We need to be careful at the outset not to let our humility become our arrogance, and to let ourselves diminish for the sake of the Gospel. The problem with all heresies is that they're always predicated on hubris—the heretic believes he sees the truth of Scripture more clearly than all the saints who have come before, and that his own reason is superior to their collected reason.
This doesn't mean we affirm truth by consensus or anything of the sort. The logical reaction to "one finite man can't apprehend all truth by himself" is not "truth is that which has been agreed upon by the majority." What we need to affirm, instead, is that God has given us as much truth as we can handle in His Word, that He intends His whole Church to apprehend that Church as a body rather than as individuals, and that the truth present in the Bible is bigger than any one or group of us.
By bigger I don't mean to suggest that it is therefore immaterial or shouldn't be sought after, but that the Bible, for all its clarity, is also incredibly abstruse at times and presents problems that aren't easily dismissed. How could it be otherwise? Christians take the Bible to be the self-revelation of a transcendent God communicating Himself both narratively and propositionally to finite human beings who are necessarily limited.
No heretic takes any of that seriously. That doesn't mean he can't make a seemingly airtight case for his position, or that he can't root that position in his own interpretation of Scripture; it simply means that he doesn't think his intellect is limited, and that he can figure everything out if he just thinks about it hard enough. In essence, then, he sets himself in a position of equality with the King of Heaven and Lord of the Universe.
Heretics often make their ideas seem humble. They couch them in peculiarly imminent terms, often gentle terms, trying to give us a sense of their Christian virtue and willingness to submit to Truth rather than to mere Tradition. What they fail to acknowledge is that their whole project is inherently arrogant, and abbrogates one of the key tenets of the Christian faith: the emphasis on unity.
An appeal to tradition is likely to spark controversy of its own in many quarters. What I mean is not tradition in the Roman Catholic sense, in which extrabiblical doctrine and practice is imported in virtue of its use within the Church. Tradition in the Reformed sense refers to no more than the essential teachings of the Church as maintained by faithful Christians through the power of the Holy Spirit acting on reason and practice. The clearest and most basic expression of these teachings can be found in the ecumenical creeds, and in the three forms of unity and the Westminster standards.
Submitting to these doctrines requires humility. Do the creeds and confessions contain doctrines that are difficult to understand and grasp? Absolutely, but so too does the Bible. Assuming that we can make perfect sense of God Himself is beyond courage: it's outright rebellion and unmitigated pride posing as intellectual freedom. To those who would reject the creeds I can only ask what alternative there is; how can we be sure we've got it right if we jettison the teachings of all those who came before us in the name of Jesus?
Humility requires our admission (primarily to ourselves) that we can't know everything, especially everything about God, and that we can't know anything perfectly or fully. Jesus didn't call a bunch of individuals to individually be His Church; He calls individuals to become united in Him as His Church, submitting to Himself and to one another in love. This doesn't appeal to human pride, but it is the only way we can hope to be united to Christ, or to understand the truth of His incomprehensibly gracious and beautiful Gospel.
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