By What Authority?: An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition by Shea Mark

Author:Shea, Mark [Shea, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586177829
Published: 2013-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE TRADITION OF GOD

How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in his excellent word!

—John Rippon

I sat for some time drumming my fingers on my Bible in thought and prayer. Up till now such claims on behalf of Tradition had always seemed bogus: a lot of Catholic theological fast talk for justifying unbiblical teachings. For years, I had envisioned the guys at Trent and Vatican II saying, “Okay, so purgatory isn’t in Scripture! So what? It’s in. . . uh. . . Tradition! Yeah! That’s the ticket! Tradition!” Indeed, I had made little distinction between such Catholic Tradition and the modernist attempts at subverting Scripture.

But now, what with the threat of modernism’s deconstruction of Scripture looming behind me and manifold evidence of a real live extrabiblical paradosis popping up not only in Scripture and Catholic theology but even in the everyday practice of my native Evangelicalism, it was dawning on me that I had perhaps been hasty in equating the Catholic claim of Tradition-as-revelation with modernist attempts to subvert the Bible. As I prayed, I recalled again Paul’s admonition to “test everything. Hold on to the good” (1 Thess 5:21) and asked nervously, “Even Catholic teaching, Lord?” The question seemed to answer itself.

So I began perusing the Catholic Catechism by Father John Hardon, S.J., to see what I could see. As I did, I began to notice a remarkable difference between Sacred Tradition-believing Catholics and modernists who believed in. . . well, what did they believe in? Certainly they did not believe, as the Catholic Church did, that “Sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit.”1 They did not teach, as the Catholic Church did, that “God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion.”2 They emphatically did not hold, as the Catholic Church did, that “the books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.”3 By some strange irony, the Catholic attitude toward Scripture, compared to modernism, sounded downright. . . Evangelical!

But Evangelical with this difference: the Catholic Church had never labored under the illusion of a self-attesting Scripture. Rather, she had avoided my many blind alleys by an ancient awareness that a Tradition of God had preserved revelation outside of Scripture and that “through the same tradition the Church’s full canon of the sacred books is known.”4

Or as the Church elsewhere put it:

Jesus Christ ordered his apostles, who are the source of all saving truth and moral teaching, to preach it to every creature. . . . This truth and teaching are contained in written books and in the unwritten traditions that the apostles received from Christ himself or that were handed on, as it were from hand to hand, from the apostles under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and so have come down to us.5

I sat blinking at these words in excitement and with not a little anxiety.

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