What Is the Relationship Between Scripture and Church Tradition?

Question 1035.

Scripture and tradition are not enemies, whatever the sharper edges of Reformation rhetoric sometimes suggest. Tradition, rightly understood, is simply the accumulated memory of how the church has read, defended, and lived out Scripture across two thousand years. The question is not whether tradition matters. It plainly does. The question is which one governs when the two appear to disagree, and on that question I have no doubt.

This is not an abstract puzzle for theologians alone. Every Christian inherits a tradition, whether a denominational one, a family one, or simply the assumptions absorbed from whichever church first taught them the Bible. Learning to distinguish that inherited tradition from Scripture itself is one of the most practically useful skills a believer can develop.

What Tradition Actually Is

Tradition, in the broadest sense, is anything handed down: creeds, confessions, liturgical practice, denominational custom, and the informal habits of a particular church culture. Some of this is ancient and carefully reasoned, forged in the fires of real controversy, such as the Nicene definition of the Trinity. Some of it is much newer and far more accidental, the product of one influential preacher’s preferences becoming, over a generation or two, assumed to be biblical when they were never more than local custom.

Paul himself uses the word tradition positively in places. In 2 Thessalonians 2:15 he tells believers to stand firm and hold to the traditions they were taught, whether by spoken word or by letter. In that context, tradition means apostolic teaching, which is to say, Scripture in either its written or its as-yet-unwritten oral form. That is a very different thing from centuries of accumulated later custom, and conflating the two is where much of the confusion in this debate begins.

Where Scripture and Tradition Diverge

Jesus Himself confronted a version of this problem directly. The Pharisees had built an entire system of oral tradition around the written law, and in some cases that tradition had come to function as though it carried equal or even superior authority to the text it claimed to explain. Jesus did not treat all tradition as automatically corrupt, but He drew a hard line where tradition had begun to nullify the very commandment it claimed to honour.

That is the test I apply. Does a given tradition illuminate Scripture, drawing out what is already there and helping believers see and obey it more clearly? Or has the tradition quietly become a substitute for Scripture, adding requirements the text never makes or excusing behaviour the text never permits? The first kind of tradition is a gift. The second kind is precisely what Jesus confronted in Mark chapter 7.

The Value of the Historic Creeds

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy for this article to sound dismissive of tradition altogether, and that is not my position. The great creeds, Nicaea, Chalcedon, and the confessions that followed the Reformation, represent extraordinarily careful, Scripture-saturated labour by believers defending the faith against real and serious error. When I affirm the Trinity or the two natures of Christ in the words those councils used, I am not appealing to their authority instead of Scripture’s. I am using language that centuries of careful biblical study refined, precisely because it captures what Scripture teaches with a clarity that guards against errors that have recurred again and again across church history.

Reading Scripture entirely without reference to how believers before us have understood it is not humility. It is a kind of arrogance dressed up as freshness, and it tends to repeat heresies the church has already named and answered centuries ago. A wise use of tradition treats it as a set of guardrails built by people who studied the same text, not as a rival source standing over the text.

When a Tradition Must Be Corrected

History supplies plenty of examples where a long-held tradition had to be corrected by a return to the text. Indulgences, the veneration of relics, and the doctrine of purgatory all developed as traditions with genuine sincerity behind them, and all of them, on examination, cannot be sustained from Scripture itself. The Reformation was, at its heart, an exercise in exactly this discipline: not the invention of a new religion, but the stripping away of accumulated tradition that had obscured what the text had said all along.

This is uncomfortable work, because tradition is often bound up with family loyalty, denominational identity, and personal affection for the people who taught it to us. Correcting a cherished tradition can feel like betraying the people who handed it to us. But love for those people is better served by honesty about what Scripture actually says than by preserving a comfortable inheritance at the expense of truth.

A Case Study: The Assumption of Mary

Concrete examples make this easier to see than abstract principle alone. The doctrine of the bodily assumption of Mary, formally defined by Rome only in 1950, illustrates the danger clearly. The doctrine has no basis in Scripture whatsoever, not even an implicit one; it rests entirely on tradition that developed centuries after the apostolic era and was eventually elevated to the status of required belief. When Scripture and tradition diverge this completely, with tradition alone bearing the entire weight of a doctrine Scripture never mentions, the tradition cannot be treated as carrying authority equal to the text.

I raise this not to be needlessly polemical but because it demonstrates, in an unusually clear case, exactly the danger I have been describing throughout this article. A tradition that begins as pious reflection can, given enough time and enough institutional weight behind it, come to be treated as though it were itself revealed truth. Scripture and tradition were never meant to function that way in relation to one another.

Protestant Traditions Are Not Immune

It would be convenient, but dishonest, to treat this as a problem confined to Roman Catholicism. Protestant traditions, including my own dispensational, Baptist tradition, accumulate customs and assumptions that can quietly acquire the same functional authority Scripture alone should carry. A particular view of church governance, a particular style of worship, a particular set of assumptions about how evangelism ought to be conducted, all can become, within a given tradition, nearly as unquestionable as Scripture itself, even though none of them carries anything like the same warrant.

I try to hold my own tradition, dispensationalism included, to the same standard I apply to traditions I disagree with. Dispensationalism is, in my judgement, the reading of Scripture that best accounts for the distinction between Israel and the church and for the plain sense of prophetic texts. But it remains a system built from careful study of the text, not a revelation alongside it, and I would abandon any part of it the moment I became convinced Scripture itself required something different.

Oral Tradition Before the Written Text

It is worth noting that for a period, particularly in the earliest years of the church, oral apostolic teaching functioned alongside and sometimes ahead of written Scripture, since not every book of the New Testament had yet been written or widely circulated. Paul explicitly commends both spoken and written tradition in 2 Thessalonians 2:15. This period of overlap does not undermine sola Scriptura. It simply reflects the reality that revelation was still being given and completed. Once the canon closed, this category of authoritative apostolic oral tradition closed with it. What remains today is ordinary church tradition, which carries a different, lesser kind of authority entirely.

How I Use Tradition in My Own Preparation

Practically, when I prepare to preach or write on a text, I read what the church has said about it across history alongside my own study of the Hebrew or Greek. Commentaries from the Reformation era, the church fathers on genuinely disputed texts, and contemporary dispensational scholars all inform my thinking. But every one of these voices is treated as a conversation partner to be weighed against the text, not a verdict to be accepted uncritically. When a respected voice from church history reaches a conclusion I cannot square with the text itself, I follow the text, even when that means disagreeing with writers I otherwise deeply respect.

This is, I think, exactly the balance the two were always meant to strike: church history informing and enriching how the text is read, without ever being permitted to overrule what the text itself plainly says.

The Reformation as Tradition Correcting Tradition

There is a genuine irony worth noticing: the Reformers did not reject tradition wholesale. They frequently appealed to earlier church tradition, particularly Augustine, against the more recent medieval tradition they were opposing. Luther and Calvin both saw themselves as recovering an older, more biblical tradition against a newer one that had drifted from Scripture. This matters because it shows that the relationship is not simply a binary of accepting or rejecting the past altogether. It is a matter of testing every custom, ancient or recent, against the text, and being willing to prefer an older habit over a newer one, or neither, whenever the text requires it.

This is a more demanding discipline than either blind traditionalism or blanket rejection of the past. It requires actually knowing what the inheritance says, actually knowing what Scripture says, and doing the patient work of comparing the two honestly, case by case, rather than adopting a simple rule that settles every question in advance.

Tradition as a Teaching Tool for New Believers

I want to end this section with something more encouraging than warning, because a good inheritance, used well, is one of the church’s great gifts to new believers. A new Christian handed only a Bible and no guidance whatsoever is, in practice, far more vulnerable to serious error than one who is also taught the church’s historic, tested summary of what Scripture teaches on the Trinity, the person of Christ, and the nature of salvation. Good custom functions as a set of handrails for someone still learning to walk the text confidently on their own.

The goal, over time, is for that believer to grow into the ability to test the inheritance against Scripture for themselves, not to remain dependent on it indefinitely without ever examining it. A habit that produces mature, Scripture-testing believers has done its job well. One that produces believers who cannot distinguish the custom from the Bible itself has, however unintentionally, obscured the very authority it was meant to serve.

Where This Leaves the Ordinary Reader

None of this requires the ordinary church member to become a historian of doctrine before they can read their Bible responsibly. Most believers absorb custom simply by being part of a church, learning hymns, catechisms, and patterns of worship long before they consciously evaluate any of it. That is entirely normal and not a problem to be solved. What matters is cultivating, over time, the habit of noticing when a firmly held conviction turns out, on examination, to rest more on inherited habit than on the text itself, and being willing to hold that conviction a little more loosely as a result.

This is slow, unglamorous work, closer to gardening than to demolition. Most of what a healthy church history has handed down will survive careful testing against Scripture, because most of it was built by believers doing exactly this same careful work in earlier generations. The goal is not suspicion of everything inherited. It is honesty about what actually governs, applied patiently and without panic, across an entire lifetime of reading. I would rather a congregation full of people still working this out patiently than one that has stopped asking the question altogether, whether because they have decided the past can never be wrong or because they have decided, wrongly, that it is worthless and can simply be discarded.

So, now what?

Take an honest inventory of what you believe and ask, for each conviction, whether it comes from the text itself or from the tradition through which the text was handed to you. Most of the time these will overlap, and that overlap is a good sign, not a problem to be solved. But where they diverge, hold your tradition loosely and your Bible firmly. That is not disloyalty to the church that raised you in the faith. It is the very discipline that church, at its best, taught you to practise.

One further distinction has proved useful in my own ministry: the difference between tradition as a verb and tradition as a noun. Tradition as a verb, the ongoing act of faithfully handing on apostolic teaching, is exactly what Paul commends and what every generation of the church is called to keep doing. Tradition as a noun, the accumulated deposit of customs and interpretations built up over centuries, is a much more mixed inheritance, containing real wisdom alongside real error. Scripture and tradition relate properly when the verb is honoured, faithfully passing on what the text says, without automatically sanctifying everything the noun has accumulated along the way.

This distinction also explains why healthy churches keep revisiting the question rather than settling it once and filing it away. Scripture and tradition are not a problem solved in a single article or a single sermon series. They are a relationship maintained across an entire lifetime of ministry, re-examined every time a cherished custom is challenged by a fresh, honest reading of the text itself. I would rather belong to a church still doing that work faithfully in its hundredth year than one that considers the question closed.

One more historical example is worth including here, since it shows the same dynamic working in reverse, tradition correcting an error that had crept into how Scripture itself was being read. The medieval church’s growing practice of withholding the cup from ordinary worshippers at communion, reserving it for clergy alone, developed gradually and was eventually justified by appeal to church custom rather than to any explicit biblical warrant. The Reformers restored the practice described plainly in the Gospels and in Paul’s own instructions to the Corinthian church, precisely by setting aside centuries of accumulated custom in favour of the text. That correction did not reject tradition as a category. It simply insisted that even long-held custom remains answerable to Scripture rather than the reverse.

I close, then, where this article began: with gratitude rather than suspicion for the inheritance the church has passed down, held together with a settled refusal to let that inheritance ever quietly outrank the text it was written to serve. Both postures, gratitude and refusal, are needed together, and neither is sufficient without the other across a whole lifetime of ministry.

You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.

Mark 7:8, ESV

For Further Study

Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology addresses the relationship between Scripture and confessional tradition within a dispensational framework, and Charles Ryrie’s writing on the doctrine of Scripture is similarly useful here. Millard Erickson offers a fuller historical survey of how sola Scriptura developed in dialogue with, and in reaction against, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox handling of tradition, which is worth reading for readers who want the wider historical picture beyond what a single article can cover.