One of the stranger criticisms directed at full preterists comes from fellow Protestants. We are told that our problem is not simply that we interpret certain passages incorrectly, but that we have wandered outside the boundaries established by the historic creeds and confessions. Sometimes the accusation is sharpened further: full preterism is supposedly the inevitable product of Solo Scriptura—the individual Christian with his Bible, accountable to no church, creed, confession, or historical consensus.
There is something peculiar about hearing that argument from the sons of the Reformation.
The Reformers did not despise the historic Church. Neither did they believe every Christian should approach Scripture as though nobody had read it before him. They quoted the Fathers, wrote catechisms, formulated confessions and convened ecclesiastical assemblies. The Reformed tradition in particular produced some of the most carefully constructed confessional documents in Christian history. But those documents were deliberately placed beneath Scripture. They were authoritative only in a subordinate and ministerial sense. They could be corrected because Scripture could not.
That is Sola Scriptura, properly understood.
Solo Scriptura is something different. It is the notion that history, teachers, creeds, councils and the communion of the saints have nothing useful to contribute to biblical interpretation. I know few serious full preterists who believe that. The issue is not whether tradition should be heard. The issue is whether tradition gets a veto.
And here full preterism may actually provide a surprisingly powerful theological defense of Sola Scriptura.
The New Testament presents the apostles as possessing genuine and extraordinary authority. Jesus could tell them, “The one who hears you hears me.” Paul could issue commands to churches with an authority no pastor or theologian possesses today. The Jerusalem Council could declare, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” The apostles were not merely particularly intelligent Bible teachers. They were commissioned representatives of the risen Christ.
This argument is important to me. Recently, a good friend of mine left Protestantism for Roman Catholicism. He now no longer accepts the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Instead, he now argues for the dual authority of the Bible and the church, with a particular emphasis on the church’s authority to infallibly interpret scripture, passed down through the apostles.
The Roman Catholic question therefore deserves to be taken seriously: if Christ established an authoritative teaching Church, why should that authority suddenly disappear?
Ironically, the full preterist understanding of the transitional period provides an answer.
The apostles belonged to a unique period in redemptive history. They stood between the inauguration of the New Covenant in Christ and the final disappearance of the old covenant order. Hebrews describes that old order as “becoming obsolete and growing old” and “ready to vanish away.” The apostles ministered during that overlap. They were witnesses of the risen Christ, heralds of the approaching judgment upon the old covenant world, founders of the New Covenant assemblies and authorized interpreters of what Christ had accomplished. And yes, they received keys of the kingdom from our Lord, to judge and guide His body the Eklessia it’s early formative years.
Their office was therefore foundational. But where do we get the idea that it was perpetual?
Paul’s language in Ephesians is striking. The household of God is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.” Foundations are not continually laid. Once established, construction proceeds upon them. Revelation employs the same imagery when the New Jerusalem is pictured with twelve foundations bearing the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.
This makes the apostolic age intelligible without requiring an endless succession of apostles.
Christ commissioned the apostles. The apostles preached the gospel, established churches, appointed elders and committed their teaching to faithful men. Their authoritative testimony was preserved in writing. The foundational generation passed away, while the Church continued to build upon the apostolic foundation.
This distinction is critical: succession of apostolic teaching is not necessarily succession of apostolic office.
Paul tells Timothy to entrust what he had heard from Paul to faithful men who would teach others. Rome understandably sees succession in that passage. There certainly is succession. But what is being transmitted? The text explicitly identifies the thing being passed along: Paul’s teaching. Timothy is to preserve the apostolic deposit and transmit it faithfully. Nothing in the passage necessarily says that Timothy receives Paul’s unique apostolic authority and can subsequently confer that same authority upon another man, who can confer it upon another, creating an infallible teaching office lasting throughout history.
That additional proposition has to be demonstrated.
Full preterism makes the distinction especially understandable because it recognizes the extraordinary character of the apostolic generation. The period between Christ and the consummation of the Jewish age was not simply the first forty years of an otherwise unchanged two-thousand-year ecclesiastical arrangement. It was a period of covenantal transition.
That helps explain the extraordinary phenomena accompanying it: apostles who had seen the risen Christ, inspired prophets, revelatory gifts, signs authenticating the apostolic mission and the production of the New Testament writings themselves. These were not necessarily ordinary features of Christianity that subsequently malfunctioned or mysteriously disappeared. They belonged to the laying of the foundation.
Once the foundation had been laid, the Church did not need additional foundations. It needed to remain faithful to the one already given.
And here we arrive back at Sola Scriptura.
The authority of Scripture does not depend upon the Church possessing continuing apostolic authority. Quite the reverse: Scripture possesses its peculiar authority precisely because it preserves the authoritative apostolic deposit after the foundational apostolic era has passed.
The Church did not become unnecessary. Pastors, teachers, elders remain necessary. The corporate wisdom of Christians across generations remained immensely valuable. Creeds and confessions became useful safeguards against repeatedly reinventing old heresies. None of that requires an infallible post-apostolic teaching office.
Nor does recognizing the canon require an infallible recognizer. The fact that the church was largely Roman Catholic at the time of the codification of the New Testament canon is incidental. It does not mean that the church created the Bible.
A person can correctly identify something without becoming incapable of error. A botanist who discovers a new species of plant and gives it a name did not create the plant. The ancient people of God recognized prophetic writings without every rabbi thereby becoming an inspired prophet. In the same way, the early Church could recognize, collect, preserve, and transmit apostolic writings without acquiring the apostles’ inspiration merely by recognizing what the apostles had written.
That principle also applies to Protestant confessions.
The Westminster Confession is valuable precisely because it attempts to summarize biblical teaching. But Westminster itself explicitly acknowledges that councils may err. The confession therefore cannot consistently become the standard by which Scripture is permitted to speak. It remains a witness beneath Scripture rather than a judge above it.
That becomes particularly relevant when full preterism enters the discussion.
If someone tells me that full preterism is wrong because I have misunderstood Matthew 24, 1 Corinthians 15 or Revelation, he has made a legitimate Protestant argument. We can open the texts and examine them. If he tells me that my interpretation fails to account for some important historical evidence, that too deserves consideration. If he demonstrates that my reading contradicts another biblical doctrine, I must answer him.
But if the decisive argument is simply that the creeds settled the question, something strange has happened.
The child of the Reformation has begun sounding remarkably like the opponent against whom the Reformation protested.
The question inevitably becomes: Can the confession be corrected by Scripture?
Every confessional Protestant must answer yes.
Then the mere fact that an interpretation contradicts the confession cannot establish that the interpretation contradicts Scripture. It may provide an excellent reason to examine the interpretation very carefully. Fifteen centuries of Christian consensus should not be brushed aside casually. Humility demands that we ask whether we have missed something obvious.
But caution is not infallibility.
This is precisely why criticizing full preterism as Solo Scriptura merely because it challenges an inherited eschatological consensus misses the point. The issue is not whether we listen to our fathers. We should. The issue is whether our fathers are permitted to close a question that Scripture itself requires us to reopen.
The Reformers themselves forced that question upon the medieval Church.
Rome could point to bishops, councils, theologians, ecclesiastical tradition, and centuries of accepted practice. Luther could not answer merely by producing an older and larger ecclesiastical consensus of his own. At some point he had to contend that the Church could be wrong because Scripture could not.
That principle is dangerous.
It was dangerous in 1517, and it remains dangerous today.
Once Protestants confess that Scripture stands above every ecclesiastical authority, they must live with the uncomfortable possibility that Scripture might correct not only Rome but Geneva, Westminster, Augsburg, or Dort. That does not mean those traditions are generally unreliable. It simply means they remain what the Reformers said they were: subordinate standards.
Full preterism brings that principle into unusually sharp focus because its understanding of the transitional apostolic age explains why the Church can possess genuine authority without possessing apostolic infallibility.
Christ has not abandoned his Church. The disappearance of the apostles did not leave Christianity without authority. It marked the completion of their foundational task.
The apostles remain authoritative precisely because their authority does not depend upon having living replacements.
We still sit at their feet, hear their testimony, receive their doctrine, and submit ourselves to the revelation entrusted through them. But we encounter that apostolic authority today in the apostolic deposit rather than in men claiming succession to the apostolic office.
Ironically, then, full preterism may preserve something its Protestant critics sometimes inadvertently surrender. By locating the apostles within the unique covenantal transition culminating in the end of the old age, it provides a reason for distinguishing the infallible apostolic foundation from the fallible Church subsequently built upon it.
The Church has authority. Tradition, creeds and confessions have value. Teachers have authority within their proper sphere.
But none of them are apostles.
And none of them carry the infallible authority of Scripture.
Perhaps the great irony is that the full preterist accused of practicing Sola Scriptura may simply be insisting upon the uncomfortable implication of Sola Scriptura: the right of Scripture to correct all of us—including Protestants.
Article posted with permission from Bill Evans
