Authority and Tradition

Start with the vocabulary, because it disposes of the crudest version of the argument in about five minutes. The Greek word paradosis, a handing over, appears in the New Testament on both sides of the ledger. Paul commends the Corinthians for maintaining the traditions just as he passed them on to them, tells the Thessalonians to stand firm and cling to the traditions he taught them by speech or by letter, and tells them to keep away from any brother whose undisciplined life is not in keeping with the tradition they received from him. Jesus attacks the scribes and Pharisees for disregarding the commandment of God to keep the tradition of men, and for nullifying the word of God by the tradition they have handed down. Colossians warns against being taken captive through philosophy and empty deception based on human tradition. Paul describes his own former life as zealous for the traditions of his fathers.

So no Christian position can be summarised as being for or against tradition. What every position in this lesson is actually arguing about is which handings-on carry God's authority and how you tell. That is a better question and it is much harder.

Notice a second fact while you are in the vocabulary. Paul uses the verbs deliver and receive as a pair for his own relation to the gospel (the BSB renders the first 'passed on'). In 1 Corinthians 15:3 he says he passed on to them as of first importance what he also received, and then quotes a formula older than the letter. In 1 Corinthians 11:23 he says he received from the Lord what he also passed on, about the night Jesus was betrayed. Paul places himself in the middle of a chain of transmission. That is not a marginal admission; it is his own account of how he got what he preaches, and it means that the earliest layer of Christian teaching was travelling by handing-on before any of it was in the letters we read.

And notice a third. Acts 15 shows the church settling a doctrinal question by a procedure, and the procedure has three ingredients: testimony to what God had visibly done, an argument from scripture, and the judgement of an assembly, announced in a letter with the formula that it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us. Every tradition in this lesson reads Acts 15 as supporting its own position, which is itself instructive. Rome reads it as a council exercising teaching authority. The Orthodox read it as conciliarity, the whole church judging together. Protestants read it as an assembly submitting a question to scripture and deciding on that basis. All three are reading the same chapter and none of them is inventing what it finds there.

The Reformation slogan does not mean the Bible is the only authority a Christian has. It means the Bible is the only infallible authority, the final court to which every other authority is answerable. Luther's statement at Worms in 1521, that unless he was convinced by scripture and plain reason he could not recant, since popes and councils had contradicted themselves, is a statement about which authority is final rather than a denial that there are others. Read what the Reformers did rather than what their heirs say they did. Calvin's Institutes quote Augustine constantly and with reverence. The Lutheran Book of Concord opens with the Apostles', Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. The Anglican Articles receive the three creeds on the ground that they may be proved by most certain warrants of holy scripture. These men were not trying to start from nothing.

The distinction they were working with has a name, supplied later by the historian Heiko Oberman in The Harvest of Medieval Theology in 1963. Oberman found two concepts of tradition running through the later Middle Ages. Tradition One treats tradition as the church's authoritative interpretation of a materially sufficient scripture: there is one source, and tradition is the way it has been faithfully read. Tradition Two treats tradition as a second stream of apostolic material running alongside scripture and containing things scripture does not contain. Oberman's point was that both existed before the Reformation, so the sixteenth century was not a novelty against a settled medieval consensus but a choice between two live medieval options.

Keith Mathison used those categories in The Shape of Sola Scriptura in 2001 to draw the distinction this section exists for. Sola scriptura, on his account, is Tradition One: scripture is the sole infallible norm, interpreted within the church, under the rule of faith, with the creeds as the boundary of legitimate reading, and an individual who arrives at a novel reading against the whole church has strong reason to suspect himself. What he calls solo scriptura is something else, a position he traces mainly to the nineteenth century and the American frontier, in which the individual with a Bible is the final interpreter, the church's past has no standing, and creeds are a human imposition. Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone's movement made 'no creed but the Bible' a watchword, and the phrase has since spread far beyond them. Mathison's argument is that this is not the Reformation position but a mutation of it, and that it produces exactly the fragmentation the Reformers were accused of producing.

The distinction is useful and it is not beyond challenge, and a student should know the challenges. Catholic and Orthodox critics reply that it is a tidying after the fact: that the practical difference between the two is hard to maintain, because on both views the individual finally decides which church's interpretation to submit to, and that the historical record of Protestant division from the sixteenth century onward suggests the mutation was latent in the original. Some Protestant critics, from the other direction, say the distinction concedes too much, and that the Bereans in Acts 17:11 are commended precisely for auditing an apostle against the text, without a rule of faith in hand. Mathison and those who follow him answer that the fragmentation argument proves too much, since Rome and the East are themselves divided from each other and each has seen schisms, and that every system finally requires a judgement from the person inside it, including the judgement to trust a magisterium.

What can be said without controversy is this. The Reformers held scripture to be the final norm and used the fathers and the creeds heavily. They did not think a Christian should read the Bible alone in a room and start from scratch, and any position that recommends this should be defended on its own merits rather than attributed to them. Whether their view is stable over five centuries is exactly what the next two sections dispute.

State the Roman Catholic position from its own documents rather than from a Protestant summary of it, and begin with a correction, because most Protestants are taught a version of it that the Catholic Church does not teach.

The Council of Trent, in its decree of 8 April 1546, said that the gospel truth and discipline are contained in written books and in unwritten traditions, received by the apostles from Christ himself or from the Holy Spirit's dictation and handed down. A draft of that decree had said the truth is contained partly in scripture and partly in traditions, and the final text dropped the partly and partly in favour of a simple and. The historian of doctrine Josef Rupert Geiselmann argued in the mid twentieth century that this change deliberately left open the question of whether scripture is materially sufficient, and while his reading of Trent's intention is contested among Catholic historians, the change to the wording is a matter of record.

The Second Vatican Council took the question up and, notably, did not restore the two-source language. A preparatory schema on the sources of revelation was sent back in 1962 and the constitution that eventually emerged, Dei Verbum, teaches in section 9 that tradition and scripture flow from the same divine wellspring and in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end. Section 10 says that sacred tradition and sacred scripture form one single sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the church. The image is one deposit in two modes of transmission, not two reservoirs.

The magisterium is then defined by its limits as much as by its powers, and this is the sentence Protestants most often have not read. Dei Verbum 10 says that the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, written or handed on, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the church, and then immediately says that this teaching office is not above the word of God but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully. On the Catholic account the magisterium is a servant with a guarantee, not an author.

Now the case at its strongest, as a Catholic theologian would make it. Christ founded a church and promised the Spirit would guide it into all truth, and the promise is empty if there is no way for the church to say what the truth is when Christians disagree. The canon itself is the standing proof: no book of the Bible contains a list of the books of the Bible, so the table of contents is a judgement the church made and every Christian accepts, which means every Christian already relies on a tradition-borne decision before he opens the text. The great christological settlements used words not found in scripture, and were right to. And the historical argument is pressed as a question rather than an insult: five hundred years after sola scriptura was proposed as the remedy for doctrinal confusion, are its results the ones its defenders predicted?

Catholic theologians name the costs of the position too, and an honest presentation includes them. The conditions under which the magisterium teaches infallibly are narrow and are themselves interpreted, so that Catholics dispute among themselves which teachings carry which weight. Development, which the next lesson takes up, has to be distinguished from innovation by criteria that critics find elastic. And the appeal to unity has to live with the fact that Catholics disagree with each other about a great deal, which defenders answer by saying that a norm is not refuted by disobedience to it.

The Orthodox account is not a milder version of the Roman one and will be misheard if it is filed as Rome without a pope. Its starting point is different. Tradition, in this account, is not primarily a body of information handed down; it is the continuing presence and work of the Holy Spirit in the church, of which doctrine, liturgy, canons, iconography and the lives of the saints are all expressions. Vladimir Lossky put it as the life of the Holy Spirit in the church, communicating to each member the faculty of hearing and receiving the truth. Georges Florovsky described tradition as the Spirit's abiding rather than the memory of words, and insisted that scripture and tradition cannot be two sources, because scripture is itself the church's own book and was never handed over to anyone outside the community that produced and received it.

That has a consequence Western readers regularly miss. On this account the question 'scripture or tradition?' is malformed, in the same way that asking whether a language or its literature is prior is malformed. Scripture is within tradition, as its written and normative centre. So Orthodox writers will agree readily that nothing may be taught which contradicts scripture, while declining the framework in which scripture is a document and tradition is a supplement to it.

Authority in this account is held by the whole body rather than by an office. The Orthodox recognise seven ecumenical councils and hold that a council's authority is not established by who convened it but by its reception by the church at large, which is why there are councils with imperial backing that were not received, the assembly at Ephesus in 449 being the standard example. The Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs of 1848, answering an overture from Pope Pius IX, put the principle in a sentence Orthodox writers have quoted ever since: the protector of religion is the very body of the church, even the people themselves. Bishops teach, and a bishop who teaches heresy is a heretic like anyone else; what guarantees the faith is not the office but the whole body's living hold on what it has received.

The criterion most often invoked is the canon of Vincent of Lerins, from his Commonitorium of 434: what has been believed everywhere, always and by everyone. Vincent is regularly quoted as though that were his whole contribution, but the same work contains a chapter on legitimate growth, in which he says that there can indeed be progress in the church's understanding, provided it is growth along the same line, in the same doctrine, the same sense and the same meaning, as a body grows without becoming a different body. That distinction, between growth and mutation, is the subject of the next lesson and Vincent is where both Catholics and Orthodox begin.

The case at its strongest, as an Orthodox theologian would make it. The church is older than the New Testament and produced it; the Spirit given at Pentecost did not lapse and then resume at moments of crisis; and a faith held by a living body is more robust than a faith reconstructed by each generation from documents, because a body can recognise what is foreign to it before it can explain why. On this account the church has not needed a mechanism for generating new dogma, because the point is not to add but to remain, and the seven councils were defensive operations against specific attacks rather than a programme.

The costs, again named by Orthodox writers themselves. When a genuinely new question arises, there is no agreed procedure for settling it, and Orthodox jurisdictions have in fact differed over such questions for long periods. Reception as a criterion is retrospective, which makes it hard to say what is binding while an argument is going on. And the absence of a central authority has left the communion vulnerable to national and jurisdictional division, which Orthodox writers discuss with more candour than outsiders usually credit.

The Wesleyan quadrilateral names scripture, tradition, reason and experience as the sources theology works from. John Wesley never used the term; it was coined in the twentieth century by the Methodist scholar Albert Outler from his reading of Wesley's practice, and it entered the United Methodist Book of Discipline from there. Wesley himself called himself a man of one book and held scripture to be the standard by which everything else is tried, and Outler's own account made scripture primary with the other three subordinate and ministerial.

The argument it provokes is worth stating precisely, because it is usually conducted at cross purposes. Critics say that as soon as experience is listed as a source it will function as one, and that a scheme of four items invites the reader to weigh them against each other, so that in practice a strong experience can overrule a text. Defenders reply that the criticism describes an abuse, that the quadrilateral was a description of how Wesley actually reasoned rather than a licence, that experience in Wesley means the assurance of salvation the New Testament itself appeals to in Romans 8:16, and that a theology which claims to use no experience is simply one that has not noticed its own. Outler came to regret the coinage and said so in print. In an essay in the Wesleyan Theological Journal in 1985, at page 16, he wrote that the term quadrilateral does not occur in the Wesley corpus, and that more than once he had regretted having coined it for contemporary use, since it has been so widely misconstrued. Notice what his complaint is and is not. He objects that the term has been misread and taken too literally, and in the same essay he insists that in such a quaternity Holy Scripture is clearly unique and that the arrangement preserves the primacy of scripture. The familiar image of four equal legs of a table is later popularisation rather than anything Outler wrote, which is worth knowing before you use it against the scheme.

Creeds and confessions are the other place authority is actually exercised, and what it means to hold one varies more than students expect. The Lutheran tradition drew a distinction in the nineteenth century between quia and quatenus subscription: subscribing to the Book of Concord because it agrees with scripture, or insofar as it agrees with scripture. The first binds; the second, critics say, binds nothing, since the subscriber decides the extent. Presbyterians have argued the same question since the Adopting Act of 1729 in the American colonies, which required ministers to adopt the Westminster standards while permitting them to state scruples, with the presbytery judging whether the scruple touched an essential and necessary article. Strict subscription and system subscription have divided Presbyterians ever since.

Other traditions hold confessions differently again. The Church of England moved from a requirement of assent to each of the Thirty-nine Articles to a general Declaration of Assent, revised in 1975, in which the minister affirms loyalty to an inheritance of faith to which the Articles bear witness. Baptist confessions, from the London confessions of the seventeenth century onward, are usually framed as the testimony of a body of churches rather than as a rule binding conscience, on the principle that no human document may stand over a believer's conscience before God. Restorationist and many independent churches take the further step of rejecting confessions altogether, and the standing reply to that position is that 'no creed but the Bible' is itself a creed, stated in four words, unexaminable because it is never written down as one.

The Lutheran scholastics had the cleanest terminology for what a confession is doing, and it is worth borrowing whatever tradition you are in. Scripture is the norma normans, the norming norm, the standard that measures and is measured by nothing. A confession is a norma normata, a normed norm, a real standard that is itself under judgement. That formula concedes both of the things that need conceding: a confession genuinely binds, and it is not scripture.

Where this leaves you is an impasse, and you should be able to state it without flinching. Every party here accepts the same Lord, the same scriptures in large part, and the same creeds of the first four centuries. Every party has a real answer to the question of warrant, and every answer costs something. The Protestant answer risks a fragmentation it has demonstrably suffered. The Roman answer secures a voice that can settle disputes, at the cost of having to defend the credentials of that voice from the same scriptures it interprets. The Orthodox answer keeps the faith in the hands of the whole body, at the cost of having no procedure when the body is unsure. Nobody in this argument is being stupid or dishonest, the argument has run for a thousand years between people who prayed about it, and a student who can state all three positions in a form their own defenders would accept has done something most people who hold one of them cannot do.