church.

In the fourteenth century, William of Ockham (c.1287-1347) became the first theologian to argue for a two-source view of revelation. From this point, the distinction between Tradition 1 and Tradition 2 became clear and was a subject of debate among theologians into the sixteenth century.

Sola Scriptura and Tradition 1

This is the context of the Reformation discussion of the nature of authority in the church. Luther, Calvin, and the other mainstream Protestant Reformers, as well as Lefèvre d’Étaples, Erasmus, and most Catholic humanist reformers, argued that Scripture alone was the source of revelation, not Tradition in way adherents of Tradition 2 understood it.

But this does not imply a rejection of Tradition 1 and the regula fidei in guiding our interpretation of Scripture. They believed that the witness of the church throughout the centuries and the regula fidei were critically important for developing a proper understanding of the Faith. The mainstream Reformers never questioned the doctrine of the Trinity, for example, even though they came to it through Tradition guiding their understanding of Scripture rather than developing it anew for themselves.

Catholicism and Tradition 2

The response of the Catholic Church to the Protestant rejection of Tradition 2 was to reaffirm Tradition as a second source of revelation at the Council of Trent. In fact, Tradition arguably trumps Scripture in Trent’s view, since the Council forbade interpreting Scripture in a way that would contradict Tradition. This made Tradition 2 the gatekeeper and ultimate interpreter of Scripture. This decision, which was aimed at Protestants, would come back to haunt the Catholic Church in the trial of Galileo.

The Radicals

Not all Protestants accepted Tradition 1. Some on the fringes of the movement rejected any role for Tradition and insisted on reading the Bible with no guidance from past theologians. The most obvious of these were rationalists such as Socinus and other anti-Trinitarians, though you find the same tendency in some Anabaptist groups. In general, however, these radical individualists were a small minority among Protestant Reformers. The descendants of the mainstream Reformers continued to read and interpret the Scriptures in light of the regula fidei.

The Liberal Rejection of Tradition 1

The individualistic reading of Scripture did not go away, however. It experienced a resurgence in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries among liberal theologians, who argued that we needed to get rid of Tradition and read the Bible afresh with our own eyes, not according to the regula fidei. This is hardly surprising, considering that Unitarian rationalists wanted to get rid of many of the fundamental doctrines of the faith while retaining the label, “Christian.”

The irony is that they defended their rejection of orthodox Christianity by claiming that their sole source of authority was the Bible and only the Bible, but they saw the Bible more as inspiring than inspired. Their rejection of Tradition made them the sole authority of what the Bible meant and what needed to be believed, and this enabled them to ignore anything that didn’t fit the tastes of their more enlightened time.

American Evangelicalism and the Rejection of Creeds

So where do modern American evangelicals line up on the question of Tradition?

Unfortunately, we’re largely with the liberals and the radicals on this, not with the historic mainstream Protestant tradition. And therein lies the problem.

We confess the authority of Scripture and its sufficiency for faith and practice, but we then interpret it as if it were written today, just for us. We read the Bible individualistically, largely ignoring the community of faith and the centuries of study and meditation on the meanings of the text by the great Christian thinkers of the past.

All kinds of problems follow from this. It inevitably leads to letting culture or our personal desires (a.k.a. the world and the flesh) determine what Scripture means or whether or not to obey it.

The problems extend even to our theology. Why is the Nicene Creed important? 43% of American evangelicals believe that Jesus is a great teacher but not God. It seems our failure to teach or even recite the Creed has already born its fruit (Matt. 7:17-18).

The Protestant principle of sola scriptura does not mean that we read only the Bible or that we read it in isolation from the insights of the theologians of the past who hammered out the answers to key theological questions through careful study and analysis of the biblical text. Tradition 1, the regula fidei, the Creeds, whatever you want to call it, is vital to keep us from going off the rails in our study of Scripture. Given the Christological heresies rampant in evangelicalism today, the truths codified in the Nicene Creed are just as important for the church today as they were in 1700 years ago.