Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 27:4 (Autumn 2013)
Article: The Authority Of The Bible And The Authority Of The Theological Tradition
Author: Kevin Giles

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PP 27:4 (Autumn 2013) p. 17

The Authority Of The Bible And The Authority Of The Theological Tradition

Kevin Giles

Kevin Giles (Thd) is an Australian Anglican pastor, theologian, and author. on the Trinity, he has published The Trinity and Subordinationism: The Doctrine of God and the Contemporay Gender Debate (InterVarsity, 2002), Jesus and the Father: Modern Evangelicals Reinvent the Doctrine of the Trinity (Zondervan, 2006), The Eternal Generation of the Son: Maintaining Orthodoxy in Trinitarian Theology (InterVarsity, 2012), and many articles in scholarly journals.

A perennial and difficult question for conservative evangelicals to answer is the relationship between the Bible and the creeds and confessions of the church. We evangelicals say that we believe in the ultimate authority and sufficiency of Scripture. We thus often hear evangelical teachers saying, “What we believe and teach comes directly from the Bible.” I frequently heard these words as a young theological student, and they rang in my mind for twenty years until one day, when writing an article on “the how” of doing evangelical theology, I came to see they were inherently untrue. We evangelicals draw on a rich theological tradition that impacts heavily on how we interpret Scripture on doctrinal matters. Scripture is our ultimate authority in matters of faith and conduct, but we always come to Scripture with the theology or doctrine we have inherited from our teachers and mentors in our minds. This theology does not spring directly from the pages of Scripture. It is the product of a long process of reflection and debate over many centuries as to what is the primary emphasis, the fundamental insight, given the diverse teaching of Scripture on specific doctrinal issues.

For most Christians, the content of their theological beliefs is first of all summed up in the three historic creeds; the Apostles, the Athanasian, and, most importantly, in the Nicene Creed, which is accepted by Eastern and Western Christians. These deal mainly with the doctrines of Christ and the Trinity. They express what the church came to conclude, after a period of sharp and divisive debate, is the teaching of Scripture read holistically on these two doctrines. For churches stemming from the Reformation and post-Reformation period, their “confessions of faith” endorse what the creeds say on Christ and the Trinity, but they also define many other doctrines, especially those disputed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Like the creeds, they document what the church has concluded is the primary and foundational teaching of Scripture on specific issues when this has been contested.

What the creeds and confessions teach is called “the theological tradition,” or “the interpretative tradition,” or jus...

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