Eastern European Baptist History: New Perspectives, 2007

did the appeal to the authority of Scripture actually work? The classic Christian consensus was that there must be a close correspondence between the authority of the living tradition of the Church and the authority of Scripture. The initial ecumenical councils of leaders from much of the Christian world, which met in the fourth century, recognised a New Testa- ment canon, treating some books as more local and less authoritative.* The * For a recent restatement of the development, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Whose Bible Is It? A His- tory of the Scriptures Through the Ages (New York: Viking Press, 2005), pp. 99-117. 189 healthy tension between appeals to the authority of Bible and Tradition broke down at the time of the Protestant Reformation due to the exagger- ated claims about sola scriptura on the one side, and Catholic exaggeration about a deposit of truth, the teaching magisterium of tradition. One subse- quent corrective was the heightened appeal to the authority of Reason as a helpful hermeneutical guide to Scripture.° The free churches, especially those influenced by the British or Baconian common sense tradition of philosophy, relied heavily on reason for constructing coherent doctrines, over which subsequent disagreements produced new Protestant denomi- nations. A fourth appeal to authority was Experience — that is, Scripture, Tradition, Reason and Experience. The experience of the guidance of the Holy Spirit was a necessary source for justifying new emphases and under- standings. In modern culture, the appeal to experience has grown, and now usually refers to the authority of the personal or individual experience of faith, most notably the experience of being filled or baptised with the Holy Spirit. In his highly regarded systematic theology of the church, Miroslav Volf points out how much literature on ecclesiology presupposes an episcopal or presbyterian form of ecclesiology as norm.° When we take stock of the way Christianity has expanded around the globe, we find the more participatory form of church polity referred to as the free-church congregational model to be the wave of the future. In most developed or modern societies there are also strong pressures from within the culture for a more democratic church. The Slavic evangelical movements were peoples movements. Some, such as the Evangelical Christians, took the priesthood of all believers so seriously that ordination of presbyters and bishops was avoided.’ Baptists, on the other hand, who looked to the Puritan or Reformed tradition, held a * See the careful analysis of comparative historical development in Jaroslav Pelikan, Credo: Historical and Theological Guide to Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Most relevant here is his discussion of polity in chapter 4, “Faith and Order’. * Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: the Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: