Aug 17, 2015
by Dr. John Yocum
Can we really know the intention of God through Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Teaching Office?
Or is insistence on the mutual interplay of Scripture, Tradition, and magisterial authority an acknowledgment and outworking within the Church of both the purpose of God and the nature of human society?
Tradition as Tutelage?
Tradition got a bad rap, beginning especially in the eighteenth century, and continuing in more or less subtle ways to the present. The loose, social-intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment, which has profoundly shaped modern, Western culture, defined its ideal as freedom from tradition. As the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it, Enlightenment is man's release from his self-imposed tutelage. Tutelage is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such tutelage is self-imposed if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but rather a lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another.
When Kant speaks of tutelage here, he is especially concerned with what we understand as Tradition: the handing-on of truth, including ethical truth embodied in a concrete way of life, within a people over time, and carrying a claim to authority. But can we historical mammal—who after all cannot learn to reason without the language we acquire only from those around u—really escape from tradition?
Alive to those dimensions of human existence, many recent philosophers are skeptical of Kant's confidence in self-sufficient individual reason. And can we live together in a peace based on truth without some reasoned adjudication of the disputes over that truth?
Community Dimension of Divine Plan
Dei Verbum (The Word of God) is one of the most widely admired documents of the Second Vatican Council among our Protestant brethren. It depicts the wisdom of God in providing for his people through a stable written form of his revelation, borne upon a living tradition, within a historical body provided with a concrete authority for maintaining the unity of the Spirit. The document speaks not only to the practical issues of doctrinal formulation and preservation, but it brings out the grandeur of the divine plan of revelation.
God speaks to human beings out of the abundance of his love, Dei Verbum tells us, so that human beings might come to know him, the triune God, and come into communion with the Father through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. God speaks to humans as to friends, inviting them into relationship with him.
That fellowship of love is not confined to discrete relationships between God and isolated individuals, but is part of a broader communion of love in which men and women have the astounding opportunity to share in the divine nature, that is, to grow into the likeness of God in Jesus Christ, as the Lord makes his presence among us corporately: It is not good for man to be alone (Gn 2:18).
This corporate dimension of the divine plan of salvation is evident in the whole history of salvation. God called Abraham from the very beginning to become a great nation and, through the nation, the source of blessing to all the earth. He spoke to and guided the patriarchs of the people of Israel, and then, through the prophets, taught his people through long centuries, preparing the way for the coming of the gospel in a corporate manner.
God's purpose and his manner of working were bound up with one another: the revelation of God, even as it came through individuals, was spoken to a people so to shape the life of a people who would live in accord with his character. He taught Israel through commandment and precept; through admonition, comfort and rebuke; and through corporate experience interpreted by inspired prophets.
From beginning to end, God has made himself known through a people, for the sake of a people, in the course of salvation history.
Written and Unwritten Form
Jesus Christ comes in the final stage of God's plan as the keystone, the fulfillment, and pivot of this history of divine revelation. He comes as the fulfillment of the whole history of Israel and as the true seed of Abraham by whom all the nations will bless themselves and in whom they will be blessed. He comes out of a people and out of a history, Son of God from all eternity and descendant of David in his human flesh.
In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world (Heb 1:1-2).
If God has prepared the way for the arrival of his Son incarnate, genuinely human and so genuinely descending from a concrete heritage, a tradition, would he abandon that mode of operation after that point? If the Lord's purpose is corporate, would that dimension of his plan not continue throughout the age of the Church?
In fact, in his earthly ministry, Jesus gathers around him a band of trusted disciples whom, after the resurrection, he commissions and empowers to carry his gospel to the ends of the earth. Jesus teaches them his word and brings them by baptism into the fellowship he has established with them (1 Jn 1:1-4).
This commission was faithfully fulfilled by the Apostles who, by their oral preaching, by example, and by observances, handed on what they had received from the lips of Christ, from living with Him and from what He did, or what they had learned through the prompting of the Holy Spirit (DV, no. 7).
The resulting fellowship is bound together in a common way of life, in prayer and sacrament, in devotion to the teaching the apostles have passed on (Acts 2:42). All that makes a pretty good summary of what Dei Verbum thinks of as the content of the Church's Tradition: Everything which contributes toward the holiness of life and increase in faith of the peoples of God . . . her teaching, life and worship . . . all that she herself is, all that she believes (DV, no. 8). Thus, the apostles handed on what they had received from the Lord in both written and unwritten form (DV, no. 8, citing 2 Thessalonians 2:15).
Food for the Soul
There is more of apostolic origin, especially in matters of liturgy and ecclesiastical discipline, than we find detailed in the New Testament. Of 2 Thessalonians 2:15, St. John Chrysostom (349-408) says, Hence it is manifest, that they did not deliver all things by Epistle, but many things also unwritten, and in like manner both the one and the other are worthy of credit. Therefore let us think the tradition of the Church also worthy of credit.
Nonetheless, The apostolic preaching . . . is expressed in a special way in the inspired books, that is, in the New Testament (DV, no. 8). The Church has always understood the Scriptures not only to contain, but actually to be the Word of God (DV, no. 24), from which, especially in the liturgy, the faithful partake of the bread of life, and that she venerates just as she venerates the body of the Lord. The Scriptures are a fixed and stable form of God's revelation and make the voice of the Holy Spirit resound in the words of the prophets and Apostles.
That image is striking; the Scriptures are not just a source-book for information, not even for Church doctrine. They are a means of communion.
For in the sacred books, the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and speaks with them; and the force and power in the word of God is so great that it stands as the support and energy of the Church, the strength of faith for her sons, the food of the soul, the pure and everlasting source of spiritual life (DV, no. 21).
One can see the special stress on the Scriptures in Dei Verbum from the fact that four of its six chapters are dedicated to the Bible: its inspiration and interpretation; the Old Testament; the New Testament; and, in an especially expansive, practical chapter, Sacred Scripture in the life of the Church. The Vatican Council fathers call for easy access to the Scriptures for all the faithful and for Scripture to nourish and regulate the Church's preaching, instruction and catechesis. Dei Verbum aptly cites St. Jerome's famous dictum, Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ (DV, no. 25; Comm. on Isaiah, prol.).
Scripture, however, has its home in the life of the people to whom it has been entrusted. The Bible is not a standalone document, but the book of the Church. Scripture and Tradition belong together. As Dei Verbum points out, it is through the Tradition of the Church that the canon of Scripture itself is known.
Which Books Are Inspired?
Among the edifying works that circulated in the life of the early Church, it was crucial to discern which were of apostolic origin and inspired by the Holy Spirit, and therefore canonical, taken as the standard of revelation that no true teaching can contradict. That need became especially urgent in the face of attempts to restrict the canon, like that of the second-century heretic Marcion, who wanted to eliminate the Old Testament and all its traces in the New Testament, and claims for heretical books, like the scriptures of the Gnostics.
How did the Church know what books belonged in the canon?
First by their agreement with the shape of the teaching passed on among the churches across space and through time. In debating with the Gnostic heretics, St. Irenaeus (130-202) points to this agreement on the outline of the gospel, which he refers to as the canon of truth, as a sign of the Church's true descent from the apostles. Scripture and Tradition, as Dei Verbum insists, flow from the same wellspring. They merge into a unity, and tend toward the same end, the salvation of human beings (DV, no. 9). Thus, agreement between the Church's public, historical preaching and the content of the books is a sign of the apostolicity of those books.
Second, because there was an historical continuity among those churches, going back to the original preaching of the apostles, the fact of their common use of the New Testament writings in their liturgies attested to their acknowledged authority. Most fundamentally, the Church knew the voice of the Holy Spirit who inspired the authors, because the same Spirit dwells in and guides the Church.
Thus, Sacred tradition takes the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles, and hands it on to their successors in its full purity. This is the task of faithfully handing on without diminution or adulteration the deposit of faithparatheke in the Greek of the New Testament, which means that which has been handed over as a trust.
The Role of the Magisterium
The Church is a fully human body, the result of a genuine incarnation in time and space. Thus, the task of passing on the deposit of faith intact belongs to a living teaching office, the Magisterium (DV, no. 10). This office belongs to the bishops, in union with the pope, whose commission is not to rule over the word of God but to serve it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, in order to draw from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed (DV, no. 10).
It belongs to the Magisterium to maintain, with the help of the Holy Spirit, the integrity of the deposit of faith so to hand it on in its integrity. At the same time, it falls to the Magisterium to discern the difference between what genuinely belongs to the deposit of faith and what might be a venerable and valuable custom, but not essential to the gospel. Distribution of ashes at the beginning of a forty-day season of penitence is not essential, but the call to repentance is.
As a living institution, the Church grows and develops. She learns, gains new insights, and moves forward. Tradition is stable but not inert. The deposit of faith has been handed on whole and entire, but the Church's penetration of it grows, through contemplation, study and the guidance of the Holy Spirit through time, until, as Dei Verbum no. 7 expresses, she is brought finally to see Him as He is, face to face (see 1 John 3:2).
Dr. John Yocum
Dr. John Yocum is an adjunct instructor of theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary. He is a leader in the Servants of the Word brotherhood in North America.