decisions decisions
decisions decisions
DECISIONS, DECISIONS
August 22, 2026
The recent discussion surrounding William Lane Craig and the eternal generation of the Son has caused me to think again about something much larger than Craig himself. Craig is a well-educated and articulate Protestant theologian and apologist, and I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of his position. He affirms the deity of Christ and the Trinity, yet he has questioned whether the eternal generation of the Son—the Nicene confession that the Son is “begotten of the Father before all ages”—has sufficient biblical warrant. His basic principle is one with which I wholeheartedly agree: the Creed must submit to Scripture.
But there is a question hiding inside that statement that I increasingly believe we cannot afford to ignore: Who has the authority to determine what Scripture means? It is easy to frame the disagreement as Scripture versus the Nicene Creed. If those are our choices, Scripture wins. No Christian creed has authority over the Word of God. But that isn't really what is happening. Scripture has not descended from heaven to announce that the Nicene Fathers misunderstood eternal generation. An individual theologian has studied Scripture and concluded that the historic interpretation of the Church is mistaken. The actual disagreement, then, is not Scripture versus the Nicene Creed. It is one person's interpretation of Scripture versus the historic Church's interpretation of Scripture.
Craig may never claim personal authority over the Creed. In fact, I suspect he would reject that description of what he is doing. His motivation seems sincere: if he believes Scripture teaches something different, his commitment to biblical authority requires him to follow Scripture. I understand that instinct because I have lived most of my Christian life with it. But practically speaking, someone still has to decide that the Creed is wrong. If my interpretation of Scripture determines which portions of the historic faith are correct, then my interpretation has become the functional court of final appeal, whether I intended for it to or not. This is the blind spot I increasingly see: saying “Scripture is our final authority” doesn't tell us whose interpretation of Scripture is authoritative.
This isn't merely an academic problem for me. I was raised with Baptist leanings. I later became Wesleyan and eventually Vineyard. As a teenager I also spent some time attending an Evangelical Lutheran church with a friend. Those are very different interpretive traditions, yet all of them love Scripture, affirm biblical authority, and can open essentially the same New Testament and say with complete sincerity, “The Bible teaches…” The problem is that they don't always finish that sentence the same way.
Sometimes those differences involve relatively secondary matters, but at other times they concern baptism, the Eucharist, salvation, sanctification, spiritual gifts, ecclesiology, free will, the nature of ministry, and what is actually happening when the Church gathers. My childhood also exposed me to an enormous variety of Christian voices through television. Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jerry Falwell, Rex Humbard, Paul and Jan Crouch, James Robison, and many others spoke confidently from the Bible. They were not all presenting the same theology, and some of their differences were substantial. Everyone had a Bible, everyone could quote Scripture, and everyone could say, “The Bible clearly teaches…” Yet their conclusions could be radically different.
I don't say this dismissively. There are faithful Christians and brilliant biblical scholars throughout Protestantism, and I have benefited enormously from these traditions. I continue to be grateful for what I received through them. But that actually makes the problem more difficult. If the disagreements could simply be attributed to stupidity, dishonesty, or insufficient study, the solution would be easy: study harder. But what happens when sincere, prayerful, highly educated Christians who all confess biblical authority arrive at contradictory conclusions?
At times the Protestant academy and pulpit can feel like the Wild West of hermeneutics. One scholar produces an impressive exegetical argument for one position while another equally qualified scholar produces an impressive argument for its opposite. A pastor preaches that “the Greek clearly means” one thing, while another pastor with the same Greek New Testament explains that it clearly means something else. Each generation seems to produce new books explaining what other Christians have misunderstood, sometimes for centuries.
Eventually this can have a pastoral consequence that I don't think we discuss enough: people lose confidence. After hearing enough Christians confidently announce contradictory versions of “what the Bible clearly teaches,” some begin to wonder whether anything is actually clear. For some, that becomes part of deconstruction. Others retreat into passivity or reduce Christianity to the smallest possible collection of beliefs upon which everyone can agree. Eventually the mantra becomes, “Well, I guess we just can't really know.” I understand that response, but lately I have found myself asking another question: What if there is somewhere we can be confident?
This may be one of the most liberating questions I have encountered in my journey toward Orthodoxy: What if I don't have to reconstruct Christianity for myself? What if Christ never expected every Christian to sit down with a Bible and independently determine the nature of the Trinity, the identity of Christ, the meaning of baptism, the nature of the Eucharist, the shape of the Church, and the boundaries of the Christian faith? What if the faith is something we receive rather than something each generation is expected to rediscover?
That word—received—has become increasingly important to me. Paul speaks of what he “received” and “delivered” to the Church (1 Corinthians 11:23; 15:3). He commands Christians to hold fast to the traditions they were taught (2 Thessalonians 2:15), calls the Church “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15), and instructs Timothy to entrust what he has heard to faithful people who will teach others also (2 Timothy 2:2). There is a pattern here of receiving, handing down, guarding, and handing down again. Christianity begins to look less like something every generation is supposed to reconstruct and more like something every generation is supposed to faithfully receive and preserve.
That doesn't mean we stop thinking. It doesn't mean scholarship is unnecessary, nor does it mean difficult questions are forbidden. It means something much more modest: maybe I am not the final court of appeal.
This also makes me think differently about the promise of Jesus: “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). I believe Jesus, so what happens if I take that promise seriously not merely devotionally but ecclesiologically? What if Jesus actually did build a Church? What if the Holy Spirit actually preserved that Church? What if the apostolic faith wasn't lost and waiting to be rediscovered by a later scholar, reformer, denomination, movement, pastor—or me?
This is where I increasingly find the Orthodox claim compelling. I realize that saying this will immediately raise objections, and that's okay. Orthodox Christians have disagreed about biblical passages, Orthodox theologians are not individually infallible, bishops have made mistakes, and the history of the Church is complicated because the Church is filled with human beings. Nor would I argue that an institution should be trusted merely because it claims historic authority. That claim has to be investigated historically and theologically.
But after investigating the history of Christianity, I increasingly find myself willing to put my eggs in the Orthodox basket. It isn't because I believe Orthodox Christians have magically solved every interpretive problem. Rather, I would rather interpret Scripture within the historic, corporate, apostolic tradition of the Church than place the final authority for interpreting that tradition in the hands of individuals—including myself.
This brings me back to William Lane Craig. The controversy surrounding eternal generation is particularly revealing because we're not discussing an obscure medieval theological opinion. We're talking about the Nicene confession concerning the identity of Jesus Christ. The Fathers at Nicaea and Constantinople were not choosing Tradition instead of Scripture; they were interpreting Scripture within the received faith of the Church.
Importantly, their opponents had Scripture too. Arius could quote the Bible. The Arian controversy therefore could not be resolved by telling everyone, “Let's just get back to the Bible.” They were already arguing from the Bible. The question was what those Scriptures meant and which interpretation faithfully represented the apostolic faith received by the Church. That is precisely the problem we still face today.
Craig can say that he doesn't find sufficient biblical warrant for eternal generation, and I have no objection to him saying that. It honestly describes his conclusion. But there is an enormous difference between saying, “I don't see sufficient biblical warrant for this,” and concluding, “Therefore the Church's confession needs correction.” There is another possibility: “Perhaps I don't yet understand why the Church confesses this.” Those statements represent very different relationships to authority.
Perhaps this is what I have been looking for. The alternatives don't have to be absolute personal certainty or theological agnosticism. I don't have to say, “I've studied this issue and I'm certain my interpretation is correct,” but neither do I have to throw up my hands and say, “Everybody disagrees, so I guess nobody can know.” There is another possibility: I can receive the faith of the Church.
I can continue asking questions. I can read Scripture carefully, study Greek, engage modern scholarship, read the Fathers, and wrestle with doctrines I don't completely understand. But when my interpretation of Scripture conflicts with the historic, conciliar confession of the Church, perhaps humility means that my first assumption should be that I may be the one who needs correction. That isn't intellectual surrender. It is simply recognizing my limitations, and strangely enough, I find tremendous freedom in that.
I don't write any of this as someone who believes he has finished the journey. There are still things I'm studying, questions I'm asking, and implications I'm working through. But the question of authority has become increasingly difficult for me to ignore. For years I could say without hesitation, “Scripture is the final authority.” I still believe Scripture is authoritative, and I believe the Creed must be faithful to Scripture. But I now realize that the statement by itself leaves an enormous question unanswered: Who determines what Scripture means?
The Baptist has an interpretive tradition. The Wesleyan has one. The Lutheran has one. The Reformed Christian, Pentecostal, Vineyard pastor, nondenominational teacher, and independent scholar all have interpretive traditions, whether they recognize them as traditions or not. All can sincerely open the same Scriptures and say, “The Bible clearly teaches…” Perhaps the answer to that exhausting multiplication of interpretations isn't finding the scholar whose interpretation finally agrees with mine. Perhaps Christianity was never entrusted to me as a theological puzzle that I am responsible for solving.
What if there really is a Church? What if the faith has actually been preserved? What if Jesus really has been doing what He promised to do when He said, “I will build my Church”? Perhaps I don't have to decide everything for myself. Perhaps I can trust that Christ has not abandoned His Church and that the Holy Spirit has not left every generation to reconstruct the apostolic faith from scratch.
And perhaps the freedom I am beginning to discover is simply this:
Maybe I was never supposed to be the final authority in the first place.
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Mike