430 - Tradition As a Protestant Problem

Tradition As a Protestant Problem
By Robert McAfee Brown

Father George Tavard, a French Roman Catholic priest now teaching in the United States, is already known for his creative book, The Catholic Approach to Protestantism (1955). He has now performed an even greater ecumenical service by giving us Holy Writ or Holy Church.¹ The latter work is an extensive treatment of one of the most vexing issues dividing Roman Catholics and Protestants, namely, the problem of the relationship of Scripture and tradition. Father Tavard contents himself with an historical study, and eschews, in this volume at least, a discussion of what his historical findings mean for the present situation. But since he explicitly offers his book as a contribution to the present ecumenical dialogue, it must be treated as such, for it gives us the historical perspective from which to approach many contemporary issues that clamor for discussion.

In the following pages I shall first give a brief summary of the position taken by Father Tavard in Holy Writ or Holy Church; second, I shall make a few comments arising out of the book itself; and third (and most important) I shall try to isolate in a preliminary way some of the basic issues raised by the book that require renewed Protestant attention, if we are to be as faithful in our side of the discussion as Father Tavard has been in his.

I

The structure of Holy Writ or Holy Church is in one sense so detailed and complex, due to the historical research it includes, as to defy summary treatment. And yet in another sense the thesis of the book is very simple, for the lesson that the historical excursions teach us is that Scripture and tradition must always be seen in organic relationship to one another, for when either attains a false

¹ Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church, The Crisis of the Protestant Reformation, Harpers, New York, 1959,

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supremacy over the other, trouble results. The trouble that results is not simply due to Protestant error. It can result just as much from the efforts of misguided Roman Catholic canonists as from the efforts of misguided Protestant Reformers. It can invade Catholicism after Trent just as disastrously as it did in the 14th century. Sola ecclesia is just as wrong as sola Scriptura. And the remedy, whether in a Catholic or a Protestant context, can only be a decision for an inclusive concept of Scripture and Church.

It is Father Tavard's conviction that the Reformation understanding of sola Scriptura, "Scripture alone," led to the disintegration of the relationship between "the authority of the written word of God and of Church traditions. "² This relationship, he feels, was normative in the patristic period. At that time it was recognized that there was a Gospel, a kerygma, and that it was "passed on" both in the written Word and in the interpretation of the written Word contained in Church tradition. As the Church found itself addressed by this Word in Scripture, it regularized a canon, chiefly for liturgical reasons, separating those books in which the Word was heard from those in which it was not. But the canon was not, Father Tavard maintains, limited to 27 books. It included "other scriptures" as well-the affirmations of the Church councils and the early fathers, for example. Thus tradition begins to be established, tradition as "the overflow of the Word outside Sacred Scripture."³ There can be no antipathy between these sources. Sometimes, to be sure, the stress is on Scripture, at other times it is on tradition, and it may even occasionally center on the institution which transmits both. But there is no fundamental cleavage, for "in each case, the oneness of Scripture and tradition is the underlying assumption which justifies occasional shifts of emphasis."⁴

The same interrelationship of Scripture and tradition characterizes the medieval period. There is a further extension of the canon, to be sure, so that Hugo of St. Victor, for example, can define the New Testament as containing "the Gospel, the Apostles, the Fathers........,"⁵ and mean by the latter term the Decretals, Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Origen, Bede, and many others. Father Tavard defends this situation, and claims that the theo-

² Ibid., p. vii.
³ Ibid., P. 8.
⁴ Ibid., p. II
⁵ Ibid, P. 16.

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logians of the l2th and l3th centuries "were thus faithful to the patristic conception of 'Scripture alone.' "⁶ On these terms it is clear that Scripture and tradition stand in no conceivable kind of opposition to one another.

But this happy situation did not last. In the 14th century there begins a kind of jockeying between the proponents of the supremacy of Scripture and the supremacy of tradition that has been the bane of the Church's life ever since. Henry of Ghent, for example, sets the authority of Scripture above the authority of the Church, whenever there is an apparent conflict. At the other pole, the notion of "post-apostolic revelation" is introduced, that is, material not found in Scripture but, as the exclusive possession of the Church, to be valued above Scripture whenever there is an apparent conflict. This cleavage between Scripture and tradition deepens in the 14th century, and one of the results is an increasing elevation of the authority of the papacy.

The latter emphasis is continued in the work of the 15th century canonists, and in a wave of reaction against them the conciliarist movement waxes and wanes. The conciliarists are scored by Father Tavard because councils can claim to be recipients of "post-apostolic revelations" in a way that obliterates the early patristic correlation of Scripture and tradition.⁷

The basis of Father Tavard's dissatisfaction with this 15th century chaos is worth quoting:

In her essence, the Church is not a power of interpretation: she is a power of reception. She receives the Word which God speaks to her in the Scriptures. It is this Word as by her received which is authoritative for her members. Thus Scripture and Church are mutually inherent. To Scripture is attached an ontological primacy; and to the Church a historical one because it is only in her receptivity that men are made aware of the Word.⁸

After an examination of the solution of the Humanists, Father Tavard turns to treat "The Glad Tidings of Dr. Luther" (Ch. VI). He feels that in Luther "the cleavage between Scripture and tradition became irreconcilable."⁹ Luther, he claims, "judges Scripture itself."¹⁰ "The justified man judged the Fathers and Doctors."¹¹

⁶ Ibid., P. 20.
⁷ Ibid., p. 56.
⁸ Ibid, p. 66.
⁹ Ibid., p. 80.
¹⁰ Ibid, p. 82.
¹¹ Ibid., p. 83.

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Luther's protestations to the contrary, he is held to have made Scripture entirely dependent upon his own private interpretation. He takes a principle, the principle of justification by faith (which is a good principle if not isolated from the rest of Scripture), and makes the entire Bible witness to this principle alone. Luther therefore emerges as a religious individualist; when there is a conflicting interpretation of Scripture, he invariably prefers his own. Thus no problems are solved by Luther. He merely introduces new problems in place of the old ones he bypassed. And Father Tavard, after a consideration of Melanchth on, who comes off somewhat better, assesses the Lutheran Reformation as follows:

The Lutheran Reformation laid the basis for a novel tradition. In it, "pure doctrine," understood as a reduced set of propositions, lorded it over the Scriptures and the fellowship of believers.¹²

And if this were not eminently true in the case of Luther himself, it is unmistakably true in later Lutheranism, in which, instead of a notion of Scripture interpreted by the Church (the principle of Catholicism) there comes to be substituted a Gospel interpreted by Luther (the principle of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession).

Father Tavard attempts a sympathetic treatment of "John Calvin and the Secret Operation" (Ch. VII) and emphasizes Calvin's attempt to keep Word and Spirit interrelated. But this is impossible within Calvin's framework; Calvin is so far removed from the visible Church that even "his zeal for Christ landed him in doctrinal iconoclasm."¹³ Calvin, so Father Tavard feels, destroys tradition, and thus paves the way for an extreme kind of subjectivism in his later followers. In order to keep these tendencies in check, later Calvinism has to assert the infallibility of its own Churches.

Thus as Luther and Calvin pass from the scene, the situation is not only no better, it is considerably worse. On the Roman Catholic side, it remains chaotic. In reaction to the Reformation, there is considerable stress on the Church at the expense of Scripture (Almain, Cajetan, and Prierias). Johann Eck can start with the primacy of Scripture over the Church and during his lifetime go full circle until he ends with the primacy of the Church over Scripture. Other apologists, trying to come to grips with the Reformation sola Scriptura, end by placing over against it a sola ecclesia. Faced with these

¹² Ibid., P. 95.
¹³ Ibid., P. 108.

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alternatives, there is a new emphasis on inspiration outside the limits of the canon-in the Church Fathers, the councils, the Pope, the medieval doctors, and even the laity. On these terms, as Father Tavard says, "Inspiration can swoop down on prophets at any time in the history of the Church."¹⁴ As the latter position becomes more extreme, there is a reassertion of "the Scripture principle." Schatzgeyer re-emphasizes the supremacy of "Scripture," albeit Scripture defined in wide enough terms to include "canonical" Scripture, "virtual" Scripture (i.e., whatever can be extracted from the Gospel by necessary consequences), and "eminent" Scripture, in terms of which, as Father Tavard reports, "Holy Writ is finally enlarged to infinite dimensions."¹⁵ In the understatement of the book, Father Tavard comments that "Catholic theology is not fully homogenous in the three decades preceding the Council of Trent."¹⁶

The chapter on that Council is clearly the most important in the book. All that can be done here is to present Father Tavard's concluding assessment. He shows, as a result of a careful study of the debates at Trent and the changes in the wording of subsequent drafts of the final document, that the notion of revelation as found partly in Scripture and partly in tradition (partim . . . partim) is discarded, so that there are not two separate sources of authority. The position of the Council is rather as follows:

The dynamic element which constitutes the source (fons) of all saving truth and all Christian behavior, is the Gospel of Christ, the Word spoken by Christ and communicated to the Church through the Apostles. It is a living Word . It carries the Dower of the holy Spirit. This dynamic element uses two sets of vessels: Holy Scripture and traditions. In as far as they convey the same Gospel of Christ, in as far as they channel the original impetus whereby the Spirit moved the Apostles, both Scripture and traditions are entitled to the same adhesion of faith. For faith reaches Christ and the Spirit whatever the medium used to contact us.¹⁷

To Father Tavard this means that "the whole Gospel is contained in Scripture as it is also contained in the traditions," even though such a position is not explicitly stated. However, it seems to him a fair conclusion since the opposite notion, that is, that the Gospel is partly in Scripture and partly in the traditions (partim . . .

¹⁴ Ibid., p. 172.
¹⁵ Ibid., p. 176.
¹⁶ Ibid., P. 195.
¹⁷ Ibid., p. 208.

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partim) is explicitly excluded. Trent therefore gives definitive utterance to what Father Tavard calls the classical view, namely, that "Scripture contains all revealed doctrine, and the Church's faith, which includes apostolic traditions, interprets it."¹⁸

In subsequent chapters Father Tavard traces what happened immediately after Trent both in Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism. He believes that Roman Catholicism by and large failed to read Trent in proper terms, and perpetuated the false distinctions that had plagued the Church in earlier centuries. Anglicanism was actually much closer to the "classical view," and Anglicanism gets credit for "A Very Good Try." Anglicans, to be sure, were guilty of limiting the work of the Spirit to Scripture and the early Church councils, in which view, as Father Tavard presents it, "The Spirit infallibly guided the Church for approximately five centuries. Then he somehow withdrew his assistance."¹⁹ But the overall estimate of Anglicanism is an appreciative one:

The theology of the Catholic eras, patristic and medieval, was better represented by the Anglican view than by many Catholic writers in the Counter-Reformation period.²⁰

Terminating his historical treatment at this point, Father Tavard comes to the conclusion that the dilemma brought to a head by the Reformation was an attempt to make "an artificial distinction between two God-given supernatural realities, Scripture and the Church."²¹ This opposition has been perpetuated ever since. And it is wrong.

The secret of re-integration, or of Christian unity, or of a theology of ecumenism (whatever name we choose to give this) may lie in opening a way back to an inclusive concept of Scripture and of the Church. Scripture cannot be the Word of God once it has been severed from the Church which is the Bride and the Body of Christ. And the Church could not be the Bride and the Body, had she not received the gift of understanding the Word. These two phases of God's visitation of man are two aspects of one mystery. They are ultimately one, though one in two. The Church implies the Scripture as the Scripture implies the Church.²²

And after a description of Revelation 22: 19, he concludes:

¹⁸ Ibid, p. 209,
¹⁹ Ibid., p. 238.
²⁰ Ibid., p. 245.
²¹ Ibid., p. 246.
²² Ibid., p. 246.

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The Book is the Word of God, and the City is the Church. The Book leads to the City. Yet the City is described in the Book. To prefer the one to the other amounts to renouncing both.²³

II

This is an exciting and in many ways an original survey. It breaks new ground, particularly in its treatment of the Council of Trent (although the author calls attention to similar researches by Father J. R. Geiselmann, S.J., in this area). It is the kind of book a Protestant needs to read, so that he can see what the reasonably familiar terrain of Church history looks like when examined from a perspective different from his own. The Protestant reader recognizes the landscape; he is sure that he has been there, and yet somehow the whole terrain is different, as though a new set of unfamiliar colors had been used to paint it. Furthermore, the "good guys" and the "bad guys" who inhabit the landscape have reversed roles. The conciliarists are not a hope but a threat. The "pre-Reformers" lead the Church even further astray. The Reformation does not save Christendom but further disintegrates it.

At the same time, there are some surprises in store for the Catholic reader. Baleful tendencies in Catholic theology are described as carefully as the positions of the Reformers. (The unscrupulous Protestant reader can, in fact, isolate a good deal of out of context fuel to feed his anti-Catholic fires.) And there must be few Rom an Catholic books in which the Anglicans get credit for being more faithful to the proper view of Scripture and tradition than most post-Tridentine Roman Catholics.

To express appreciation does not, of course, mean that a Protestant critique is unnecessary. There are many places where Protestant questions and Protestant comments are called for. Several will now be raised that grow directly out of the book itself, after which there will be a more extended discussion of the basic problems that are posed for Protestants when the issue of tradition is treated with full seriousness.

1. In a book that contains so much it may seem petty to complain about omissions, but there is one dimension of the problem of Scripture and tradition that receives only passing comment. This is the position of Protestant sectarianism. If the "classical" Reformers illustrate to Father Tavard the dangers of "Scripture alone," surely

²³ Ibid., p. 247.

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the sectarians point to another problem, the dilemma raised when Scripture is subordinated to personal experience, or when isolated portions of Scripture are made normative for the whole of it. (The issues here are perhaps not too dissimilar from those raised by the theory of "post-apostolic revelation.") It is the sectarian movement that pinpoints the problem of the relationship of the Holy Spirit to tradition, and suggests how a wrong emphasis on the Spirit can be just as stultifying to the creative "traditioning" of the kerygma as is a wrong emphasis on Scripture.

The matter is merely mentioned here, for it is to be hoped that Father Tavard will produce a second volume carrying his story down to the present day; a treatment of the sectarian approach to Scripture and tradition written by a Roman Catholic will be worth waiting for.

2. We must ask the authorities in the patristic period for a full discussion of Father Tavard's treatment of what seems to be a Golden Age in the history of the relationship of Scripture and tradition. His contention, as we have seen, is that Scripture and tradition were so inextricably united during the patristic period that statements that seem to exalt one above the other are no more than modest shifts of emphasis within an accepted presupposition of their unity. However, in the light of such a book as T. F. Torrance's The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers (Oliver and Boyd), it would seem clear that as early as the second century the clear import of Scripture was being disregarded in the Church, and that tradition was already beginning to conflict with Scripture. To whatever degree this is true, it suggests certain reservations about Father Tavard's treatment of the unity of Scripture and tradition in the early Church.

3.A basic issue is raised in connection with the treatment of the conciliarist movement. Father Tavard is quite rightly disturbed by the notion of "post-apostolic revelations," but he is also worried by the conciliarist movement which rises partly in reaction to the increasing elevation of papal power. The difficulty with the councils, he feels, is that they have no guarantee of proclaiming the truth, since it is freely acknowledged by all that councils can err. Their authority can be questioned in the same way that the authority of Scripture can be questioned. Furthermore, and this is a point of some importance, councils could become the official repositories of "post-apostolic revelations."

Here we reach an ultimate cleavage between Protestants and

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Catholics. Father Tavard must naturally assert that the Pope is exempted from all of these liabilities, and the Protestant must naturally assert that whatever can be said of the human fallibilities of a group of Christians meeting in a council must also be asserted of a single Christian, even though he sit in Peter's chair. In fact, the subsequent history of papal pronouncements cannot fail to suggest to the Protestant that the Papacy itself has become the repository of "post-apostolic revelations," since many of these seem to the Protestant to be utterly divorced from Biblical faith and the apostolic witness. Thus Father Tavard's criticisms of conciliarism must be turned by the Protestant to the Papacy as well, even though Father Tavard cannot accept the latter procedure any more than the Protestant can reject it. One can only record this basic difference with regret. Father Tavard must assert that the Papacy is divinely protected from error in a way that a council is not, while the Protestant must assert that neither enjoys this total exemption from error, and that both can be repositories of truth only to the extent that they submit themselves to the claims of Holy Scripture and faithfully reflect its witness.

4. It is with Father Tavard's treatment of Luther and Calvin that the most persistent Protestant questions will naturally be raised. Father Tavard has a more sympathetic treatment than most Catholic writers are ever able to muster. and can to a certain extent understand the motives that led them in the direction they went. He also gives full weight to the disintegrative effect of Catholic theology upon the Church of their time. And yet he still comes to the conclusion, apparently inevitable among Catholic scholars, that Luther was only a religious individualist who set "my" Gospel against the Gospel of catholic Christendom, and who used the Bible chiefly as a sourcebook of isolated texts to support "my" Gospel.²⁴

Here I can only record how diametrically opposite must be the conclusion to which a Protestant comes when he looks at the phenomenon of Luther's reaction to medieval Christendom. Where the Catholic historian Lortz, for example, must criticize Luther because he was "not a good listener," i.e., because he did not really listen to the Church, the Protestant must assert that Luther was above all else a very good listener, i.e., that he listened with utmost

²⁴ For a thoroughly up-to-date assessment of Luther's use of Scripture, all disputants who are concerned about this problem must consult Jaroslav Pelikan's Luther the Expositor, Concordia.

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attentiveness to the voice of Scripture, heard within it the Word of God, and acted accordingly in obedience to that Word. It meant disagreement with the convictions and practices of the Church, but it was a disobedience in the name of Scripture for the sake of the Gospel, and thus also for the sake of the very Church itself.

We find the same difficulty in the treatment of Calvin, for whom Father Tavard obviously has considerable admiration. But Calvin, too, is credited with having destroyed tradition and paved the way for subjectivism. There are also a number of generalizations about Calvin's theology that need to be challenged.²⁵ Father Tavard makes what seems to me a questionable judgment about later Calvinism when he describes the efforts of Calvinists to find an objective certainty for faith. He asserts that in the Scottish National Covenant of 1580 "the Scottish Kirk naively boasted of its own infallibility,"²⁶ but he fails to take account of the safeguards against this very sort of thing that are contained in the disclaimer at the beginning of the Scots Confession of 1560:

Protestant that gif onie man will note in this our confessioun onie artickle or sentence repugnand to Gods halie word, that it wald pleis him of his gentleness and for christian charities sake to admonish us of the same in writing; and we upon our honoures and fidelitie, be Gods grace do promise him satisfactioun fra the mouth of God, that is fra his halie scriptures, or else reformation of that quilk he sal prove to be amisse.

Similarly, he cites the Westminster Confession's assertion that in all controversies the Church is to appeal to the Scriptures, and the Scriptures in their original tongues. He therefore concludes, "Discarding the infallibility of a religious tradition, the Puritans thus paved the way for the infallibility of scholars."²⁷ But these are surely words too strong to describe the mind of the Westminster Divines, who, having asserted in the document under discussion that all councils can err, can reasonably be held to have included their own deliberations within this statement. Infallibility is not a no-

²⁵ I simply list some of these that seem to me to do less than justice to Calvin: "Calvin accounted for faith in a way that may be termed aristocratic. . . . He treated ordinary Christian life as though it were necessarily mystical. . . . Calvin overlooked for all practical purposes the world of everyday Christians, where sanctity and sin rub shoulders. . . . The ecclesiastical polity of his Geneva was not meant to assist the weak in faith. It was devised to sift the goats from the sheep, the damned from the predestined..." (pp. 104-105). And so on.
²⁶ Tavard, op. cit., p. 110.
²⁷ Ibid.

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tion that sits lightly on any Protestant head, be he even a Puritan divine.

5.A Protestant reaction to Father Tavard's treatment of the Council of Trent can only be one of excitement. Is it indeed possible that this is what the Tridentine fathers really meant? If we must not be too quick to jump to the conclusion that it is, we must also be increasingly open to the possibility that it may be. We shall have to wait and see what further Catholic research brings to light, and, fully as important, bow these conclusions are received within the Roman Catholic magisterium; for it will make necessary some burning Catholic reassessment of the post-Tridentine history of Catholic doctrine. But if Father Tavard has made his case, that case, while not removing all the obstacles to Catholic-Protestant understanding about the relationship of Scripture and tradition, certainly renders irrelevant two-thirds of the usual Protestant polemic about Trent, and opens up genuinely new possibilities of Catholic-Protestant dialogue in this whole area.

III

Father Tavard has expressly limited his study to a presentation of historical material. Nevertheless, his presentation raises a number of fundamental issues that need re-thinking by Protestants. The following are half a dozen areas in which Protestants are called upon to engage in some fresh intramural debating in the light of Father Tavard's study.

1. Surely the basic question we must ask ourselves afresh is what we really mean by sola Scriptura. That this was one of the rallying cries of the Reformation is self-evident. The Reformers, confronted by what they could only feel to be the corrupt traditions of men, made the decision to reject these false traditions and return to "Scripture alone" as source and norm for the life of the (Church). Ever since, Protestants have attempted to rally their various banners around the ensign inscribed sola Scriptura. Indeed, the current emphasis on "Biblical theology" (with its concomitant suspicion in some quarters of "natural theology") is often interpreted as the modern expression of this basic Protestant impulse.

But can we really get away with this? Can we really assert that we rely on Scripture alone? I am sure that we cannot, at least not as the phrase has come to be understood. We must face the fact

441 - Tradition As a Protestant Problem

that a doctrine of sola Scriptura in any pure form is simply not a possibility for us. The reason this is so is a very basic one. No one in the 20th century can "leapfrog," as it were, over nineteen intervening centuries and establish a simple continuity with the apostolic age in which the Scriptures were produced.²⁸

Even if this were desirable (which is debatable), it is impossible. The "leapfrog" is doomed to failure on at least two counts: (a) it ignores the fact that people inevitably read the Bible in the light of a denominational or theological heritage, and (b) it ignores the fact that they read it in the light of their contemporary situation. We must have enough Protestant courage to face both of these facts.

(a) No one approaches the Bible free of denominational or theological presuppositions. Lutherans tend to read the Bible in the light of the interpretive principle of justification by faith, Presbyterians in terms of the sovereignty of God. The sect groups read it from the perspective of their own practices, which may range from snake handling to speaking in tongues. Liberal Protestants find the Bible a handbook for social justice, while conservative ones find it depicting an everlasting hell fire designed for liberals.

(b) But our contemporary situation also conditions the way we read the Bible. Americans in East Lansing hear Romans 13 in a different way from Americans in East Berlin. When Mississippi Senators and Afrikaner Nationalists read Paul's speech on Mars Hill, they draw different conclusions about racial discrimination than do natives of Indonesia or the Congo who read the same passages.

No one is trying to be dishonest. Everyone claims to be hearing the Word of God. But the indisputable fact of the matter is that Lutherans, Presbyterians, sectarians, liberals, conservatives, East Lansingites, East Berliners, southern Americans, southern Afrikaners, Indonesians and Congolese all read the same Scripture and all hear different things. Much of this may be due to faulty reading and faulty listening. But it cannot all be explained so simply. It can be explained only by recognizing that Protestants do not rely on sola Scriptura in quite the unambiguous way that Reformation Sunday sermons would suggest.²⁹

When the notion of sola Scriptura is interpreted as though we ac-

²⁸ This suggests, incidentally, the need for a searching criticism of Kierkegaard's thesis, in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, that the nineteen centuries make no more difference than a single day.
²⁹ The above four paragraphs are drawn from the forthcoming The Spirit of Protestantism, Oxford University Press.

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tually approach Scripture de novo and make use of nothing else in arriving at Christian judgments, transforming Protestantism into "the religion of a book," then Father Tavard is quite right in his assertion that the Protestant attempt to maintain this posture is an unfortunate and even disastrous one.

But is this in fact what the phrase means or ought to mean? Do we not actually mean by sola Scriptura something quite different, so that when properly understood it does not imply either a naiveté' with regard to our historical situation or a kind of individualistic interpretation of Scripture to fit what we desire to find in Scripture? When Protestantism asserts sola Scriptura it is not asserting that the only thing it believes in is the Bible, nor is it saying that Church history is unimportant, nor even that nothing else matters so long as one has a correct view of Scriptural inspiration. It is, on the contrary, asserting that if we wish to know Jesus Christ, if we wish to be confronted by him, judged by him and re-created by him, then Scripture is the place to which we must go, for Scripture is the means through which we discover for ourselves who he is and what he does. Without Scripture we cannot find him or be found by him. It is thus in Scripture alone that we discover what is needful for our salvation, Scripture not as something isolated from all else, but Scripture as the "alone" source of our knowledge of him.

What I am groping for in these statements has been put with signal clarity by Professor Albert Outler in a statement that might well be taken as a starting point for subsequent discussion of this matter:

All the great Reformation watchwords-sola Scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia-have one essential meaning: solus Christus. This is the source and center of Christian faith. . . . Solus Christus is the content of Christian theology, and it is the source and center of Christian community. . . . Jesus Christ is the Christian dogma. Everything else in Christian thought derives from or subserves this primordial conviction.³⁰

Protestantism exists to witness to Jesus Christ. It does not exist to witness to Scripture, save as Scripture in its turn is witness to Jesus Christ.

2. The discussion thus far should make it clear that the issue can no longer be stated as "Scripture vs. tradition." This is a wrong way of posing the problem that can only produce wrong answers. The

³⁰ Outler, The Christian Tradition and the Unity We Seek, Oxford, p. 128. This is one of the most important contemporary books on the problem of tradition.

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real problem is to discover a proper relationship between Scripture and tradition.

This means that the question for Protestants is not, "How can we get rid of tradition?" or "How can we set Scripture against tradition?" It is rather, "How can we employ tradition creatively within a Protestant context?" This is a very different question. To busy ourselves with it does not mean that we have already become crypto Catholics. It means rather that we have acknowledged that there may be more fruitful ways of understanding the fullness of our Protestant heritage than we have yet explored.

Now if Protestants are called upon to recognize that the Protestant stress on Scripture at the expense of tradition has created difficulties, Roman Catholics are no less called upon to recognize that post Tridentine Catholic theology has created its own set of difficulties by exalting tradition at the expense of Scripture. (It would seem, indeed, to be one of the major implications of Father Tavard's book that Roman Catholics must re-examine their own position in the light of the new understanding of Trent.) One of the most encouraging things on the ecumenical scene is the fact that these reassessments have actually begun. The Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches has a theological commission on Tradition and Traditions, under the leadership of Professors Outler and Skydsgaard, that is examining precisely these issues, and the most significant emphasis in contemporary Roman Catholic theology has been its renewed stress on Biblical studies. Professor Cullmann, commenting on this dual reorientation, says:

We are beginning to understand on the Protestant side what an immense treasure there is in the work of the Fathers, and we have begun to break away from that strange conception of Church history and Christian thought which supposed that between the second and the sixteenth centuries there was, with the exception of certain sects, a complete eclipse of the gospel.
On the other side, we are witnessing today a Catholic interest in the reading and study of the Bible greater, perhaps, than at any previous period. The work of Pére Lagrange, to name only one; the encyclical Divino afflante spiritu; the extraordinary energy of the Biblical Institute in Rome and of the Biblical School of the Dominicans in Jerusalem; the publication of the excellent translation in the Sainte Bible, known as the Jerusalem Bible; do these not prove that the most valuable Catholic contributions to the understanding of the

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Bible are due, despite the theory of tradition, to a direct, immediate contact with the biblical text in the original?³¹

3. Now if our Protestant problem is not accurately described as the acceptance of Scripture and the rejection of tradition, but as the creative use of tradition for the better understanding of Scripture, this raises some further problems. If Father Tavard is right in his re-assessment of Trent, the Roman Catholic could assert that his concern is likewise to establish "the creative use of tradition for the better understanding of Scripture." This means that we must take special pains to distinguish just what we mean by "tradition," not only among ourselves but in distinction from Catholic usage. This implies the necessity of a philological study more intensive than I am aware that Protestants have yet made.

Without taking the easy out of suggesting that "the problem of tradition" is merely a problem of semantics, it can be said that much of our difficulty springs from the fact that Protestants and Catholics mean different things by the same word, and that even among ourselves we give the word different meanings in different contexts. (The discriminating reader may feel that the latter tendency has been given ample illustration in the preceding pages.) Protestants, furthermore. tend to use "tradition" as a pejorative term, meaning by it, let us say, "man-made accretions that have distorted the apostolic faith beyond recognition." But when Catholics refer to "tradition" they can presuppose the complete congruence of that same apostolic faith with Munificentissimus Deus.

It is important therefore to recognize that the word "tradition" can bear many meanings. Catholics, for example, distinguish between "passive tradition," i.e., the content of doctrine, and "active tradition," i.e., the transmission of doctrine from one age to another through the living magisterium of the Church of Rome. In this sense, active and passive tradition coincide for Roman Catholics. They would not thus coincide for Protestants, even if the latter could be persuaded (which is unlikely) to accept the notion of tradition as "passive." Such a notion suggests a kind of propositional

³¹ Cullmann, "The Tradition," in The Early Church, Westminster, p. 98. Professor Cullmann has been more responsible than any other Protestant theologian for the increasing rapprochement in Europe between Catholic and Protestant scholarship. Cf. his Peter, Westminster; A Message to Catholics and Protestants, Eerdmans; and Begegnung der Christen, a series of essays jointly edited by Professor Cullmann and a Roman Catholic. A full-scale Roman Catholic treatment of Cullmann's theology has recently been published in France.

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revelation that has recently come under heavy fire in certain Protestant quarters.

The Protestant, to be sure, refers to tradition as the content of what is "handed on," and as the actual act of "handing on" itself, and in this sense the two are, indeed, from the Protestant perspective, inseparable. For it is by the very act of "handing on" (in, for example, the event of preaching or the event of the Lord's Supper) that the content is given its meaning. The actual act of "handing on" is at the same time a "re-calling" of a past event, and a "recalling" that makes the past event a contemporary event. This notion, to which we must return, has important consequences for our understanding of the relation of tradition and the Holy Spirit, and for our understanding of the distinction between apostolic tradition and later ecclesiastical tradition.

Is it enough, with the Edinburgh Conference on Faith and Order (1937), to refer to tradition as "the living stream of the Church's life"? Must not traditio, "handing over," be defined by us in terms that will make clear who "hands over" what, in what way, and under what conditions? Or will this, as some Protestants would urge, overly formalize matters that are better left to the discretion of the Holy Spirit, who can over-rule all the theological statements that men devise?

Nor do even these comments begin to explore the varied meanings "tradition" has had. Sometimes (as in orthodox Protestantism) it has been equated with the content of Scripture so that the Biblical message, committed to writing, and the Biblical message alone, is what is "handed down." Sometimes (as in various forms of "Catholicism") it has been identified with the faith set forth in the ecumenical creeds. Elsewhere it has meant the interpretation given to those creeds by the Fathers..... or the medieval doctors . . . or the 16th century Reformers..... or (becoming more and more rigid) the l7th century Reformers. In some strands of sectarian Protestantism, tradition has been equated with unwritten information given at various times by the Holy Ghost to men specially inspired to receive such truths.

A good deal of work is clearly needed if such diverse interpretations are to contribute to, rather than hinder, ecumenical discussion. Once again Professor Outler provides us with a starting point, in the context of his discussion of a true authority rooted in history,

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"and yet not located or circumscribed by human institutions and traditions":

There is just such an authority for all Christians. It is the origin and center of our faith and our community. It is God's self-manifestation in Jesus Christ who possesses all men who receive Him (John 1: 12). It is God's prime act of tradition-or "handing over" Jesus Christ to share our existence and to effect our salvation. "For he who did not spare his own Son but 'handed him over' for us all, will he not also give us all things else with him?" (Romans 3: 31-32; cf. also Romans 4: 24-25).
This divine "tradition," or paradosis, was a divine act in human history-and it is renewed and made contemporary in the ongoing course of history by the act of God's Holy Spirit, whom Jesus "handed over" to his disciples in the last hour on the cross (John 13: 30). The Holy Spirit-"sent by the Father in my name" (John 14: 25)re-creates the original act of tradition (traditum) by an act of "traditioning" (actus tradendi), so that the tradition of Jesus Christ becomes a living force in later lives and in faith based on response to a contemporary witness. . . .
The primary aim of the apostolic community was to "hand over" Jesus Christ to all who would receive Him by faith and according to their testimony.³²

Surely the last sentence provides a meeting point with Father Tavard's statement that "tradition is the art of passing on the Gospel." The Gospel must clearly be "passed on" (or "handed over") from generation to generation. The fact that the Gospel is itself constituted by a series of historical events, and that we live at a later historical period than the events themselves, makes tradition in this sense inevitable, and we can accept the fact as an indisputable point of common departure.³³

But even if we can have a point of common departure, it does not appear likely Chat we shall have a point of common arrival. For, almost immediately, we discover that our understanding of how the Gospel is "passed on" creates differences between us-intramural differences between Protestants as well as extramural differences between Protestants and Catholics. We must now look at what some of these cleavages are.

³² Outler, op. cit., pp. 110-111, 113
³³ It is discouraging to discover how hard it is to convince Protestants of this elemental fact that the very nature of Christian faith as rooted in history makes it impossible to escape from tradition, in the sense of "handing on." Their fears about the consequences of making such an admission would appear to be directly proportionate to the deficiency of their understanding of the significance of the Holy Spirit in Christian history.

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4. One of them is the problem of the Biblical canon, which involves not only the canon itself but also its relationship to non-canonical materials in the life of the Church.³⁴

Contemporary Protestantism betrays a certain uneasiness concerning the canon. The structure of the New Testament canon was originally dictated by the belief, now known to be incorrect, that each of the 27 books could claim apostolic authorship. Today we are forced to assert that if the early fathers did the right thing in giving the canon the shape it now has, they did so for the wrong reason, but that this, rather than being the greatest reason, was a providential act of the Holy Spirit, who has thus used the follies of men to praise him. To critics, it often sounds like ex post facto reasoning.

If, however, we must no longer try to claim apostolic authorship for our 27 books, it seems clearer and clearer that we can claim apostolic content, and that it is both possible and proper to assert that the New Testament does indeed satisfy the criterion of apostolicity. That is to say, if we want to know what the apostolic faith was and is, we know where to turn. We turn to the New Testament as our surest way of recovering that witness-and maintaining it. The New Testament becomes our norm or yardstick for measuring the apostolic faith, and this is precisely what the word "canon" means.

We are not, however, out of the woods when we have made this assertion. For the same Biblical studies that have overturned the claims of apostolic authorship have likewise made clear that the New Testament is not a static deposit of "apostolic faith." It is, we may say, the apostolic faith becoming conscious of itself, the faith of the early Church as it is growing and developing to maturity. Within the New Testament itself we find many examples of a developing "tradition," ranging from the earliest documents (ca. 50 A.D.) to the latest (ca. 150 A.D.). The shape of the Christological affirmations in the Petrine sermons in Acts and in the letter to the Colossians certainly demonstrate that Scripture is itself part of the developing tradition within the early Church. When we take into account the oral traditions behind the documents, we discover that over a century has elapsed between certain liturgical fragments preserved in Paul's letters, and the Second Epistle of Peter. If this

³⁴ Cf. particularly Cullmann, The Early Church, Westminster, esp. pp. 87-99, and Diem, Dogmatics, Oliver and Boyd, pp. 194-239. Diem contains a critique of Cullmann on pp. 215 f.

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does not create a hopeless situation, it certainly creates a more complex one, and we are never entitled to talk glibly about "the apostolic faith," as though this were easily discernible in all of its ramifications simply by reference to the New Testament.

Protestant apologetics has a further face-lifting job to do if it is not to be reduced to face-saving. For there is a type of Protestant defense of the canon which is so eager to exalt the difference between the Bible and other books, even subsequent Christian literature of high caliber, that it gives the impression that the Holy Spirit was extraordinarily active for a few decades and that once the 27 books were completed his job was done. This is certainly the impression that much Protestant exaltation of Scripture makes on Catholics, both Anglo- and Roman. The Anglicans, for their part, being unwilling to concede the Holy Spirit so short an active life, extend his activity to include the ecumenical councils of the undivided Church. But, as Father Tavard points out, why should he cease to guide the Church after 500 years? On these terms, Roman Catholics appear to have far the most impressive record of assistance from the Holy Spirit, since they claim that he has never ceased to guide and direct the See of Peter.

This type of argument misses, of course, the point of What Protestantism means in giving such an exalted place to the canon. No Protestant means to assert that the work of the Holy Spirit ceases when the canon is complete. What we mean to say is that from that time on his unceasing work receives a different outward expression. For, the witness of the original apostles now being completed and the substance of their faith preserved for us in Holy Scripture, it becomes the task of the Holy Spirit henceforth to lead us into all truth, by helping us to understand what is contained in Scripture itself, and making those events contemporaneous for us. This is the insight toward which Calvin was pointing in the Institutes when he placed such emphasis on the relationship of Word and Spirit. There may need to be more Protestant work done to articulate what this relationship involves today, but Calvin was surely on the right track.³⁵

A related issue that is particularly highlighted by Father Tavard's book is the question of the limits of the New Testament canon. The

³⁵ One of the best contemporary treatments of the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the ongoing tradition is contained in Daniel Jenkins, Tradition, Freedom, and the Spirit, Westminster.

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Protestant answer is clear: 27 books. The Catholic answer is not so clear. "Scripture," in the Catholic sense, as Father Tavard's study shows, includes considerably more than 27 books, and at various times in Church history the limits have stretched to almost infinite width, to include writings of the apostolic fathers, the patristic writers, the conclusions of ecumenical councils, and so forth. This divergence in what is meant by "Scripture" is one of the most serious barriers to clearer Catholic-Protestant dialogue. This particular job of clarification however, seems in the nature of the case to reside particularly with the Roman Catholic scholars.

As a Protestant who has been excited by Karl Barth's suggestion that we must in principle regard the canon as "open,"³⁶ I must confess that reading Father Tavard's book gives me second thoughts on the matter. I do not find myself reassured, as I read his account of the fortunes of "Scripture," that a flexible canon is necessarily a good thing. The whole course of medieval Christianity and, I must add, of post-Tridentine Catholicism, seems to lead further and further away from "the faith once delivered to the saints," and more and more in the direction of what appears distressingly like a new gospel. Be that as it may, the Protestant claim concerning the providential character of a fixed canon seems to me less and less like ex post facto reasoning, and more and more like sober fact.³⁷

5. We are already moving from the problem of the canon itself to the problem of the relationship of the canon to non-canonical materials. Here we are concerned with the relationship of the apostolic witness in the New Testament to the subsequent witness of Christendom. How are these related? Can we assert that there is a decisive watershed in Christian history, to which all subsequent generations of Christians look back if they are to understand the meaning of their faith? Put in terms that broad, Protestants and Catholics could surely agree. But can we go further, as the marking off of the canon would seem to suggest, and make a radical distinction between what Oscar Cullmann has called "apostolic tradition" and "ecclesiastical tradition"? Here there begins to be clear division between Protestants and Catholics which is pinpointed more precisely when we go on to ask whether the function of the apostles

³⁶ Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 1, 2, esp. pp. 476 ff.
³⁷ Having said this, I must go on to say that Barth's whole treatment of Scripture, canon, authority, and tradition in Church Dogmatics, 1, 2, Ch. III, is perhaps the most creative in modem Protestant thought.

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was a unique function that ceased with them, or a function which was itself "handed on" to subsequent followers. At this point the issue is fairly joined between Cullmann's assertion that "the apostolate is by definition a unique office which cannot be delegated"³⁸ a claim widely repeated in Protestant literature-and Father Danielou's assertion (in response to Cullmann) that "in this transmission and interpretation of the message, the Church enjoys a divine infallible authority as did the apostles as recipients of revelation."³⁹

In the Catholic view there is great stress on continuity of function, so that what was done in and through the apostles continues to be done in and through their delegated successors. The notion of the apostolate as a unique office that cannot be delegated would, of course, be a serious blow to the Roman Catholic doctrine of succession. And yet, as Cullmann's researches have shown⁴⁰, there is impressive evidence to suggest a radical difference between the time of the apostles and the time of their successors, between "the preaching of the apostles and the preaching of those who depend on the apostles." As Daniel Jenkins has argued in The Nature of Catholicity, the apostles do not leave us successors to themselves, they leave us their witness, their testimony, which is preserved for us in Holy Scripture. The validity of the Protestant stance is greatly affected by whether or not this radical distinction between the first apostles and all subsequent generations of Christians can be maintained.⁴¹

If we insist on this, we are not for a moment denying "tradition." We are merely saying that there is a difference between the apostolic tradition itself, and the tradition of subsequent generations of Christians. This assertion is based not simply on a good deal of internal New Testament evidence, but on the fact that the distinction was clearly accepted by the early Church itself. The very fact that the canon was established is the best evidence that the early Church was determined to distinguish between the apostolic tradition and all later tradition, and to insist that the former be the norm for the lat-

³⁸ Cullmann, op. cit., p. 77.
³⁹ Danielou, in Dieu Vivant, p. 111, italics added; cited in Cullmann, op. cit, p. 75.
⁴⁰ Cf. ibid., especially pp. 75-87.
⁴¹ The problem of the relationship of the apostolate to the subsequent ministry of the Church is a source of dispute not only between Protestants and Roman Catholics but between Protestants and certain Anglicans as well. The poles of the argument are well represented by Kirk, ed., The Apostolic Ministry, Hodder and Stoughton, and T. W. Manson, The Church's Ministry, Westminster. So much is at stake in the outcome of this debate that it is hard to be sure what constitutes convincing research. The ecclesiastical affiliation of the writer being known, the position with which he will emerge at the end of his research is predictable to a depressingly high degree.

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ter. Later tradition there certainly is, for Protestants as well as Catholics, but the function of the later tradition is to help interpret the earlier. This task of interpretation is always the task of the Church, but the interpreters stand under the apostolic tradition rather than beside it. Cullmann comments:

There is an apostolic tradition which is a norm because it rests upon eye-witnesses chosen by God, and because Christ speaks directly in it, and there is a post-apostolic tradition which is a valuable help for the understanding of the divine Word, but is not to be regarded as a norm.⁴²

It would seem as though the divergence here were complete, with Protestants assigning a unique authority to the apostolic tradition and Catholics giving coordinate authority to ecclesiastical tradition. But Father Tavard's treatment of the Council of Trent raises the question of whether we are quite as far apart as this.

When Father Tavard can state as the implicit meaning of Trent that "the whole Gospel is contained in Scripture as it is also contained in the traditions,"⁴³ and again that "Scripture contains all revealed doctrine, and the Church's faith, which includes apostolic traditions, interprets it,"⁴⁴ we have at least come within hailing distance. Trent's rejection of the partim . . . partim formula suggests, to Father Tavard at least, that Scripture and tradition live in this kind of organic relationship to one another. Tradition, in this sense is not "elevated" above Scripture: rather, tradition is the faithful interpretation of Scripture by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. If this italicized assertion is indeed what Father Tavard means, it is certainly patent of a Protestant interpretation, and I have stated it in a way that as a Protestant I would be prepared to defend.

But I am afraid that we do not come to a point of real meeting. For Protestants know that Father Tavard, along with Father Danielou and every other Roman Catholic theologian, must go on to assert that "the faithful interpretation of Scripture by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit," is guaranteed to be infallible and irreformable, and as Protestants we cannot help interpreting this to mean that the Church can make of Scripture whatever it chooses to make. This is a real impasse, for the Catholic does not

42 Cullmann, op. cit., p. 86.
43 Tavard, op. cit., p. 208.
44 Ibid., p. 209,

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accept the implication (if not innuendo) behind the assertion that the Catholic Church "makes of Scripture whatever it chooses to make." This is nonsense if not blasphemy to the Catholic, since the Church, under divine protection, can only make Scripture mean what it truly means. This is the precious assurance that the dogma of infallibility guarantees. But the Protestant remains convinced that his appraisal is in fact an accurate description of what has happened in the unfolding of Roman Catholic dogma, particularly since 1854. The dogmas of the Immaculate Conception, of Papal Infallibility, and of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, do not seem to him to be accurate interpretations either of the explicit or the implicit intent of the apostolic witness. They seem indeed to undercut that witness. And their presence as irreformable dogmas makes the Protestant less than sanguine about the extent to which the re-assessment of Trent suggested by Father Tavard could really take hold on Roman Catholicism without threatening the entire edifice of post-Tridentine theology. (In fairness to Father Tavard it must be said that his present book is not concerned with this problem. We must hope, however, that he will take occasion in another book to deal with the problem just stated, for it is an awesome stumbling-block to the Protestant mentality.)

6. Even if we appear to come to an ultimate cleavage over the relation of apostolic tradition to ecclesiastical tradition, there is a final point at which the thrust of Father Tavard's book suggests a creative line for Protestant thought. This is focused by his insistence on the inseparability of the Book and the Church. I think we must be willing to meet Father Tavard considerably more than halfway here. We must be willing to agree, from our premises, that what is needed is "an inclusive concept of Scripture and of the Church. Scripture cannot be the Word of God once it has been severed from the Church which is the Bride and the Body of Christ. And the Church could not be the Bride and the Body, had she not received the gift of understanding the Word. . . . The Church implies the Scripture as the Scripture implies the Church."⁴⁵ We must utter our own "Amen," to his concluding words: "To prefer the one to the other amounts to renouncing both."⁴⁶

Certainly there is no difficulty at all for us in the first assertion

⁴⁵ Ibid., P. 246.
⁴⁶ Ibid., p. 247.

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that the Church implies Scripture. The Reformation was built on this. In the Reformers' eyes, the medieval heresy was its denial of this fact. The reform of the Church was a reform based on listening to the Word of God found in Scripture. No Scripture, no Church.

Protestantism is less confident in asserting that Scripture implies the Church. It would be my contention, however, that this is just as inextricably a part of the Protestant witness. We do not just have Scripture, we have Scripture in the Church. Surely Scripture, as the product of the Christian community, is likewise the sustainer of the Christian community. The Bible is both the product and the producer of the Church. If a Christian hears the Biblical message in solitude, as he may, this will never be the end of the matter, for the very nature of the message will force him into community. Indeed, the fact that he has been able to hear the Bible in solitude will only be possible because there has been a community reading it, studying it, and also passing it on (i.e., "traditioning" it), so that it is there for him to read. The Word of God, we must assert, speaks its most vibrant word to the people of God, the royal priesthood. This means that we cannot really talk about the Bible without talking about the Church. So if we have always asserted vigorously that the Church implies the Bible, perhaps we are now called upon to assert more vigorously than we have that the Bible implies the Church. At this point, we can only feel very close to Father Tavard in his conclusion.

IV

But this remains for the Protestant only the penultimate word. The Protestant must make this assertion in a Protestant context or be misunderstood. For, no matter how much Trent may be reassessed, we still mean something different when we talk about the relation of Scripture and Church. There still remains a priority in the relationship. Scripture (as the account of the apostolic faith) is always normative, and the Church (as the extended attempt to reflect upon and "hand on" the apostolic faith) is always derivative. The Church stands under Scripture, not alongside it. Scripture judges the Church, not vice-versa. The Church is a listening Church before it is a teaching Church. It must listen to Holy Scripture, listen to whatever Scripture says to it under the guid-

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ance and illumination of the Holy Spirit, speak whatever it hears -and then listen again, realizing in fear and trembling that the Word of God may be a judging Word before it is a healing Word, a Word that must destroy if it is ever to fulfill.

It is for just this reason that Scripture must be given priority in the partnership. The saving fact about the committing of the apostolic witness to writing is the fact that the text is there. We can distort it, misinterpret it, and twist it, to be sure, and the history of the Church is full of sorry examples of how men have done this. But we can never quite get away with it, for the text remains-to speak its Word more powerfully than our word, to rise up and drown out our voices when we go too far astray from it. It has done this before, and it will do it again. This self-recuperative power of the Word is the secret of renewal in the life of the Church. Only as we are ready to concede this priority to the Scriptural witness can we have any hope of transmitting faithfully the apostolic witness. Without the text, we would inevitably distort the witness. We do it all the time, and it is the given ness of the text that finally thwarts us in this endeavor.

None of this can be guaranteed by human means. There is an "apostolic succession," but it is measured not by the imposition of a certain number of validated human hands, it is measured by our fidelity to the apostolic witness, the norm for which is Holy Scripture. Continuity there is, but it is God's and not ours. Divine continuity can exist in the midst of human discontinuity.⁴⁷ The Holy Spirit can be indifferent to human channels, even channels guaranteed to possess the proper credentials. He can, as he has done before, raise up children of Abraham out of the most unpromising looking stones. We can never claim that he must use us. We can only hope that we will be used by him.

⁴⁷ On this point, see further Jenkins, Tradition, Freedom, and the Spirit Westminster, Pp. 88 ff.