Why Do Catholics Do That?: A Guide to the Teachings and Practices of the Catholic Church

Book by Johnson Kevin Orlin

CHAPTER 1
 
 
FAITH OF OUR FATHERS
 
What the Church Has to Work With
 
THE MINUTE YOU SAY “Tradition,” a lot of people think that you’re talking about things like holy cards, the Mass in Latin, long-habited nuns, and fusty old priests who always said you weren’t allowed to. But these are memories of culture, not faith; they’re matters of custom, and they don’t have anything to do with Tradition.
 
Tradition—with the capital?—isn’t something that you do. It’s something that you know. Tradition is the body of unwritten knowledge given by Christ to the Apostles and handed down by them to their successors, the Church’s bishops, who teach it to everybody else. It’s the first thing you have to know about the Church, because that’s how it all started. After all, Christ himself never wrote a word of his teachings, and during the first couple of generations after him the Apostles converted thousands by word of mouth—by Tradition—long before the Bible was assembled (see Gal 3:2, 1 Pt 1:24–25, etc.).
 
The New Testament is really only one of the many products of Tradition. St. Papias, who was himself a convert of the first post-Apostolic generation, reminds us that St. Mark “was neither a hearer nor a follower of the Lord; but ... of Peter, who had no intention of giving a connected account of sayings of the Lord.... Mark, then, made no mistake, but wrote things down as he remembered them; and he made it his concern to omit nothing that he had heard nor to falsify anything therein.” And the so-called Muratorian Fragment, a document from the middle of the second century, notes that “Luke wrote in his own name from what he had learned when Paul associated him with himself as a companion of his journey; nor did he himself see the Lord in the flesh,” which is obvious from the Bible itself. The Fragment also mentions that John’s Gospel was a collaborative effort by Apostles who had heard Christ.
 
It’s not really surprising that there would be written and unwritten parts of Christian revelation, because that’s how revelation has worked ever since Genesis. The revelation to the Jews is embodied in Torah, which translates as “teaching” or “direction”, and this came in two forms, too. The written part is the texts that we know as the first five books of the Bible, and then there’s the oral tradition handed down among the priests and rabbis that was never written down—“the lips of the priest shall keep knowledge, and they shall seek the Law at his mouth,” as Malachi put it (2:7; have a look at Is 59:21, too). Naturally, this oral deposit of faith is referred to in other Jewish writings. The Talmud, for instance, the great body of rabbinical comment on Torah, spells out more than forty definite precepts “given to Moses on Sinai” that aren’t mentioned in the written Torah.
 
So, just as the Old Testament doesn’t record every bit of God’s revelation to the Jews, the New Testament doesn’t embody all of Christ’s revelation, either. It embodies an indispensable amount of it, of course—“ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ,” St. Jerome said, and the Church gives a resounding “Amen!” to that. But the Evangelists and the disciples who wrote Epistles made it clear that they weren’t writing down everything (check Lk 1:1–4, 10:16; Jn 16:12–13, 21:25, Heb 13:22, 2 Jn 12, 3 Jn 13, 14, etc.). And St. Paul, Pharisee that he was, would never have conceived of Christianity as a mere book religion. He knew plenty of direct quotations from Jesus that didn’t get written into the Gospels (like Acts 20:35).
 
That’s why the Gospels and the Epistles all assume that you’re familiar with Sacred Tradition, at least in its main lines. It isn’t always easy to see the relationships between the Tradition and the Bible, though; basically, the Church doesn’t hold any truth on the basis of Scripture without Tradition. But then, she doesn’t hold any truth on the basis of Tradition without Scripture, either.
 
Whichever way you look at it, you can’t take one without the other because Sacred Tradition is the only source of information about fundamentally important ideas like the Trinity, which isn’t explicit in the Bible. The same holds for the Old Testament, too. There are plenty of important doctrines like the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead that come from Jewish oral tradition, not from the written Torah, which is why the Sadducees tried to reject those ideas (Mt 22:23, Mk 12:18, Lk 20:27). And, apart from actual articles of faith, Tradition alone sets the framework for a lot of the basics in the ways that Christians worship. The commemoration of Easter, for example, and going to church on Sundays are still part of Christian life even in the separated sects, but they come out of Tradition, not out of the Bible.
 
One thing about the relationship is certain, though: you need to refer to Tradition if you want an authentic interpretation of the Bible. Without reference to Tradition, you can end up taking biblical passages out of context, or, really, you can end up taking the whole Bible out of context. “This, then, you must understand first of all,” as St. Peter cautioned, “that no prophecy of Scripture is made by private interpretation ... in these Epistles, there are certain things difficult to understand, that the unlearned and the unstable distort, just as they do the rest of the Scriptures also, to their own destruction” (2 Pt 1:20).
 
What he means is that the Church has always relied on Sacred Tradition as the rule of faith, the touchstone that you use to test any insight, any directive, or any teaching, as well as any biblical passage (Acts 8:30–31 records an early instance). This runs along the same lines as the practices in Judaism, too, where the oral Torah served as a framework for the interpretation of the written.
 
(The story goes that a “heathen” came for instruction to the great rabbi Hillel, who died about the year 10, while Christ was a boy in Egypt. The heathen said, “I’ll believe you about the written Torah, but not about the oral. Take me on as a convert on condition that you teach me the written Torah only.” So Hillel took him on, and the first day, taught him the Hebrew alphabet. The next day, he taught him the alphabet again, but backwards. “You did it differently, yesterday!” the heathen objected. “Well,” said Hillel, “if you have to depend on me to teach you the alphabet correctly, how much more must you depend on me for the interpretation of the Torah.”)
 
There’s only one Tradition, but it has a different appearance, depending on when you look at it. There’s divine Tradition, given by God the Father before Christ’s coming or by Christ himself afterward. The next phase was apostolic Tradition, which is the expansion of Christ’s teachings given to the Apostles by the Holy Spirit (Jn 16:12–15). This is the Tradition that the Church first communicated through the Apostles’ oral teaching, and it was during this phase of Tradition that the New Testament got written down. That’s why we got four forms of one Gospel—the Apostles told about Christ in ways that their particular audiences would understand, and they did the same thing when they wrote down those parts of Tradition. None of the four Gospels is wrong in any way, but they sure are different. Yet they all exist against the uniform background of apostolic Tradition.
 
The third phase of Tradition resides in the living voice of the Church, which comes to us now through the bishops as the successors of the Apostles who are entrusted with preserving and spreading the teachings of Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit to protect them from error (Acts 13:1–12, for instance, or 2 Tm 1:6–14. Or, as St. Hilary of Poitiers put it, back in 357, “The Lord has not left this in uncertainty”). This ecclesiastical Tradition is embodied in preaching, in the instruction given to children and adult converts, and in other person-to-person communication. It was through ecclesiastical Tradition that the Bible was put together, and it’s always been of primary importance in the life of the Church. St. Papias recalled that “when anyone came along who had been a follower of the Apostles, I would inquire about the Apostles’ discourses: what was said by Andrew, or by Peter, or by Philip, Thomas, or James.... It did not seem to me that I could get so much profit from the contents of books as from a living and abiding voice.”
 
Still, there’s a definite change in the character of Tradition since the death of the Apostles. They had a unique relationship with Christ, and by the time the last of them died (John, in about the year 70), the revelation given by Christ was complete, and so was the revelation given by the Holy Spirit. So there’s no way that anything can be added to the deposit of revelation since then. And there’s no way that anything can be dropped, either. Apart from the guidance of the Holy Spirit, which is understood as guarding the Church from error, there’s simply no mechanism in the Church for adding or deleting anything. The whole hierarchy of Pope, bishops, councils, and congregations is set up to do just the opposite, to keep any innovations from slipping in or any precept from slipping out, and they’ve always done a superhuman job of it.
 
But even though Tradition can’t change, our knowledge of it can grow, and that’s what ecclesiastical Tradition is for. It works sort of like the natural sciences, you might say. The material universe rolls along in the same way from age to age, but we can learn a lot more about it through astronomy, chemistry, physics, and the like, as we go along. In much the same way, the whole mechanism of grace and salvation, the priesthood, the Ten Commandments, and every other part of Christianity all existed from the beginning in the mind of its designer, and it never changes. But our understanding of it grows steadily because Tradition unfolds as the Church faces new situations.