Justin Martyr's Dialogue With Trypho is a very important and wonderful work of apologetics. The same arguments used by Justin to convince the Jew Trypho of the truth of the Christian faith are used even today.
The one abiding principle employed by Justin is using the Scriptures alone to make his case. Trypho says he would not have listened to Justin had it been otherwise.
And Trypho said, "Prove this; for, as you see, the day advances, and we are not prepared for such perilous replies; since never yet have we heard any man investigating, or searching into, or proving these matters; nor would we have tolerated your conversation, had you not referred everything to the Scriptures: for you are very zealous in adducing proofs from them; and you are of opinion that there is no God above the Maker of all things."
The Scriptures alone are the source of our faith. That is not just the testimony of men like Irenaus who calls scripture the ground and pillar of our faith:
We have learned from none others the plan of our salvation, than from those through whom the Gospel has come down to us, which they did at one time proclaim in public, and, at a later period, by the will of God, handed down to us in the Scriptures, to be the ground and pillar of our faith.
Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1
But it is also the method of Justin Martyr in his dealings with Trypho. Where did he get this method except from the tradition taught to him? Does that sound contradictory? It is not. The tradition of the Church is the use of scripture as the source of our knowledge of and about God. The Scriptures are, as the Reformed labeled them, our Principium Cognoscendi.
The logical priority of Scripture over all other means of religious knowing in the church—tradition, present-day corporate or official doctrine, and individual insight or illumination—lies at the heart of the teaching of the Reformation and of its great confessional documents. Indeed, it is the unanimous declaration of the Protestant confessions that Scripture is the sole authoritative norm of saving knowledge of God. The Reformed confessions, moreover, tend to manifest this priority and normative character by placing it first in the order of confession, as the explicit ground and foundation of all that follows.
The more systematically ordered Reformed confessions, the First and Second Helvetic, the Gallican, the Belgic, juxtapose the doctrine of God with the doctrine of Scripture—a pattern followed in the seventeenth century by the Irish Articles and the Westminster Confession. This confessional pattern holds considerable significance for the development of Reformed theology, since it provides the basic form of the orthodox theological system: the confessions present the cognitive foundation or principium cognoscendi of revealed theology, the Holy Scriptures, and, based upon Scripture, the essential foundation or principium essendi of all theology, which is to say, God himself. Without the former, theology could not know the truth of God—without the latter, there could be no theology, indeed, no revelation. The movement of faith from one principium to the other is noted explicitly by the Belgic Confession: “According to this truth and this Word of God, we believe in one only God who is one single essence, in whom there are three persons, really, truly and eternally distinguished according to their incommunicable properties, namely, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Thus, Scripture leads us to the consideration of the unity and trinity of God, specifically of the essential unity and personal trinity of God.
It is simply amazing that the Orthodox and Catholics have take issue with what is so plain a matter. The scriptures were given to us by God so that we might know Him.
