During a recent business trip I had the opportunity to sit next to a real American hero on the airplane. She was one of the National Guard soldiers who were wounded at the Ft. Hood shootings in Texas a while ago. She was wearing a bracelet with the names of her fellow soldiers who died in the assault, and she herself was still recovering from being shot three times.
Our discussion eventually turned to religion. Among other things, she talked about her faith in God and about her conversion from Catholicism to a mainstream Protestant denomination, which will remain nameless at this time. She chose this denomination specifically because it did not dogmatically follow certain teachings of Scripture, but rather was “open to discussion” about those issues that were important to her. She described her denomination’s approach to doctrine with the following analogy – Faith can be pictured as the seat on a stool, which is supported by three legs – Scripture, Tradition, and Discussion. All three of these, she said, need to be weighed in deciding matters of theology. I challenged her on this, but as usual I didn’t think of the best questions to ask until after we parted. With your patience I would like to share this rebuttal with you now.
Building on her analogy of Faith as a stool, let’s visualize this analogy as being drawn on paper. One of the first things that is obvious is that the stool is not resting on anything. Rather, it is just floating in midair. Since we are not on a spaceship, this stool must be resting on something. What is it? What are the legs of Scripture, Tradition, and Discussion resting on? In other words, what is the underlying authority that judges the conflicting claims that may arise between these three?
It should be pretty clear by now that the floor on which this Faith analogy rests is Human Autonomy. In this model, each person is allowed to study the Scripture, Discuss it, and compare it with Tradition to determine theological truth. If I appeal to Scripture for a theological truth claim, then she could simply explain it away with Discussion to reach a view of God that appeals to her. I hope you can see the relativism that this model produces. There can be no definite “right” or “wrong” view of God since man is the ultimate authority in judging what is true about Him and what He has really said about Himself. Furthermore, if God has revealed something to man in Scripture, it can be trumped by Discussion and/or Tradition by the one who is autonomously judging the claim in question. You may recognize this as the original sin of man, where Adam wanted to be arbiter of good and evil instead of God.
Let’s contrast this with another analogy that represents Biblical Christianity. Faith is still represented as a stool, but its three legs are Tradition, Discussion, and Church Government (I just needed a third leg, so this sounded good!). The floor, then, is Scripture instead of Human Autonomy. In this model, all elements that constitute Faith are governed by the objective revelation of God in His Scripture. Scripture serves as the arbiter and judge in matters of dispute between the three legs, not human opinion. This is the only model that accurately reflects the God of Scripture who claims to be the objective authority in all matters relating to Himself.
I am still praying for that hero I met on the airplane. I am not questioning her faith, her relationship to God, or her sincere devotion to Him. Rather, I am questioning how she knows what she knows about Him, which is something we all must deal with. We could have debated the surface issues we disagreed about, but that would have been uproductive given her misunderstanding of Faith. Rather, we must dig deeper to find out why she believed what she believed, in hopes of showing her the problems inherent with her beliefs.
