If you like church history and tradition or are interested in knowing more about church history and tradition then Evangelicals and Tradition will surely make the top shelf of you book case.
The book is well researched and has a lot, and I mean a lot, of great quotes from the early fathers. This is a dire need in our day. Today, many Christians are taught by their Evangelical churches that tradition is “man-centered;” as if God just dropped the Bible from heaven and never intended to use man to glorify Him. These Christians that teach tradition (liturgy, ethics, etc.) to be man-centered are those that simply hold to a new, modern tradition, a post-enlightenment tradition that thrives on rebellion against the tradition church.
Evangelicals and Tradition is such the book that aims to show how important tradition really is. In the Introduction on page 18, Williams says, “Rather, if contemporary evangelicalism aims to be doctrinally orthodox and exegetically faithful to Scripture, it cannot do so without recourse to and integration of the foundational tradition of the early church…renewal…will take place through an intentional recovery of Protestantism’s catholic roots in the church’s early spirituality and theology.” Cheers! Catholicity, to Williams, is inclusive to the early church and not so much the modern fragmentation of the Church!!!
Williams later goes into issues of the Canon of Scripture and its relation to the Church. This is were his Baptist roots begin to show as he briefly refutes the Southern Baptist paranoia of authority and seeks to convince the reader of early church ecclesiastical authority. I’m not sure what his answer would be for the Southern Baptists, though, since their sanctions speak with authority but do not really claim to have authority. He stops short in many areas of the book where, if he were a part of a more high church tradition, he would be able to continue the argument to its “traditional” conclusion; that the authority of the Bible involves the authority of the Church leadership and the Bible is not to be subjected to private manipulation.
In Chapter Four, Williams makes bold proclamations against the hyper-evangelical/ “reformed” views of justification. This book is worth purchasing simply to read this chapter. He is very bold to proclaim that the early church fathers had sound views of justification that do not match what we teach today. Williams says, “In general, the fathers maintained the free and unmerited character of God’s grace toward us, expressing it sometimes in the terms of justification by faith, although they saw ongoing justification in a different light. Making firm differentiations between justification and sanctification was not the essence of doctrinal discourse for them. More pertinent to the early church’s thinking as it concerned faith and justification was how a believer was purified…but the majority of early fathers stressed that God’s work in the life of a Christian was more a process than a point”
Even if you don’t agree with Williams’ teaching it is still worth the time to digest. And although the book is a bit over stimulating at times with all of the various quotes from the historical teachers, it is a book that carries a unique goal: to teach the average Christian as well as the learned Christian to value church tradition. So buy the book, grab a highlighter and start swiping. You’ll be glad you did!