Tag: Pelikan

The unraveling onion of the Reformation criticism of tradition

Like many of the Protestant critics who followed him, Semler could claim to be following in the footsteps of Luther and the Reformation, and to be doing so with greater consistency than the political situation of the 16th century had permitted the first Protestant reformers themselves to do. The same kind of historical–critical scrutiny to which Luther and his fellow reformers had subjected to cherished traditions and doctrines of the medieval church, such as the claims of the Papacy or even the sacramental system, could and should be rolled back to the very first centuries of the history of the church. Even the first century, revered as “apostolic,” must not be beyond the reach of historical criticism.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Canon and the Critics

The irony of pitting the Bible against the Church

Another aspect of the divine irony that we have seen repeatedly in the history of the use of the Bible within both Judaism and Christianity is that the Bible being used as a weapon against church and tradition had itself come from the arsenal of the church and had been preserved and protected by the tradition.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Bible Only

The Bible is not self authenticating

The very conflict over the biblical canon between the Protestant Reformers and the Council of Trent made it clear that even in a doctrine of sola Scriptura the authority of the Bible did not authenticate itself automatically (which would have required some kind of doctrine of repeated inspiration in each generation of the history of the church) but depended on recognition by tradition and by the church for acceptance.

Jaroslav Pelikan
Whose Bible Is It?
The Bible Only

Progress is gradual and always builds off of a foundation

The dichotomy between tradition and insight breaks down under the weight of history itself. A “leap of progress” is not a standing broad jump, which begins at the line of where we are now; it is a running broad jump through where we have been to where we go next.

…The growth of insight — in science, in the arts, in philosophy, in theology— has not come through progressively sloughing off more and more of tradition, as though insight would be purest and deepest when it has finally freed itself of the dead past. It simply has not worked that way in the history of tradition and it does not work that way now.

Jaroslav Pelikan
The Vindication of Tradition

The nature of the Christian to the Church is that of a child to a parent

We do well to recognize as infantile an attitude toward our parents that regards them as all wise or all powerful and that is blind to their human foibles. But we must recognize no less that it is adolescent, once we have discovered those foibles, to deny our parents the respect and reverence that is their due for having been, under God, the means through which has come the only life we have.

Jaroslav Pelikan
The Vindication of Tradition