Tradition & the Fathers

It's a privilege to be so near London Theological Seminary and the John Owen Centre, Finchley. I was there again today (despite a local bus strike) to join around 30 others for a day seminar with Dr Nick Needham.

Nick pastors Inverness Reformed Baptist Church and lectures in Church History at Highland Theological College. He is the author of a series of popular books on church history published by Grace Publications Trust (a group I'm closely involved with) - 2000 Years of Christ's Power (3 of a projected 5 or 6 volumes have appeared). 

The day was entitled Learning from Tradition and the Early Church Fathers and consisted of two papers and discussion, either side of an excellent lunch. AM Nick began with an anecdote about an American Fundamentalist burning a library of works by the fathers, then showed how different this was to the attitude of Luther, Calvin, the Puritans, Gill and Spurgeon. It should not be the attitude of Protestants today. By way of example, he showed how (in spite of Dan Brown and co) the deity of Christ was accepted before Nicaea, where hardly anyone backed Arius. Similarly, the idea that the canonical Gospels were accepted quite late is untrue.

In the afternoon, we looked more broadly at learning from tradition. Following Jaroslav Pelikan (and Heiko Obermann) Nick urged us to be like the Reformers and reject the Roman view of tradition (T2) and follow tradition where we feel it is biblical (T1). We ought not to be like the anabaptists who argued that we should reject all tradition (T0). The idea has been well expounded in the book The shape of sola scriptura by Keith A Matheson. The example here was of seeing who the fathers concentrate on the person of Christ whereas we often move too quickly to his work.

Ken Brownell chaired and there was good discussion. Nick is a fine scholar with his feet on the ground and he answered our questions with grace and insight. With the resources we have today it is realistic to propose more delving into the patristic field where there are clearly rich pickings.

Perhaps the most interesting line of thought opened up for me was the observation that the fathers (pre-Christendom) were in a position more similar to ours (post-Christendom) than the Reformers.