From Ricky, it appears as if a great deal of what you say depends on the Protestant Reformation Doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Can you demonstrate that the Ante-Nicene fathers actually believed in that concept when they may not have had access to all the scriptures? It seems as if they may have held to a more prima Scriptura mindset. Okay, very perceptive question. And I think you're largely accurate in everything that you have said. So I would describe the position of the pre-Nicene Christians.
They look to the apostolic faith. Now, the best witness of that were the New Testament scriptures. And of course, they looked to the Old Testament scriptures as explained by the apostles. Now, the one advantage they had over us is they received this orally. I mean, the New Testament Christians, they heard Peter preaching, they heard Paul preaching, they heard John preaching. So they were able to receive the faith orally, directly from the apostles before anything was written down.
It was already there before probably maybe the first New Testament book was Matthew, and that may have been written 10, 20 years after the church was founded. So, yeah, it was received orally at the beginning, and then the Scriptures went to verify what had been taught. So the first generation, when you look at, say, Clement of Rome, who was a direct disciple of the apostles, yeah, he would have received it mainly orally, but he also had the Scriptures. And it's interesting in what's called 1 Clement.
He quotes from Scripture just, I mean, paragraph after paragraph. It's just Scripture, Scripture, Scripture, not just the Old Testament, but largely New Testament Scripture. So even at that early date, and it was probably written in like the year' 97, even at such an early date, they're quoting Scripture as their normative rule for theology, for teaching, and that sort of thing. So, that's what passed into the second century.
Yes, the faith handed down, but the primary witness to that is the Scripture or the infallible witness is that of Scripture. And the further then you got from the last apostle who was apparently John, the last one who died, then the more the Christians needed to cling to the Scriptures because, yeah, memories can be fallible. And in one church, maybe they never heard this oral teaching, and some other church did, but you had the writings.
Now, you said, yes, they didn't have, they had them all, but not every church had every single writing necessarily in their church library or collection of scripture. But I think it would be safe to say that virtually every church had the four gospels and the is it 13 letters, I think, of Paul? So they had the bulk. They also 1 John, nearly everyone quotes from and 1 Peter. So the bulk of the New Testament, yeah, all the churches had that they all looked to.
Then you had other complementary books like 2 Peter, James, Revelation, that some churches had, some didn't. And they maybe affected the understanding of certain outlying doctrines, but not the core of the faith. You had that primarily in the four gospels. And they also, of course, had acts. So, yeah, the apostolic faith is what they look to, but the scriptures, you know, was their guarantee of what that faith was.
And Tertullian, around the year 200, maybe it was 198 or so, and I don't remember the writing now specifically, but he talks about tradition in it. And he says," If you want to know what the authority is for certain things, well, the authority is tradition because you won't find any Scripture for it." But the things he lists are all what you might call ritualistic practices of praying at certain times or how they did certain things in baptism, fairly minor matters.
It wasn't any of the foundational teachings that he was saying that, you know, we have to refer to tradition on that. There are things if he didn't have, nothing would be lost. So, and that's how much tradition had accrued, you know, let's say around the year 200, which wasn't very much. So, yeah, the bulk of it is scripture. So, back to your question, I seem to be more espousing the sola Scriptura view. And you are right to a degree, and it's through the School of Hard Knocks.
So after I originally read the early Christian writings, which when I read them, I was just trying to find answer to theological questions, and then discovered a lot of things I never expected. And yeah, it totally turned my life around. But yeah, I saw things that, okay, this isn't in the New Testament. I never necessarily thought I should follow them or that I had any obligation to. But it was interesting to see that.
But I was mainly concerned with what was in the New Testament, that I realized I wasn't obeying, that the churches I had belonged to weren't obeying. It said you didn't need to. And that's what really got my attention and my life.
Years later, when we had a fellowship in Texas, a house church, and we sort of set off with the idea," Okay, let's take scripture as understood by the early Christians, and then any traditions up to the year 200, then we'll follow them as well, unless they somehow clearly contradict Scripture, and there was nothing we came across that we felt fell into that category." So, we did things like the early Christians prayed three times a day at the third, sixth, and ninth hour.
I feel pretty certain that's an apostolic tradition. It was so universal. It's mentioned so early, it's in the Didache. You can see indications in the Book of Acts that this was a practice. So, yeah, we followed that, but it's not commanded in the New Testament. They fasted on Wednesday and Friday. Again, I feel fairly certain that was handed down by the apostles because it's so universal, so early. And yet it's never a written commandment. But we felt like, let's do it. And then, yeah, there were other ones.
And it seemed like a harmless and a solid enough pattern to go by. Well, what happened? What went wrong was, yeah, so where do you cut off? Like I say, we made the artificial deadline of the year 200. In other words, a century after the apostle John died. If it's not written down there by then, if we don't have written testimony by then, then it's very questionable, could this have been handed down by the apostles? But that was an arbitrary date. So, yeah, people said, well, what about this?
Okay, maybe we see it in the year 235, but it doesn't seem to be something new in the year 235. Shouldn't we also follow that? Shouldn't we follow this? And what ended up happening was pretty soon we were going all the way to the Council of Nicaea. As long as it was pre-Nicene, then we would do it or we would maybe do it. It was hard to be consistent because sometimes there's only one witness, one you know written witness to a particular practice. And okay, so is this really apostolic or not?
And people then got so caught up in things that were not in Scripture. Well, then it spilled over into theology. And as we practiced some of these traditions from the second century, some of which I believe were Apostolic and others may have just been early Christian traditions. It brought us in more contact with like the Catholic and Orthodox churches and things they were doing. And we could see a clear distinction between the pre-Nicene church and then the modern-day Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.
But then in dialogue with them, you know they would say, well, you know we would say what you teach on Mary, that's just not scriptural. They say, well, Irenaeus calls her the second eve. Oh, okay. So then pretty soon people, well, Irenaeus says the second eve. So somehow he becomes authority, something that's not even in the New Testament. It's like, well, you've got a pre-Nicene Christian from the second century. And he says this. Of course, he didn't pray to Mary. He didn't say she was queen of heaven.
He didn't say she was sinless, anything. You know, he was just saying she was a counterpart of Mary. That's as far as he ever went. But yeah, as it built up, I saw this was not it was a good experiment, but I felt it was dangerous and unworkable. Yeah, where is it going to lead up? So, yeah, I came to the conclusion. I think the safest thing is what's in the New Testament?
If something was universal at an early date, like praying three times a day, then I think it's a good practice, but I would be very uninclined to teach it as a commandment, to put it as a requirement on our church. In our church, there's a few of us who practice that. I still try to practice it every day. There's some other brothers who do that with me, but it's not a commandment or anything like that.
So, yeah, it's just through the School of Hard Knocks that I've come back to that because I'm not in the second century. It's very hard to replicate something when you weren't back there and you're just having to look at a small witness to the lenses of history. Now, as I've said in some of my books, Sola Scriptura is really a myth because nobody, nobody, absolutely nobody uses only the Scripture as their authority.
A lot of people say that, but I think it's impossible because even if you're just a hermit, you're up in the Appalachian Mountain somewhere and you just read the Bible, you haven't read any commentaries, you haven't listened any sermons from anybody else, read any other Christian literature, which wouldn't be a good thing. But let's say you're doing that and you just read the Bible, well, you're still putting your interpretation on it.
I mean, there are verbal contradictions in the text of Scripture, and you have to decide," Okay, how do you harmonize this verse with that verse?" Everyone sees that and has to do it. And so you're adding something to Scripture when you come up with that harmonization. I mean, it's a logical, necessary thing to do, but the way you harmonize it isn't necessarily the way the apostles harmonized it.
So, yeah, you can add your own thoughts on it, or you can go to a theologian like Martin Luther or John Calvin, which so many people do, or Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, you know, whatever. And the course I've followed that I feel is the safest and is really just common sense is to look at how did the Christians who were closest to the apostles understand these passages of Scripture?
And particularly looking at what they believed in the second century, but on most theological subjects, there is no change between what you read in the year 125 and what you read in the year 315. There's very little change that way. So taking Scripture as the final authority and using the early church as our best commentary to shed light on the Scripture.
If we don't use them, like I say, we're going to either use some teacher we look up to or our own minds or some great theologian or famous theologian, I should say, from past centuries.
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