When the theologians in the Church use the Church as regulative for their hermeneutical soundings, the theologians are engaging in natural theology. In other words, when the something like a consenus patrum (consensus of the ‘Fathers’) is assumed as normative, then the norming norm really isn’t Scripture any longer; instead it is Scripture read by appeal to traditioned traditions. There is an a priori belief, latent to this, that presumes that simply because a majority thread of doctrinal development can be identified in the development of the Church’s ideas, that inherent to the development there has been a concursus Dei and God’s providential hand has been ‘causing’ the development of these dominant doctrinal loci. In other words, theologians who appeal to this norming ecclesial tradition are appealing to this tradition as if they have been able to discern God’s hand in the midst of it all; thus giving this tradition divinely prescriptive force for the Church catholic.

What becomes problematic about this, in my mind, is that it presumes too much. Not only that, at a methodological level, it collapses God into the ‘natural’ development of things in the Church. But how does this absolutizing of the Church’s tradition allow for the Church to critically hear the voice of the living God? If God’s voice is collapsed into the natural development of the Church, then how is it possible to distinguish His voice from the Church’s? This represents one problem with this natural theological appeal to the tradition of the Church as regulative for the doing of Protestant theology. This appeal clearly fits well with the magisteria present in the Roman Catholic ecclesiology, with its ‘apostolic succession’ in tow; not to mention Orthodoxy’s own version of that. But Protestant theology operates with and from the so called ‘Scripture Principle.’ Scripture alone, for the Protestant, is the norming norm and regulative rule by which the Protestant theologian arrives at their theological conclusions in regard to God and His voice. But even this principle, without some critical reworking, can just as easily fall prey to the ecclesiocentric approach we have been discussing. In other words, if we don’t have a theology of the Word wherein the Word of God finds its res (reality) outwith its ‘written’ aspect, we will end up with the same problems as the Roman Catholics have; we will just end up with a paper pope rather than a flesh and blood pope. And that is what has largely happened in my estimation.

To exasperate things, many Protestant evangelical Reformed theologians, of late, have been retrieving Thomas Aquinas’s theology for the Protestant’s consumption. They might claim that they are only retrieving aspects of Thomas’s doctrine of God and the prima pars, rather than the whole of Aquinas’s theology. But if theology is determined to be what is in shape by its doctrine of God, then it is no wonder that Aquinas’s whole theology has crept into the edifice of Protestant theology, in sectors, in regard to the regulative hermeneutical nature of the Church.

I would argue that one’s theology proper determines all else that follows; since a doctrine of God, and its intellectual soundings, impose themselves upon the rest of the subsequent theological endeavor. If, for example, Aquinas’s/Aristotle’s theory of causation is part and parcel with his doctrine of God, then that will implicate the way the theologian views the role of the Church in regard to theological formations. And this takes us full circle. It is an uncritical reception of Thomas’s theological superstructure that has largely impacted the way evangelical theologians are doing theology today. But I think this goes beyond the reception of Aquinas. In a complex, there is a belief that there is a hierarchy of being vis-à-vis God. Given this interconnected universe, the theologian presumes that God has reached down, in a causal way, and given the Church the keys in regard to the development of sound theological reflection; and I mean in an absolute understanding of the Church vis-à-vis the Great Tradition. It is this foundation upon which the theologian does their work in a sort of locus or Ramist approach to the theological task.

For my money, we don’t want to start with the Church; we want to start with the head of the Church, who is Jesus Christ. If we don’t start with Christ we will end up with the Church as Christ; that is when it comes to a theory of authority. If our theologies are ecclesiocentric in orientation the voice of God has no space to penetrate and correct His Church; because the Church is already ostensibly speaking for God. This is the ongoing problem evangelical theologians who are retrieving in this way (the way I have been sketching) run up against. They simply are working from what they perceive as the providentially given theological form, and telling the Church that this is God’s voice for the Church; in regard to what should count as orthodox theology. In my view, God is much more free to be God for us if we reject this mechanistic conception of natural theology. And yes, this once again comes back to a doctrine of God. Some might say it comes back to what is called the via antiqua vesus the via moderna; the Thomist way versus the  nominalist. But no matter the philosophical antecedents, if the Protestant theologian is going to claim to be doing Protestant theology, theology of the Word theology, then they must come up with a better theological superstructure that allows for the Word of God to genuinely confront and contradict the Church’s own self-understanding. I do not see this unfolding in evangelical theology currently and as such think that most of evangelical theology represents an uncouth complex of an appeal to natural theology while also claiming to be adherents to the ‘free’ Word of God. Insofar that the Church’s Tradition is seen as regulative for the evangelical theologian’s mode, they are not able to operate from a theology of the Word that operates in and from the free life of God that He is for us and antecedently in Himself. We have taken the keys from the reality of the Gospel, and given them to the Church; and this is exactly the argument that Roman Catholic theologians have been making against sola Scriptura for centuries. They have a point, and the evangelical Reformed theologians have more to work to do in order to nuance their way past this present dilemma.

This is why I go with Karl Barth. He has already done the work that most evangelical Reformed theologians scorn. And this is not to mention that Martin Luther himself, and his theology of the Word, has already done much of this evangelical work right from the beginning of the Reformation. Yet contemporary Reformed theologians seemingly think Luther’s theology of the Word was over-wrought and thus not fundamental to the whole of the Protestant Reformation. This is a strange thing. There is a reason, though, why Barth quotes Luther in his CD more than any other theologian. I would submit it is because Luther grasped this ‘free’ theology of the Word that modern retrieval movements cannot countenance given their submission to the Thomist ingredients for how the theological project ought to be done and understood.