TRADITION AND THE TEACHING AUTHORITY OF THE CHURCH

We now move on to explore how the traditions, both oral and written, came to occupy a central place of authority in the Christian Church.  There are those who believe that tradition should play no role in the construction and formulation of doctrine and dogma. The reality is, however, that it is the tradition that paved the way for both doctrine and dogma, as well as for the emergence of Scripture.  

The dichotomy between Scripture and tradition that many want to propose is a false dichotomy, which in turn rests on faulty premises. As our Catholic and Orthodox sisters and brothers will remind us, the traditions in the Early Church were in existence long before the Scriptures came to be.  If anything, the Scriptures were the result of the tradition, much to the chagrin of my Protestant sisters and brothers.

The fixing of the time of revelation to the past and the limitation of authoritative writings to that period meant that the Scripture was not self-sufficient, but required interpretation, synthesis and application. In fact, the Bible's own internal pluralism and historical determinacy rendered it ambiguous to subsequent generations. Thus a tradition of authoritative interpretation emerged in Christianity analogous to the Mishnah and Talmud of Judaism.  It took the form of the regular fidei (rule of faith) and later of the doctrina or dogma of the church, the standard of "right belief (Edward Farley and Peter C. Hodgson in "Scripture and Tradition," p. 70)." 

A dogma is an officially sanctioned teaching that articulates an article of faith and is considered to be free from error.  However, dogma consists not merely of individual dogmas, but also of an internally coherent set of dogmatic prepositions touching all the major moments of faith and organized according to the salvation-history scheme.  Truth is distributed in leveled fashion across the individual units of dogma and is construed in the sense of an ahistorical, immutable essence, free of error.  Dogma in the strict sense was propounded in a postscriptural period of definitive commentary, the period of the Church Fathers and the councils, from roughly the second through the sixth centuries. Eventually, almost all the attributes of Scripture itself were extended to dogma, which is not the theology or even the product of a theological process, but rather a material norm proposed by theology.  Although according to Catholic teaching new dogmas are occasionally promulgated, they in fact do not have the same authority as the old ones, and for all intents and purposes, the period of normative dogmatic formulation, like the time of revelation is long past (Ibid., p. 71). 

This, of course, raises the question of whether divine revelation, however it is conceived, is given "once and for all."  Is the "faith once delivered to the saints" unchangeable and fixed in time?  In the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, revelation is given for once and for all, and in Protestantism, the notion that "Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever," permeates the mindset that revelation and dogma are not fluid, but rather static.  

What continues is the teaching authority of the Church and the theological work of individual theologians. The latter, according to the classical model, is done primarily in the genre of citation and translation rather than that of critical inquiry. That is to say, the theologian works from evidence in the form of authorities rather than immediate experience.  The primary task is one of "translating" the content of Scripture and dogma into appropriate modern forms, and the question of faith is limited to formal operations such as working out the internal coherence of the system of doctrine by constructing a dogmatics, a house of dogma, out of the bricks and mortar of Scripture texts and Church doctrines.  We hasten to add that this was the model of what the proper theologian was about.  The great thinkers of the Church-Origen, Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, Luther, Calvin-transcended it, even though they may have accepted it in principle (Farley and Hodgson, op. cit., p. 71).

The Church, with its magisterial or teaching authority served as the institutional guardian of scriptural interpretation, doctrinal promulgation, and theological application.  The institution legitimated its claim to authority through the notion of apostolic succession, according to which a direct link was established by Jesus (more specifically, Jesus' intention to found a church), the original apostles, and their successors (the bishops of the Church, among whom the Roman bishop attained primacy).  Thus the episcopal college and the papacy became secondary representatives, vicars of God and Christ whose declarations expressed God's very will (Ibid.).

The extension of the principle of identity reached its logical culmination with  the dogma of papal infallibility propounded at the First Vatican Council, although the claim had been implicit for centuries. Ironically, its promulgation occurred at a time when  the claim had already lost much of its credibility. In fact, it was an overextension that could not be sustained and that called forth internal criticism demanding more authentic ways of understanding ecclesiastical authority in the Catholic tradition (Ibid., p. 72).

The primary issue of the Reformation concerned this third locus of authority in the classical theology: the institutional Church. The Reformers challenged certain external features of Catholic institutionalization, yet the Protestant churches generally believed themselves to be "providentially sanctioned" as the form of the Church willed by God, even when splintered into hundreds of rival sects. Furthermore, even though primacy was accorded Scripture as opposed to tradition, an authoritative interpretive key to Scripture was created in the form of the Lutheran and Reformed confessions, which took on the character of inspired, inerrant documents, a "magisterial" teaching in Protestant dress.  And of course the patristic dogmas were never questioned, nor was the authority of the Church Fathers, or the ecumenical creeds. Thus despite the norm of sola scriptura  (scripture alone), the difference between Protestant and Catholic versions of authority were more apparent than real, especially when viewed in light of the presuppositions and axioms of the classical criteriology operative in both. The negative impact of sola scriptura was to turn Christianity into a book religion-a logical extension of the Scripture principle not unlike the logical extension of institutional authority in the dogma of infallibility. The positive insight behind the assertion of sola scriptura (as well as sola fide, sola gratia, and ultimately sola Christus ) was the critical questioning of all authorities.  This insight did not, however, totally bear fruit until the Enlightment (Ibid.).

En fin, in the construction and formulation of Christian theology, we continue to wrestle with the question of authority. Who or what are the final authorities in determining the content and nature of the theology which identifies us as "Christians?"  Is it a book? Is it a leadership, supposedly appointed by Christ Himself?  Is it a consensus of the community of faith, consisting of both lay and ordained clergy? Where does authority ultimately reside?  What is the "Supreme Court (final court of appeal)" in Christian theology?  Is the claim to biblical inerrancy and infallibility making out of the Bible what Karl Barth called a "paper pope?"  These questions have and will continue to baffle and challenge us as we seek to construct a theology which is a witness to the liberating and salvific acts of God in history.  

Rev. Dr. Juan A. Carmona 

Past Professor of Theology

Tainan Theological College/Seminary