Scripture Is Not Tradition

Lesslie Newbigin (Reunion of the Church, 129-131) explains that the Church of South India (CSI) statement regarding Scripture “excludes the possibility of treating the Scriptures merely as the earliest expression of the continuous faith of the Church, and treats the faith of the Church as a response, continuously confirmed in its experience by the Holy Spirit, to the revelation of God’s saving acts which the Scriptures record” (129).

The CSI statement refers to “the faith which the Church has ever held,” but Newbigin says it is a mistake to take “faith” as the fides quod found in the Vincentian Canon. The faith ever held is not “a series of doctrinal statements providing the final standard by which the beliefs of the Church and individuals are to be tested.” If the “faith” is taken as a quod, then the “Church” which has “ever held” this faith also has to be defined. 

That, he says, begs the question: “All the beliefs held at all times by all bodies in all lands calling themselves Christian Churches hardly together constitute a manageable standard of faith” (130). That is a hyper-maximalist misunderstanding of the Canon, which does not affirm everything that has everywhere been taught but only those things among all that have been believed and taught that are shared by all. 

Still, Newbigin’s emphasis on Jesus Christ as “the ultimate standard of faith” is right: “When we appeal from the present to that revelation we are not appealing from a later to an earlier phase in the development of a society called the Church. We are appealing to the Church’s living Lord, who is alive in the Church to-day, whom alone we must obey, but who has made His nature and will to us by a work done for mankind at a certain point in history. . . . We do not go to the Bible to find the earliest forms of the traditions and rules of the Church. If we were doing that, the criticisms of those who point to the still earlier traditions of liturgical practice would be sound. We go to the Bible to meet Christ, our present and living Lord”  (131).