Last night I was talking to some friends of mine who happen to be Catholic. And not just casually catholic, attending mass and holding on to the faith of their parents, but Catholic in the best way, having converted to the faith later in life after studying and reading and discussing what the Catholic branch of Christianity has to offer, and studying hard at schools like oxford and UCLA.
And the discussion of infant baptism came up. Now I go to a Protestant where, although I have never seen nor heard of anyone in our denomination practice infant baptism, it is technically on the books as a good and right practice. However with some understanding of how it is practiced in the Catholic church this form of infant baptism is completely different from what they practice. From reading the liturgy associated with infant baptism in my church it is easily seen that it really is a dedication by the parents to raise their children in accordance with Christian beliefs; its a symbol that doesn’t mean anything but allows those arround them to help keep them in accountability.
The Catholic church on the other hand, sees baptism as the means that God uses to cleanse us of original sin. And though they get the general belief that baptism is important to the believer and commanded by God, the specifics of why they get baptized comes from another source- tradition. From the earliest of Christian writers, we can see that baptism was practiced to remove sin from the believer.
It wasn’t the topic of infant baptism that had me intrigued, rather it was the negation of that most important component of truth that is held by most protestant churches- Sola Scriptura, Scripture Alone. Ask any protestant believer what they teach at their church, and the responses will be similar, well we just teach the bible. Which in itself is interesting because if all churches were to “just teach the bible” there would be no denominational distinctives, and therefor no reasons for denominations to exist. If we were honest with ourselves we would probably say that our church teaches our pastor’s view on the bible (hopefully informed by the holy Spirit). But even that isn’t entirely true either because most pastors, after choosing their passage for the week, read various sermons and commentaries on what other people who had more time or knowledge have said about scripture. So a Sunday morning sermon must be in part though to be a third party’s, often of unknown origins, ideas about the bible.
Now some might take that as a disrespect to the office of pastor, but the role of a pastor is primarily in communication of truth and personal ministry, and not as theologians proper but it does raise an important question- who does you pastor turn to for truth? Which theologians, historians, and church fathers are informing their understanding, and how is that informing yours? We say “Only Scripture” or “Just the bible” but even our most basic ideas about who God is, are informed by Scripture and Tradition.
Go to your favorite bible word search site (I like blueletterbible.org) Now type in the word “Trinity” Go on, I will wait for you. Nothing? Lets try “Rapture”. Still nothing? Neither of these ideas is strictly from scripture though people support the ideas of each of these from scripture (The concept of the trinity has been around for 2000 years, and rapture for only about the last 150, which accounts for my reluctance to support the idea of a rapture of the church, but that is for another time) The point is, our understanding of who God is, the very core of our Christian faith, is defined in part by tradition.
Now the Free Methodists do actually believe in tradition as a valid way of receiving truth along with Reason and Experience. Now I had to make my own picture because when I started looking for pictures of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral on the internet, mostly what I found was articles debasing the ideas that tradition was an acceptable source of truth for the believer (at which point I started looking for the non-existent comment button on their sites) Unlike Catholicism, which holds an about equal view of Scripture and Tradition, the Quadrilateral creates a hierarchy: Scripture, then Tradition and Reason, then Experience.
But all of this to say, I realize suddenly why it is hard for people to embrace and love church history in the way that I have come to love it- as a text for understanding who God is, what the Church is supposed to be like and how I fit into all of that. And without seeking that tradition, all we are left with is our own thoughts about God instead of the fullness of the history of Him interacting with his people.
I have come to love the words and lives of the saints, the creeds, the truth of God contained in the history. And I have realized that I do hold not to Sola Scriptura, but rather to Prima Sciptura, scripture first, but certainly not the whole.
