. . well into the second century, the Old Testament remained the early Christians’ only authorized text, but the needs of churches and the assaults of heretics led to a relatively rapid formation of the canon of the New Testament by the late second century and its fixation by the mid-fourth. The essential criterion was that these writings contain authentic apostolic tradition.153
Thus, the earliest view of the relationship between Scripture, tradition, and church may be called the coincidence view: that the church teaches what the apostles taught, which it receives from the apostolic Scriptures and from the apostolic tradition.154 During this period, Scripture, tradition, and church were assumed to teach one apostolic message.155
There is no conflict between them, and the whole Christian message is found in each.156 This approach proved extremely useful to Irenaeus157 and Tertullian158 in their struggle against the Gnostics who appealed to their own Scriptures and to their own secret traditions. In his response, which provided the most effective answer to Gnostic heresy, Irenaeus claimed that the apostles’ teaching, found in their genuine writings, was handed down in an open public tradition of teaching in those churches which they had founded, where it was still taught.159
In time, the coincidence view gave way to the supplementary view: that tradition is needed to supplement Scripture by providing teaching not found in Scripture.160 In the fourth century, Saint Basil of Caesarea became one of the first to apply such a method in his defense of the deity of the Holy Spirit when he stated that some Christian beliefs are not found in Scripture.161 To count as authentic apostolic tradition, such fathers as Saint Augustine162 and Saint Vincent of Lerins163 in the fifth century West required that these be recognized and practiced throughout the whole church. Dale Johnson provides a helpful synopsis of the development of tradition during this particular period:
Tradition is a weed in the Christian garden. It germinated in the rocky soil of the church fathers, some of whom watered it. The Bishop of Rome sometimes fertilized this tender houseplant called tradition, and it eventually grew into the theological equivalent of kudzu. The growth of tradition as a coordinate source of authority, however, did not emerge from a church council or papal pronouncement. It grew out of a process, not an event. The history of the early church and the development of tradition are so closely intertwined that it is nearly impossible to separate them. This happened in part because the canon of Scripture was not fully recognized for the first few centuries of the Church.164
In the Middle Ages, this approach resulted in the emergence of unscriptural doctrines, such as indulgences and Mariology.165 It is these extra-biblical doctrines, which were held and promoted on the same level as those found in Scripture, that played a major role in the monstrous abuses by the Catholic Church of its power over the lives of men and prompted Martin Luther to revolt against Rome’s view of tradition. In Lane’s opinion, it was not justification by faith alone that lay at the center of Reformation, but rather the relationship between Scripture and the church, with the key question being: “Does the gospel define the church or vice versa?”166 One can certainly see how the other issues raised by the Reformers may ultimately trace back to this crucial point.
Luther’s battle cry, therefore, soon became one the distinguishing feature of the Protestant Reformation from which its other distinctions ultimately originated, was his emphasis on sola Scriptura. In fact, it was from this principle that the rest of Luther’s “solas” ultimately originated. As one of the most important priorities of his life’s work, Luther’s focus on Scripture alone is ever-present in his writings, for as The Babylonian Captivity of the Church affirms, “what is asserted without the Scriptures or proven revelation may be held as an opinion, but need not be believed.”167 Calvin similarly asserted:
For the truth is vindicated in opposition to every doubt, when, unsupported by foreign aid, it has its sole sufficiency in itself. How peculiarly this property belongs to Scripture appears from this, that no human writings, however skillfully composed, are at all capable of affecting us in a similar way. Read Demosthenes or Cicero, read Plato, Aristotle, or any other of that class: you will, I admit, feel wonderfully allured, pleased, moved, enchanted; but turn from them to the reading of the Sacred Volume, and whether you will or not, it will so affect you, so pierce your heart, so work its way into your very marrow, that, in comparison of the impression so produced, that of orators and philosophers will almost disappear; making it manifest that in the Sacred Volume there is a truth divine, a something which makes it immeasurably superior to all the gifts and graces attainable by man.168
What this meant was that all church teaching, including the teachings of the early fathers, needed to be tested by Scripture.
In reaction to the Reformation tide, the Roman Catholic Council of Trent in 1546 issued its Decree Concerning the Edition and the Use of Sacred Books. It stated that “the truth and discipline [of the gospel] are contained in the written books and in unwritten traditions—those unwritten traditions, that is, which were either received by the apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or were received from the apostles (having been dictated by the Holy Spirit) and have come down even to us, having been transmitted as it were hand by hand.”169 Furthermore, Scripture and tradition were to be venerated “with equal affection of piety and reverence.”170 The First Vatican Ecumenical Council completed this line of thought when it declared the church’s teaching office to be centered in an infallible papacy.171 The notion of tradition’s equality with Scripture was further upheld at the Second Vatican Council in 1962–1965.172
While outlining the danger of elevating tradition to the same level as Scripture, the first theological principle is not meant to reject the importance or validity of tradition. Lane is absolutely right when he states that “we must honour our theological forbears and listen with respect to the voice of the past, but we are not bound to it.”173 For “Tradition is worthy of respect,” he goes on, “but is subject to the word of God in the Scriptures.”174
Hence, what the first principle advocates is Scripture’s superiority over tradition.175 John Calvin so fervently affirmed this principle that he included it as part of the title of the seventh chapter of the first book of the Institutes of the Christian Tradition: “It is a Wicked Falsehood that Its [Scripture’s] Credibility Depends on the Judgment of the Church.” He then ends the second section of the same chapter with these words: “Indeed, Scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their color, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.”176 Several hundred years later, John Webster reiterated the same idea, writing that “Scripture is not the word of the church, the church is the church of the Word.”177 The Bible must remain “the decisive and final authority, the norm by which all the teaching of tradition and the church is to be tested.”178 Webster masterfully sets straight the proper biblical relationship between church and Scripture when he states:
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