On Scripture and Tradition
Domenico Ghiriandaio. Saint Jerome in His Study (fresco), 1480.
Ognissanti Church [Church of All Saints], Florence.
(Listen to and audio version of the blog below!)
For many Protestants sola scriptura, or “Scripture Alone,” is the guiding principle in understanding and living the Christian life; for Roman Catholics (and many others in the liturgical churches), both Scripture and Tradition carry equal weight. In this blog I’d like to explore the dynamic between the two. For Roman Catholics the proper relationship between the two is best stated in the Vatican II document Dei Verbum, where we read: “Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture . . . both [flow] from the same divine wellspring . . . [forming] one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church” (DV, II, 9-10).
As I begin writing this blog I can’t help but hear Tevye singing the tune “Tradition” in the 1964 musical, Fiddler on the Roof, as I even now hum the song over and over in my head! (Don’t you just hate it when a song gets stuck in your head like that? Aieee!).
But here we go.
The English word “tradition” derives from the Latin noun, traditio, the verb form being tradere, meaning to “hand over,” or perhaps better, to “transmit.” The verb form is important, for “tradition” is not a static thing (a noun), but an ongoing process (a verb).
As societies form and develop, beliefs, behaviors, and cultural norms evolve into customs, laws and societal structures. And as a society becomes more complex and interrelated with other societies, its customs, laws and structures must adapt to new, ever-changing conditions, advances in knowledge and often, seemingly random disruptions in day-to-day life . . . and sometimes cataclysmic upheavals. A society’s traditions as they develop over time form the basic threads of its communal continuity, the warp and the woof (if you will) of a society’s cultural fabric. That identity is firmly rooted in the past—in its traditions—but those traditions that are foundational to a society’s core identity must be pliable, must evolve, even as the society itself must evolve if it is to survive and prosper.
So it is with theology, with faith, thinking. Our understanding of God has deep roots in Scripture, in the closed canon of 66 books in the “common canon,” or 73 books in the larger (or Septuagint) canon. In either case, our understanding of the sacred texts has evolved over time. The writings on scripture from the Patristic Era (late 1st – mid 8th centuries) are foundational: Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp of Smyrna, Papias of Hierapolis; Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen (especially), John Chrysostom; Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great—the scriptural giants. But we add to the Patristic writers the scriptural understanding of those writing during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation . . . as well as today’s biblical scholars, scholars who publish in journals such as the Society of Biblical Literature’s Journal of Biblical Literature (JBL), published quarterly since 1881; Journal for the Study of the Old Testament; Vetus Testamentum; Catholic Biblical Quarterly; Biblical Archaeological Review; New Testament Studies; and so on. Today, biblical scholarship flourishes, making continual inroads into understanding and applying the text. In biblical scholarship today, we have not a paucity, but a plethora of riches!
The same is true of Tradition. Flowing from the “same divine wellspring” as Scripture, Tradition has its foundational expression—as does Scripture—in the writings of the Church Fathers, especially Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine of Hippo, Ephrem the Syrian and Athanasius of Alexandria. Nor should we forget to include the Church “Mothers,” such as Perpetua (Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas), Egeria and Macrina (sister of Basil of Caesarea). Of particular importance are the great doctors of the Church: Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, Anthony of Padua; Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux. They are all foundational.
But as with Scripture, other theologians build upon that foundation, publishing in such Catholic theological journals as: American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly; Lumen Veritatis; Newman Studies Journal; Nova et Vetera; Philosophy and Theology; The New Scholasticism; The Thomist; and Theological Studies. Add to these the riches of Protestant scholarship in such journals such as: Bibliotheca Sacra; Evangelical Quarterly; Journal of Reformed Theology; Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society; and The Princeton Theological Review.
Such is the cornucopia of theological scholarship.
But that’s work of the professional theologians and scriptural scholars. In our churches, parishes and pews our traditions are lived out, expressed in our daily liturgies and lives. In the past, most of us reading this blog have experienced our living traditions in middle-class, white American communities and perhaps (in southern California) as we rubbed elbows with our Hispanic brothers and sisters. For the most part, though, our experience of Tradition has been refracted through the distant mirror of our European ancestors.
Today, that’s changing. John Allen, the long-time Roman Catholic journalist and Vatican Correspondent, published The Future Church, How Ten Trends Are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church (New York: Doubleday, 2009). I heard John Allen speak at length on these trends shortly before his book came out. If, indeed, he’s right about the trends that he sees, “Tradition” will remain consistent with Scripture, of course—both flowing from the same divine well-spring—but it will undergo a seismic transformation in the coming decades.
In his book, Allen notes that:
During the twentieth century, Europe and North America dominated the Catholic Church; today, two-thirds of Catholic Church members live in Africa, Asia and Latin America. With John Paul II, we had our first non-Italian Pope; with Francis, our first South American Pope. In the future, many (if not most) of our Popes will come from the southern hemisphere, most probably from Africa and South America;
Vatican II opened the windows to the modern world—aggiornamento; today, we’re “reaffirming the traditional markers of Catholic thought, speech and practice,” a knee-jerk reaction, it seems, to our radically secular culture;
In the past, we struggled in our relationship with Judaism, a relationship that profoundly (and rightfully) shamed the Church; in the future, our struggle will be with Islam, the fastest growing religion on the planet, poised to overtake not just Catholicism, but Christianity itself, by 2075;
In the past, our Church focused much of its pastoral energy on our youth; now, those young people in the Church are leaving in droves, and a large percentage of the young are “nones,” over 40% of whom embrace no religion at all. By default, our primary pastoral energy will focus on the aging and the elderly, those still within the fold;
In the past, the Church was “clerical,” with deacons, priests and bishops in leadership positions; today, the “ordained” are in steep decline. The number of priests in the US has dropped by 30% since 1965, from 58,632 to 37,302 in 2018; of those, only 25,706 are diocesan priests. (https://www.usccb.org/offices/public-affairs/clergy-and-religious);
As a result, lay people are assuming leadership positions in the Church ranging from parish administrators and parish staff, to Eucharistic ministers and parochial school principals and teachers;
The Church faces bioethical issues today, far beyond abortion, birth control and homosexuality. Today, issues such as gender reassignment, cloning, genetic enhancements and the use of fetal tissue to drive critical medical advancements dominate the moral and ethical landscape;
The Church, whose contemporary social teaching emerged during the industrial revolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and focused on nation-states and issues of capital and labor, now faces a 21st-century global landscape dominated by multinational corporations, intergovernmental organizations, technological behemoths and global 24/7 social media;
The Church, who in the past focused primarily on the welfare of human beings, must now concern itself with the welfare of the planet itself, if human beings are not to become extinct;
All Christian denominations are losing members. In 2020, 47% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue or mosque, down from 50% in 2018 and 70% in 1999. Catholics have experienced an even steeper decline than the overall Christian population, down 18 points, as opposed to Protestant denominations, which are down 9 points (Gallup, “US Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time,” March 29, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx ).
As we move into the future, the Church (across all denominations) faces enormous challenges, not only in its actions, but in its self-definition. For the most part, our Eurocentric concept of Tradition has been fairly stable, exploring nuances and subtle developments of our foundational beliefs: standing on the shoulders of giants, we have discerned the distant theological landscape with some degree of clarity. If the trends that John Allen points out are correct, however, it may call for a radical transformation of our theological and scriptural vision, for we may be entering a terrain far beyond our known horizon, a terrain we cannot possibly envision.
And that brings me to an article by Craig Baron, “God Is Deeper than Darwin: John Haught’s Catholic Theology and Science.” Craig Baron is an Associate Professor of Humanities at the Queen’s campus of St. John’s University, and his article offers a brief synopsis of John Haught’s understanding of the relationship between scientific biological evolution, as expressed in Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), and post-Vatican I’s understanding of the relationship between faith and reason. To understand fully Haught’s position we should read for ourselves his Deeper than Darwin, the Prospect of Religion in the Age of Evolution (Boulder Colorado: Westview Press, 2003), God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (New York: Routledge, 2008) and Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God and the Drama of Life (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2010).
I must confess that I’ve never understood the struggle many have reconciling Darwin’s mid-nineteenth century theory of evolution (which is an established fact, we must admit) and God as designer and creator of the universe, who brought into being all that is. Those who insist on a literal seven-day creation, those who see Scripture and science in collision, fail to recognize the mythopoeic genre in which Genesis 1-11 is written. To me, it is self-evident—even from Scripture—that creation is on ongoing process, as our very lives are an ongoing process of “becoming.” The billions of cells that constituted my infantile body are long-gone, replaced many times over by new and evolving cells as I grow older, as I continue “becoming.” In like fashion, my self-identity is an ongoing process. If I were to search for a final definition of “me,” it would be like looking in a dark room for a black cat that is not there.
Scripture gives us the first hint of creation, not as a static act anchored in the past, but as an ongoing “process,” when in Genesis 1: 1, we read: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The word “created” is בָּרָא [baw-rah’], a telic verb, a completed action in and of itself. But this telic verb results in atelic, ongoing action: as Bruce K. Waltke points out in his commentary on Genesis, “because of God’s largess, the apple tree doesn’t produce one apple but thousands, and the grain of wheat multiplies itself a hundredfold” (Genesis, A Commentary. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001, p. 58). Robert Alter, in his magisterial three-volume translation of the entire Tanak, opens Genesis with: “When God began to create heaven and earth . . .” (The Hebrew Bible, Volume 1, the Five Books of Moses, Torah: A Translation with Commentary. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019, loc. 1298).
Haight, distinguished Research Professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., expresses the proper—and indeed sublime—relationship between God and his creation by saying:
“If nature is truly differentiated from God, as it must be if theology is to avoid the slide into pantheism, creation has to have considerable leeway for wandering about experimentally, ‘on its own’ . . .. There can be no self-giving of God to the universe unless this universe is allowed in some sense to be a drama of self-actualization, though in a way that occurs within the limits of relevant new possibilities proposed by its creator.”
(“Evolution and Faith: What Is the Problem?”, Conversatio, a Publication of the Portsmouth Institute for Faith and Culture, posted January 1, 2021: https://portsmouthinstitute.org/evolution-and-faith-what-is-the-problem/ ).
As we ponder the relationship between Scripture and Tradition, we strive mightily to understand the trajectory of humanity within the greater context of God’s ongoing creation, a trajectory that is not linear, but one that is shot through with the grandeur of God, flaming out, “like shining from shook foil,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins would say.