Although we cannot benefit from the testimonies and insights of Christians who have not yet lived, we would be foolish to ignore those who have come before us. Bernard of Chartres (d. circa 1124) famously said that we stand on the shoulders of giants—in other words, the body benefits from the exegetical insights, the doctrinal clarity, and the pastoral wisdom of the witnesses who have come before.

In August of 1981, a young Swedish doctor named Hans Rosling faced a puzzling dilemma. Numerous people in the village of Nampula, Mozambique, were suffering from inexplicable cases of paralysis. At first, he suspected an outbreak of polio, but after he conducted tests, the virus was surprisingly eliminated as a possibility. With the nation on the edge of civil war, Rosling worried that the cause might be much worse—chemical or biological warfare.

After weeks of research with an international team of physicians, Rosling’s focus settled on a shocking culprit—an ordinary, starchy root vegetable called the cassava. Cassava had been a traditional part of the diet in Mozambique—and across much of Africa—since it was introduced by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. Early in the investigation, a village elder complained that disease had struck the village because “the rain has not washed our cassava.” Although his concern was initially ignored, investigators soon came to realize that the cassava, if not properly prepared before eating, contained dangerous levels of cyanide—a naturally occurring poison that, when ingested, brought about paralysis and death. The villagers were being poisoned by their own staple food.

Following a process that had been passed down for centuries, villagers traditionally spent days preparing cassava before eating—soaking the cassava in water for a week and drying it in the sun before grinding the root into flour—a method that removed toxic cyanide. But because of impending civil war, villagers were ignoring the tradition, bypassing the time-intensive process, and producing cassava flour immediately after harvesting the root. Safe preparation of the cassava required the accumulated wisdom and skills passed down by elders.

Knowing the Bible Together

In a similar way, there is profound danger in being disconnected from Christian tradition. Prosperity preaching, bizarre personality cults, rigorous legalism, and freewheeling libertinism are all poisons passed along to unsuspecting Christians in part because of biblical preparation that has abandoned the wisdom of the ancients.

What is more, such false teaching is sometimes justified by teachers who claim to be “Bible-only” people. They assert the validity of their interpretation by wrongly arguing that the Bible is the Christian’s only theological resource and that anyone who counters with an argument from church history has forgotten what the Reformation stood for. Whether from malice or ignorance, they can twist the Scriptures to a wrong end—a pattern of brokenness that has its root in the first garden. Unfortunately, sometimes we eat what they serve because we, too, have lost sight of the biblical value of knowing Scripture together.

Sola Scriptura, Not Nuda

For the Protestant Reformers, a return to the centrality of Scripture never meant the abandonment of tradition. The Reformers recognized, however, that tradition in the Roman church had taken on an inertia of its own. Over the centuries, a right concern for maintaining the purity of doctrine had a negative effect of slowly consolidating the authority of interpretation into the hands of a few. Not unlike the Pharisees of Jesus’s day, the Roman clergy had come to invest the Church’s interpretation of Scripture with the same authority as the Scripture itself.

In fact, Roman tradition had (conveniently) come to assert that only the clergy—centered in the person of the Roman bishop—had final authority to say what Scripture finally meant on all matters related to life and faith. The Reformers identified a major problem with this assertion: the Scriptures created the church, not vice versa. As Luther famously quipped, “Who begets his own parent? Who first brings forth his own maker?”

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