Over the last couple centuries, a bequest from the Reverend John Bampton has resulted in the publication of over one hundred and sixty theological works. Bampton, a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, is largely remembered for donating his estate to the “Chancellor, Masters, and Scholars of the University of Oxford,” with the stipulation that an annual series of eight lectures was to be presented and then published on one of the following topics, in order “to confirm and establish the Christian faith and to confute all heretics and schismatics: (1) upon the divine authority of the holy Scriptures; (2) upon the authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers, as to the faith and practice of the primitive Church; (3) upon the divinity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; (4) upon the divinity of the Holy Ghost; [or] (5) upon the articles of the Christian faith, as comprehended in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.”1 Several of these manuscripts have proved useful in my research and so from time to time I have returned to exploring others.
Walter Augustus Shirley (1797–1847) was selected to deliver the Bampton lectures in 1847 and his lectures were published under the title, The Supremacy of the Holy Scripture.2 Shirley’s particular interest was in challenging those “Christian” religious systems which were based on human authority rather than on the revealed Word of God.3 In his own day there existed a form of what we would now call cultural Christianity—a religiosity, an interest in religious things, a “semblance of godliness,” and perhaps even a profession of religious faith—which lacked any “real faith.”4 Shirley regrets that for some supposed Christians, “there may be the most implicit belief in certain religious opinions, and … [even an] entire submission to the teaching of the visible church, [yet] without any faith in the Word of God, or any devout allegiance to the supreme will.”5 To counter this situation, Shirley not only challenged claims regarding the authority of the apostolic traditions as interpreted and taught by the Catholic Church, but also any deference to contemporary Protestant teachings which were being elevated over Scripture itself.6 I contend that his concerns are also pertinent as we question whether the early church indeed deferred to oral traditions for multiple decades before publishing the first Gospel, as is asserted by many modern biblical scholars.
I encourage the present reader to survey Shirley’s publication directly, as only a few choice excerpts are offered below.
From Lecture I.
We are tempted to think that if we have persuaded men to submit to what we believe to be truth [then] all is gained; but we must bear in mind that if they have submitted their judgment to our authority without having been convinced that what we teach is really contained in the Bible, [then] they have not performed an act of faith, but of reason. They have received our teaching, not as the word of God, but as the word of man; and therefore even though their opinions be scriptural, yet their trust has been given to a human teacher, and is not an exercise of faith in God.7
Therefore our great object as Christian teachers must be to bring men to the Bible, as the record which God has given them, and by which they must be judged at the last day.8
[Reflecting on God’s revelation through Christ:] We must moreover allow … that when the Son of God, the living Word, proclaimed the Father’s will of love, he did so by oral teaching, and did not during his personal ministration dictate any written document. … Nor was this the case only while the Lord Jesus was going in and out among his disciples … but even afterwards for several years, “the salvation which was first spoken by the Lord” (Heb. 2:3) was verbally handed on, and confirmed to the faithful by those who heard him … It would seem that nothing was committed to writing until the Spirit had led the disciples into all truth, and the faith was fully delivered to the saints; for there is reason to believe that even the Gospel of St. Matthew was not written long before the earliest epistle of St. Paul, which exhibits the Christian system in its complete development.9
[With respect to the possibility that some unwritten teaching of Christ might yet exist as oral tradition:] All therefore that He [Jesus] said was divine; and all that He did presented a perfect example. But this cannot be said even of the Twelve, not simply because it would include the traitor … but because they had each only their several gift of the Spirit of God, and in other points were liable to error, and actually did err, as in the case of one among the very chiefest of them whom his brother apostle “withstood to the face, because he was to be blamed” (Gal. 2:11). In this careful manner must we guard our concession respecting the authority even of a well authenticated apostolic tradition, if such can be proved to exist in the sense in which the phrase is usually employed.10
The example cited in Galatians is significant for reminding us that it is the written testimony of the apostles which we accept as inspired and inerrant, and not whatever they might have said orally. I suspect that the apostles’ own recognition of the “Supremacy of Scripture” would have impressed on them the need to expeditiously publish a Gospel, which could then be stood alongside the Jewish Scriptures as the latest supplement to the Spirit-inspired Word of God.
From Lecture II.
We have then to investigate the fact here assumed [i.e., by the Catholic Church] of the existence of this unwritten Word of God, and to show that the authority of Scripture, the testimony of Christian antiquity, and the teaching of our own Church, are all opposed to the idea of there being an oral record of divine origin, which supplies the deficiencies of Scripture, explains its difficulties, or fixes its interpretation.11
Much of Shirley’s argument in lecture II, which disputes the possible existence of an authoritative oral tradition which might have persisted into Shirley’s day, also stands as an argument against the possible existence of an authoritative oral tradition which was passed from one believer to another within the earliest years of the church age, as the church spread beyond Jerusalem and Judea, and which carried authority greater than that of the Jewish Scriptures.
From Lecture IV.
We have endeavored to prove that the Apostolic Fathers, and the Churches over which they presided, or to which they addressed the Epistles which have come down to us, knew nothing of Tradition in the comparatively recent sense of an unwritten Word of God, of like authority with Scripture, and of greater practical value as explaining its sense. If this point may be regarded as established, the first link is wanting in the chain of the traditionary system, for we can hardly suppose that those writers who so freely quoted the written documents of the Evangelists and Apostles, would not have referred to their private and supplemental oral communications, had any such existed.12
Summary.
Bishop Shirley began his first lecture by quoting Isaiah—”To the law and to the testimony; if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isa. 8:20).13 Echoing Isaiah, Shirley declared that “blind submission to human teaching on divine subjects instead of referring all to the revealed word of God … is of the very essence of unbelief, for it trusts man rather than God.”14 Thus, it is to the Scriptures, to the law and the testimony, that we must direct people, rather than to the traditions and teaching of men. Correspondingly, I suggest that this same principle would weigh on the leaders of the early church who, recognizing Jesus’ aversion to oral traditions which might contradict Scripture (Matt. 15:6), would be eager to produce Scriptures which would themselves carry prophetic and apostolic authority as the very Word of God.
- A helpful index of the published lectures, dating back to the first series in 1780, is available at https://theologicalstudies.org.uk/series_bampton-lectures.php, with links to copies of the sermons at archive.org. These lectures transitioned to being biannual at the beginning of the twentieth century. For an extract from Bampton’s Will, refer to Shirley, Walter A. The Supremacy of Holy Scripture. Oxford: J. Vincent, 1847, iii–iv. ↩︎
- Hill, Thomas, ed. Letters and Memoir of the Late Walter Augustus Shirley. London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1849. Shirley’s publication notes that Shirley had actually taken ill prior to delivering all of the lectures, and later died; therefore, some of the published lectures are based on his notes. Shirley, Walter A. The Supremacy of Holy Scripture. Oxford: J. Vincent, 1847. ↩︎
- Ibid., 7. ↩︎
- Ibid., 1–4. ↩︎
- Ibid., 2. ↩︎
- Ibid., 29, 34–35, 71–72. ↩︎
- Ibid., 6. ↩︎
- Ibid., 7. ↩︎
- Ibid., 13–14. ↩︎
- Ibid., 16–17. ↩︎
- Ibid., 35–36. ↩︎
- Ibid., 95. ↩︎
- Ibid., 1. ↩︎
- Ibid., 3. ↩︎
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