Correction: Scripture taken as a whole provides the apostolic faith.
No it doesn't. Not everything that Jesus and the first Christians believed and did is recorded in Scripture. The communities that produced the texts of the New Testament are in a far better position to interpret those texts not simply because they lived in that context (a common but mediocre claim), but because the Scriptures were written for specific communities to be performed in those communities.
Forget the Pauline epistles for a minute. Check out the gospels. The gospels are
performance pieces, meant to be spoken aloud. Just go on youtube and look up Marks's Gospel on Stage. It takes about an hour and a half to perform the whole thing (similar to ancient plays) and you get a lot more of the dynamism and humor and tragedy in the text through seeing it performed.
The churches for whom it was written saw it performed, and those performances continued down through generations. Those performances were interpretive, through gesture, intonation, tension, and pathos, in a way our study of Scripture centuries later cannot be.
The continuity of the gospel-writing communities and the gospel-performing communities and the gospel-reading communities of early Christianity doesn't mean that meanings couldn't change and shift over time. However, it does mean that the burden of proof is on
us when we interpret Scripture and the faith against the general thrust of the earliest fathers, especially those who were trained by the apostles and those writings that come from apostolic communities: Clement, the Didache, Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Hippolytus.
I'm
not saying that we can't hold views on Scripture that contradict the church fathers, even the earliest church fathers. What I am saying is that if we want to hold an interpretation of Scripture or the faith that differs from the earliest fathers, we need to not only mount an exegetical case, but we need to mount a historical case in order to demonstrate where exactly their line of continuity broke off.
Allow me to repeat that: If we want to hold an interpretation of Scripture or the faith that differs from the earliest fathers (and we may), we need not only to try and show why our interpretation is legitimate on biblical grounds, but also why theirs is not on historical grounds.
I think Lutherans and Anglicans have done a pretty good job of doing exactly this sort of research. I think Protestants, on the other hand, have not. They have either retreated into the slogan
sola scriptura as a cover for a reading of Scriptural that regards only the prior historical context of the text, and not its reception history, or have just thrown out Constantine as a catch-all excuse (despite the fact that the doctrines that Protestants find so objectionable- the monarchical episcopacy and the regenerative objectivity of the sacraments- were both fully formed a hundred years before Constantine's conversion).
That's my case, and it's how we ought to do counter-traditional theology.
