Examples of Tradition now accepted by all Christian churches (Part 3)

The Divinity and Humanity of Christ

For at least the first 500 years of the Church there were many heresies that arose about whether Christ was fully man and fully God – or when He became God or what have you. Gnostic Docetism, Nestorianism, Monophysites. Sincere followers and members of Christian churches used the Bible to defend these heresies and believed that’s what the Bible taught.

The Trinity

The word trinity is not in the Bible. The Trinity is not explicitly taught, which is why there was, again, much confusion on this topic in the early Church, causing many splits. Even today, this is part of the reason why Jehovah’s Witnesses fall into the error of denying the Trinity.

People died for these beliefs on both sides of the issue. It was huge. Both sides believed they had the Bible on their side. The Church held councils and made dogmatic statements about these issues hundreds of years after the Apostles died. Did they come up with ‘new’ man-made traditions? No, all Christians today believe that this was the truth from the beginning. But they clarified and defined what the Church as a whole always knew. Even if the earliest Christians didn’t have the same vocabulary and that had to evolve, the truth of the matter was always present.

Now, all Christians take this for granted. We don’t think we need a Catholic dogma or doctrine to tell us, it’s right there in the Bible. Well, it is in the Bible, but it took a few hundred years for the Church to teach and expound this truth to get to the point where it is taken for granted like today. I remember in high school math textbooks, sometimes we’d have little math history snippets. It would describe how some guy came up with something like the Pythagorean Theorem. In a triangle, a squared + b squared = c squared. At the time, it was this huge revolutionary breakthrough. To us in the 1980’s it was no big deal. Big deal, I learned that in 7^th grade! But it was easy to know because generations of math understanding being built upon math understanding got us to that point. Another one was the concept of numbers you could write down. At first, mathematicians for years or generations just talked about numbers, but they couldn’t write them down. Then, years later, they came up with the idea of zero. This ‘institutional memory’ is similar to sacred Tradition. I guess you could also call it orthodoxy. If it was instantly taken away and all we had was the Bible, we’d be back to arguing about whether or not the Holy Spirit is a distinct ‘person’ or not. It’s not trivial, it’s been revealed to us by God through the Church.

Bigamy & Polygamy are not allowed.

I am not aware if and where bigamy and polygamy is condemned in the Bible. We understand that it was something God allowed in the OT, but now we know God intended for one man & one woman. We don’t see God condemning multiple wives in the OT, and some great men of God had multiple wives. In the NT, Jesus forbade divorce, but didn’t speak of multiple wives. I’m not at all sure on this, but my sense is that this practice had fallen by the wayside by this time. Nevertheless, I don’t think the Bible ever condemns polygamy. I could be wrong.

Martin Luther, because he bound himself to sola scriptura, recognized this. When speaking on polygamy, Luther said “I confess, I cannot forbid it, when someone wants to take several wives. It does not contradict the Scriptures. Only among Christians I would not like to see such an example introduced, because one, for the sake of avoiding scandal, should avoid even what is allowable!” [From Rebuilding a Lost Faith, John L. Stoddard, p. 128.]