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

By Daniel H. Williams

Book Overview

A learned and uniquely constructive book that gently urges "suspicious" Christians to reclaim the patristic roots of their faith. This is the first book of its kind meant to help Protestant Christians recognize the early church fathers as an essential part of their faith. Writing primarily to the evangelical, independent, and free church communities, who remain largely suspicious of church history and the relationship between Scripture and tradition, D. H. Williams clearly explains why every branch of today's church owes its heritage to the doctrinal foundation laid by postapostolic Christianity. Based on solid historical scholarship, this volume shows that embracing the "catholic" roots of the faith will not lead to the loss of Protestant distinctiveness but is essential for preserving the Christian vision in our rapidly changing world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802846688
• ISBN13: 9780802846686
• Release Date: October 1999
• Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
• Length: 253 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Radical Moderation - Christian Catholicity

Williams is another voice in the chorus of Christians calling us to return to the Fathers. In a world threatened by the extremes, Williams calls us to a radical moderation, rooted in the Bible but guided by "the Tradition." On the one hand, retrieving the Tradition expels the incoherent syncretism that liberal Protestantism tends toward. On the other hand, the Tradition resists the overt consumerism of conservative evangelical church growth. To be fair, both conservative and liberal Protestants engage in marketing religion as another item for consumption. Williams argues that such approaches put Protestants in danger of losing the content for which the original Reformers protested - the apostolic faith as written in Scripture and proclaimed in the Tradition of the Church in late antiquity. To argue that D.H. Williams is "postmodern" is simply avoiding the issue. If consumer religion is modern, then Williams is post-modern. One reviewer suggests that Williams denies "ultimate truth" because Williams doesn't quote 1 Timothy's statement that "all Scripture is inspired by God." The same reviewer also dismisses the idea that the Bible can be twisted and made to say anything. This again misses the point. Williams affirms the inspiration of the Bible by God. His point is to explain how the earliest Christians recognized and affirmed together that inspiration. Moreover, it seems amazing to me that any Protestant could deny that particular passages of Scripture could be twisted or misinterpreted. Was this not the case the Protestant Reformers made against the Roman Catholic church? Jesus himself corrects misinterpretations of the Old Testament. Early Christians encountered those claiming to be Christian who rearranged the picture of Jesus as proclaimed by the apostles and eventually written in the New Testament. Christians need some boundaries when reading the Bible. The Tradition - the faith passed on from the apostles themselves - is that guide. Retrieving that Tradition will enable all Christians, including evangelicals, to reclaim a sense of true catholicity.

A Challenge to the Evangelical Mind

The troubled state of Evangelical worship and doctrine has elicited different solutions from those within its boundaries. Some have called for a repudiation of the individualism so prevalent in the Evangelical mainstream and a return to the higher view of the Church endorsed by the early Protestant Reformers. Others, concluding the principles behind the Protestant experiment have been the cause of the problem, have cast their lots with Rome, Constantinople, and Canterbury. Still another view, championed by Thomas Oden and D. H. Williams, calls for retaining the many strengths of the Evangelical movement and adding to it the riches of the faith of the early Church. In Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism, Williams puts forth an analysis of the current state of affairs in Evangelicalism and their historical roots. He then proposes a program for a new Evangelicalism by retaining the current structures but supplementing them with a sense of history and received faith and tradition so missing from the current Evangelical scene. Only by maintaining contact with the Christians of the past, Williams contends, can Evangelicals be truly prepared to counter doctrinal errors and questionable practices within the Church. Williams' historical analysis makes a number of insightful points as to how the Churches founded by the early Reformers gradually turned their backs on the past. For example, Williams contends there was initially a far greater respect of the Tradition of the Church among Protestants until the wide use within Roman Catholicism of the Donation of Constantine - now known to be a forgery - to bolster papal claims. It was in this period that the Emperor Constantine was demonized by many Protestant apologists. Thus because Roman apologists convinced early Protestants of something that never actually happened, Protestants increasingly viewed the post-Constantinian Church as the source of apostasy. Williams forcefully points out the folly of this characterization - the most important doctrines of the Christian Faith received their most powerful expression and defense from the Ecumenical Councils and Church Fathers of that period. Additionally, there was no disconnect of doctrine and practice with what was believed prior to Constantine. It is this disengagement from the history of the Church that is the source of many current woes in modern Evangelical Protestantism and leads some to invent their own histories (i.e., the ahistoric silliness of such beliefs as Baptist Successionism and the restorationist sects). However, a question one must pose to Williams is if the Evangelical mainstream were to adopt the ideas suggested here, would they cease to be Evangelicals and become something else? That is, does the proposed solution mean to leave Evangelicalism as has been known and practiced and move on to another path. If ahistoricial reasoning is as ingrained into the Evangelical Protestant psyche as Williams suggests, then it follows t

Don't be afraid of the T word

As a Baptist teaching patristics and historical theology at Loyola University of Chicago, D. H. Williams is well positioned to write this book. He knows from the inside the suspicion (indeed, hostility) of many in the "Free Church" toward anything labeled tradition. Worried that the market-oriented approach to estab-lishing "Bible-based" churches will result in an increasingly sectarian model of the Church, he aims to show that only by taking on board the Church's Tradition (the common Christian tradition, as opposed to the traditions of various Christian groups) can evangelicals preserve a definitive theological center. Williams claims that, despite their mistrust of the formal language of creeds, all the essential elements of evangelical theology are dependent on the Tradition enshrined in the Nicene or Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, rather than simply being drawn from the Bible (37). He shows that the earliest Church was guided by tradition expressed in the formulation of the Gospel, the messianic exegesis of the Old Testament, the survival of ancient confessional and hymnic materials in the New Testament, and the formation of the Christian canon itself. He makes the case that the efforts of Tertullian and Irenaeus to define the norms of the apostolic Rule of Faith were made necessary by claims and counterclaims of Gnostics, Marcionites, and others that the Bible supported their competing versions of truth. He shows that the need for catechetical instruction required the churches to distill the essentials of the faith into formulaic constructs. His delicate task here is to show that the various summaries of the Rule of Faith were all intended as condensations of the apostolic Tradition existing alongside, but not displacing, scripture. Next he tackles the notion, widespread among Free Church evangelicals, that the "pristine" Church of the New Testament period fell into corruption shortly thereafter, particularly as it accommodated itself to the empire during Constantine's rule. He sharply critiques examples of Free Church historiography that attempt to trace out a pure line of apostolic Christianity (represented by the Poor of Lyons, the Albigensians, Waldensians, Hus, Wycliffe, and others) preserved against the slide of the Church into the apostasy of papal absolutism. Williams faces his most difficult task in chapter 5, where he devotes forty pages to responding to what he identifies as four theses implicit in the evangelical rejection of the ecumenical councils and creeds. In sum, this rejection is based on the misunderstanding that: (1) bishops of the late patristic period were tools of imperial and papal power rather than shepherds of the people; (2) the Nicene and post-Nicene creeds were political decisions that were meant to displace local church confessions; (3) the universal creeds dethroned scripture from its uniquely authoritative position. Williams maintains that during the post-Constantinian period the Church worked out definiti

A corrective to the myopia prevalent in Protestantism today

At the suggestion of a professor of Patristics after taking his class on Early Christian Thought, this was a tremendous eye-opener to the danger of forsaking the wellspring of rich legacy found in the Early Church and in Christian history in general. D.H. Williams writes primarily to "Suspicious Protestants," i.e. those leery of tradition and its (oft-thought) destructive influence upon authentic Christianity. On the contrary, Williams argues, Tradition (capital "T" -- thus not the man-made jots and tittles of deadening religion but the Heritage of Orthodoxy bequeethed to us from the Ancient Church) is just the necessary component to direct our way aright in the pluralistic/subjectivist mileiu in which we find ourselves. As Henri de Lubac has correctly noted: "Every time a Christian renewal has blossomed in our West, whether in thought or in life... it has blossomed under the sign of the Fathers."Buy this book!! You won't regret it!

A LOOK AT THE 21ST CENTURY FAITH - ANCIENT AND FUTURE

When the history of the Church in the 21st Century is written, surely D. H. Williams will be one counted as a modern day prophet. This is a most interesting and challenging work that places the Ancient Faith directly in the stream of the Evangelical Faith. Modern day evangelical protestants are discovering that while the faith is wide, it is not very deep. We have lost our "roots" and thus are tossed about by every wind of teaching and yet another denomination springs up.Once one gets over the shock of an Evangelical Baptist Pastor teaching in a Roman Catholic University; the book continues to offer up challenges and surprises that serves to focus our faith. As a former Evangelical Protentant who is now an Anglo-Catholic, I delight that others are also on the journey "back to the future".An outstanding work that may well become a great classic of the faith.