Reforming our Thinking on Tradition

Personal bias and subjectivism is a reality we all can acknowledge as individuals, but can't see without a community.

If that is true, then why are we so absolutely opposed to giving any real authority to the community of faith's understanding of the Bible- in other words, "tradition"?

It seems we have taken the Biblical example of the Bereans (Acts 17:10-11) to mean that it is our duty to let our subjective interaction with a given passage of Scripture be the final arbiter of what is true. But that's not even what happened in Acts 17, for the Bereans examined the Scriptures together (verbs are plural) to see what was true! When the Reformers taught the duty of private interpretation, they did not have this modern subjective just me and my Bible approach in mind. They uniformly taught the necessity of reading any given passage in a manner consistent with the teaching of the whole of Scripture since its Divine origin requires such consistency. Further, they taught that such a process could really only be accomplished as individual understanding was corrected by the rest of the community of faith.

In other words, that individual understanding that contradicted the accepted understanding of the community of faith should immediately be suspect and bears a heavy burden of proof. This provides both a "check" on the individual and the community and is consistent with the warnings of Hebrews 3:12-13: Heb. 3:12   Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. We would do well to rethink our negative attitude towards "tradition" and view our own understanding of Scripture with a little less confidence.

Then perhaps we will not find ourselves in the typical Protestant predicament described by Richard Lints: "If our central concern in approaching the text is how it makes us feel or what it seems to be saying to us, then the church is doomed to having as many interpretations of the text as there are interpreters. In banishing all mediators between the Bible and ourselves, we have let the Scriptures be ensnared in a web of subjectivism. Having rejected the aid of the community of interpreters thought the history of Christendom, we have not succeeded in returning to the primitive gospel; we have simply managed to plunge ourselves back to the biases of our own individual situations." The Fabric of Theology, p. 93