DAY 247
CHALLENGE
“Tradition may be valuable in some ways, but it can’t be allowed to play a determinative role with respect to Scripture.”
DEFENSE
It is precisely by Tradition that Scripture itself is determined.
How do we know what belongs in Scripture? Various criteria have been proposed, the most fundamental of which is inspiration, for Paul says, “All scripture is inspired by God” (2 Tim. 3:16). It’s true that if a book is inspired then it is Scripture, but this is not a practical test, for inspiration is not an objectively verifiable literary property (see Day 229).
Another test is “apostolicity”—that a book was written by an apostle or approved as Scripture by the apostles. The difficulty is that, like inspiration, apostolicity isn’t a detectable literary quality. It must be known by means apart from the text.
The way the early Church determined inspiration when the canon was being recognized was whether a book had been handed down to and read in the churches as apostolic. As Evangelical scholar C.E. Hill notes:
Christian writers often spoke of their Gospels (and other books) as handed down to them. Christian writers of the second century do not speak of choosing the Gospels, or of the criteria they might have created for making such choices. This is not the way they thought. When speaking of the church’s part in the process they instead use words like “receive,” “recognize,” “confess,” “acknowledge,” and their opposites. Just like the faith itself, which had been “received from the apostles and transmitted to its children” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3:1:praef.; cf. 1:10:1), so the Gospels themselves were “handed down to the church by the same apostles (Against Heresies 3:1:praef.; 3:1:1, 2) (Who Chose the Gospels?, 231–32).
The act of handing something down is what tradition is. The Latin verb tradere, from which “tradition” is derived, means “to hand down.” Tradition is thus the means by which we know which books are Scripture, giving it a determinative role.
The teachings handed down from the apostles also were used to identify false scriptures that disagreed with this teaching (see Day 138). Tradition—in the form of apostolic doctrine—thus also played a determinative role in establishing the canon.