a. Tradition
Tradition, of course, is not the ultimate norm for
Protestants, but it is important. It includes all the teaching and activity of
the church down to the present day. On the one hand, as I indicated earlier,
the Christian has an obligation to hear the teachers that God has given the
church over the hundreds of years of its existence. They must be heard
critically; we wish to profit from their mistakes, as well as from their
achievements. On the other hand, it would be foolish for us to try to build our
theology from the ground up, as it were, seeking to ignore all tradition.
Descartes tried that in philosophy, but his successors have recognized that we
can never begin to think without some preconceptions. Although those
preconceptions can be critically purified, we cannot do without them
altogether. Therefore when we seek to escape the bonds of tradition, we merely
substitute one set of preconceptions for another. Indeed, what we do then is to
substitute our own half-baked, ill-conceived preconceptions for the mature
thought of godly teachers. To try to start totally afresh (“just me and my
Bible”) as many cultists have tried to do, is an act of disobedience and pride.
The work of theology is not the work of one individual seeking to gain a
complete knowledge of God on his own but the corporate work of the church in
which Christians together seek a common mind on the things of God.
b. Creeds
If we have a Bible, why do we need a creed? That’s
a good question! Why cant’ ewe just be Christians, rather than Presbyterians,
Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians? Well, I wish we could be. When people
ask what I am, I would like to say, quite simply, “Christian.” Indeed, I often
do. And when they ask what I believe, I would like to say with equal simplicity
“the Bible.” Unfortunately, however, that is not enough to meet the current
need. The trouble is that many people who call themselves Christians don’t
deserve the name, and many of them claim to believe the Bible.
So when people ask what, for example, Westminster
Seminary teachers, it is not enough to say “Scripture.” True as that answer is,
it does not distinguish Westminster Seminary from schools of the Jehovah’s
Witnesses, Mormons, or other cults, to say nothing of the other branches of
mainline Christianity—Baptists, Methodists, and so forth. We must tell people
what we believe. Once we do that, we have a creed.
Indeed, a creed is quite inescapable, though some people
talk as if they could have “only the Bible” or “no creed but Christ.” As we
have seen, “believing the Bible” involves applying it. If you cannot put the
Bible into your own words (and actions), your knowledge of it is no better than
a parrot’s. But once you do put it into your own words (and it is immaterial
whether those words be written or spoken), you have a creed.
There is, of course, always the danger of
confusing your creed with Scripture, but that is the same danger that we face
in any attempt to do theology—distinguishing our work from God’s. That is a
danger that must be faced, not avoided by a deceptive “no creed but
Christ” slogan. Not to face it is not to accept our responsibility as
ambassadors for Christ. (John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God
[A Theology of Lordship; Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1987], 304-5, emphasis added)
