What is the right way to live?

This is the question. And for those seeking the answer, they ask a second: Where do I go to find out… who or what do I trust to tell me?

The apostle Thomas wondered this question, and asked on behalf of the confused followers of Jesus: “How can we know the way?” Jesus gave a simple, yet enigmatic answer: “I am the way — even the truth and the life!” (John 14:6)

Ever since Jesus left the apostles, his followers have searched for how to live “the way” in absence of Jesus, and discovered there were many places to find it — many places that “Jesus” could be found… many revelations of the “way” and “truth” and “life.” These “revelations” or “sources of truth” included the Torah/Biblical teaching, the natural world, love itself and those who exhibit love, philosophy and theology, conscience/moral intuition, and the promptings of God/guidance of the Spirit. All of these sources have, for centuries, been “listened to” by followers of Jesus, and are (with defensible plausibility) the sources Jesus himself listened to and referred to us.

As the church in the West developed, Christians questioned and debated what exactly it looked like to love, serve, and honor God, and what sources of authority could be trusted to guide us to the answer.

One of the unifying features of Christian thought on the subject has been a reverence for the Biblical texts, and the early church fathers gave frequent reference to scripture to back up their explanations of the “way” (of moral, social, theological, and philosophical claims). This was often done with poetic argument, allegorical associations, and symbolic reasoning, as well as (what we often focus on today) literal 1-to-1 arguments, historical context, and anthropological research.

Scripture and Tradition

In the 16th century, Martin Luther and many of the Protestant reformers developed the doctrine of Sola Scriptura (Latin: Scripture Alone) which holds that the Bible is the “sole infallible source of authority” for Christian faith and practice. This served as a way to reign-in the corruption of the Church institution (holding the Church accountable to the Text itself), in hopes of bringing everyone closer to the true teachings of Jesus and the apostles.

The Anglicans and Anabaptist took an approach described as Prima Scriptura (Latin: Scripture First), which accepts that there are multiple guides for Christians to use in the question of how to live, but that Scripture is still "primary."

The response of the Roman Catholic Church (in its counter-reformation) was to formalize its own position: that Scripture and Tradition were both of equal worth as authorities. "Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, first promulgated with His own mouth… saving truth, and moral discipline… [which are] contained in the written books, and the unwritten traditions which, received by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or from the Apostles themselves, the Holy Ghost dictating, have come down even unto us, transmitted as it were from hand to hand… [and thus we] receive and venerate with an equal affection of piety, and reverence all the books both of the Old and of the New Testament – seeing that one God is the author of both – as also the said traditions… preserved in the Catholic Church by a continuous succession." —Counsel of Trent, 4th session

The Bible: A Book Birthed From Tradition

I was raised a good, sola scriptura Protestant. However, this “Bible alone” language no longer seems to me to be the most accurate or helpful way to describe the relationship between Scripture and various other sources of authority. Let’s zoom-in for a moment to consider simply Scripture and Tradition (a hot, intra-Christian debate), it must be recognized, that if we trust Scripture… we are implicitly trusting the Tradition that birthed it. The Bible wasn’t written by one guy… but by dozens (if not hundreds, counting editing hands)… who lived hundreds of years apart. And it wasn’t compiled in a single generation… but over the course of hundreds of years. Many of the texts of the Biblical library were edited and re-edited to serve the needs of the current community as the text was passed-down.

Imagine you’re living within the Jewish word well before Jesus… some scrolls are prominent and have been sacred for generations — like the Torah scrolls of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. You know Exodus the best, because that’s the only scroll your community has (scrolls are very expensive!) but you’ve memorized parts of the others. And you love all the Nevi'im (writings of the prophets) that you’ve heard recited. Certain writings (let’s say Ruth and Ezra-Nehemiah) are currently rising to prominence in your area… and there’s a resurgence of love for the ancient Proverbs… but your area won’t get wind of the Daniel’s scroll or the Qohelet scroll until you’re long gone. Every generation, some writings rise in prominence and others fall… eventually some fall way and are forgotten, but some continue to pass the test in every generation, and are elevated in prominence and authority! Every generation has the opportunity to add notes here, clarify a point there, author an introduction, insert a traditional Psalm, etc.

This process… this organic process of forming and compiling scripture… is tradition! It’s the custom of the community to revere certain texts and pass them down to their children.

The Bible: A Book Read Through Tradition

Secondly, the Bible cannot be understood except through “tradition.” On the most fundamental level, language itself is a “tradition” formed over many generations and passed-down to us. We must use our “tradition” of language to understand the meaning of the Text. Alongside this, there are also various traditions of how to read and interpret language — there are debates over the proper methods for reading, studying, and applying a text (eg: logical analysis, allegory, dictating, singing together, meditation, authorial intent/context, psycho-social applications, etc). Within Christianity, there are many passed-down traditions of “how to read” the Bible and how to interpret certain passages. The “sola scriptura” tradition was passed-down to me though my Protestant heritage.

Thus, it’s not possible to even understand the Bible, except through the lens of tradition. The diagram below helps to show my thinking on the subject:

Wesleyan Quadrilateral

Another model I quite like is the Wesleyan Quadrilateral — a Methodist way of considering the authorities we trust: in terms of 4 domains: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience (each one being the side of a quadrilateral). I appreciate that this model expands (and includes) the previous concepts. The introduction of “Reason” and “Experience” acknowledges that our understanding of anything (including Scripture and Tradition) is mediated through our own reasoning (“reasoning” here is not just propositional logic, but includes inductive and abductive reasoning, analogical and relational reasoning, critical thinking, and all the mental heuristics we use) and through our experiences (what has worked or not worked for us, our own biases, our encounters with heaven and hell, etc.). In the Wesleyan Quadrilateral — which is meant to be applied to matters of faith and theology — Scripture is considered the most foundational and important (the base of the quadrilateral) thus making it a prima scriptura option.

Knitting Analogy

Finally, in this last section, I’d like to introduce a model of my own invention which is neither binary nor geometric — but an embodied, procedural analogy — that of knitting. This model can help us understand how the 4 Wesleyan authorities relate, and what their roles are in answering the question: What is the right way to live?

Yarn: Experience

We each are born into this world with a little yarn (experience), which we continue to collect throughout our lifetime. Each moment, we are given more yarn — of different colors and textures — and while your yarn might look quite a bit different than the yarn another person has, we all have some sort of raw material to work with. How do we make sense of all this yarn we have? Well we do that with…

Reason: Needles

Reason makes sense of our Experience, working it into new patterns, allowing us to shape it into something intelligible. “Reason” here refers to more than just logic, but to all the ways we “make sense” and all the processes that help us to “ration” our attention well. While we might all have different knitting needles, they all pretty much do the same thing… the question is how we use them! What is the right way to use them? Well, we can learn through trial and error, or, we can learn through…

Tradition: Guidebook

There are lots of different guidebooks for knitting out there, each with different stitches and patterns, but all of them provide tried-and-true methods for using our needles (with our different kinds of yarn) to make something beautiful! In this analogy, each religious tradition has its own set of manuals and guides that it approves, and its own preference for stitches. There will be notable differences between the work of knitters in Hinduism and the knitwear of the Muslim tradition, but there will also be some common threads. The question remains however, what role does scripture — of any holy text, including the Bible — play in all this?

Scripture: Knitwork Collection

Scripture then, is a curated collection of knitwork — some of the finest specimens of hats, gloves, sweaters, and more! This collection of knitwork has been revered for generations as masterpieces which are suitable for instruction in the art of knitting. They help us to answer many questions we have like: What sort of things should we be making in the first place? What does an excellent final project look like? If some of the works in the collection appear at first to be less “inspired” — less skillful or less functional than others — perhaps that challenges us to re-define what “success” looks like, or broaden the way we think about the “goal” of knitting.

Cultures are united together by these collections — people making things which model or reflect the knitwork of their sacred collection (though still tailored to their contemporary needs). They debate over many of the details — how to “interpret” the collection — and even exactly what works belong within it — but they are still united in discussing and revering these masterpieces.

There are many things to study within the collection. We can reverse-engineer a knitwork and learn its unique patterns and techniques used to make it. A knitwork that was once quite confusing with a purpose lost to time, may later, through historical/archeological research, be understood again. Many people say you can’t really appreciate the collection just by looking at it… you have to “try on” copies and experience living with them to truly understand their value.

The potential associations write themselves… but I will stop for now! I’d love to hear from you what insights may arise from viewing scripture, tradition, reason, and experience in this way!

Conclusion

So. What do I trust to tell me how to understand, relate with, and do life? Well, I trust in God, who is experienced and known through experience, reason, tradition, and scripture! And, underlying and uniting them all, I trust in Love. For Love is the source that gives rise to these things, and is the medium through which I can see any of these things clearly. With the eyes of love, I can discern the truth of my experience… I can reason wisely… I can know what to keep from tradition and what to leave behind… and I can receive the mysteries of scripture… including that “God is love” and that Love itself is enfleshed in Christ, and exemplified in his life, death, and resurrection, revealing the truth of love as humility, courage, self-sacrifice, and forgiveness, from which new, surprising, and redemptive life springs forth!

Photo Credits:

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
Photo by Vlada Karpovich on Pexels
Photo by Emma Louise Comerford on Unsplash
Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels
Photo from 55 Fantastic Japanese Knitting Stitches by Kotomi Hayashi
Photo by Vlada Karpovich on Pexels

Sola Scriptura, Tradition, and Knitting