The Bible (Part II)...and Tradition

What did the Bible have to say about the Church's authority and this notion of "Tradition" (extra-biblical teaching) that we hear talked about in Catholic churches, in opposition to sola scriptura?  (Contrary to my assumption and implicit understanding in my Protestant upbringing, Tradition does not mean rituals and superstitious customs of the Catholic Church.) Tradition, to the Catholic Church, refers to the teaching of the Church that is passed down throughout time, beginning with the Apostles. It may not be explicitly stated in the Bible, but it is what the Church claims has always been understood by men everywhere and exists as a part of the "deposit of faith" (the Catholic Church defines the Deposit of Faith as the body of saving truth entrusted by Christ to the Apostles and handed on by them to be preserved and proclaimed). The claim of the Catholic Church is that they have a living voice that announces the life and teachings of Jesus Christ with Tradition in one hand and the Scriptures in the other.

There are many examples within the New Testament of the Apostles calling upon tradition (paradosis) as an authority:

2 Thess. 2:15 “So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions [paradosis] which you were taught, whether by word of mouth [extra-biblical oral teaching] or by letter from us.”

2 Thess. 3:6 “Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep aloof from every brother who leads an unruly life and not according to the tradition [paradosis] which you received from us.”

Lk 1:3-4 “It seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught [that is, the oral paradosis]”

For Paul and Luke, the litmus test for authentic Christian teaching is not “Is this written?” (as Protestants would ask) but “Is this apostolic (i.e., taught by the Apostles)?” John also acknowledges that his mention of specific stories and teachings of Jesus is not meant to deny other extra-biblical traditions (Jn 20:30; 21:25), so long as these traditions do not oppose his teaching and that of the other apostles. (1 Jn 2:18-19; 4:1-3; 2 Jn 7-9)

Lk 10:16 Christ told the Twelve Apostles: “He who listens to you listens to me.”

 

1 Cor. 11:2 “Now I praise you because you remember me in everything, and hold firmly to the traditions (paradosis), just as I delivered them to you.”

Paul twice tells the Corinthians “what I received I passed on to you” (1 Cor 11:23; 15:3)—what he received is the teaching concerning the events surrounding the Lord’s Supper and Resurrection, and this was via apostolic paradosis, the transmission of tradition (Paul was not one of the 12 Apostles, so what he received was passed down via extra-bilblical teaching, or tradition). Paul also refers to it as “from the Lord,” which gives the apostles’ teaching Christ’s authority.

1 Th 2:13 “we also constantly thank God that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God.”  These words have authority not because they are written but because they are apostolic; apostles knew that Christ had told them “He who listens to you listens to me.”

Acts 8:31 Ethiopian eunuch “How can I [understand the Scriptures] unless someone explains it to me?”  Oh wow. This seems to sum up the matter I'm wrestling with precisely...how can we know the right interpretation of the Scriptures? Would God provide that authority to some entity as a way to preserve all the teaching He inspired to be written and passed down? The Catholic church would say yes, and that the Bible and Tradition are two sides of one coin, that cannot be separated, and the "Magisterium" is the authoritative teaching body within the Catholic church. The Orthodox church also has a notion of tradition and particular loyalty and unity around to the teachings of the first seven councils (but after that, it becomes a bit less clear, where tradition and teaching depends on the region of the church). The Protestant church would say it's up to every individual's conscience and inner working of the Holy Spirit (I think--I'm not sure there actually is a consensus on that answer, as there is not much consensus about many things...)?

2 Tim. 3:14-15 “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which were able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”  Paul is writing this before the Bible as we know it was established ("Scriptures" refers to the Old Testament), and he's saying, “what you have learned and believed” is to be trusted “because you know those from whom you learned it”—that is, because the Body of Christ, the Church, is teaching it, then you know it is true and should be continued. The Scriptures are a part of and consistent with this, which reinforce what Timothy had been taught.

For Paul, the inspired Scriptures are trustworthy, not because they attest to themselves, but because they rest on the Church's teaching, for as he writes in 1 Tim. 3:15, "God's household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth."  Hmm. The church is the foundation of truth?? What in the world?? I'd never heard this. The Bible is the foundation!  But this foundation as that of the apostles teaching (which is held in the Church) is referenced again in Eph. 2:19-20, "...members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone." The foundation of the church (God's household) is not of paper and ink, but of the apostles and prophets (with Christ as the chief cornerstone). The books of the Bible are truthful because the group of people who wrote, edited and canonized the books is the Body of Christ.  Paul also writes in Eph. 3:10, "His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms." The pillar and foundation of their faith (1 Tim. 3:15)  is not first and foremost a sheet of papyrus, but a living community which Paul refers to again in 2 Cor. 3:2-3, "You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts."

So in summary, the claim of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches is that New Testament believers did not come to trust the Church and its Head (Christ) through the book of Scriptures; they came to trust the book of Scriptures through the Church and its Head. So this issue of Scriptures and Tradition naturally leads to the issue of Authority (which I'll address in a later blog post).

Hmmm...this all just seemed too radical, ideas that I was not permitted to accept as a Protestant. Yet I couldn't deny that there seems to be something to this line of thought. If nothing else, even if I didn't embrace it, I could at least see where Catholics get their claims for Scripture and Tradition being part of one package.  If God would go to such lengths to give His people holy Scriptures, then it made sense that He'd also give the Body of Christ, the Church, the Bride, a means of correctly understanding and transmitting the Scriptures.  Yes, He gives the Holy Spirit to all believers--but whose version of what the Holy Spirit is telling them do we use?  It makes sense that God would give some part of the Body the ability to correctly discern the Holy Spirit and disseminate this message. Otherwise, what good is the Scriptures if we all have our individual (and conflicting) interpretations and there isn't unity but rather divisiveness in the face of non-believers?

So, even if I didn't embrace it, I could not call Catholics heretical for believing this idea of Scripture and Tradition.  That was a huge step for me.  But I couldn't just stop there in saying the Catholics have an argument for it, I needed to investigate further to see if I was going to embrace that one idea--not any of the others, mind you!

Perhaps allowing for the Bible and church history, or "Tradition" as the Catholic Church calls it, to go hand-in-hand would help to bolster all that I believed about the Bible (it's authority, inspiration, infallibility, inerrancy, etc.) and provide me a solid foundation for determining the appropriate interpretation of all the sticky/confusing aspects of my theology that I'd wrestled with for years (since entering college in 1997).  All of this was not diminishing my understanding of and reverence for the Bible's inspiration and authoritative revelation, it was simply bringing the possibility of the Catholic Church's version being a bit more legitimate.  As John Henry Newman (an Anglican priest who converted to Catholicism in 1845...and the founder of University College Dublin, where I worked in my post-doc) put it, “A revelation is not given, if there be no authority to decide what it is that is given.”  Hmm.

I then discovered this quote by one of my all-time favorite Christian thinkers and writers, and one of the highest regarded in Protestant circles: C.S. Lewis, in "Miracles," writes: “Nothing could be more unhistorical than to pick out selected sayings of Christ from the gospels and to regard those as the datum and the rest of the New Testament as a construction upon it.  The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection.  If they had died without making anyone else believe this “gospel,” no gospels would ever have been written.” What this seems to be saying is from the very beginning, the Gospel was transmitted and believed because of the witness and testimony of the Apostles and the first generation of believers...the transmission of the Gospel of Christianity was not due to the transmission of the Bible, but of the teaching of the early church/church members, so to speak.

Note also that the first three covenants are all passed on orally, not only from God to Adam, Noah, Abraham, but from them to their descendants. Genesis, etc. was not written until the time of Moses, yet God assumes Moses will know who God is talking about when He declares, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham,” etc.  That's a form of Tradition existing among the Israelites...why are we so opposed to it as Protestants?  I supposed Protestants would say they aren't opposed to it, as long as it's backed up by Scripture. But here we have hundreds of years, both in the Old Testament time, and in the first 400 years after Christ, when there were no Scriptures to back it up, so it had to be upheld with authority. 

There was starting to seem to be circular reasoning in the Protestant theory/approach to things, or at best cafeteria style pick-and-choose what you want to accept...based on what the Holy Spirit was showing you as an individual to be true, basically. In the Protestant world, it seems that ultimately, decisions are up to the individual's conscience, and far be it for anyone to "bind my conscience." But we've seen where that approach has gotten us--there are as many combinations of theories for theology as there are people! (Okay, that's a hyperbole, but you get the idea.) If every man is an island, just my Bible and me and the Holy Spirit, then there is vast room for distorted beliefs. There has got to be some sort of vetting process, some oversight about what can and should be taught...

Okay, so Protestants might argue that we should “Keep silent where Scripture is silent, and not bind the conscience of the believer to tradition on questions in which Scripture is ambiguous; extra-biblical may be useful, but not revelation.”  But there are issues accepted by Protestants and Catholics alike that are not explicitly defined in Scripture alone but by Scripture rightly understood in the context of a larger tradition (which Catholics argue is just as much from God as the Scripture it interprets):

• polygamy: not provable from Scripture alone
• Luther, “I confess that I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict the Scripture.  If a man wishes to marry more than one wife he should be asked whether he is satisfied in his conscience that he may do so in accordance with the word of God.  In such a case the civil authority has nothing to do in such a matter.”
• Paul mentions remarriage is forbidden while one’s spouse is still living (Rom 7:3, 1 Cor 7:39), but he only specifically mentions for women
• if we “let Scripture interpret Scripture” we are given biblical figures as Jacob, David, Solomon, who are spoken of with great approval by God, yet who are polygamous
• the problem, according to Scripture (1 Kgs 11:2-6), with Solomon’s wives is that they were pagan, not that they were many
• the command in Deut. 17:17 warning against having many wives also warns in previous verse against having many horses, so are we only allowed one horse?
• Paul command’s overseers to be a husband of but one wife (1 Tim 3:2, Ti 1:6); fact that Paul gives this command only to overseers (bishops) suggest (if we have no tradition outside Scripture) that other Christian men could have more than one if they liked (especially since in that culture embraced polygamy and there’s no specific teaching against it in Scripture)
• Basil the Great says the Church’s teachings on polygamy are “accepted as our usual practice, not from the canons but in conformity with our predecessors.”
• Jesus forbids divorce and remarriage (Mk 10:11-12), does not forbid multiple wives if you retain the previous ones.  But with Church Tradition of Monogamy, we understand the meaning of the passage--so we Protestants are deriving our belief from Scripture as it has always been understood by the mind of the Church
• Trinity-not explicitly in Scripture, but historic Christianity, twenty centuries of Christians, including people who had heard the apostles with their own ears and who clearly regarded Jesus as God, believed this
• when Evangelicals speak of absolute union of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, we are resting not on the Bible alone, but on the Bible in union with the interpretative tradition of the Church, just as we rested on its Tradition of the Table of Contents of Bible
• Note that the Church Councils formulated ("one in three persons") and promulgated the dogma years before the canonical books of the Bible assumed its present shape in 397 AD.    
• Protestants accept (and require) belief in this conventional understanding of the Trinity...yet we are never taught how it came to be established (for that would be giving credit to the Catholic Church Councils? During which the same councils decided upon books of the Bible that we are going to reject as divinely inspired?)
• the Closure of Public Revelation is unwritten tradition, which we all regard as crucial; nowhere in the New Testament does it say public revelation will close after the apostles (Rev. 22:18-19 refers to that book specifically)

Thus, we can see that we as Protestants are interpreting the Scriptures through the lens of the Church's historical teaching. To say Scripture is the sole source of revelation and must interpret itself, seems to say that some of the most basic dogmas and ethics of the Faith are up for grabs.

Again, this line of thought naturally leads one to the issue of Church authority--is Church Tradition (i.e., teaching that may not be explicitly found in the Bible) authoritative and binding for a Christian?? I somehow didn't see this question coming, when I asked my original questions at the beginning of the post. But such it has been with this journey--it's like a domino effect, when you answer one question, then the logical next question or implication has to be addressed, etc.

We will begin to comment on this issue in the next post...