Published: August 5, 2026 | thefinalconvergence.com
The final straw man. The charge that has perhaps the most emotional force of the three, because it sounds, at first hearing, like a genuine defense of something worth defending.
Biblicism dismisses the whole tradition. It treats two thousand years of Christian thought as worthless. It acts as if Christianity started with the individual reader this morning. It ignores the Great Tradition, the accumulated wisdom of the church, the interpreters who have gone before, and produces a rootless, ahistorical Christianity that is more susceptible to error, not less, because it has cut itself off from the community of believers across the centuries.
This charge, unlike the naivety charge and the anarchy charge, contains something genuinely true. The something true is important enough to name clearly before answering the charge. Because the charge fails, but it fails in a specific way that requires precision to identify.
“Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Paul tells the Thessalonians to hold the traditions. Not to dismiss them. Not to treat every generation’s reading as equally authoritative. To hold the traditions that were taught, the apostolic deposit faithfully delivered. Tradition as the accurate transmission of what was originally given. That tradition is worth holding. The question is not whether the tradition has value. The question is what kind of value it has, and what happens when that value is misconceived.
What the Charge Gets Right
The anti-tradition charge contains a genuine warning that the Biblicist must take seriously. The church’s accumulated engagement with the Scripture across twenty centuries is a genuine resource. The interpreters who have given their lives to understanding and expounding the biblical text, the patristic theologians, the medieval scholars, the Reformers, the post-Reformation biblical commentators, the nineteenth and twentieth-century exegetes, have produced insights, corrections, and clarifications that the individual reader ignores at their peril.
C.S. Lewis identified what he called “chronological snobbery”, the uncritical assumption that the ideas and readings of the present generation are superior to those of previous generations simply by virtue of being newer. The person who dismisses two thousand years of Christian thought on the grounds that they are reading the text freshly, without the tradition’s influence, is not demonstrating freedom from the tradition’s errors. They are demonstrating the specific blindness of their own cultural moment, a blindness that twenty-third century readers will identify with the same clarity that twenty-first century readers identify the blindnesses of the nineteenth century.
The Nicene Creed is the church’s careful, community-tested, Scripture-grounded formulation of theology, produced by men who had engaged the relevant biblical texts with the specific questions raised by controversy, drawing on exegetical resources and historical context that the individual twenty-first century reader does not independently possess. The person who dismisses the Nicene Creed on the grounds that they are “just reading the Bible” is not reading the Bible more carefully than the Nicene fathers. They are reading it with less historical and exegetical resource. These are real concerns. They are worth holding.
What the Charge Gets Wrong
The charge fails because it conflates two different relationships to tradition that must be carefully distinguished.
Tradition as a resource: The accumulated reading of the church as evidence for what the Scripture says, evidence that is weighty, that carries genuine epistemic force, that the honest Biblicist takes seriously and engages carefully. The tradition as a witness: this is how the church has consistently read this text across twenty centuries. Here is the evidence for why that reading is correct. Here are the places where the tradition’s consensus has been supported by careful exegetical work. Here are the places where the tradition’s consensus has been more contested.
Tradition as an authority: The accumulated reading of the church as the governing framework within which the Scripture must be interpreted, authoritative in the sense that readings outside the tradition’s consensus are suspect by virtue of being outside it, regardless of the textual argument. The tradition as the master: the church has read this text this way; therefore readings that differ from the church’s reading are wrong.
The Biblicist’s relationship to tradition is the first, not the second. And the anti-tradition charge mistakenly attributes the second to the Biblicist when the Biblicist actually holds the first.
The Reformers’ Actual Relationship to Tradition
The anti-tradition charge is most decisively answered by examining how the Reformers, the paradigmatic Biblicists of Days 6-10, actually used the tradition.
Calvin’s Institutes is saturated with patristic citation. Augustine appears on page after page. Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Cyprian — Calvin engages them extensively, uses them as evidence for his readings, and treats their consensus as a serious argument in favour of specific interpretations.
Luther’s engagement with the medieval tradition was deep and extensive before it became critical. He did not come to his Reformation convictions by ignoring the tradition. He came to them by engaging the tradition honestly and discovering, through that honest engagement, that the tradition had at specific points departed from the Word it was claiming to transmit.
The Reformers were not anti-tradition. They were against Tradition-as-co-authority, the specific elevation of the church’s accumulated reading to a position co-equal with or governing the Scripture. That is a very different thing from dismissing tradition as worthless.
The Biblicist reads the tradition. Engages with it. Uses it as evidence. Weighs the consensus seriously. And then brings it to the text, asking not whether the reading falls within the tradition’s consensus but whether the tradition’s consensus accurately represents what the text says.
What the Tradition Actually Says About Scripture
The anti-tradition charge, pushed to its conclusion, produces a precise irony: the tradition itself supports the Biblicist position on Scripture’s authority.
Athanasius — the hero of the Nicene controversy: “The holy and inspired Scriptures are sufficient of themselves for the preaching of the Truth.”
Augustine — the most cited theologian in the Western tradition: “I have learned to yield this respect and honour only to the canonical books of Scripture: of these alone do I most firmly believe that the authors were completely free from error…For all other writings, in reading them, however great the superiority of the authors to ordinary men, I do not accept their teaching as true on the mere ground of the opinion being held by them.”
Chrysostom — whose commentaries Calvin used extensively: “Let us not therefore carry about the notions of the many, but examine into the facts. The Scriptures are our rule.”
These are not Biblicists writing in isolation from the tradition. These are the tradition, the most significant figures in the patristic period, the men whose writings the confessional tradition itself cites as authoritative witnesses. And they held a doctrine of Scripture’s sufficiency and supreme authority that is closer to the Biblicist position than to the confessionalist position. The tradition’s own testimony, honestly examined, supports the Biblicist claim.
Where the Genuine Anti-Traditionalism Is Found
The genuinely anti-traditional movements are not those that hold the Scripture as the supreme authority. They are those that have departed from what the earliest church actually believed about Scripture, adding Magisterial authority, confessional authority, or ongoing revelatory authority to the Word.
The NAR movement that claims new apostolic and prophetic revelation is genuinely anti-traditional, the early church did not hold that prophetic authority continued beyond the apostolic generation, and the movement’s claim for ongoing revelation departs from the patristic consensus on canon closure.
The progressive Christian movement that revises the Scripture’s teaching through cultural hermeneutics is genuinely anti-traditional, the early church did not read the ethical teaching of the New Testament as culturally conditioned in the way progressive Christianity requires.
The Roman Catholic claim that the Magisterium holds a co-equal authority with Scripture in defining binding doctrine is not a patristic position. Augustine’s statement above makes clear that he did not treat any human authority, including his own, as co-authoritative with the Scripture. The Magisterial claim is a development, not a recovery.
The Biblicist is not departing from the tradition. The Biblicist is recovering what the tradition, in its earliest and most scripturally formed expressions, actually believed about the authority and sufficiency of the Word.
Holding the Traditions That Were Taught
Paul’s instruction to the Thessalonians, hold the traditions which ye have been taught, names the tradition that is worth holding: the apostolically delivered tradition, the faithful transmission of what was originally given, the deposit that the Scripture both records and governs.
That tradition is worth holding. Not as a co-authority with the Scripture, Paul’s own instruction is that the standard against which traditions are evaluated is the Scripture itself (1 Corinthians 4:6). But as the accumulated wisdom of the church in its engagement with the Word, weighty as evidence, valuable as resource, honest about its own fallibility.
The Biblicist holds the traditions that were taught. They simply refuse to elevate those traditions to the authority of the Word that taught them. That is not anti-traditionalism. That is the most consistently traditional position available, the position of Athanasius, Augustine, Chrysostom, and the men the confessional tradition cites as its own authorities.
Tomorrow, Day 19, the series enters its fourth major section. The Holy Spirit, scholarship, and the real authority problem.
“Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.” — 2 Thessalonians 2:15 KJV
📖 This post is adapted from Biblicism: The Faith Once Delivered. If it helped you, the full book is available on Amazon — or you can support this ministry directly.
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