Evangelicals, Francis, and Tradition

Gerald McDermott has been prosecuting a case against a certain version of evangelical theology over the past few years (see here and here). His fundamental point is the need to recover the Great Tradition within Evangelicalism and thus to read scripture in and through the lens of the church spread out through time. To fail to read scripture in this way, according to McDermott, is to hold to nuda scriptura in which the interpretation of scripture is reduced to the application of current sensibilities that reinforce the autonomy of the late-modern individual. When personal interpretation trumps the tradition, McDermott wonders how one can ever move beyond a new kind of Babylonian captivity, the captivity of interpretation to a modern cultural milieu.

While I have great sympathy for his project, McDermott’s appeals to creeds as a way to bolster confessionalism worry me.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/05/on-thinking-with-the-church?utm_source=First+Things+Subscribers&utm_campaign=cf32bde0d2-5_27_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_28bf775c26-cf32bde0d2-172554629