In this sermon, Bishop Stuart Ruck discusses the concept of tradition and its relationship to the Bible. He shares a story about his wife teaching developmentally disabled students and emphasizes the importance of discerning between true and false statements. Bishop Ruck simplifies the church's historical views on tradition and the Bible into two categories: tradition as spiritual grandparents and tradition as a vehicle for the gospel. He highlights the need for scholars to help navigate the overwhelming amount of information and misinformation in today's age, and emphasizes the importance of starting our understanding of the Bible with a doctrine of who God is and His desire for us to have access to Him.

This is Church of the Resurrection in Wheaton, Illinois. This week's sermon is by Bishop Stuart Ruck and is part four of our fully scriptural series. My wife Catherine has been a teacher for a few decades and she was teaching many years ago in a school in Oak Park. She had a classroom of developmentally disabled students. One whose name was Robert and she was going through a kind of true-false exercise with the students. She would say a statement and she would then ask them, is that statement true or is that statement false? So, for example, she said, a banana is yellow. And Robert, who was quick every time to the answer, said, true. Then she said, a dog meows. And Robert's like, come on, false. Then Catherine said, a man can eat breakfast alone. And Robert said, false. Catherine said, okay, I'm not sure you were tracking with me. Let me give it to you again. A man can eat breakfast alone. And Robert said, with a little bit more strength this time, false. And Catherine said, okay, Robert, work with me on this. A man comes down the stairs in his robe and his slippers. He goes into the refrigerator, gets out milk. He goes to the cupboard, gets out cereal. He pours himself some breakfast. He has breakfast alone. And Robert said, Mrs. Ruck, a man cannot eat breakfast alone. No one should ever eat alone. I would say he was quite developmentally able. Of course a person can have breakfast by themselves. What was Robert getting at is that no one should live their lives alone. You may eat by yourself here or there, but you should be eating as part of a larger community, of a household or roommates or a family. So let me give you a true and false resurrection. A Christian can read their Bible alone. Wow. You're not sure. Okay. All right. That's my job is I need to get you to the point where you can say, see, Brett said it with confidence because he was at the first sermon. He already knew the answer. All right. That doesn't count. Christians can read Bible by themselves. Indeed, we often and will and should read our Bibles by ourselves in meditation and prayer and your quiet time and your morning prayer time. But Christians, they never read the Bible alone. Because Christians are never, ever alone. Turn in your Bibles to Ephesians chapter 2. We're going to look at Paul's teaching here about the Bible. And what we see is that Christians read their scriptures. They read the Bible as sons and daughters. That's our main idea today. Christians read the Bible as sons and daughters. We read the Bible as sons and daughters of our Father in heaven. And we read the Bible as sons and daughters with spiritual grandparents who have gone before us. As you look at this little passage here with just two main verses that we're going to focus on, verses 19 and 20, we said that we read scripture as sons and daughters. First part of verse 19 and then verse 20. Sons and daughters of our Father in heaven. Second part, we read the Bible with spiritual grandparents who have gone before us. Primarily the second part of verse 19. Ephesians is a marvelous book written by the Apostle Paul. It's a book of closeness. It's about the closeness of God the Father with the Son and the Holy Spirit. It's about the closeness that God the Father through the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit wants to have with every human being who would come into a knowledge, a saving knowledge of who God is. Closeness with God himself. Closeness with those whom he has created. And then closeness with those among whom he has created. And unity among those whom he has created. And love among those whom he has created under the ministry of the Father. And also, not as a kind of early driving theme, but a critical theme of that book of Ephesians is closeness with the Bible. All right, let's go to work on this. We need to start as we think about how we read the Bible in the church, how we read the Bible as the church with the Father from whom every good gift has been given. So we start our thinking about the Bible with the Father, with a doctrine of who God is and who the Father is. In this case, we learn that the Father is one who wants you to have access to him and he wants to have access to your minds and your hearts. And as I do this sermon today, often as we preach, we're hoping by the ministry of the Holy Spirit and Revelation to have you change a practice or adopt a practice. That's part of what we're going after in preaching. This morning, I'd like to do more toward having you change your thinking about how you read the Bible, particularly in regard to access to the Father. So bump up from verse 18, excuse me, verse 19, to verse 18 there in your Bibles. And we read that for through him. Now if we bump up from there, we see that we're hearing about people being reconciled to God, that's verse 16, in one body through the cross, referring to the Lord Jesus. Jesus came and preached peace to you who are far off and peace to those who are near. For through Jesus and the cross, we both have access in one spirit to the Father, which is simply to say this, your Father wants you to have access to him. So he gave you the church, the household of God, and he gave you the Bible. Now some of you can immediately get there with your relational biography. You had a dad who really wanted to know you. And he wanted you to know him. So your life was peppered with conversations and experiences with him where you got to know him and he got to know you. Some of you do not have that in your biography. But you have it in the household of God. You actually have it fundamentally in your biography that you have a father, the Father, who has wanted you to know him. So he gave you the Bible that you could know all about him. You could have total access to him through the power of the cross. This is the gift the Father gives you because he wants to be close to you. And he wants you to be close to him. You are no longer strangers and aliens, we see. Look at that. So he goes from this thought about access to the Father, and then right after that, Paul says, for through him we both have access to the Father, verse 19, so then you are no longer strangers and aliens. At the heart of the sinful nature manifestation, one of the applications of the sinful nature is that we live as strangers. We live alienated. We live separated, fragmented, profoundly alone. I'm not talking about the good of solitude, where we have time with God alone. I'm talking about fragmentation. I'm talking about isolation. I'm talking about the sinful nature that again and again pushes us to push away from others and to push away from God. Indeed, most of us read our Bibles in some state of isolation. We read our Bibles as if it's just us and the Bible. You can read your Bible by yourself, but you can't read your Bible alone. But we're no longer strangers and aliens. Indeed, Paul says you are members of the household of God, the last part of verse 19, the church. That's the church. So in our Gospel, John 14, Jesus said, It's really sweet. And there is an emotional impact to Jesus saying that. But you mustn't let that be sentimental or sweet, particularly if you didn't have a good home life. It's also a profound theological statement. Jesus is saying the Father and I will come, and we will give you the church. We'll give you the household of God. We'll revolutionize your experience of family. We'll revolutionize your experience of being close. We'll revolutionize anything that you have in your background. You come into the household of God, you are a member. You are a citizen. You are a saint. You have spiritual grandparents who have gone before you. You have global brothers and sisters. You have cross-racial brothers and sisters. You've got this crazy, massive, huge family, people coming in and out, speaking different languages, cooking different food on the stove. The household of God is a gift from the Father. It's the gift of the church. And you read your Bible with them. You read your Bible in a way that those who have cross-racial experiences help us understand the Bible in a way we may not because of our blind spots. And the same with the global reality. Part of the household of God. You have an ancient family, and you have a global family. You have a massive family. Welcome to the family. It's so beautiful. Welcome to the family. It's a Bible culture family as well. At the heart of our culture is family. Every family has a culture. We're a Bible family. We're a Word of God family. We're the people who are gathered around under the Word of God and the power of the Word of God, learning from the Word of God, being absolutely changed by the Word of God. John Calvin, 16th century thinker, Reformation father, said this about the Scriptures. The Scriptures are something alive. They're full of hidden power, which leaves nothing in anyone untouched. The Scriptures leave nothing in anyone untouched. That's what our family revolves around in the Lord Jesus, is that we're all touched or seeking to know the Word of God, which reveals to us our Father in heaven. Scripture is the foundation. Go with me now to verse 20. Built on the foundation. So we have a household of God. That's an image. Paul's painting a picture in his poetic writing. We have a household of God, and then we have a foundation, which is the prophets and the apostles. Now those are actual people. He's referring to the prophets of the Old Testament, primarily here, although he could also be referencing prophets in the New Testament. Primarily prophets of the Old Testament, very likely, and the apostles. These were people. These are people who are receiving from the Holy Spirit divine revelation and giving us the ministry of the Holy Scriptures. So they're people, but they're also writings. They're both. It's shorthand for the Bible. The Hebrew Scriptures, which are signified by the prophets, and then those Scriptures will become known as the New Testament, which is the gift of the apostles, the foundation of the Bible, the Bible's supreme, even in relationship to Holy Church, who we love so much. The Bible is the foundation. When my wife's grandfather built a home in tornado country in Oklahoma, part of family lore is that he built a home with a foundation as deep as the house would go high because he knew that amazing storms would come and batter that house, but it could not touch the foundation. Our roof can get torn off. We can go through a lot as the church, but you know that the foundation of the Word of God is untouchable, unstoppable, irresistible, powerful. Do you know that this is why Jesus said, don't be afraid. Don't be afraid in your own life. Don't be afraid about what's happening in the culture. We have a foundation. We're ready for storm season. Supreme. But that said, Paul wants to make clear, connected. So church and Bible are very connected. We read the Bible in the church as part of the church. We read Scripture with our spiritual grandparents. I once took a drive. One of my favorite things to do in my hometown where I grew up was to visit my maternal grandparents, and I would love to go there, and I'd walk in the door of their old, wonderful house, and I'd immediately hear the grandfather clock ticking. I'd go in the living room. I'd sit in the same seat every time. There'd be my grandfather seated over there, herringbone jacket, horn-rimmed glasses, smoking a pipe, really. There'd be my grandmother sitting over there, Halston perfume, and I would just talk. I would just talk and talk and talk, and they loved to listen to me. That's what grandparents, I guess we're supposed to do that, just sit and listen to kids talk. And they'd lean in, and they'd ask me questions. I'd go down to my grandfather's basement. He had just artifacts from our life together as a family and from his grandfather, and he'd show me different things, and I'd walk away with this experience that I was part of something much larger, this family heritage. I'd also walk away having talked to them, and I would say some things that were urgent to me, and they would lovingly just not be too worried about whatever I thought was so worrisome in my life. They had a lot of years. They knew what really mattered and what didn't. Or things that I thought were not a big deal, and they thought some of these things were really a big deal from their vantage point. They gave me perspective. I want to talk about tradition, which is a hard word to preach on because so many of you have experiences that are negative or positive or no experience, but I want to talk about tradition. It's a Bible word, and I want to explain what it means, but as I explain that, I want you to think about tradition more like visiting your grandparents and less like going to a very uninteresting museum that seems to have nothing to do with your life. Let's look at tradition in the Bible. C.S. Lewis, Christian thinker, mid-20th century, said this about tradition in the past. He said, most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future. Don't try to think too hard about that. Here's what he's saying. We don't know what the future is going to bring. I mean, we know that there's prophecy, and that can give us kind of through a glass dark that the Bible says what may be coming. That's true, but we can't really study the future. Lewis is simply saying, you've got the past. God providentially gave you the past, so we can study it as a gift from God. Then he says, you know, there are scholars that when they do great scholarly work, one of the gifts of scholarship, Lewis says, is that they've gone to other places in their reading. They've gone to other cultures in their reading. They've gone to other eras in their reading, and the scholar who's been there can come to this current culture and say, hey, this is not urgent, although it feels urgent. This is actually urgent, and it may not feel urgent. The gift of the scholar is to help us, in some degree, quoting Lewis again, be immune from the great waterfall of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of this age. I just had a little sentimental nostalgia there. Oh, for the microphone being our greatest challenge. Oh, that blasted microphone. The waterfall of nonsense that pours from hundreds of social media channels of this age. So how does the Bible think about tradition? OK, some of you, when you hear the word tradition, you may have Tevye trauma. Tevye, main protagonist, fiddler on the roof, mage song with tradition. Maybe that song is even going through your head right now. And tradition is kind of complicated, and Tevye is kind of complicated, because on one hand, he is trying to maintain traditions that were really important in the village and beautiful things. And there's some beautiful scenes of tradition that are very arresting and beautiful. On the other hand, Tevye also uses tradition as a weapon, and he uses it in a rigid way, and he actually uses it primarily against his daughters. So can you just not think Tevye while I do this? Can you kind of come with me and think Paul? That's one of my goals today, that you think Paul with tradition, not Tevye. OK, turn with me in your Bibles to 2 Thessalonians. If you have one of the Rev's Bibles, that's page 989. 2 Thessalonians is hard. So even if this wasn't relevant to what I'm preaching on, I would just throw out 2 Thessalonians, because it's hard to find. It's kind of working a little bit. See, I already have my tab there, because I knew ahead of time I was going there. It's very helpful. All right, 2 Thessalonians. Here are the Apostle Paul talking about tradition. Now, the word tradition is a specific Greek word, paradosis, and it actually is a personified word. So it is not, again, a word that talks about some kind of disconnected thing that's used against people. It's actually handing over. That's the idea. It's that there are hands and people from era to era that are passing on the gospel to one another and the riches of the gospel. And that this will be part of the life of the church, the household of faith. So Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 2, verse 15, Now, our Lord Jesus condemned traditions that drew people away from the scriptures, drew people away from God that were the inventions of persons. This is not what Paul's talking about. Paul's talking about what I'm going to describe in a moment as a nourishing tradition. Again, chapter 3 of 2 Thessalonians. Just turn over your page. with the tradition that you received from us. Another writer in the New Testament, Jude, will say, will talk about the apostolic deposit which has been handed over, which has been given to us. Martin Luther, 16th century Christian thinker, Reformation father as well, put it this way. This is really helpful. Scripture is the light. Tradition is the lantern. Scripture is the light. It can't be replaced. It is supreme. But tradition is the lantern that gives us, that helps to carry. There's a kind of embodied vehicle of the gospel. Let's talk about tradition and the Bible and how it's been viewed over the centuries. This is a massive body of work. I'm going to simplify it about tradition and the Bible to just two ways that the church has thought about tradition and the Bible, church and the Bible. The first is what we've been working on, tradition as spiritual grandparents. This is an early church way of thinking, particularly the first five centuries of the teachings of the church, is that the idea was that grandparents, as a matter of fact, we know that one of our earliest church fathers, Irenaeus, very likely was discipled by Polycarp, who was himself discipled by the apostle John. This is a lived reality for them of the tradition, the baton being passed on from generation to generation about the gospel of Jesus Christ, which they knew was supreme. Tradition as spiritual grandparents is also the ethos of what might be called the Continental Reformation, the Magisterial Reformation, the Reformation in England, the Lutheran Reformation, the Covenant Reformation and beyond. In tradition as spiritual grandparents, the phrase that you should know was developed sola scriptura, S-O-L-A, scripture supreme. The idea behind sola with an A, scriptura, is this, final authority is scripture alone, but not a scripture that is alone. Final authority is scripture alone, but not a scripture that is alone. So we give a contrasting view of how tradition and the Bible work together. This came up with another stream of thinking that was prior to the Reformation, but especially was exhibited in the Reformation. That's tradition as your unknown second cousin, which is to say, who cares? Right, which is to say, doesn't matter for my life. I mean, there may be a family member out there who's my unknown second cousin, but it really, I'm not listening to them. They're not listening to me. Indeed, some came to the point where it wasn't tradition as unknown second cousin, it was tradition as crazy dangerous uncle that you have parties and don't tell him that you're coming. He'll probably drink too much. Actually, keep tradition away. You can go either way with this. But behind this tradition as the unknown second cousin is an idea that the individual interpretation is always prioritized over the corporate interpretation. Now, this got manifested in some streams of what's called the Radical Reformation, whereby the individual was given a critical place. Now, let's be really clear. The intentions behind this, and we need to read our history, read it carefully, was very well-intentioned. It was saying, we need to take Scripture seriously. We're looking at the excesses and the confusion of the church, and we need to go back to the Bible, which absolutely is right. We need to go back to the Bible. But they and their well-intentioned zeal, and we're going back to the Bible alone, actually set up for an incredible confusion that disconnected the church from the foundation, which is not Paul's vision. You have a household of God, you've got members in the household, and you've got the foundation of the apostles and the prophets, with the chief cornerstone being the Lord Jesus. That would be called, not just second cousin, but solo scriptura, S-O-L-O. Now this has actually found its way into a lot of teachings in contemporary evangelicalism. Even though many of us may have a Reformation background, many of us actually were trained, without even necessarily knowing it, that it's the Bible and us alone. There's some real challenges with that. Ironically, in a tradition that seeks to take the Bible so seriously, which it does, it actually doesn't take the Bible seriously enough, because the Bible teaches so clearly on the place of the church, and the relationship of the church with the Bible. Also, the Bible takes so seriously the sinful nature of every human person, which is to say, left alone with us and just our Bible, without our family around us, we can rationalize what this Bible teaches about our moral life in a moment. Take a large cultural issue. We can rationalize, or all of a sudden have some new discovery out of some kind of scholarship that says that, actually, we've been reading the Bible wrong for all these centuries, and this is how we need to read it now. And it's a completely new interpretation of the Scriptures. And all of a sudden, if you have so low Scripture, the fact of the matter is, you begin to figure out, well, then who gets to decide what the Bible has said and how to interpret it? And again and again, it'll be the smartest man or woman in the room, the most degrees, the most published, whatever it might be, and that they get to decide. Well, who gets to decide? No, the church decides, under the authority of Holy Scripture. The family decides, the grandparents decide, that we're under somebody who's gone before us and our global brothers and sisters help us decide, that we're not alone when we read the Bible at all. This is extremely important. This doesn't mean that every day that you read the Bible, you need to think about all the other components. No, your Bible is understandable. That's one of the key understandings of the Scriptures. It's understandable. You can read it. But there are sections that are hard to understand. And there are teachings in the Bible that vis-a-vis cultural initiatives become very confusing. I'll explain that in just a moment. Let me go to my point before I do that, which is, who is tradition? And I'm saying, who? Because it's persons. It's embodied. It's not separate. It's not some kind of body of literature alone that somehow that's tradition. Who is tradition? Well, it's paradosis. It's the handing over. So there's four key elements to who is tradition. The first are the creeds. Talked about those some last week. Very in brief. The creeds are a constellation. They're a concrete witness of who God is, who Jesus is. They're not comprehensive for the whole Bible. They're not meant to be. But the creeds didn't fall like a meteor out of heaven and someone went, oh my word, there's the Nicene Creed. Let's pick this up. Bring it over to the church. Here, you guys just say this every week. I just found it. It's amazing. Right? No, no, no, no, no. How did you get the Nicene Creed? People, bishops, meeting in council. First council ever that ever happened, Acts chapter 15. There's councils in the Bible. And they kept meeting after the first century. They met for several centuries and you look at the first four councils where the church gathered, East, West, Africa, Asia, Europe, Middle East, to get clear about what the Bible said about who God is, about who Jesus is. Those are the councils and the bishops. First is the creed, second are the councils and the bishop. But they are working through these questions to guide the church in what the Bible has said. This is really important. An early church thinker, Vincent de Lorenz said this, what has been believed everywhere, always by all. He meant the unified church that was still in unity. The church had a massive schism, 1054. But prior to that, we had a unified church. Very diverse, but unified. And the idea was, what's been taught? This was really important for John Calvin as he's challenging current church realities. He says, look, let me be really clear. With the ancient church, we deny that we have any disagreement. The leader of the Reformation said, nay, whether we revere the church as our mother. Because he was looking at the councils. He was looking at the creeds. We have creeds, we have councils and bishops. Let me have the early church teachers who are called the fathers. Now, not everything the fathers wrote is infallible by any stretch. But as you study the fathers, and we are fortunate to have some who've really studied the fathers in our church who are going to do more teaching on what the early church teachers taught, we see that there is a deep unity there which reflects the unity of the church in that time. You have early church fathers who have a significant proximity to the culture of the early church, and we listen carefully to them. And you have Reformation teachers. Cramner, for us, was Anglicans. Luther, Calvin, others. But it's not just the creeds, not just the councils, not just the early teachers of the church. Those are actually all texts that you can study. This is really important for the fourth one, and hang in there with me. I know I'm pushing. It's the prayer and practice of the church over the centuries. It's the people of God and how they've worshiped the living God in their liturgies, how they've practiced the worship of God, how they've practiced the life of the church. There's a term for this. It's called lexorande, lex credende. As the church prays, so she believes, which is to say that it's not just all these very important pieces that make up tradition. We make up tradition. It's not just some small group over here. We who pray, when we say, blessed be God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and blessed be His kingdom now and forever, you are living in the tradition of the church. As it passed down to you from spiritual grandparents who paid a mighty cost to say that. So the prayer and practice of the church, our prayer book in Anglicanism is 85% Scripture. Why? Because we're praying the Bible. As we pray, so we believe. Well, how does this play out? Why does this matter so much? Because it gets us to the nourishing traditions of the church. Nourishing tradition is a cookbook that we have at home. And in this amazing cookbook, it talks about the fact that there are traditions that have been lost in how we are to develop and prepare our food. That have been known for centuries and now is being lost. But also traditions that don't matter at all in food. So the writer of the cookbook gives this story and she says, you know, every time I make a roast, I cut the end of it off. And my kids saw me and said, why do you always cut the end off the roast? I said, I don't know, my mom always did it. So she goes to her mom and says, mom, why do you always cut the end off the roast? She said, because I didn't have a pot big enough to fit the roast. Okay, it's not very nourishing or very important. Get a bigger pot. But then she finds out that actually when she makes her oatmeal, that for centuries, people have been soaking oatmeal the night before they cook it. Because at soaking, she releases critical enzymes and nutrients in the oatmeal. And people have known that soaking of grains is very important in the releasing of nutrients. That's actually a nourishing tradition. Something that needs to be passed on and passed down. So we bring these nourishing traditions together, creeds, councils and bishops, early church teachers, reformation teachers, prayer and practice of the church. We find that we are in our grandparents' living room with the Bible in the center. So a couple of years ago, our culture had a massive change. And that is that our Supreme Court justices ruled that a man and a man could marry one another and a woman and a woman could marry one another. Now this was very confusing for many, even those in the church, because they have same-sex attracted family or same-sex practicing family. And their family seemed so happy that this was happening. And they want their family to be happy. And what does the Bible really say about this? And can I trust the passages in the Bible about this? And the whole culture seems to be celebrating. And well, it's like this fog descends. So how do we read our Bible in the church when an issue like this comes up? Well, first, we can go to a place like Ephesians 5 that teaches very clearly that marriages between a male and a female, those who are distinct yet called to a unity, that it reflects Jesus and his church, two distinct realities called to unity. Well, what if a scholar, maybe even a conservative scholar, and he said, well, you know, we actually haven't read Ephesians 5 properly. And with a new study of the Greek and new understanding of ancient Eurasian traditions and cultures, we actually have come to a new perspective on this. And really, we need to rethink this. And you're going, I don't know. I don't know Greek. I don't know all that stuff. Is that true? Do I need to rethink it? And you go, well, now where do I go? How do I handle this really confusing issue that my heart's all confused about anyway? And now this person who's in authority is saying that maybe this is the case. But then you can go to the creed. And the creed says, we believe in the one holy Catholic apostolic church. It's the only other time we say we believe other than Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Oh, we believe in the church. Well, who is the church? Well, she's been made up of councils. She's been made up of early teachers. We can go to the early teachers of the church who, across the board, in a uniform way, thought that male and female were made in the image of God. That they're called to marriage and the beautiful calling of marriage. Or they're called to celibacy. Either way, they're called to a life of closeness with another male or female or with God. But that's been the teaching of the church in the early centuries, from the beginning. Teaching of the Reformation fathers. No Reformation teacher taught anything differently. But then you go, well, but is that enough? And you go, but how about the prayer and practice of the church? Well, the church has always, in her worship services, had wedding liturgies. And those wedding liturgies have never, ever had a wedding liturgy for two men or two women, ever. There were sects. There were offshoots that were deemed no longer orthodox or part of the church that would do things like that and mix up male and female. But the church never, ever did that. And you go, oh, there's clarity. There's a foundation. I don't have to be confused. No, you don't have to be confused. I don't have to be afraid. No, you don't have to be afraid. I don't have to be angry. No, you don't have to be angry. I don't have to be insecure. You don't have to be insecure. Just come into your grandparents' living room. That can actually let you love those who disagree with you on this fundamental issue, other fundamental issues. You know who you are. You're a son or daughter of the Father who's given you the Bible so you know who He is. You can actually pivot and love and serve people that disagree with you and hope that through your love they might come to know who the Father really is and His plan for their lives as male and female. You have a nourishing tradition. It's like a lantern. And you have the light of Holy Scripture. A person can read the Bible alone. False. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Thanks for listening. Our vision at Church of the Resurrection is to equip everyone for transformation. 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