Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 178:711 (Jul 2021)
Article: Scripture, Tradition, And Church: From Peter Abelard To Karl Barth
Author: Douglas A. Sweeney

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Scripture, Tradition, And Church: From Peter Abelard To Karl Barth

Douglas A. Sweeney

Douglas A. Sweeney is Dean and Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.

* This is the third article in the four-part series “Sources of Authority for Teaching Christian Doctrine: A Brief Historical Sketch,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 4–7, 2020.

“The saying is sure: whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach, married only once, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way—for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church? . . . I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim 3:1–5, 14–15, NRSV).

In the first lecture of this series, we talked about the sending of the Spirit and the spread of Christian doctrine during early church history. In the second lecture, we treated creeds, canons, church councils, and the best-known contests over biblical exegesis in the post-canonical era. In this third lecture, it’s time to tell the part of our story most know best—the part in which Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants alike debated the relative authority of Scripture, Tradition (now spelled with a capital T), and leaders of the church in the teaching of its doctrine to the faithful.

A fitting place to resume our story is the early twelfth century and Abelard, for no one symbolizes medieval disagreements over doctrine and sources of authority more fully than the Frenchman Peter Abelard, whose Sic et Non (Yes and No, c. 1120) undermined

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the faith of many in the unified witness of the teachers of the church. Posing one hundred fifty-eight theological questions, he arrayed the church fathers on opposing sides of each question, demonstrating that they contradicted themselves and encouraging a dialectical search for truth. Despite the errors many frequently decried in Sic et Non, it awakened earnest students to the problems that attend glib appeals to “the tradition” or “the witness of the fath...