Scripture is Tradition

Recently a meme was posted to an Anglican group on Facebook that asserted that everything in the Book of Common Prayer was either taken directly from Scripture or could be proven from Scripture and that nothing was taken from tradition.  In response I pointed out the obvious flaw in this assertion.  The Bible did not just drop down from Heaven complete at the time of the Reformation.  It was passed down from generation to generation in the Church for sixteen centuries from the Apostles.  The Old Testament portion of the Scriptures had been received by the Christian Church in the period of the Apostles after having been passed down from generation to generation in ancient Israel.  In the case of some of the books of the Old Testament this stretched back almost as long before Christ as the Reformation was after.  The word for something that is received by being passed down from generation to generation is tradition.  The Latin verb trado, tradere means “to hand over” and its fourth principal part, the passive perfect participle which would mean “having been handed over” is traditus –a –um, from which tradition is obviously derived.  In the Diocletian Persecution of the early fourth century those who handed over their copies of the Scriptures and/or other Christians to the persecutors were called traditores, which is also derived from this Latin word, and which is the source of our word traitor.  It makes a big difference what is handed over, to whom it is handed over, and why.  Something that is handed over or passed down from generation to generation as a priceless heritage is a tradition.  This is, usually, a good thing.  Handing over someone to be persecuted or sacred books to be burned is a bad thing.  The point, of course, is that the Bible itself as something handed down from generation to generation, is a tradition.  Therefore, to assert that the Book of Common Prayer takes from Scripture but not tradition is to commit a fallacy.

 

The person who posted the meme responded by pointing out that memes by their very nature have to be short.  If the meme were revised to accurately acknowledge that what was excluded from the BCP was not tradition in general, but a certain kind of tradition that conflicts with the Bible, it would be too long and not pithy enough to be effective as a meme.  While that is certainly true it works better as an argument against social media memes than it does as a counter to my argument.  Social media memes are essentially the democratization of the sound byte.  Democratizing things seldom if ever improves them, usually it does quite the opposite.

 

The meme poster maintained that the word tradition by itself is acceptable short hand for the idea of traditions that conflict with and contradict the Scriptures.  This usage itself, however, is unscriptural.

Those who hold this view of tradition as a man-made rival that is hostile to the authority of the God-given Scriptures inevitably fall back on a single incident recorded by both SS Matthew and Mark in the fifteenth and seventh chapters of their respective Gospels.  In this incident, the Pharisees ask Jesus why His disciples violate the “tradition of the elders” by not washing their hands (a washing for ceremonial rather than hygienic purposes is in view here) before eating bread.  Jesus responded by asking them why they violate the commandment of God by their tradition.  The commandment He then specifies is the commandment to “honour thy father and thy mother” and the tradition by which they were violating the commandment was the tradition of corban, that is, of dedicating something for sacred use in the Temple.  The accusation was that they were allowing people to get out of their obligation to honour their parents by taking care of them when they are old by allowing them to declare all their possessions to be corban.  The problem with the way those who pit Scripture and tradition against each other try to use this passage is that Jesus does not condemn tradition qua tradition, or even the tradition of men qua the tradition of men, in it.  He does not even condemn the specific tradition in question which tradition is itself drawn from Scripture in which corban is one of the basic Hebrew words for gift, offering, or sacrifice.  What He condemned was its misuse to evade one’s duty to do what God has commanded.  Indeed, just as it is not tradition, man-made tradition, or the specific corban tradition that Jesus condemned but its misuse, so what is contrasted with the misuse of tradition is not “the Scriptures” in general but the narrower “the commandment of God.”  Even “the word of God” in Mark 7:13 is best understood as meaning “the commandment of God” which appears twice in verses 9-9.  Note that what we call the Ten Commandments in English were called in Hebrew by an expression that means “the Ten Words” as does the Greek word into which it was translated in the Septuagint and which is the root of our own Decalogue.   The point of this passage has to do with priorities not some troglodytic message like “Bible good, tradition bad.”  There is nothing wrong with dedicating something to God’s use but there is something wrong with doing so in order to evade one’s duty to one’s parents.  In this, as in most of Jesus’ rebukes to the Pharisees, His most basic criticism was that their priorities were wrong, that they scrupulously tithed the tiniest of seeds, while ignoring judgement, mercy, and faith, that they strained out a gnat while swallowing a camel (Matt. 23:23-24).

 

The Lord Jesus’ actions bespeak a very different attitude towards tradition than that which is sometimes read into His rebuke of the Pharisees. While He preached on a mountain (Matt. 5-7) and from a boat (Lk. 5:1-3), His most frequent place of preaching and teaching was the synagogue (Mk. 1:21-28, Lk. 4:16-37, Jn. 6:59) which the Gospels say He regularly attended.  The synagogue was the local meeting place for Scripture reading, Psalm singing, prayer and teaching.  The synagogue in this sense of the word was an extra-Scriptural tradition.  There are no instructions for establishing any such institution in the Old Testament.  The word appears in the Septuagint but as a translation of Hebrew words depicting all of Israel as an assembly or congregation.  In the eighth chapter of St. John’s Gospel Jesus is said to have gone to Jerusalem for the feast of dedication (Hanukah) which was not one of the feasts instituted in the Law of Moses or anywhere else in the books regarded as canonical by both Jews and Christians but celebrates the rededication of the Temple after the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes who defiled it in events recorded in the books of Maccabees which are found in the LXX but not the Hebrew Old Testament.  St. Luke’s account of the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist depict elements of the traditional Passover Seder.  These elements were not prescribed in the Torah but are recognizable from the Jewish tradition today.  How far that tradition had developed into what it is today by the first century is unknown but what is clear is that Jesus had no objection to observing the traditions of His people merely because they were extra-Scriptural or man-made.  It was the abuse and misuse of tradition and not tradition itself that incurred His rebuke.

 

This is entirely in keeping with the attitude towards tradition found in the Old Testament (Psalm 11;3, Prov. 22:28-29).  St. Paul in his earliest epistles tells the Thessalonian Church to “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:15) and to withdraw from any brother who does not walk “after the tradition which he received of us” (2 Thess. 3:6).  In his first epistle to the Corinthians he depicted the Gospel message itself as a tradition “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received” (1 Cor. 15:3).

 

2 Thessalonians 2:15 reads like it was written to combat precisely the kind of ideas that I am addressing here.  That tradition is not something to be regarded as bad or suspect in itself is evident from his instructions to the Thessalonians to adhere to the traditions they had been taught.  My point that the Scriptures themselves are tradition is also present in the verse in the words “or our epistle.”  That something in tradition is not necessarily bad because it is not in the Scriptures is the only reasonable deduction from the words “hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.”

 

The false pitting of Scripture and tradition against each other belongs to the type of thinking that I call Hyper-Protestantism.  The ordinary Protestantism of Dr. Luther and his associates, the English Reformers, and even John Calvin much of the time at least when he is allowed to speak for himself rather than when he is interpreted by those who claim to be his followers, is conservative in its approach to tradition.  Tradition, the handing down of that which is valued from generation to generation, is in itself a good thing.  Attacking it, which is inevitably for the motive of setting up something of your own creation in its place, is a bad thing.  Bad things can be handed down along with good things.  When something bad is passed down this is a bad tradition and bad traditions are always man-made rather than coming from God.  It does not follow from this, however, that everything man-made is bad.  Indeed, the erroneous conclusion that everything man-made is bad is completely debunked by the example of Jesus Who Himself observed man-made traditions such as Hanukkah and synagogue attendance.  When bad things slip in to an otherwise good tradition these should be identified and removed in the interest of preserving the tradition as a whole.  This is precisely what the conservative Reformers were trying to do.  Dr. Luther, Archbishop Cranmer, and John Calvin on his good days, did not want to abolish or overthrow the Catholic tradition.  They wanted to excise certain bad things that had crept in to the Western branch of that tradition.  These were mostly recent innovations that had popped up after the Great Schism of the eleventh century.  The claims of the Roman Patriarchate to supremacy over the entire Church are an exception to that, obviously, because these were one of the factors that produced the Schism.  The sale of indulgences, by contrast, which set off the Reformation by arousing the righteous ire of Dr. Luther in the 95 Theses in 1517 was very recent at the time, although it grew out of seeds that had been planted in the first Crusade, a few decades after the formalization of the Schism.  Dr. Luther et al. did not see in these things reason to get rid of the Catholic tradition as a whole, or even as a reason to jettison everything that entered the Western branch of that tradition after the Schism (1).  They saw them as impurities that needed to be removed from the stream of tradition and the best way of cleansing the water to be to go back to the source.  In this they showed themselves to be Renaissance humanists for this is an application of the ad fontes principle behind the Renaissance revival of the study of classical antiquity.  The best result of the application of this principle to cleaning up the stream of Christian tradition where the waters had gotten muddied was with regards to the freeness of salvation.  That salvation, in the sense of forgiveness of sin, freedom from its bondage, and restoration to peace with God and everlasting life in His kingdom, is a gift of God’s grace, freely given to mankind in Jesus Christ, is essential to the Gospel message, attested throughout the New Testament, most strongly in the Johannine and Pauline writings, although it is clearly there in the others, even the Jacobean epistle (Jas. 1:17-18).  This truth has always been there in the Catholic tradition but it was particularly covered up by the mud that had entered the Roman branch of that stream and so was in most need of being cleaned up.  Classical Protestantism cleaned the mud off of this truth.  Hyper-Protestantism, as an inevitable consequence of pitting Scripture and tradition against each other, (2) has formulized and crystalized it, raising the question of whether this truth was better off with mud on it in the living water of tradition or cleaned off but embedded in dead crystal.

 

Hyper-Protestantism goes beyond classical Protestantism’s objections to errors of Roman innovation and opposes itself to the Catholic tradition claiming to be standing for Scripture in doing so.  Ironically what the meme that inspired this essay asserts about the BCP, that everything in it is either taken from Scripture directly or can be proven from Scripture, can for the most part be said about the Catholic tradition.  The errors of Roman innovation are not part of the Catholic tradition.  They have not been held everywhere, in all the ancient Churches, since the Apostolic era but are distinct to the Roman Church and, except for the Roman distinctions that contributed to the Schism, are post-Schism in origin.  The doctrine of Purgatory, for example, is a Roman distinctive.  The Eastern Church has never taught it and refused to ratify the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence (1431-1449) both of which had healing the Schism as their purpose, in part because of the affirmation of Purgatory by these councils which are wrongly considered to be ecumenical by Rome and which are the occasions by which this innovation became official Roman dogma.  Protestant objections to Purgatory, therefore, are to a Roman innovation, and not to something that belongs to Catholic tradition.  Hyper-Protestant opposition to iconography, by contrast, opposes something that genuinely belongs to the Catholic tradition.  Iconoclasm had been condemned by the Second Council of Nicaea despite its having been promoted by a series of Byzantine Emperors and a pro-iconoclasm council (Hieria in 754) convened under their sponsorship.  This council was held in 787, prior to the Schism, and was received by the entire Church, East and West, as the seventh ecumenical council.  It is therefore a genuine part of the Catholic tradition.  The Hyper-Protestants say this doesn’t matter and that icons are idols condemned by the Second Commandment.  If the Second Commandment means what the Hyper-Protestants claim it means, however, then it also condemns the Ark of the Covenant that God commanded to be made shortly after giving the Ten Commandments, the tablets of which were to be kept in said Ark.  The distinction between what violates the Second Commandment and what does not is made in the Old Testament by the account of the brass serpent of Moses.  In the twenty-first chapter of Numbers, the Israelites, after grumbling against God and Moses for the umpteenth time, were smitten with a plague of fiery serpents that poisoned them with their bite.  Moses intervened for them, God told him to make a brass serpent and put it on a pole, and everyone who looked at it would be healed.  From the New Testament we know that this was a type of Christ (Jn. 3:14-15).  While this involved making an image of something “in the earth beneath” it did not violate the Second Commandment.  This is because the purpose in making it was not to make a “god” to be worshipped.  When, centuries later, the Israelites did start worshipping it as a “god” it then became an idol in violation of the Second Commandment and King Hezekiah ordered it destroyed (2 Kings 18:4).  The lesson from this is that the making of likenesses is not itself a violation of the Second Commandment without the intent to treat such likenesses as gods.  The Scriptures, therefore, clearly do not support the Hyper-Protestant understanding of the Second Commandment.  This is the closest that Hyper-Protestantism comes to finding something in the Catholic tradition that is in violation of Scripture.  Most often it operates on the obviously fallacious assumption that something that is not commanded in Scripture is therefore in violation of it.  It treats prayers for the dead, for example, as being in violation of Scripture even though they are nowhere prohibited in it and the parenthetical part of 2 Tim. 1:16-18 is probably an example of it.  In some cases it treats parts of the Catholic tradition that are clearly taken from the Scriptures as being in violation of the Scriptures.  This is most obvious with matters pertaining to the Virgin Mary.  The words of the Ave Maria come directly from the first chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke (vv. 28, 42), in which she is also called “the mother of my Lord” (v. 43) which is obviously the equivalent of Theotokos/Mother of God which cannot be rejected without being guilty of the Christological heresy of Nestorianism.  Even the title Regina Coeli comes from the Bible.  I’m not talking about the pagan practice condemned in Jeremiah 7, but the first verse of Revelation 12.  No argument that the woman in Revelation 12 is not Mary can withstand scrutiny.  The woman gives birth to Jesus and so is obviously Mary. (3)   While the Church of Rome has undeniably taken things way too far with regards to the Blessed Virgin, confusing the entire Catholic tradition of Mariology with Mariolatry as Hyper-Protestants tend to do, is not the answer. (4)  Nor, to conclude this point, do these matters which Hyper-Protestants often seem to object to in the Catholic tradition more than they do the Roman innovations that classical Protestantism objected to, comprise more than a fraction of the Catholic tradition.  Most of the traditional Catholic liturgy, Eastern or Western, is taken directly from the Bible, as is the traditional faith confessed in the ancient Creeds, and the traditional episcopal form of Church polity.

 

That is only to be expected.  The written Word of God comes to us via the route of having been passed down in the Church from generation to generation and so is itself a tradition rather than a something-other-than-tradition to be set against tradition.  Since it is the Word of God it is infallible and therefore the yardstick against which everything else in the tradition is to be measured but this should not be done in the hostile-to-tradition manner of Hyper-Protestantism.  Our attitude should be that what is in the Catholic, not merely Roman but genuinely Catholic in the Vicentian sense, (5) tradition is wholesome, good, and true unless disproven by the Scriptures, rather than that is suspect until proven by them.

 

(1)   John Calvins’s magnus opus was the Institutes of Christian Religion, the first edition of which was published in 1536.  His own account of this work was that it began as a type of catechism based on the Apostles’ Creed.  The Apostle’s Creed, however, like the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, consists of twelve articles arranged in three sections, in accordance with the Persons of the Trinity.  Calvin’s Institutes consist of four books, the subjects of which correspond to those of Peter Lombard’s four books of Sentences.  Lombard’s Sentences were one of the most important texts in Medieval Scholasticism because from Alexander of Hales in the thirteenth century onward they were the text books used for dogmatics or systematic theology in the universities and writing a commentary on them was a requirement of graduation.  Dogmatic theology as a discipline has largely followed the Sentences in its structure, is organization and classification of topics, ever since.  Calvin in his Institutes, which quote Lombard over a hundred times albeit often in a hostile manner, was no exception and it is perhaps more significant in his case because like Tertullian his training had been in law.  It is also worthy of noting that his explanation of the Atonement takes the satisfaction model of the other father of Scholasticism, St. Anselm of Canterbury to the next stage of development beyond that of St. Thomas Aquinas.  Calvin’s Hyper-Protestant fan club will, of course, say that he found his explanation of the Atonement in the pages of Scripture and it can certainly be supported from the Scriptures.  So, however, can the classical and Patristic model with which the Eastern Church has explained the Atonement since the first millennium and which Gustaf Aulén who named it the Christus Victor model argued was Dr. Luther’s.  Indeed, the easiest model of Atonement to prove from the Scriptures, provided one doesn’t press the metaphor on the point of to whom the payment is made, is probably Origen’s ransom model.  Obviously John Calvin got his understanding of the Atonement from the New Testament, and just as obviously he did not get it by reading the New Testament for himself for the first time without ever having received any prior teaching.  Regardless of to what extent he was willing to acknowledge it himself his understanding of the New Testament on the Atonement was heavily influenced by St. Anselm and St. Thomas.  Even the doctrine of predestination with which his name is permanently associated shows the influence of a tradition of interpreting St. Paul that flows from St. Augustine through Peter Lombard and St. Thomas Aquinas.

(2)  The title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962) and the essay in the same volume entitled “The Tower of Babel” are essential reading if one wishes to understand why this consequence is inevitable even though Oakeshott was writing from the perspective of political philosophy rather than theology.  The principle is the same.  Traditions, Oakeshott explained, are living and include both the kind of information that can be summarized and put down on paper as a formula and the kind of information that cannot.  Rationalism, treats the second kind of information as unimportant and discards it, taking the first kind of information and formulizing it.  So crystalized, this information which had been part of something living in the tradition, becomes a dead ideology.  The discarded type of information is not unimportant at all.  The difference is the same as that between someone who prepares a meal with nothing but the instructions in a recipe book to go by and someone who prepares the same meal after having been taught how to do it by a master chef. Hyper-Protestantism is this same approach that Oakeshott calls rationalism applied to the Christian tradition.  It separate the Scriptures, the living Word of God, from the living tradition of the Christian Church.  Then it takes the truths it wishes to emphasize from the Scriptures and formulizes them.  Think about the difference between the ancient Creeds and the Protestant Confessions.  The Creeds are as alive as the tradition to which they belong.  They contain the basic Christian faith and when they are liturgically recited in the Church the “I believe” of each individual member joins with that of each other, and with those of Christians past and yet to come, to form the collective “we believe” of Christ’s Church.  The Protestant Confessions, by contrast, are longer, contain secondary and tertiary doctrines as well as the basic faith, and express them in the form of a numbered list that gives the impression that one is supposed to go through it checking each item off.  Now consider the significance of this for the truth of the freeness of salvation.  The Protestant Confessions each express this truth clearly but contradict it by their checklist format.  The ancient Creeds don’t articulate it per se, but neither do they in any way, by direct expression or by format, contradict it, and this truth is implicit in what is confessed about Jesus Christ in the Creeds.

(3)  Since Revelation is a highly symbolic book she is also more than Mary, or rather Mary as the symbol or representative of something else.  That she is Mary as the second Eve, the fulfilment of the prophecy of Genesis 3:15 in which “the woman” is both Eve and Mary, is clear from the entire chapter in which her nemesis is the dragon, “that old serpent.”  The imagery of the first and last verses would suggest that Mary, the New Eve, appears as the symbolic representative of the people of God.  The imagery of the first verse is that of Joseph’s dream, indicating Israel, and that of the last verse, is of the Church which has “the testimony of Jesus Christ.”

(4)  It also conflicts with the high Mariology of most of the Protestant Reformers.

(5) “Now in the Catholic Church itself we take the greatest care to hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all. That is truly and properly 'Catholic,' as is shown by the very force and meaning of the word, which comprehends everything almost universally. We shall hold to this rule if we follow universality, antiquity, and consent.” – St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, 2.6.