Scripture, Tradition, Reason, Experience

I have been musing on the four guides that we ought to trust in making sense of the world we live in. Relying on any one of these to the exclusion of the others is not a good idea. The best way to discover the truth about reality, and more importantly to discover how to behave as a result of knowing that truth, is to take seriously all four guides.

• SCRIPTURE. As a Christian, I believe that God speaks in and through the written text of the Bible, and therefore the Bible is a book I should trust. This is not to say I should take everything in it as the literal truth. There are layers of meaning (as with any text) and the most important truths are not always on the surface. The Bible is a book to engage with – to absorb, study, question, wrestle with, listen to and above all take seriously. John Campbell, in “Being Biblical”, has some very interesting things to say about the way we approach Scripture.
• TRADITION. Why reinvent the wheel? Better brains than mine have tackled the same issues as I face today. Admittedly some of them lived long ago and in different cultural contexts, and their conclusions are not always valid for my own age and context. But it is still worth knowing what others think. Truth is best discovered in a community setting, listening to and sharing with others, taking seriously the voices of the past as well as the present.
• REASON. I like to think of myself as a rational creature. I am not interested in a stupid faith. My understanding of the world has to be a sensible one. Careful thought, logical examination of the evidence, honest common sense – all of these are vital if I want to get to the truth.
• EXPERIENCE. Does my view of the world match personal experience? If not, there is something sadly wrong. In fact my own unique experience of life, in physical, mental and spiritual terms, is the raw material from which I derive my understanding of life. Where’s the point in trying to establish the truth based purely on thought-experiments or abstract principles? Truth is to be found in the material, emotional and spiritual roller-coaster of day to day life.

As I said, we must trust each of these guides. Anything which is fundamentally at odds with one or more of them is something to be very wary of.

An interesting aside: A few years ago a group of local ministers were debating this topic over one of our fellowship lunches. All agreed that we need to respect scripture, tradition, reason and personal experience, but there were differences of opinion as to which of these should be given higher priority. The evangelical ministers favoured the Bible and the high church ministers regarded tradition as important. After the meeting I realised that the entire discussion had been conducted on the basis of reason. We did not get out our Bibles and compare texts. We did not quote the wise pronouncements of the church. We did not each insist that we were right because of our own personal experience. We acted as if the truth could be discovered by reason and we debated it in friendly and logical fashion. From that I conclude that to all intents and purposes we live in an age where reason is seen as having higher priority than scripture or tradition – though in a post-modern world personal experience is increasingly becoming the yardstick by which ‘truth’ is measured.