Doctrines Known By Tradition

A reader writes:

I was wondering whether you could think of any doctrinal issue (other than the canon of scripture itself) which virtually all Christians would agree on, but which has not been spelled out by either: scripture, ecumenical council or ex cathedra papal pronouncement. 

I’m imagining that perhaps there is at least one essential Christian principal which has been established solely by Sacred Tradition.  If so, it might help non-Catholic Christians better understand the concept of Sacred Tradition. 

Doctrines that have been promulgated (or buttressed) primarily by papal pronouncements would undoubtedly be denied by many non-Catholic Christians to be essential Christian doctrine.  For some reason, some Protestants seem to accept early councils as valid (yet without thereby validating the concept of Sacred Tradition). So while the doctrine of the Trinity itself, which is not explicitly delineated in scripture, would be a pretty strong argument for (& explanation of) the concept of Sacred Tradition, I am looking for another such doctrine.   

After all, some Protestants will assent to anything (like the Trinity) that was laid out in the Nicean Creed, but will still deny the authority of Sacred Tradition. Can you think of another example of a universally agreed upon Christian doctrine which was not explicitly made clear by either scripture or ecumenical council?

I’m not sure that all of the elements named above are needed for a doctrine to help non-Catholics understand the role of apostolic Tradition. For example, while–let’s say–an Evangelical would not accept a teaching that had been defined ex cathedra because it was defined ex cathedra, if it were not stated or implied in Scripture and he nevertheless accepted it, it would be possible to point him to the extrabiblical history of belief in the doctrine and thus help him understand the value of apostolic Tradition.

Similarly, I suspect it’s not necessary to point to doctrines that no ecumenical council has addressed, just those councils to which Protestants do not appeal. If, for example, the Council of Trent had defined something extrascriptural that a Protestant accepts then he won’t accept it because Trent defined it, so his basis must be something else, and it would again be possible to point to the history of the doctrine and thus its basis in apostolic Tradition.

When it comes to those ecumenical councils to which Protestants commonly do appeal (either the first four or the first six), while they do accept in broad outlines the results of these councils, they do not attribute to the councils an infallible teaching authority. As a result, they defend the results of these councils on the grounds that their teachings are rooted at least implicitly in Scripture.

For example, the doctrine of the Trinity–as taught by I Nicaea and I Constantinople–will generally be defended by Protestants not by appealing to the authority of the councils but by appealing to the passages of Scripture which provide bases for fact that there is one God, that the Son and the Spirit are God just as the Father is, and that the three are distinct Persons. There is no single text of Scripture which puts the doctrine together, but the different aspects of the doctrine are clearly enough reflected in Scripture that the Bible may be said to imply the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

It seems to me that all that is essential to finding a doctrine that can help our Protestant brethren understand the role of Tradition is that the following conditions be met:

a) The doctrine in question is accepted by the Protestants to whom one is speaking
b) The doctrine is not stated in Scripture
c) The doctrine is not implied by Scripture
d) The doctrine has an extrabiblical history to which one can appeal as an alternative, extrascriptural basis

The canon of Scripture is a subject which, in broad outlines, meets these criteria. Actually, it would be better to formulate this as "the canon of the New Testament," since Protestants do not accept precisely the same Old Testament canon. If one focuses on the New Testament, however, it is quite clear that the reason individuals in the Protestant community today accept the books of the New Testament that they do is because these books were passed down from the early Church as having been written by the apostles or their associates and were regarded by the early Church as divinely inspired. It is thus God’s guidance of the Church’s Tradition that provides the basis for our knowledge of the canonicity of these books.

(At least, this would follow for those Protestants who do not accept the claim that the Holy Spirit enables each individual to recognize for himself which books of Scripture are inspired–a claim that is very easy to falsify in practice. It would be quite easy, for example, to write an imitation of 3rd John that sounds enough like John that a person who had not read the original document would not be able to tell, by reading the two, which was authentic and  inspired and which was not.)

When it comes to other doctrines meeting the above requirements, I would propose two which readily spring to mind: the fact that there is to be no more public revelation and the fact that there are to be no more apostles.

Neither of these is directly stated in Scripture and, while there are verses to which some may appeal in defending them, these verses fail to do so upon examination.

For instance, in connection with the claim that there is to be no more public revelation, some may be inclined to appeal to the verse in Jude that says that the faith has been once for all delivered to the saints or to the book of Hebrews’ appeal definitiveness of God’s revelation through Christ. While these passages do indeed show that the substance of the Christian faith was already revealed, they cannot show that there is to be no more public revelation unless one is prepared to say that Jude and Hebrews are not part of public revelation, in which case their statements are non-inspired and correspondingly lacking in authority.

Others have appealed to the fact that at the end of the book of Revelation it says that no one is to tamper with the contents of "this book" as proof of the idea that Scripture, and thus public revelation, is closed. However a clear-eyed reading of the passage in its context shows that this is an illusion.

Part of the illusion is generated by the fact that Revelation is placed at the end of the New Testament in its traditional canonical order. But the canonical order of the books of the New Testament does not represent the historical order in which they were written but is based on other criteria. Revelation happens to be placed at the end because it deals (at least in its final chapters) with the end of the world, but the fact that it has this subject matter doesn’t tell us when it was written. We simply don’t know with any precision when Revelation was written relative to the other books of the New Testament. Even if it can be established that Revelation was written after some of them, we can’t possibly show with any certitude that it was written after all of them. This is especially true if you accept–as I do–that Revelation was written prior to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, which is depicted as still in existence in the book itself.

Further, the illusion is based on the idea that Scripture is a single book. This is an anachronism that would not have occurred to the original readers of the work. Books in the first century were not bound the way they are today, with the pages sewn together in a spine. This form of book is called a "codex," and it was popularized in the early centuries by Christians (presumably because of the ease with which it allows one to flip to particular Bible passages), but in the first century books were normally bound in the form of a scroll, and the New Testament was not a single book but a collection of scrolls, just as the Old Testament was.

Also, right at the beginning of Revelation John is told to write down the vision he sees "in a book," and the most natural (one might say, blindingly obvious) interpretation of the book mentioned at the end is that it is the same book. In other words, John is firs commissioned to write the vision in a book and then, at the end, a warning is given against tampering with the contents of the book John has written.

Reading these passages in light of how books were bound in he first century (indeed, the word for "book" was synonymous with the word for "scroll"), John is first told to write the vision "in a scroll" and then after he has done so there is a warning against anyone who tampers with the contents of "this scroll."

One certainly cannot derive from this the idea that there is to be no more Scripture, much less that there is to be no more public revelation.

When we turn to the question of whether there are to be any more apostles, some might appeal to the passage in Acts 1 where the Twelve select Judas’ replacement, Matthias. In this passage one of the criteria for selection is that the replement must have been a witness of Jesus’ ministry, from the time of his baptism to the time he ascended into heaven. Since no one after the first century met those requirements, it could be argued, there could be no futher apostles. But if that is a requirement for being an apostle then it would exclude two individuals who are directly called apostles in Scripture, namely Paul and Barnabas.

This passage forces us to recognize that there is a difference between The Twelve and the office of apostle in general. Scripture is not explicit on what the difference is, but from the available evidence it would appear that The Twelve were a select group who served not just as witnesses of the risen Christ (of whom there were many who weren’t ever apostles) but as witnesses specifically of his earthly ministry. You had to witness that to be one of The Twelve, but you didn’t have to be a member of The Twelve to be an apostle.

So what did you have to have to be an apostle? The term in both Greek (apostolos) and Aramaic (shlikha) signifies one that has been commissioned to act on behalf of another (like an ambassador, emissary, or legate), and it seems essential for being an apostle that one receive such a commission from Christ to function in this capacity. In the case of all of The Twelve except Matthias this commission was given directly by Christ during his earthly ministry. In the case of Matthias it was given through a special procedure used in Acts 1. And in the case of Paul it was given (apparently) through visions.

There is one point at which Paul says "Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord?" and he may be referring to the incident on the Damascus Road, where Christ appeared to him and then commissioned him to preach his word to the nations. There is also the incident, in Acts 13, where the Holy Spirit directs that Paul and Barnabas bet set aside to the work to which he has called them, following which hands are laid on them.

But all this happened after Christ had ascended to heaven, and if that’s the case then there is no reason why Christ and the Holy Spirit could not have continued to appear to or speak to people and commmission them as apostles. The office didn’t have to die out in the first century. God could have kept it going. Christian history simply records that he didn’t.

(NOTE: While the bishops are sometime referred to as the successors of the apostles, this does not mean that they are themselves apostles. They’re not. They succeeded the apostles in the leadership of the Church when the apostles died out, but the two offices are distinct, as illustrated by the fact that they co-existed in the apostlic age–and by the fact that bishops generally can’t work miracles and certainly can’t write inspired books of Scripture.)

There are thus no passages in Scripture that state or imply either that public revelation is closed or that there are to be no more apostles. These are known from extrascriptural elements of apostolic Tradition that have been passed down to us.

To my mind, these–together with the canon of the New Testament–are among the more convincing doctrines known primarily by Tradition, and I would point to them in preference to some of the other suggestions that one sometimes hears (e.g., the immorality of abortion; that one can be inferred from the fact that the unborn are human and that killing innocents is wrong, both of which principles are amply attested in Scripture).

FINAL NOTE: In dealing with Protestants on this subject it often needs to be pointed out that sacred Scripture and sacred Tradition are not exclusive sources. Indeed, as something handed down to us, Scripture itself is part of sacred Tradition–its written part. Abstracting from that, though, many doctrines are known both by Scripture and by Tradition. For example, there is the fact that we are to be baptized. Christians were responding to this command before Matthew 28 was penned, and the practice of baptism was already established in the Christian community. The fact we are to be baptized is thus passed down both in written form an in the unwritten praxis of the Church, making it a fact known both by Scripture and Tradition but not only or primarily by Tradition.