Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants

Anglican Theological Review, Spring 2001 by Vivian, Tim

Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants. By D. H. Williams. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999. ix 243 pp. $16.00 (paper).

It's dangerous to review a book of historical theology that confirms your most deeply held beliefs as it forcefully corrects the beliefs of others that you have long held to be misguided and erroneous. Smugness should be the First Deadly Sin of the book reviewer. With that confession, this sinner highly recommends Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism as a clear defense and impassioned advocacy of Tradition in the Church, especially in conversation with Evangelical or Free Church denominations that have rejected and even vilified Church Tradition in favor of a supposedly "Biblebased" theology, liturgy, and ecclesiology.

Williams, a Baptist pastor and professor of patristics and historical theology at Loyola University of Chicago, bravely tells Evangelical Protestants that most of their historians, theologians, and pastors, in ignoring the patristic and conciliar foundations of the Church (Tradition with a capital "T"), have built their own increasingly splintered (p. 208) churches on precariously shifting sands (p. 217). To counter this mistake, the author proposes that Evangelicals "integrate the serious study of patristics . . . into current theological reflections of evangelicalism" (p. 4) and urges that "the path of renewal for evangelicalism must happen through an intentional recovery of its catholic roots in the church's early spirituality and theology" (p. 16).

Williams' call for a recovery of the Church's catholic traditions by Evangelicals is not prompted by mere nostalgia but by a sincere concern that modern Protestantism has replaced "the tyranny of the [Roman Catholic] magisterium with the tyranny of individualism" (p. 201) and that "the traditionless and noncredal approach...lacks the centripetal force" necessary to ward off its "tendency toward fragmentation" (p. 208). He places Tradition in opposition to "a kind of religion that is so infatuated with contemporization and self-fulfillment" that it is "tantamount to spiritual idolatry" (p. 216). Without referring to it, therefore, Williams is seated firmly on the venerable three-legged Anglican stool of scripture, tradition, and reason.

In Chapter 1, "Rediscovering the Church's Tradition," Williams urges that "there is no way one can remain faithful to the gospel without learning how the [Early Church] Fathers defended it, without sharing in their struggles to formulate it" (p. 13). In Chapter 2, "The Earliest Formation of the Christian Tradition," the author shows how tradition preceded the New Testament and is witnessed to by New Testament documents, something that will not come as a surprise to readers of this journal but will undoubtedly be a revelation to many Protestant Evangelicals, Williams' primary audience (p. 1). Chapter 3, "Defining and Defending the Tradition," covers the symbiotic relationship between Scripture and the Rule of Faith in the Early Church and demonstrates how "Scripture was not sufficient alone" and needed Tradition. In Chapter 4, "The Corruption of the Church and its Tradition," Williams severely critiques the Protestant tenet of a "fall" of the Church (variously dated) and its "restitution" at the time of the Reformation. There was no ecclesiastical "fall"; the Church's Tradition continued on through its bishops, councils, and creeds, all of which Williams vigorously defends in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, "Scripture and Tradition in the Reformation," the author argues that "the Reformation was not about Scripture versus tradition but [rather was] about reclaiming the ancient Tradition against distortions of that Tradition" (p. 176).

Perhaps Williams' most fruitful suggestion finally is that "patristic Christianity offers a coherent and faithful ecumenicity that provides 'roots' of identity" (p. 139), not only for Evangelical Protestants but also for Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox. The Episcopal Church is now in communion with the Lutheran Church in America and is continuing discussions with the Presbyterians, Orthodox, and Roman Catholics, while the National Council of Churches and the National Association of Evangelicals talk of uniting. May books like the one under review here help all of us find our common roots together in Bible and Tradition.

TIM VIVIAN

St. Paul's Episcopal Parish Bakersfield, Caliornia