Brett Lee-Price Apologetics
We are living through a rather unique moment in the history of Western Christianity, whereby the faith that has long undergirded our culture and grounded such fundamental assumptions about reality, humanity, and morality is increasingly being questioned and challenged by positions that are profoundly different. Questions surrounding identity, sexuality, marriage, the human body, political authority, and even what it truly means to be human are no longer merely peripheral controversies. They are, at their foundation, theological questions, concerning the nature of creation, our understanding of humanity, and, ultimately, the God who has created us.
Charles Taylor, in his monumental A Secular Age, argues that secularisation is not simply the decline of religious belief but a transformation in the very conditions under which belief takes place. Christianity is no longer the assumed framework through which Western society understands itself.1 Indeed, as Carl Trueman has explored in several recent works, the modern individual increasingly understands identity as something internal—discovered within oneself rather than received from an external authority, especially not least, to be found within a divinely established created order.2 The autonomous self, and its supposedly sovereign capacity to determine what is true and meaningful, has become somewhat central to how many understand the world.
It is within this context that many Christians are looking for answers. Yet many contemporary evangelical churches present a paradox: we profess an ancient faith, and yet much of what we present seems remarkably modern—and not necessarily in a good way. Our worship, language, and approach to ministry can often be shaped by the very culture we seek to challenge. Our songs, rather than reflecting the theological breadth of the Psalms and, indeed, much historic hymnody, can become preoccupied with our immediate feelings and felt needs. Our preaching, whilst rightly seeking to apply Scripture to contemporary life and proclaim the cross of Christ, can become so concerned with individual circumstances that the wider theological framework of Christianity is scarcely considered.
Now, I do not wish to suggest that all contemporary worship is inherently shallow, nor that an older hymn is necessarily superior to a newer one, and definitely not that that faithful preaching ought to dispense with personal application. That would be, rightly, considered an altogether lazy criticism. Rather, there is a difference between making Christianity intelligible to contemporary society and letting contemporary society determine how Christianity is understood. When ecclesiastical life is governed by relevance, experience, and individual fulfilment, we ought to ask what sort of Christian understanding we are seeking to cultivate.3
Mark Noll famously opened his 1994 The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind with the observation that ‘the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.’4 Perhaps we might extend that criticism further: much contemporary evangelicalism has become historically forgetful, theologically minimalistic, and largely disconnected from the wider Christian tradition. We possess an ancient faith, and yet sometimes behave as though Christianity began within living memory.
Consequently, it should come as little surprise that when Christians discover Athanasius, Augustine, the ecumenical councils, Aquinas or classical theism, they encounter a theological depth that seems completely alien to their evangelical experience. For some, the conclusion becomes increasingly attractive: perhaps the answer is Rome, or perhaps Eastern Orthodoxy. Perhaps, just perhaps, historic Christianity requires abandoning Protestantism altogether.
This is a concern that should, I believe, be taken seriously. Indeed, those asking these questions have quite often recognised a genuine problem. However, recognising the problem is not the same thing as identifying its solution. What if the Christianity they are leaving behind is not especially representative of historic Protestantism? What if the Reformers themselves, and the generations of Protestant theologians who followed them, possessed precisely the theological depth, catholicity, and historical consciousness that many are now searching for elsewhere?
The Knowledge of God and the Reformed Tradition
In contrast to society’s fundamental assumption that the individual stands at the centre of his own understanding of reality, Christianity begins not with man, but with the God who created man and on whom all things depend. It is for this reason that John Calvin opens his Institutes of the Christian Religion by considering the relationship that exists between the knowledge of God and the knowledge of ourselves. Calvin recognises that these are inseparably connected, yet argues that we cannot rightly understand ourselves without first contemplating God.5 In other words, the modern crisis of anthropology cannot be divorced from the doctrine of God.
The Reformed orthodoxy theologians, particularly those writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, developed this point through what have been described as the principia theologica—the first principles of theology.6 The first, the principium essendi, is God Himself: the living God who exists independently of creation and is the foundation of all things. God does not derive His existence, goodness, or perfection from anything outside Himself. He is the Creator, and we are His creatures. Our knowledge of God is not an exercise in autonomous human enquiry.
Franciscus Junius developed this distinction through his account of archetypal and ectypal theology. God knows Himself perfectly and infinitely; creatures know Him truly albeit finitely, through the knowledge that He graciously accommodates and communicates to them. We can, therefore, know God without presuming to comprehend Him exhaustively. Indeed, the very possibility of theology to begin with rests upon the act of divine condescension.7
This leads to the principium cognoscendi externum, the external principle of theological knowledge. If God is the source of theology, then how can we know Him? The answer is that He has revealed Himself. Hebrews begins by declaring that the God who spoke through the prophets has now spoken in His Son, whilst John tells us that the only begotten Son has made the Father known (Heb. 1:1-3; John 1:18). God’s revelation is not restricted to Scripture—He also reveals Himself in creation, and supremely in Christ—but His inspired Word serves as the unique and infallible written norm of Christian doctrine. Scripture possesses this authority notbecause the church confers it, norbecause the individual Christian independently grants it, but because its ultimate author is God Himself.8
The third principle, the principiumcognoscendi internum, concerns the inward reception of divine truth. This is because, as sinful creatures, we do not merely require revelation; we also require the gracious work of the Holy Spirit to receive it rightly (1 Cor. 2:10-14). Herman Bavinck brings these principles together in his Reformed Dogmatics. That is, God Himself, His self-revelation, and the illumination of His Spirit. While Reformed authors used different terminology, the theological order was relatively clear: Theology begins with God, is made possible by His self-disclosure, and is received savingly through the work of His Spirit.9
These were not merely distinctions developed abstractly in a theologian’s study. They helped to shape how Reformed churches received and articulated doctrines to be confessed throughout Christian history. Consider the Second London Baptist Confession, substantially following the Westminster Confession and the Savoy Declaration. It confesses God as infinite, eternal, immutable, and incomprehensible, ‘a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions’.10 This is the language of classical Christian theism. Divine simplicity affirms that God is not composed of parts; immutability, that He does not change as creatures do. The Reformers neither invented these doctrines nor unintentionally retained them as remnants of medieval philosophy. They were consciously received, defended, and confessed as part of the church’s understanding of the triune God.
Therein lies a problem with contemporary discussions of classical theism. We encounter divine simplicity in Aquinas, or read Athanasius on the Trinity, and assume that these doctrines somehow belong more properly to Rome or Constantinople. But the historic Reformed churches confessed this same triune God with considerable theological care, while constantly engaging with the patristic and medieval theologians who preceded them.
Scripture and Tradition
The question, then, is not whether the Christian past ought to be received, but upon the precise grounds it should be received, interpreted, and judged. One of the most persistent misnomers of sola Scriptura is that it represented the rejection of tradition altogether: that the Reformation left the individual Christian with little more than his Bible and his own interpretation of it. Yet, such an this understanding owes far more to modern individualism and would have been seen as utterly alien to the Reformers. The disagreement in which they held concerned more with the nature and limits of ecclesiastical authority and particularly as to whether the church’s inherited theological judgements could possess authority independent of, or ultimately equal to, Holy Scripture.
In his masterful Harvest of Medieval Theology, Heiko Oberman distinguished two distinct medieval understandings of tradition. Under Tradition I, Scripture remained the normative source of revealed doctrine, with tradition understood in relation to its ecclesiastical interpretation and transmission. Under Tradition II, unwritten apostolic tradition could also convey revealed teaching not contained in Scripture. Not every medieval theological teaching work neatly fit these categories, but they remind us that the relationship between Scripture and tradition was contested long before Luther.11
Augustine, in his correspondence with Jerome, reserved unconditional confidence in the freedom from error of canonical Scripture, which he reserved for it alone; other Christian writers could be corrected. In On Baptism, Against the Donatists, he distinguished Scripture’s authority from the decisions of bishops and councils, allowing that later councils could correct earlier ones.12 Likewise, Thomas Aquinas distinguished the authority of canonical Scripture from arguments that were drawn from subsequent theologians (Summa Theologiae I, q.1, a. 8). Now neither Augustine nor Aquinas were Protestants, and it would be irresponsible to conscript them into a sixteenth-century dispute without ensuring proper acknowledgement is paid to their wider ecclesiologies. Yet both demonstrate that differentiating theological authorities was not a Reformation innovation.13
The Second Helvetic Confession (1566), associated with Heinrich Bullinger, makes the Reformed position particularly clear: ‘the interpretations of the holy Greek and Latin Fathers’ are not despised, but neither are they exempted from the judgement of Scripture.14 The same applies to councils. Scripture remains the norming norm, while creeds and confessions are normed norms—genuine ecclesiastical authorities, but subordinate to the Word of God. Sola Scriptura, therefore, did not mean nuda Scriptura.The church receives, teaches, and confesses the Word; it does not stand above the Word by which it is itself constituted and reformed.
This also helps us to correct an unfortunately common Protestant misunderstanding of the Reformation, and one in which the motto post tenebras lux—after darkness, light—is sometimes taken to mean. Namely, the gospel had disappeared for a millennium, only to be rediscovered in the sixteenth century. Yet even Calvin, despite his severe criticism of Rome, acknowledged that God had continued to preserve remnants of His church.15 There is a difference between arguing that the church had become corrupted and claiming that it had ceased to exist. It would do us well to remember that the word Reformation presupposes something to be reformed; it is not the reconstruction of Christianity from nothing.
Consider William Perkins, whose 1597 work bore the revealing title A Reformed Catholic, with the subtitle A Declaration Showing How Near We May Come to the Present Church of Rome in Various Points of Religion, and Wherein We Must Forever Depart from Them. Perkins was not conceding the term catholic to Rome. He was asking where the Reformed churches shared Christianity’s inheritance and where Scripture required them to depart from their opponents.16 Or, several decades earlier, the Bishop of Salisbury, John Jewel, in his Apology of the Church of England (1562) challenged Rome’s exclusive claim to Christian antiquity, calling upon his opponents to demonstrate from Scripture and the Fathers precisely where the Reformers had departed from the apostolic faith.17Likewise, Peter Martyr Vermigli engaged extensively with Augustine, Aquinas, and Gregory of Rimini, critically appropriating theological resources acquired within the medieval church.18 The succeeding generation of Reformed orthodox, including Zanchi, Turrentin, Van Mastricht, and Owen, continued to employ scholastic distinctions and methods without adopting every medieval doctrinal conclusion. As Richard Muller has demonstrated, the Reformation’s relationship to the preceding theological tradition is far richer than the persistent account of a complete rupture would suggest.19
In that sense, the Reformation ought to be understood as being both catholic and reformational. But this raises another question. If Protestantism is so frequently accused of departing from Rome’s supposedly unified and continuous theological tradition, how historically accurate is this portrayal of Roman Catholicism itself?
History is Complicated
Consider the Immaculate Conception of Mary as formally defined by Pius IX in 1854. Aquinas maintained that Mary was sanctified before her birth, but did not affirm that she was preserved from original sin from the first instant of conception. John Duns Scotus, by contrast, defended an account of her preservation through the merits of Christ. This was no minor disagreement: it reflected a controversy between two influential strands of medieval theology. A doctrine that is now considered binding on Roman Catholics was not articulated uniformly by the two most significant medieval theologians recognised by the Church.20
And this history becomes even more complicated when we turn to the matter of ecclesiastical authority. The Western Schism, beginning in 1378, divided the Western Church between rival papal claimants and, due to both political intrigue and good-faith attempts to resolve the matter, eventually led to a period of three rival papal contenders.21 At the Council of Constance (1414-1418), which sought to resolve this matter, the decree Haec Sancta asserted that a general council derived its authority directly from Christ, and that even the pope was bound to obey it on matters of faith and reform. While the authority and subsequent reception of that decree remain contested, its historical significance is unmistakable. The relationship that existed during the medieval period—and, indeed, going back to the Early Church—between papal and conciliar authority was the subject of profound medieval disagreement, and while it was the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-1517) that saw the decline of the conciliarist position, it was only Vatican I, in Pastor Aeternus (1870) that defined the pope’s supreme and immediate universal jurisdiction, together with his infallibility, granted under specified conditions.
Roman Catholic theologians can, of course, appeal to legitimate doctrinal development to account for these matters, and we cannot dismiss an argument simply because development has occurred; but nevertheless, the arguments for the historical primacy of Rome, as well as the ecclesiastical claims defined at Vatican I, are certainly not identical propositions. The latter cannot simply be assumed from the former. Likewise, it was the Council of Trent (1545-1563), the effectual Roman Catholic response to the Reformation, that oversaw a significant doctrinal consolidation of Roman Catholicism, pushing through very real theological differences that existed between the different orders that existed, such as the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits (among others), and even then it did not bring every debate to an end. The subsequent Dominican-Jesuit debates de auxiliis, concerning the interplay between grace and human freedom, provide evidence that institutional unity did not always entail theological uniformity.22
Something similar could be said of Eastern Orthodoxy. While its continuity with ancient Christianity is real, its history is hardly theologically immobile. The Byzantine iconoclastic controversies saw competing ecclesiastical judgements about images between the eighth and ninth centuries, culminating in the restoration of icon veneration in 843.23 In the fourteenth century, Gregory Palamas and his opponents disputed fundamental questions about God’s essence, His uncreated energies, and creatures’ participation in the divine life. Palamas’ position was hardly unanimous, and it was only after his position was vindicated through a series of Constantinopolitan synods, that it became deeply embedded within Orthodox theology.
Or consider the Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-1445), where much of the Greek episcopal delegation accepted reunion with Rome, with a concession on Roman primacy and the Filioque, only for the agreement to be rejected later in the Orthodox world. Here the question is not simply which bishops signed a particular decree, but how the church recognises an authoritative council and receives its theological judgements. Eastern Orthodox theologians have serious accounts of Holy Tradition and ecclesiastical reception. Yet, nevertheless, these accounts, like Rome’s magisterial claims, require their own historical and theological justification.
I remember being struck, while studying the patristic period at Macquarie University, by how complicated the early church itself was. The Fathers did not agree upon every theological question, any more than their medieval successors. And while neither Rome nor Eastern Orthodoxy maintain that every opinion of every Father is infallible, the question must be asked: when the Fathers disagree, by what standard is one interpretation received and another rejected? At what point does a particular theological judgement become binding upon the church, and by what authority is that judgement made? Appeals to antiquity and continuity do not, by themselves, answer those questions.
Beholding the God Who Has Spoken
None of this, of course, necessarily proves that Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy is false simply because theological controversies have occurred within their histories. Certainly, that would be a remarkably poor argument and one that could, with equal ease, be turned back against Protestantism. Rather, it establishes that neither tradition can resolve the question of theological authority merely by appealing to an allegedly unbroken consensus. Historical claims must be demonstrated, and ecclesiastical claims must be justified.
Most importantly, recovering classical Christian theism does not necessitate a return to Rome or Constantinople. To confess that God is simple, immutable, eternal, and triune is to confess profound truths concerning God. But does divine simplicity establish the universal jurisdiction or infallibility of the bishop of Rome? Does Nicene orthodoxy necessitate the Immaculate Conception? Does the patristic doctrine of God establish the obligation to venerate icons, or one particular account of ecclesiastical reception? None of these conclusions follows without further biblical, historical, and theological argument.
And here we return to the principia theologica. God Himself is the source of theology; His self-revelation, normatively given to His church in Holy Scripture, remains its infallible rule; and His Spirit enables us to receive that Word. The church’s inheritance is therefore neither to be dismissed, but neither is it to be enthroned. We should—no, we must receive it with humility, whilst refusing to confer upon our forefathers an authority that belongs to God alone.
Craig Carter is right to insist that ‘the purpose of theology is … to enable contemplation and worship of God while avoiding heresy’.24 That is worth remembering, particularly when theological retrieval itself can become another marker of ecclesiastical identity. The object is not to establish that Protestants have read more of the Fathers than their opponents, or to transform the doctrine of God into another argument to be battled and won on the internet. It is to know, to confess, and to worship the God who has graciously made Himself known in Jesus Christ.
Perhaps, then, what contemporary evangelicalism really needs is not another attempt to reinvent itself to remain relevant to the modern world, but a serious recovery of the theological and ecclesiastical inheritance it has too often ignored and neglected. Not because our forefathers were infallible, but because they too sought to understand the God who has spoken. The answer to the theological poverty of our time is not less Scripture, history, tradition, ecclesiology or metaphysics; it is to recover these things in their proper order—under the authority of God’s Word and fore the worship of His name. For at the beginning of theology stands neither Rome, Constantinople, nor even Geneva, but God Himself.
And it is this God whom we are called to behold.
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