I like Johann Sebastian Bach. For my money, he’s the greatest Western composer who ever lived. As someone who used to play the upright bass quite regularly, I think you could build a solid technique just by studying the cello suites. I remember the first time my dad played me a recording of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. How can you recover from something so beautiful? In terms of composers and musicians, for me Bach is first. He is the standard by which all other music is judged. But I don’t only listen to Bach. I can’t. If I am to understand Bach, I have to have a context for appreciating him. Other people wrote music before him and some amazing stuff has come after him (influenced, I would argue, heavily by him). Bach alone is the norm for good music, but the works of J.S. Bach are not the only music.

Catholicity is important. By that I mean, that which has been believed by all Christians, at all times, and in all places. I am a catholic in that I belong to the universal Church (the group of true believers that exist everywhere). As a catholic, I have a great respect for the tradition of the undivided church of the first millennium. And as a Protestant, I am distinctly and immovably rooted in the Reformed tradition that reclaimed and resourced the heritage of the early church. This is why liturgy is so important. Michael Allen and Scott Swain wrote an excellent book that tries to articulate this historic perspective.

“In its Christology, the catholic-Reformed tradition is catholic- such that it gives a trinitarian (Nicene) account that holds to the cosmic centrality of Jesus Christ as the mediator between Creator and creation (Chalcedonian). It also emphasizes both gifts received in union with Christ: the acquittal and pardon received through justification, and the new life of sanctification received by the Spirit, being sent for service and mission in the world” (Reformed Catholicity, p.152).

It’s a way of believing in and being “one holy catholic church.” And it is this Reformed catholic tradition that is helpful in understanding the relationship between Scripture and tradition. I cannot recall how many times I have heard the Latin phrase “sola Scriptura” invoked as the reason why Protestants only need to the Bible and need not be overly concerned with confessions and creeds. When the Reformers used the principle of sola Scriptura (“Scripture alone”), they did not mean that the Bible was our only authority. They no more believed that than I believe that J.S. Bach was the only musician who ever lived. Rather, they meant that Scripture alone is the highest authority, the supreme court of authority by which all other norms are judged. Creeds are authoritative insofar as they are based on the authority of the Bible.

The confusion of independent churches that claim “no creed but the Bible” (which is, in itself, a creed) is that they are not embracing sola Scriptura, but solo Scriptura, “a bastard child nursed at the breast of modern rationalism and individualism” (Reformed Catholicity, p.85). They operate with the authority of only Scripture because all that is required is ourselves, our brains, and our Bibles, and with that rationalistic Trinity, we can remake Church as we see fit.

This is the damaging height of arrogance. As theologian Kevin Vanhoozer has observed, “The ‘Bible and me; approach to theology is the recipe for a theology that is dangerously naive, without historical depth, entirely lacking hermeneutical self-reflection, devoid of catholicity, open to being press-ganged to justify political agendas of the far left or far right, and missing the theological sophistication that derives from engaging from those in other theological traditions. All new theologians should repeat this mantra: Anyone who knows only the Bible does not really know it” (“Analytics, Poetics, and the Mission of Dogmatic Discourse,” in The Task of Dogmatics: Explorations in Theological Method, p.46).

If I want music, I can’t just listen to Bach, even if Bach is the measure by which I judge all music. If I want authority, I can’t just read the Bible, even if the Bible is the measure by which I judge all authority. That’s the only way I can hear the music as it was written.