The twentieth-century Reformation scholar Heiko Oberman makes a very helpful distinction between what he calls “Tradition One” and “Tradition Two.” He claims that you cannot read the Reformation as a blanket rejection of tradition, because there are different kinds of tradition. Tradition one (T1), Oberman says, is the tradition of doctrinal formulation that is closely tied to, and justified by, reflection on the exegesis of Scripture. The traditional teaching of the church on the virgin birth, for example, would represent what Oberman describes as T1. This is what Paul was talking about when he told Timothy to pass on, or hold fast to, the form of sound words: it is passing on the tradition of teaching derived from the Bible. So there is good tradition and, in fact, most pastors operate with some form of tradition (T1). If you are preparing a sermon on a Sunday, typically speaking you won’t just stare at the page of the Bible and hope for enlightenment, you will pull your commentaries and maybe a systematic theology or two off the shelves in your study to help you better understand what the passage means.
The Reformers were comfortable with T1. When they attacked “church tradition,” they were referring to what Oberman would call tradition two (T2). That’s the tradition of dogmatic or doctrinal formulation which stands somewhat independent of biblical exegesis and rests its authority on the magisterial, direct teaching of the church herself. If the virgin birth is an example of T1 kind of teaching, we might say that the immaculate conception of the virgin, the idea that she was conceived without original sin, would be a T2 doctrine. (Now I know a very good Roman Catholic theologian, like Matt Levering, would try to make a case that you could justify the immaculate conception on the basis of Scripture, but I am not persuaded.)
In sum, there are two kinds of traditional teaching, that which rests closely on reflection of exegesis of Scripture and that which rests more directly on the magisterial claims of the church. Hold that in mind.
Oberman is correct in his analysis of tradition in the Reformation but we need to add one further dimension to it. The Reformers operated with what I would call a hermeneutic of trust regarding the past. One of the things that characterizes our present age is suspicion, particularly suspicion of authority and suspicion of tradition. Cynicism and suspicion are in the very air we breathe. For the Reformers that was not the case. How did that affect their view of tradition? Well, we might fairly characterize them as accepting church tradition as being T1 unless it was self-evidently T2. To put this another way, they accepted the historic teaching of the church on any given topic unless it became very clear that it wasn’t justifiable by reflection on biblical exegesis. That is quite a significant way of thinking about (and not simply doing) theology. I remember during the heat of the 2016 Trinity controversy, somebody asked me, “well, how do you justify eternal generation?” I said, “In my world I don’t have to justify it, that is the traditional teaching of the church. If you reject it, the burden is on you to prove that the church is wrong.” You see the difference in cultural mindset? The basic assumption of the Reformers is that the doctrine of the Trinity is part of T1. It is taken as a given that should only be modified as and when it is demonstrably incorrect or inadequate. Read more»
Carl Trueman, “Reforming God?” Reforming Faith and Practice volume 4, no. 2 (2019)
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