Evangelicals and Tradition

Well, here is the first post on the new site. 

Here it goes...


 Its interesting to me how often a certain ideas or discussion occur in bunches...as in when different people, of different groups bring up similar ideas and you laugh internally thinking, "didn't I just have this conversation with so and so?"  Well this post is kind of like that for me.  

I wouldn't say that I was necessarily a fan of all that thegospelcoalition.com folk put out, but this article was pretty well done and fair.  What are Evangelicals to do with the creeds and councils?  I grew up in an evangelical Reformed church where the Apostles Creed was said regularly and we were certainly aware of other the other creeds, like the Nicene, which was said perhaps once a year.  So in someways, the title and and even the necessity of the statement would for much of my life seem absurd..."What do you mean, 'what do we do with the creeds and councils'?"  We use them as a guide and rule for our faith.  But it was on a plane somewhere over the US when a devout Southern Baptist stranger in the seat next to me asked what I was reading.  It was Alister McGrath's scant volume on the Apostle's Creed.  He was my age, which then was about 30, and he had never heard of the Apostles Creed.  I was dumbstruck.  I know that Baptists are non-creedal folk, except for the very creedal statement "No creed but the bible."  I had assumed that while it may not be prefigured into their lives of faith, that it was still known.  

I appreciate the writers attempt to connect the Evangelical tradition with the larger history of the church and many of the points he makes does counter prevailing assumptions about Evangelicals and tradition. I am still skittish about how he might be referring to the authority of scripture and its inspiration in a culture of individualism, where we say we place the authority upon scripture as the norm, but authority is still tied to our interpretations of that, and thus the authority we confirm upon scripture is really rooted in the individual prone to distortions of all kinds and claims of truth.  It is exactly for this reason the Evangelical church is in such desperate need of the catholicity of faith, across the ages, and around the world, which necessarily includes the Creeds and Councils.