How should I respond when a friend places church tradition above Scripture?

Aaron Aaron writes in I have a friend that’s been to an Orthodox church over the past few months. My attempts to reason with him on the foundation of Scripture has been fruitless because of what the church has told him, because the traditions of Orthodox faith basically usurping Scripture.

How would you go about trying to reason with such a person if he can’t find an agreed foundation on Scripture? To start with, Aaron, you’re completely in a totally understandable place of being frustrated and stymied by someone who has been told that what really what we need is to stand in the long tradition of the Orthodox Church. As they put it, Orthodox means straight or right.

This is the the Orthodox Church, as we call it today, the Eastern Orthodox or the Russian Orthodox. Plenty of Orthodox churches that will always say what the tradition of the church says, and even how they treated Scripture far more important than than us. Just trying to be Johnny come lately here in the 21st century, or even, you know, the 19th century of the 20th century, trying to say what the Bible means, because we really should be standing with our our brothers back in the second century, third century, fourth century.

And all I’ve got to say is to someone like that. Well, I am always going to go with the clarity of Scripture, and I’m happy to disregard what they might have taught in the second century, third century, or what the tradition of the church was, because God has spoken in His Word. And Psalm 119 has made clear the longest chapter in all the Bible, that this is where I go for the truth.

I don’t look back and say, well, what did they think about this in previous generations? Well, then that’s going to trump everything I see right before my eyes. I have no problem standing on the shoulders of people that have gone before me to try and understand the Scripture. But Aaron, you’re saying exactly what I’ve experienced with people who’ve done the same thing your friend has done, and that is they’ve hopped over to the Orthodox Church and they’ve said, well, now, you know, we’re going to downplay what you’ve told me the Bible teaches, because I can’t be dogmatic on that, because that’s not the way they saw it in the early church.

And I can show you matter of fact, I would invite people to read what we have available. We have volumes and volumes available. Philip Shaft is the probably the definitive work. He edited the ten volumes that precede the Nicene Council in the fourth century. So the first, you know, 320 years of the church, 300 years of the church.

You’ve got all these sermons and all this teaching. And if you just go through that, it’s a lot of material, but you’ll see many things you’re going to say, well, I can see clearly in the text of Scripture that if you really look at all the New Testament says, it doesn’t comport with what they were teaching here in Antioch at this particular time or in this particular church and in, you know, Constantinople or whatever you’re going to say, no, I’m happy to disagree with the early church teachings.

Just because it’s old doesn’t make it make it right. And Aaron, I just I guess I just point out those things and they’re still going to say, well, I’m going to stand with my ancient brothers, and I’ve been exactly where you’re at, Aaron. And that unfortunately leaves you stymied and frustrated because you can’t win. It’s a lot like Catholicism in the sense that they’re going to say, not only is the tradition of the church authoritative, but now this set of group of guys, the magisterial leadership of the church in Rome, they’re going to tell us what to what to know and what to do and what to think.

It’s a lot like other groups, if you think about it today, they watch Tower Track Society or looking to what happened in the Brigham Young or, or Joseph Smith period of, of, you know, Pearl of great price and all that was written. Here’s our proper understanding. Or as Mayor Baker said, here’s the here’s the keys to the scriptures right here.

I’m going to tell you what it is. And we can’t look at the Bible ourselves. And that was why the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago was so helpful in saying that the Scripture can be understood by the plow boy, and we just got to get it in his language to be able to make sense of it. Because if it’s locked away with scholarly languages and we can’t read in our own language, we’re going to struggle.

That’s why Martin Luther works so hard to translate the Bible into the native language of his people, into German. And we find, you know, Tyndale and Wickliffe and all those great forerunners of giving us the Bible in our language, which eventually culminated in the Hampton Court and in the King James Bible that was authorized before that, the Geneva Bible.

But when we finally got the Bible in our language, I say our language in English, speaking from our perspective, or if you’re a German and German or whatever you might have gotten your Bible in, you could finally say, is the priest writers, the priest’s not right. And then we can say, in essence, the same thing to the Orthodox, well, is the church history right about this, that or the other?

And there are plenty of topics that I think it’s not hard, as you read through the first 300 years of church teaching, sometimes you’ll say that’s not quite right. And that’s why a lot of times the councils kept coming together and saying, wait a minute, we don’t like what you’re saying here because it doesn’t comport with all of Scripture, and we have a council that would straighten it out.

And so we have to dismiss a lot of what was said ahead of time. If they didn’t deal with the totality of scriptural data and stated accurately and put it all into to the consideration before I say something about the Trinity or Christ or the nature of Christ, or whatever it might be. So yeah, Aaron, I wish I had better hope for you in that, but I’ve been there myself.

Even I’m thinking of one guy in particular I knew really well, and after he had been for a few months to the Orthodox Church, I couldn’t reason with him any longer because he had decided where his authority was, and it wasn’t any longer going to be with us. Sitting down with an open Bible and discussing what the Bible says, which ultimately I know is an offense to someone.

If you’re Orthodox, you’re thinking, that’s not what we do. That’s that certainly is what happens. The shift in authority, just like the Roman Catholics will say. We have three authorities, the magisterial authority of the church. We have the tradition and we have the Bible. And they’ll say it this way in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, they will say, you cannot have one without the other.

You got to have all three of them in like three, you know, legs on a tripod. If you don’t have them, we don’t have the truth. And I’m going to say with the reformers, sola scriptura, I think we have the truth. If we have a Bible in our hand, and will there be some interpretive debates? We’ll sure there will.

But when it comes to things that are crystal clear in the Scripture about our salvation, about repentance and faith and salvation by grace, all these things that we stand on and certainly were fought about 500 years ago, they are as clear as they can be. All right.