Something has shifted in evangelical reading habits. Where the movement’s strengths once lay in biblical exegesis, preaching, spirituality, missions and evangelism, it is now common to find evangelical theologians, pastors and laypeople reading the Early Church Fathers, the medieval theologians, the Reformers and the post-Reformation scholastics. Writing for The Gospel Coalition, R. Lucas Stamps welcomes much of this “retrieval” — the recovery of the church’s historic inheritance — but argues that it needs rules if it is to remain Protestant.
His first rule is a hierarchy of doctrine. Every doctrine matters, he writes, but not every doctrine matters equally: some are integral to the faith, others derivative, and “the further the derivation proceeds, the less certain we can be of the conclusions reached.” The Trinity, he says, is of greater moment than the specifics of church polity — “It’s more important to be a Nicene Trinitarian than it is to be a Presbyterian or a congregationalist.” That sentence is worth pausing over in free-church settings, coming as it does from a tradition that has often treated questions of polity as first-order. Stamps applies the same logic to political theology: not unimportant, but of lesser moment than the doctrine of God, and within it, principles such as natural law and human dignity carry more weight than their particular applications, which are “irreducibly local and particular.”
His second rule is to acknowledge diversity within the tradition. On very few questions does the Christian tradition admit only one orthodox position; the creeds and councils are the baseline, but elsewhere it is better to speak of “traditions” in the plural. Stamps lists the contenders for authority in political theology: the pre-Constantinian persecuted church, the late Roman and Byzantine eras, the medieval feudalists, the magisterial Reformers, the free-church movements, the Erastians, the Scottish Covenanters, the Baptists of the early American Republic. Enshrining any one of them as the golden era is as precarious, he argues, as assuming that our own moment is the goal toward which Christian history was always leading. Retrieval, he insists, is not repristination — not the restoring of a previous arrangement to its pristine condition. History is neither unbroken progress nor perpetual decline, and some developments, such as the abolition of slavery, are simply good.
Third, the past must not be misused to serve conclusions we have already reached. Stamps gives two examples: Augustine’s ordo amoris, the order of love, deployed as cover for racial prejudice, and the medieval formula gratia non tollit naturam sed perficit — “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it” — stretched to imply that anything “natural” in a fallen world may be preserved uncritically.
The fourth rule is the one that keeps the whole project Protestant. Retrieval requires critical appropriation: due deference to the Christian tradition, but with Scripture retaining “pride of place as the sole, inspired, and inerrant Word of God.” Stamps puts it memorably — we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We can laud Luther’s defence of justification by faith alone and still find his attitude toward Jewish people noxious and unbiblical; rely on Thomas Aquinas’s Christology while rejecting his views on the inferiority of women; value Jonathan Edwards’s contributions while finding fault with his views on slavery. The purpose of retrieval, he concludes, is not for history to supplant the Bible’s authority in faith and practice. A careful study of the Christian past, he writes, “reveals many successes but also many failures as Christians (like us) have sought to order their lives according to the truth of God’s Word.”
Source: The Gospel Coalition — thegospelcoalition.org
