It's no secret that many Evangelical Christians have a deep love for the Bible.
Early in my Christian walk, I attended a Friday night "Journey group" wherin members of a local unaffiliated Evangleical Church and a typically southern mix of Baptists and the token Methodist would gather to study their pastor's Sunday sermon, the contents of which were posted on the church's website along with a series of study questions. We were challenged to apply the themes in the sermon to our own lives as followers of Christ and the Bible was necissarily the primary study tool. Every single person I studied with had a deep reverence for scripture.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1:1)
We all know the verse. What struck me one night as I read that passage was that I was holding in my hand a book which contained (what I was told was) the singular and complete revelation of God to man. Reading John 1:1 in light of that revelation put me in awe and along with my Evangelical friends, I fell in love with the Bible that night. One of the ladies with whome I studied had a habit of moving her hand back and forth across the page as she read. I thought her motion was a nervious habit but I realized then that she was caressing the words, and I understood why.
With time and prayer comes clarity.
A basic education in Biblical history shows that the Church was born, at the latest, on Pentacost in the year 33 AD and that the first book of the New Testament was written ten years subsequent to Pentacost at a minimum. Simply put, the Church existed for at least ten years before a single word of the New Testament had been written. It's not unreasonablwe to ask what these very first Christians did without the Bible, which as I was told by my Evangelical sisters and brothers in Christ, was the singluar and complete revelation of God to man. The argument can in fact, be made that the written word of God was not needed because the Apostles were still alive. That is not debated here.
You have nullified the word of God for the sake of your tradition. (Matthew 15:6)
The Catholic concept of Sacred Tradtion - a body of knowledge outside of the Bible handed on orally - as being a genuine part of God's revelation to man is often condemned by many non-Catholics with the passage above supplied as proof. Whether the written word of God was needed while the Apostles were still alive is not the point. The idea that Jesus' condemnation of the Pharisee's hipocrisy somehow extends to the oral teaching of God's revelation, given in its fullness to the twelve Apostles and then handed on by the Apostles to those whom the Apostles themselves taught and comissioned to teach on their behalf - that is the point, but the facts simply don't support the claim. God's revelation to man was handed on exclusivly through a tradition of oral teaching or the first ten years of the Church's existence. Tradition - with a capital T - was the standard of religious teaching at the time.
The consensus among scripture scholars is that the book of Revelation was written by St. John towards the end of his life, some time around 90 AD. Recent Scholarship indicates that 2 Peter may have been written by one of Peter's proteges as late as 120 AD. Either way, the New Testament was not completely written until at least 57 years after Pentacost and prehapse as late as 87 years after the birth of the Church. Any insistance that the Bible alone is the sole source of God's revelation to man begs the question of what the early Christians did for half a century until the Bible was complete? At a very pragmatic level, Sacred Tradition actually makes a lot of sense in a world where being caught in posession of Christian documents meant having your hands and feet sawed off or being burned alive.
Consider the fact that what constituted the inspired word of God was argued about among Christians for another 250 to 300 years. It was not until the late 300's AD that the Christian world agreed what books were supposed to be in the Bible and which were not. The word "Bible" (biblios) itself was not used until the late fourth century. Bibles were scarce throughout the majority of Christian history, having to be transcribed by hand until the advent of the printing press in 1433. Even then, the majority of humans on earth were unable to read through the 1700's (1). If the Bible alone is the complete revelation of God to man, how was the faith passed on to ordinary Christians like you and I through eighteen centuries or Christianity? How did the faith survive? The answer is through oral traidtion; through Sacred Tradition.
Yes, Sacred Scripture is the inspired word of God, breathed by the Holy Spirit through human authors. Yes, the Bible is God's revelation to man. But is the Bible the sum total of all revelation? Is it complete?
But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. (John 21:25)
The Bible itself could not be clearer. Not everything Christian is in the Bible.
My Evangelical friends gave me a deep love for Sacred Scripture. I pray for them regularly and give thanks to God for putting them in my life. But with all due respect, and I'm sure some of them will see this statement as near blasphemy, only some of what was revealed in fullness by Jesus to the twelve Apostles was actually written down. The rest of God's revelation, those things which the world could not contain were every one of them to be written can be found in Sacred Tradition.
-Tim-
References
(1) Historical World Literacy Statistics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy
(C) 2001 Timothy L. Hollingworth
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