How to View Christians of the Past

The other day, I ran across someone who said something along the lines of: "we should not to listen to the Calvins, the Luthers, the Augustines...etc.--when we have the Bible as the perfect and inerrant Word of God. Man is prone to error, God's Word is all we need."

And as someone who has found much value in the Christians who have gone before us, this prompted me to ask the question: At what point does our love for the very rich Christian history and the "developments, or applications of the Word of God over the course of time" become misguided? Is this not what the Catholics do? They let their love for tradition and the role of the church replace and add to the Word of God. They view the church's interpretation as the final authority, the church's later councils and subsequent statements as authoritative.

We cannot do that.

So, the question is: as Bible believing Christians, what role should Christians throughout church history (and specifically their teachings) have on us today? Clearly their words aren't Scripture. And clearly these individuals of the past have all erred, even said (many) things that are false. Augustine had a high Mariology. Luther spoke ill of the Jews, persecuted Anabaptists, and believed in the baptism of babies. Calvin had similar baptismal misunderstandings and was likewise a sacralist. Should we just ignore their writings entirely and "just" stick to Scripture?

Let me be clear: We have to be first and foremost people of the Book. There is no getting around this. We have to know the Bible and hold it so much higher, no, miles higher than any other work of man. This Book has to be our food, and our drink. We have to hide its Word in our heart and view everything we see through its lens.

But the reason, in part, that we have this understanding of Scripture is due to the recovery of its centrality by the reformers and those who have gone before us.

Because none of us are a-traditional. None of us are untouched by the thought and developments of men of the past. If it were not for Luther and Calvin, men who returned to the central teachings of Scripture and the early church, would we be so wise and discerning in ourselves to come to those same conclusions in our own day? I presume not. We cannot delude ourselves into thinking that our understanding of Scripture (Sola Scriptura), our understanding justification by faith alone, by grace alone...etc. would somehow be unchanged today if it were not for the work of men throughout history and their recovery of Biblical truth prior to our day. To say so would be staggeringly arrogant.

The truth is we are indebted to imperfect figures of the past. We do not worship them, we do not hold their teachings on the same level of Scripture; we must be aware of their individual shortcomings--but we have to appreciate that without their legacy of faith our understanding of truth would be vastly different. As Peter of Blois said of the men before him, "We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants; thanks to them, we see farther than they. Busying ourselves with the treatises written by the ancients, we take their choice thoughts, buried by age and human neglect, and we raise them, as it were, from death to renewed life." It is that legacy of faith we must treasure, that  returning to truth in the midst of error that must be celebrated.

We can also take the framework many of these men recovered in the authority of Scripture alone--and take it further in our application than they were able to in their contexts. Where Calvin and Zwingli blended church and state due to hundreds and hundreds of years of the unholy mixture, we can deviate because their most central recovery of the Bible's authority disagrees with them. Where Luther got the Eucharist wrong (thinking the body and blood of Jesus Christ were present in the elements), we can right the ship because of the more fundamental understanding of Scripture he passed on. We can continue the "Spirit of the Reformation" in areas where the reformers themselves could not arrive in their own lifetime.

Furthermore, we can glean from their teachings. No different from the sound preaching and sound teaching so precious throughout the New Testament, the study of men who held the Bible high can be edifying to our spirit and can lead us closer to Christ. You can make accusations about John Calvin, but you cannot say that he did not know His Bible (Scripture absolutely permeates the pages of the Institutes). You can say that not all of Martin Luther's conclusions were accurate, but any reading of his will affirm that he was anything but light on Scripture.

So like any teacher or preacher today, we can consult their works. We can glean from their often deep interpretations of Scripture and wrestle with their various conclusions. It is also helpful to see from the outside looking in, how they applied the Bible to their own very different contexts--how they broke away from cultural and national norms in order to live subject to the words of God. There is much, so much that can be learned from their work (not to mention their personal examples as well).

But they are not apostles. Their writings are not Scripture. They are flawed men. Thankfully we can now look back and hold their teachings critically against the lens of Scripture--a privilege we owe in part to them.