Can we understand the Bible apart from tradition?

Peter Wehner reflects on tradition in the current issue of Commentary.

He observes that even conservatives are wont today to leap over tradition and to grab for abstract principles.  The result is to follow modernity’s method and thereby to miss deeper truths which come only from working through tradition on our way to a partial grasp of truth.

This is especially true for Christians trying to understand the Bible.  And particularly so for evangelicals who tend to think tradition is always a bad thing and presume they can get at the inner meaning of the Bible without working their way through theological reflection on it.

Now of course there are good and bad traditions.  Jesus warned against bad traditions that obscure God’s Word in Matthew 15.  But Paul urges the Thessalonians to keep to the traditions which he had taught them (2 Thess 2:15).

There is no direct encounter with the Word apart from theological tradition.  Those who think they can skip it over and get at the Word in an unmediated way are simply naive, not recognizing how some tradition is influencing how they understand the Bible.

So the real question is not if tradition influences us in reading the Bible, but which tradition we use to interpret the Bible.

If we do not sit at the feet of the Great Tradition that has formed orthodoxy, then we will inevitably run into heresy.

As the biggest evangelical church in San Francisco has now done.