Layers of Tradition: Reclaiming the Quadrilateral

From the very beginning of the Protestant Reformation, its rallying cry was sola scriptura, the interpretive principle that the church’s doctrine should be based upon Scripture alone. In its original form, it was an assertion that the Roman Catholic Church’s appeals to authorities outside of Scripture were invalid. Later, the Council of Trent would react against this and declare that Roman Catholic tradition held a parallel authority to Scripture. But the Reformers did not argue for nuda scriptura, or “naked Scripture,” bereft of any context. Luther and Calvin both appealed to the Early Church Fathers of the first 500 years in making their cases against Roman Catholic excesses and abuses.

The Anglican “three-legged stool” of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason popularized by theologian Richard Hooker made explicit what is implicit in all other theological methods. This three-legged stool acknowledged the sole authority of Scripture itself, but it explicitly declared that Scripture had to be interpreted by Tradition—what Wesley and others have called “Christian antiquity,” namely the consensus teachings of the early church before roughly 500 AD—and Reason. The Anglicans recognized that there were unspoken assumptions in the theological methods of both the Continental Reformers and the Roman Catholics: each appealed to something other than just Scripture apart from any context. 

In the Reformers’ case, this meant appeals to the writings of the Early Church Fathers, particularly St Augustine of Hippo. For the Roman Catholics, it was more explicitly stated in the Council of Trent’s proclamation that “unwritten” tradition held a place of equal importance alongside Scripture. The Anglicans recognized that even from the time of the early church, the church utilized other tools than Scripture itself in order to interpret Scripture. In recognizing these implicit tools, Anglicanism made these tools explicit—where the tools were assumed before, now they were declared plainly.

In his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker had set out a theological method that rejected Puritans’ insistence on using Scripture as a handbook of answers without context, as well as Roman Catholic excesses and abuses. He instead emphasized the authority of Scripture alongside a strong connection to the early church as authoritative interpreters of the Bible. By Wesley’s day, Hooker’s perspective had become widespread, and Wesley himself referenced him approvingly. John Wesley’s collection of devotional classics, “A Christian Library” (1750) included a volume on Richard Hooker, and he had even quoted Hooker in a defense of religious feeling (“enthusiasm”): “But then remember, ‘that Scripture’ (to use the words which you cite from ‘our learned and judicious Hooker’) ‘is not the only rule of all things, which, in this life, may be done by men." (“The Principles of a Methodist Farther Explained,” Works 449-50). As Richard Heitzenrater writes in Wesley and the People Called Methodist,

By the eighteenth century, Hooker was a standard authority. Samuel Wesley’s Advice to a Young Clergyman (1735) assumes that any aspiring cleric will be well-grounded in Hooker, and John Wesley’s own framework for authority owes an obvious debt to the Hookerian perspective that had become pervasive by his day. (10)

Tradition and the Experience of Conversion

In addition to the Anglican “three-legged stool” of Scripture, the writings of the Early Church Fathers, and reason, Wesleyan theology has expanded to include Experience as a separate consideration in interpretation. In the sense of Biblical interpretation, Experience is often misunderstood to mean “my own personal experience”: the social, political, cultural, and temporal place in which an individual dwells and from which they seek to make sense of their environment. Modern Liberal Protestants within Methodism thus speak of the experience of being born of a particular race, sex, gender identity, socio-economic status, and sexual self-identification. But this Liberal Protestant appropriation of the Experience criterion of the Wesleyan hermeneutic is actually a misappropriation. Wesley’s view of “experience” was not about the personalized, individualistic lens through which someone might be inclined to interact with the world and to make sense of it. Instead, it was specifically about the experience of being assured that one was a son or daughter of God by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that God had justified him or her through faith in Jesus Christ.

Wesley felt compelled to add to his own Anglican heritage’s three-legged stool because Anglicanism’s hermeneutic did not have a place for conversion. But Wesley believed that if faith was real, it had to be more than mere intellectual assent: it had to be felt. As a result, he said that for a teaching to be true, it had to correspond to the experience of the regenerated Christian. But in a very real sense, Wesley’s inclusion of Experience flowed directly out of the Anglican hermeneutic’s Tradition “leg.” To ascribe authority to the early church’s tradition, or teachings, was to ascribe authority to the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church as the ultimate resource of authority. The church, being taught by God, would speak what God had taught throughout the centuries, that is, the church’s Tradition. But the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church is not a faceless institution, nor is it an ecclesial bureaucracy. Instead, the church is the community of those who have been regenerated, or born-again, by the Holy Spirit. 

The church is the primary interpreter of Scripture, because God’s self-revelation is both entrusted to her care and directed primarily at her, but the “basic unit” of the church is that of the individual, regenerated Christian—not just those who simply self-identify as Christian. Because the true church is a community of regenerated individuals, it is that community of regenerated individuals who, as they interpret Scripture, form the teachings that the church, as the people of God, promulgates and passes down to subsequent generations as “tradition” (which by its very etymology means “to pass down” or “to hand over”). 

But not everything taught by someone claiming to be regenerate is actually the teaching of the church, nor is it all true. Throughout history, there have been many people who claimed to be Christian, and who have claimed to speak for God, to prophesy by the Holy Spirit. Those who have claimed to prophesy have often taught doctrines which opposed and contradicted other persons who claimed to speak for God. From the beginning, the church has had to sort out which teachings to pass down as her own, which is the realm of apologetics (and polemics).

Reason, the Viceroy

Even as early as the second and third centuries, men such as St Justin Martyr, Origen, and St Irenaeus utilized reason to defend the Christian faith against those who would teach contrary doctrines or who did not recognize the church’s teaching authority. Human reason is certainly fallible, and the early Christian apologists recognized this as much as anyone in the centuries to follow. Reason can be faulty: as Anglican priest and poet John Donne wrote, “Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend / But is captived, and proves weak or untrue” (Holy Sonnet XIV). But reason itself is tradition-based.

Reason is part of what it means to be made in the image of God, and still serves as a valuable tool in discerning what to teach as true. But it also derives from handed-down (“traditional”) patterns of thought and logic that are not universal. As Duane Elmer describes in his book Cross-Cultural Connections, Asians and Africans often seem to frustrate the Western sense of logic. He describes one of his former students, a Korean named Daniel, who once asked him for advice.

On one occasion he asked if I wanted to take a drive up to the bluff overlooking the bay. Since I had come from the flatlands of Illinois, new scenery seemed a great idea. As we drove slowly to the destination, Daniel began to talk, vaguely and, from my perspective, without a clear point. It started out with his church, moved on to his ministry with the college group, what he was doing, who was attending and what was happening or not happening.

About forty minutes later and at the top of the bluff overlooking Long Island Sound, I got the first clue of what this was all about. Daniel said, “Do you think it is appropriate for someone in a pastoral position to date someone in the church?” In my get-to-the-point way I said, “Daniel, you are the college pastor. Are you interested in dating someone in your college group?” My bluntness caused him to falter for a moment, but then he agreed that was the case. (151)

Elmer then goes on to describe the Asian approach to this delicate issue as being similar to an onion (one slowly peels off each layer until one gets to the core issue) or a spiral (one works from the outside and slowly winds toward the central concern). This allows the Asian person to gauge his or her conversational partner’s interest in the topic, as well as to “feel out” the conversational partner’s views. In the end, for the Asian, the oblique or “curved” way of presenting the issue allows him or her to break off the conversation without having exposed the core issue if s/he decided, based upon the conversational partner’s responses, that the Asian did not trust the partner with the issue. The recognition that even our methods of logic and reason are tradition-based is important because it points back to the church as the primary interpreter of Scripture. Eastern logic is not Western logic, nor is Western logic the logic utilized by Africans or Hispanics. Reason is thus a valuable aid, but it is deficient by itself and its authority must be shored up by other sources of interpretive authority.

Wesley’s “Anglican plus conversion experience” hermeneutic was coined the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” by Albert Outler (a coining he later expressed regret to have made), but it is ultimately a refining of Anglicanism’s most common hermeneutical principle. There is a close-knit interplay between the four “legs” that make up Wesley’s refined Anglican hermeneutic. The church’s Tradition is the collection of approved interpretations and teachings which have been presented by individuals and confirmed by multiple members of the church. Where there are questions about a teaching or interpretation’s authenticity or applicability, human Reason enables the individual members of the church to discern the interpretation or teaching’s truthfulness, enabling members of the church to confirm that interpretation or teaching’s place in the church’s Tradition. 

Membership in the invisible church and in visible church organizations (whether referred to as denominations, in Protestant fashion, or as communions, as others prefer) are not synonymous. Because of this, the Experience of assurance, or the witness of the Holy Spirit, must be used as a criterion for inclusion in the teaching authority of the church. What is called by many theologians “the internal witness of the Spirit” is called Experience in the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Although Reason helps to prove that the Bible’s message is reliable, it is insufficient to the task of showing the validity of the Christian faith. Instead, the final proof of Christianity’s truthfulness comes through the witness of the Holy Spirit.

A person can claim to have this internal witness falsely, so it becomes important to both the church as a whole and to the individual members that this internal experience is matched by the external signs of new life. The internal witness is confirmed by the external exhibition of the fruit of the Spirit, which enables the church to determine the truth of the claims to membership, and thus of claims to having a part in the church’s authority to discern doctrine. If we look to the Roman Catholic Church as an analogy, we could say that each person who claims the internal witness and externally exhibits the fruit of the Spirit is a member of the Magisterium, the body which determines what teachings will be handed down by the church.

Scripture the True Rule

Ultimately, the Experience of assurance and the utilization of Reason are subordinate to Tradition, and are themselves tradition-based. The church’s Tradition, whether in doctrine or in interpretation, carries the weight of the church’s authority as the Body of Christ who is sent out into the world by God, who is taught by God, and to whom the Scriptures themselves are addressed—and Scripture itself is the source of authority as the written Word of God. Reason’s role is to help verify a particular interpretation or teaching’s place within the church’s Tradition, acting as a gatekeeper with regard to what will be admitted into Tradition. 

The role of Experience is not to offer cover for viewpoints contrary to Scripture under the guise that the Scriptures do not match the person’s circumstances or personal experience. Instead, Experience establishes precisely whose reasoning will be considered genuine and worthy of inclusion in the determination of what constitutes Tradition. The issue of theological method comes down to one question: “Whose tradition?” 

Especially when we define Tradition as “the consensus of the first five hundred years,” Tradition becomes a life-giving link to the time period during which Christianity’s core doctrines and conclusions were hammered out in the unity for which Jesus prayed in John 17. In fact, we can look to Tradition, or the teachings which have been passed down through the centuries, as a vital link not just to the time period of the formation of Christian orthodoxy, but also a spiritual bond to the apostles themselves, and through them, the Triune God himself (“we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ,” 1 John 1:3). Scripture itself is apostolic tradition, the teachings received from the Apostles and handed on to other believers who eventually recorded them in written form. The church values Scripture in part for its connection to the Apostles, and through them, its connections to Jesus Christ himself.

So do we place authority with the church, the people of God who have been regenerated and who are in communion with God? Or do we place it outside the church, with those who utilize various other traditions to determine their place in the world and how they interact with the biblical text? For faithful Christians, the answer is never in denying tradition, but instead looking to the church’s own tradition—Scripture as interpreted by faithful witnesses in times past and present.

James Mahoney is an ordained Elder in the Western States Annual Conference of the Global Methodist Church.