Why the Bible Trumps Tradition

The Roman Catholic liturgy that Dwight Longenecker advocates is further proof of the Protestant understanding of sola scriptura — the idea that the final authority in the church is Scripture, not the bishops:

Some time ago, a friend of mine compared the amount of the Scripture used at Mass to that used in an Evangelical Protestant service. The Catholic Mass was almost 30 percent Scripture. When my friend checked the content of his local Bible-based Evangelical church, he was surprised to discover that the total amount of Scripture read took just 3 percent of the service.

When Catholics go to Mass, they hear a reading from the Old Testament, they say or sing one of the Psalms, then they listen to a reading from the Epistles, then a Gospel reading. The whole structure fits together so that the Mass is focused on Christ in the Gospels.

Catholics follow a three-year cycle of Scripture reading, so a Catholic who goes to church faithfully will – over those three years – hear almost all of the Bible read. Furthermore, the responses and the words of the Communion service are almost all from Scripture. So a church-going Catholic does know and use Scripture – its just that he uses it primarily for meditation and worship (Psalms 119:48) – not primarily for personal information and instruction.

You can think of it this way: Evangelicals use the Bible as a rule book. Catholics use it as a prayer book.

That is music to a Protestants ears, the part about the prominence of Scripture in worship (though Longenecker does not factor in that for much of Roman Catholic history the readings of Scripture were in Latin). And if evangelicals have substituted other sources for the Bible in worship, they should return to the prominence of the word of God as the lifeblood of Christian worship.

At the same time, what Father Dwight does not notice is that his case for Scripture in worship weakens the Roman Catholic argument for the authority of tradition. If teachings of the father and the magisterium have equal authority as the Bible, then why not have readings from papal encyclicals or prayers from theological treatises as part of liturgy? The reason for not using these other fallible human sources (sorry to the defenders of papal infallibility) is that the Bible is the only reliable guide for determining what pleases God in worship. As the Westminster Confession explains:

The light of nature showeth that there is a God, who hath lordship and sovereignty over all, is good, and doth good unto all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might. But the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.

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