A review by theologiaviatorum
A Dissertation upon the Use and Importance of Unauthoritative Tradition by Hawkins Edward 1789-1882

informative medium-paced

4.25

I don't know when I first had the idea to read the influences of those authors I admired or where I got the idea but it has been my practice for some time. Alan Jacobs calls it reading "upstream" (The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, 43-50). So when I read Newman's "Arians of the Fourth Century" and found he so often quoted a sermon by Edwards Hawkins I decided to try and locate it. It was a difficult find, and the only edition I found was a reprint (which I never do because they are usually low quality and oddly formatted), but I am interested in the topic and this work in particular so I purchased it. It's old and the language shows, but it was helpful. His central contention is that scripture itself makes clear that it was God's intention for his book to be understood with the aid of "unauthoritative tradition." He emphasizes the "unauthoritative," in essence, to maintain his Protestant credentials. He regularly makes clear that he is not arguing for the elevation of tradition in the manner of the "Romanists" (a nasty term for Catholics). He insists that "the Scriptures will be our only authoritative rule of faith" (44). But he also points out that scripture is not systematic but, rather, they are occasional and "in every instance supposing [the readers] previously informed of the Christian doctrines, in short always implying previous oral teaching" (25). So he conceives the purpose of scripture not to teach the doctrine but to prove or confirm the doctrine which has already been taught. "If then the foregoing account of the Scriptures be correct, we cannot but admit the object of those sacred books to have been much less to teach, than to enforce and establish what had been taught before" (31). Hawkins suggests that the Protestant aversion to any mention of "tradition" is an unfortunate and extreme reaction to Catholicism. He writes, "an excessive dread of the papal heresy has caused the just and legitimate use of traditional instruction to be continually overlooked by pious Protestants" (17).  This edition also contains supplementary extracts from his Bampton Lectures in 1840 where the pagination resets (my references are to the first work "A Dissertation Upon the Use and Importance of Unauthoritative Tradition." All in all I found the work insightful, although occasionally offensive.