When some Christians
hear the word Tradition, they imagine customs and folkloric practices; but as a
theological term that is not the case.
Tradition with capital
T, is a proper name that refers to the whole set of beliefs and practices that
are part of living Christianity. It is not only something that comes from the
past, even though Tradition started with the Apostles and chronologically precedes
the Scriptures in existence; it is a living phenomenon, as it changes and
adapts into new expressions in time.
Tradition is divided in
two forms according to origin:
APOSTOLIC
TRADITION: Conformed by all the beliefs and
practices that have been held by Christianity since very ancient times, everywhere
and by most, to this day.
These beliefs are found
in the writings of the first Christians, especially of the first four centuries,
also known as “Church Fathers”. It is
called “apostolic” because due to their antiquity, it is very possible that
these ideas were of apostolic origin, especially when they were held as such in
different parts across the Christian world of the time.
Apostolic Tradition
plays a crucial part in the definition of doctrine in Christianity, since it is
taken into consideration to finalise biblical doctrines that may not be clear
and conclusive in Scripture. This Apostolic Tradition is made up by the “Consensus Patrum”; that is, by all
those beliefs and practices held in common by all the first Christians and not
by the personal opinion or practice of some of them.
Among these beliefs are
the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the personhood of the Holy Spirit and the
Canon of Scripture itself.
ECCLESIASTICAL
TRADITION: Are all the practices and customs held
by the living Church through the ages to this day. The difference with
Apostolic Tradition is that these practices, not doctrines, were born from
within the Church and have no divine origin but human. These practices are
establish by the living Church according to her needs and according to times
and places, usually by universal councils or local synods, and can be revised
again and changed by these same channels according to new realities.
TRADITION
PRECEDES SCRIPTURE
It is important to
treat this as a separate issue as it is sensitive to traditional Christianity
and it should not be a motive of scandal to Christians who hold the Scripture as
ultimate rule of Faith.
Lord Jesus did not
leave any written book with his teachings as far as we know to this day. All
his teachings were delivered orally and were kept by the Apostles, as far as we
know, also that way. In the same manner, the Apostles preached and evangelized
as had seen the Lord do, and established authorities in the local communities
that may pass on their teachings in a
faithful manner ( 2Tim 2:2; Tit 1:5, 9). Written documentation, the letters and
then the Gospels, came later. The letters we have were not made with the
deliberate intention to serve as testaments to posterity, but as casual
epistles over specific issues to specific communities. The Apostles, by
revelation and insight may have known that eventually these letters will be
taken as they are taken today, but that was not their original intention. Only
the Gospels and Revelation were written with that purpose, as to leave a
written legacy to posterity of the Messianic claim of our Lord Jesus and his
teachings (Lk 1:1-4; Jn 20:30-31).
As these writings were dispersed
among the Christian communities of the first centuries, they were accredited by
the consensus of the communities and their communal memory, as being genuine
and authoritative among others that were considered forgery or pseudo-epigraphical
(2Th 2:1-2). It was this communal memory and criteria which was used as one of
the decisive elements in the establishment of the Canon of Scripture; another
one was conformity with the consistent Christian teaching held at the time.
Tradition precedes
Scripture in the sense that it existed and kept the Christian faith before it
was put in writing by the Apostles, and even then, as the first witnesses died
out, to establish which books were genuine and which were not, according to the
common faith they shared.
Tradition does not
precede Scripture in importance though. The Church, even before the Canon was
established, held in supreme authority the apostolic writings because they expressed
directly their teachings (Col 4:16; 1Th 5:27; 2Th 3:14; 2Pe 3:16). True Apostolic Tradition never contradicts
Scripture. Since human oral teaching can be distorted from one to another and
through time, all apostolic traditional claim must be examined at the light of
clear and straightforward biblical teaching. That is the reason why the Apostles
left us these writings, and the Church Fathers testify of this. (1)
THE
PLACE OF TRADITION IN THE CHURCH
Tradition has served
the Church in preserving alive the teachings of the Apostles and the testimony
of their written documents until the Canon was officially formed.
Tradition serves today,
to clarify concepts, doctrines and practices whose meanings are not clear or
explicit in the Bible, by showing us how the first Christians understood those
things.
Tradition sets the
Biblical narrative as a whole and each individual book in its proper context,
historical and doctrinal. To pretend to interpret the Scripture ignoring
Tradition is a dangerous endeavour that has been proven many times, to end up
in sectarianism and heresy. Scripture and Tradition go together and they cannot
exist one without the other.
Omar Flores.
(1) Irenaeus
of Lyons, Against Heresies, 3:1:1
Tertullian
of Carthage, Against Praxeas, 11
Hyppolytus
of Rome, Against Heresies, 9
Dionysius
of Alexandria, Eusebius’s Church History,
7:24:7-9
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