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By Douglas A. Sweeney

[Douglas A. Sweeney is Dean and Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.]

[This is the fourth article in the four-part series “Sources of Authority for Teaching Christian Doctrine: A Brief Historical Sketch,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 4–7, 2020.]

“The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love” (Ephesians 4:11–16, NRSV).

In the first lecture of this series, we talked about the sending of the Spirit and the spread of Christian doctrine during early church history. In the second installment, we treated creeds, canons, church councils, and the best-known contests over biblical exegesis in the post-canonical era. The third lecture covered the best-known part of our story—the part in which Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants alike debated the relative authority of Scripture, Tradition (now spelled with a capital T), and leaders of the church in the teaching of Christian doctrine. But we ended with some questions that remain to be addressed in this final lecture. By the early twentieth century, the three main branches of the global Christian church still disagreed sharply on the issues discussed in the last lecture—undermining the unity and witness of God’s people, not to mention their ability to transmit the faith in a uniform way. Major differences persisted regarding the nature of and best ways to teach Christianity, and we wondered whether the churches could surmount them. Let’s look at what has happened during the last hundred years.

Before the mid-twentieth century, Roman Catholics had a rough time gaining much ground with Cardinal Newman’s understanding of the development of doctrine, circumventing the strictures set at Trent and Vatican I, and incorporating the findings of modern scholarship on Scripture into the teaching of the church. The great weight of tradition had many spinning their wheels or, depending on one’s point of view, standing fast on principle amid the winds of change. In the spirit of renewal, though, or ressourcement—an effort to improve Catholic teaching by recovering older sources of exegesis and spiritual theology—a few Catholic thinkers sought to update the church’s way of catechizing the faithful, curtailing its reliance on polemical materials. Hans Urs von Balthasar and Henri de Lubac were the best known among them. Karl Rahner, Yves Congar, and Joseph Geiselmann did the most work on the development of doctrine.

Rahner suggested that because revelation is divine communication, doctrine should develop in the history of the church—and not merely as a matter of making formally explicit what was formally implicit in the original deposit. Revelation conveys things “virtually” as well, he said, things that cannot be reduced to any finite, propositional form—any standard set of words—but are made more explicit over time under the guidance of the Spirit and the church. As a young person in love knows and feels many things too profound to be expressed in their early love letters, things better communicated over a steady course of time, so God shows himself to the bride of Christ, the church, who fathoms her Beloved—first revealed long ago—asymptotically through time. In the present life she always has room for improvement in her knowledge of the Lord. But the church’s teaching office has “an organ of perception by which she can tell whether something which, from our point of view, emerges as a result of theological activity, is in fact objectively something more than the result of human speculation; whether it is still God’s Word, though now expressed propositionally, in a new form, in a new articulation and explication.”[1]

Yves Congar, like Rahner, wrote frequently on Scripture, tradition, and the church, contending that the forces in this triad of authority always work together by the power of the Spirit. The Bible, he said, is materially sufficient though formally insufficient for the church’s cardinal doctrines. The faithful had long enjoyed unwritten customs that enhanced their faith and practice. But everything essential to salvation is in Scripture, interpreted for them through tradition in the church. Totum in scriptura, totum in traditione (“all in Scripture, all in tradition”), Congar claimed with Cardinal Newman. These are never “to be placed side by side as rivals, but always to be combined, and referred each to each.” When push came to shove, Scripture won pride of place in Congar’s triad, worrying traditionalists in the Catholic Church. The Bible, tradition, and the church, he confessed, “are not on the same level.” Rather, Scripture “has an absolute sovereignty; it is of divine origin, even in its literary form; it governs Tradition and the Church, whereas it is not governed by Tradition or by the Church.”[2]

Joseph Geiselmann denied what is often called the “two-source theory” of authority in Catholic Church history, a theory usually said to have been formalized at Trent and then wielded to divide Roman Catholics and Protestants. He denied, more specifically, that hierarchs at Trent taught that Scripture and tradition stood as separate and parallel sources of authority. They had entertained this notion in the Council’s early stages, but had ultimately decided, in Geiselmann’s construction, that Scripture and tradition both offer God’s Word to the faithful in the church—and do so together—totum in scriptura, totum in traditione. This implied that the Bible is materially sufficient for Christian dogmatics; it does not need supplements from unwritten sources (whose historicity was now difficult to prove). Academics tied to Tübingen, where Geiselmann taught on the theological faculty, were far more involved in higher-critical work on the Bible than most other Catholics, which complicated Geiselmann’s reception in the church and raised concern about the bearing of his work on Christian doctrine. But by the early 1960s, the bishops were abuzz about Scripture and tradition, and most would soon repudiate the two-source theory.[3]

These efforts to reevaluate the nature and history of doctrine and dynamics of tradition culminated at Vatican II (1962–65), the most influential council since the Reformation era. Its delegates did not contravene older teachings. But they did move past some medieval ways of speaking of our triad of authority—Scripture, tradition, and the church’s teaching office—especially the suggestion that the Bible and tradition had been parallel sources of divine revelation whose interpretation by holy mother church was now fixed. In a document that changed the face of Protestant-Catholic dialogue, “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” known best as Dei Verbum, the council fathers argued that the Bible and tradition intersect in their witness—forming a common fund of truth—and that the church makes progress in its teaching over time by the guidance of the Spirit. There is “growth in understanding of what is handed on,” they claimed, “both the words and the realities they signify.” Our sacred writings regulate the movement of tradition, while tradition regulates further study of the Bible. The kernel of this statement is worth quoting here at length:

Tradition and scripture are bound together in a close and reciprocal relationship. They both flow from the same divine wellspring, merge together to some extent, and are on course towards the same end. Scripture is the utterance of God as it is set down in writing under the guidance of God’s Spirit; tradition preserves the word of God as it was entrusted to the apostles by Christ our lord and the holy Spirit, and transmits it to their successors, so that these in turn, enlightened by the Spirit of truth, may faithfully preserve, expound and disseminate the word by their preaching. Consequently, the church’s certainty about all that is revealed is not drawn from holy scripture alone; both scripture and tradition are to be accepted and honoured with like devotion and reverence. . . . Tradition and scripture together form a single sacred deposit of the word of God, entrusted to the church. . . . The task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether in its written form or in that of tradition, has been entrusted only to those charged with the church’s ongoing teaching function, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ.[4]

As attested in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992), Vatican II is now the standard for discussions of our triad of authority in the church. Planted deep in Dei Verbum, which it excerpts extensively, the Catechism teaches that the gospel of our Lord “was handed on in two ways,” through Scripture and tradition, which together constitute one deposit of the faith. God’s people ever plumb this deposit “more deeply,” applying it “more fully,” but “the task of interpreting” it “authentically,” at least, “has been entrusted solely to the Magisterium of the Church, that is, to the Pope and to the bishops in communion with him.”[5]

The most important Catholic commentator on Scripture, tradition, and the Spirit in the church since the end of Vatican II was Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. His work on Christian doctrine spanned four major seasons of his service to the church: that during Vatican II, his time as an exponent of the Council after it ended, his ministry as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1981–2005), and his tenure in the papacy (2005–2013). Young Ratzinger labored as an “expert” (peritus) at Vatican II for Cardinal Josef Frings, Archbishop of Cologne, and played a crucial role assisting German delegates at work on Dei Verbum. In the wake of the Council, he interpreted its judgments in a spate of publications. He became an archbishop in 1977. And in 1981, he was asked to lead his church’s most important teaching body, propagating its doctrine from the Vatican.

As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he addressed our concerns in several ad hoc speeches. Then in the most important book ever assembled on the subject, he repackaged his thoughts in a comprehensive fashion, anticipating statements he would make from the chair of St. Peter. God’s Word: Scripture-Tradition-Office did three things. (1) It repudiated the principle of sola scriptura and the material sufficiency of Scripture for dogmatics (contra Geiselmann et al.), noting that most Christians cherish doctrines not taken solely from the biblical materials—not even with the help of distinctions like those between virtual, formal, and material implications of the original deposit. (2) It said that council fathers at Trent had a capacious view of tradition, one that ought to be maintained by the Catholic Church today. This does not require access to unwritten customs understood as a material source of doctrine on their own. But it does call for faith in God speaking through tradition, which transcends and subsumes both Scripture and the church. “Revelation signifies all God’s acts and utterances directed to man,” in the Bible, the church, and the history of the world, “a reality of which Scripture gives us information but that is not simply Scripture itself,” he explained. (3) It reiterated that bishops in communion with the pope—the Roman magisterium—are appointed and enabled by the Lord to hear his voice and define Christian doctrine for the faithful.[6]

Shepherding the church left Benedict little opportunity for research or complex writing. But while pope, he did publish a major apostolic exhortation on our theme titled Verbum Domini (2010), which codified the doctrine he had worked on for years and dispatched it to the world with the stamp of St. Peter. Pope Benedict underscored two “essential” roles of tradition in this document (depicting it, again, as the source of both the canon and the teachings of the church): it helps Christians recognize the Bible as God’s Word; and it helps them to grow in the knowledge of the same. “We see clearly, then,” he reasoned, “how important it is for the People of God to be properly taught and trained to approach the sacred Scriptures in relation to the Church’s living Tradition.” As they do so, he summarized, “the Church hands on to every generation all that has been revealed in Christ. The Church lives in the certainty that her Lord, who spoke in the past, continues today to communicate his word in her living Tradition and in sacred Scripture. Indeed the word of God is given to us in sacred Scripture as an inspired testimony to revelation; together with the Church’s living Tradition, it constitutes the supreme rule of faith.”[7]

Roman Catholics are not the only ones to rethink the Spirit’s role in guiding Christian teaching since the end of Vatican II. A vast array of Christians has engaged this concern. For now, a brief sampling of their work must suffice, one that focuses more closely on the relationship of Scripture and tradition in the church than on the leading theories of doctrine, its purposes, and roles (another subject that has garnered much attention in recent years).

Among the Orthodox, the Ukrainian-Russian priest Georges Florovsky, who taught in Paris and the United States, has done the most important work on Scripture and tradition. With Orthodox colleagues such as Vladimir Lossky, Sergei Bulgakov, and Dumitru Stăniloae, he contended that the faith and worship of the people of God is the treasury of tradition and that the fathers—more than popes, church councils, and academics—are the most important guides to what the Spirit says in Scripture. In a series of publications gathered in 1972, he wrote, “Opinions of the Fathers and of the ecumenical Doctors of the Church frequently have greater spiritual value and finality than the definitions of certain councils. And these opinions do not need to be verified and accepted by ‘universal consent’” (contra Vincent of Lerins). The seven great councils are authoritative, of course, but the “ ‘Fathers’ were those who transmitted and propagated the right doctrine, the teaching of the Apostles, who were guides and masters in Christian instruction and catechesis.” As he put this in reference to the Bible and the church,

it must be kept in mind that the main, if not also the only, manual of faith and doctrine was, in the Ancient Church, precisely the Holy Writ. And for that reason the renowned interpreters of Scripture were regarded as ‘Fathers’ in an eminent sense. . . . Two major points must be made in this connection: First, the phrase ‘the Fathers of the Church’ has actually an obvious restrictive accent: they were acting not just as individuals, but rather as viri ecclesiastici [church representatives] . . . . Secondly, it was precisely the consensus patrum [consensus of the fathers] which was authoritative and binding, and not their private opinions or views, although even they should not be hastily dismissed.[8]

The Spirit led the fathers in the exegesis of Scripture and the fathers, as an ancient, magisterial consortium, shaped the worship, faith, and practice of the rest of God’s people, including church officials—and should do so today.

Several Protestants have also penned influential texts on these themes since Vatican II. The Anglican Richard Bauckham has contended in the face of liberal Protestants and forward-leaning Catholic leaders alike that the Bible “is not simply the first part of the tradition.” Rather, “the church’s recognition of the canon of Scripture created a real break, which gave the origin of the tradition, in this written form, a uniquely normative status in relation to the rest.” Interpreters of Scripture ought to learn from the past, but their teaching should not be a top-down affair. The development of doctrine is “the generation of fresh meaning in the encounter between Scripture and new contexts,” he claims, a meaning that is stunted and sometimes even spoiled when restrained by tradition or contained from above.[9] The Scottish Methodist I. Howard Marshall has proposed that the New Testament authors handled Old Testament texts, the ministry of Jesus, and apostolic writings in a way that yields guidelines for teachers in the present. They did not view “individual texts as units of meaning,” but as parts of an ongoing story of redemption. They did not read texts, that is, in isolated bits, with meanings ever fixed, but as part of God’s saving work continuing today. Some texts “may be seen,” then, “as staging posts on the way to fuller understanding; they are no longer valid in their original form . . . but continue to be authoritative in a different way.” Divine teaching progressed within the canon, so “developments in doctrine and new understandings after the closing of the canon are inevitable,” he reasons.[10] The American evangelical Kevin J. Vanhoozer has revised Marshall’s plan for the development of doctrine. “We move from Bible to doctrine,” he has written in response, not by wielding general principles for moving past its teachings derived anachronistically from what some believe to be its sacred hermeneutic, “but rather by discerning and continuing a pattern of judgment” that recurs in the canon in many forms. The Bible yields guidelines for handing on the faith; but expositors must not contradict what it says in the name of forward progress. They must learn, rather, to “render the same kind of judgments as those embedded in the canon in new contexts and with different concepts.” As Vanhoozer has recapitulated this argument more recently, “the development of doctrine is a matter of thinking biblically in new situations. Scripture shapes our vision of the whole, instills mental habits, forms the desire of our hearts, and trains us in the way of discipleship. . . . Doctrinal development is ultimately a matter of the church’s faith improvisation in accordance with the Scriptures and with earlier faithful improvisations.”[11]

Perhaps most importantly, majority-world leaders have proposed new approaches to our subject since Vatican II, attracting more attention from their colleagues in the West than at any time since 1054. Many underscore the notion that “the Word of God grew” (or “increased,” or “advanced”) as the early church spread in the Lucan book of Acts (ὁ λόγος τοῦ θεοῦ ηὔξανεν, Acts 6:7, 12:24, 19:20). In the West, this phrase is usually said to have referred to numerical expansion by means of Christian witness. But global Christians often say the faith itself grew—that Christian doctrine grew—as the Word was embraced in new cultural situations. As the late Gambian Catholic, Lamin Sanneh, has reminded us, “Christianity is a translated religion because the Gospels themselves were a translated version of the preaching of Jesus [from Aramaic to Greek], and . . . the missionary milieu of the early church necessitated further translations and, by implication, fresh adaptations of the faith.” Christianity, he stresses, “is not intrinsically a religion of cultural uniformity,” but translatability. “More people pray and worship in more languages in Christianity than in any other religion in the world,” he reports. This cultural malleability, moreover, bears crucial implications for the teaching of the faith in the church. “There must be wider benefits for all in the movements of renewal taking place in a post-Western world Christianity,” he claims.

The tradition of exegesis that has been practiced in the West seems to have run its course. There are too many instances of recycling and cultural discounting, and too willing a tendency to suppress difference, for us not to think that the envelope can’t be pushed much further. The standard exegesis spins faith into just more cultural filibuster. Yet in Africa and elsewhere there is enough sense of commodiousness, with fresh materials being introduced into Scripture, prayers, hymns, and liturgy, for that not to affect how people in the West think and speak about the gospel and the church.[12]

Postcolonial endeavors to contextualize the faith, or indigenize doctrine, are affecting catechesis all over the Christian world. In many different churches, especially those with a modicum of missionary verve and ecumenical awareness, ordinary Christians are advancing in discipleship in ways shaped profoundly by those outside the West. Japanese theologians are changing the way we understand the suffering of God in the person of Jesus Christ. South Africans are changing what we say about the Spirit. Argentineans are changing what we teach about the gospel, encouraging an accent on good news for the poor. This list could be extended for a very long time. Even the most conservative teachers in most denominations now believe that Christian doctrine can develop for the better, and that non-Western Christians have much to teach us all. In this era of improvement, they are listening to the Spirit with a new sort of intensity, hoping he will guide them as they live by the Word in a complicated, frightening, and ever-changing world.

As I hope is clear by now, Christians have toiled through two thousand years of disagreement over how best to teach about the faith in congregations. Tracking with the Spirit as he leads us into truth has proven harder than it seems, even with a canon of Scripture and a long-standing history of interpretation behind it. Teaching in, with, and under the Christian church has been contentious, even when our leaders shared structures of authority. Most have concurred with the Lord’s apostle John: “the Spirit is the one” who “testifies” to the truth. If “we receive human testimony, the testimony of God is greater.” And “those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts” (1 John 5:6–10). Finding language, though, for what is in the heart can be mysterious. Putting words to our faith in Jesus Christ can be a challenge. Not many should be teachers, as James the Just warned, “for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (Jas 3:1). Hence those who seek to teach in the service of the church, transmitting Christian faith—indeed, handling sacred truth—without recourse to the history of the church’s teaching ministry are naïve at best, blatantly negligent at worst. There are answers we can live by to the questions raised here about inculcating doctrine, and the roles of the Bible and tradition in so doing. But we need to understand them. And people who neglect the tradition of debate about the sources of our teaching will not even understand the questions.

The stakes of pedagogical improvement are high. As Paul challenged the Ephesians, the church of Christ is one and its witness should be unified. “[Bear] with one another in love,” he urged them, “making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit,” he added theologically, “just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all” (Eph 4:2–6). Such unity implies—and requires—a common core to the faith we deliver to disciples in the church. And this core should represent, inspire, and facilitate our union with the Lord and profession to the world. As Jesus asked the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, “may [they] all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me” (John 17:20–23). Does our teaching serve the ends to which the Lord Jesus prayed?

The communion of the saints is an ancient, immense, highly-variegated fellowship. But those who bear the Spirit are united with the Lord—and, in him, with one another—and have everything we need to give voice to the faith. We have Scripture, most importantly. Please give everything you have to its study, memorization, and application. But we also have a deep, rich tradition of exegesis and application of the Bible in the church through the ages. Please don’t minister the Word of God without church history. The orthodox traditions of the teaching and the practice of the Word will serve you well. They will keep you in bounds, help you counteract heresy, mitigate your tendency to doctrinal one-upmanship, and animate your teaching with the wisdom of the faithful. As Paul encouraged his younger charge Timothy in Ephesus, shoring up his confidence and strengthening his witness, “the household of God,” the “church of the living God,” is now and ever shall be a divinely-anchored “pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim 3:14–15). She represents her Lord as the temple of his Spirit, an indefectible witness to the truth and potential of his everlasting Word. Teach the Christian faith within it. Rely on its support. Minister the Bible with the best it has to offer. Hold fast to the supremacy of Scripture for doctrine, but squelch the temptation to construct your own theology with nothing but your own, best reading of the Word. I ask these things for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Notes

1. Karl Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie, Band I (Einsiedeln-Zürich-Köln: Benziger, 1954), chapter 3; English trans., Theological Investigations, Volume I: God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore: Helicon, 1961), quotation from 75.
2. Yves M.-J. Congar, La Tradition et les traditions, I. Essai historique; II. Essai théologique (Paris: A. Fayard, 1960–63); English translation, Tradition and Traditions: An Historical and a Theological Essay, trans. Michael Naseby and Thomas Rainborough (London: Burns & Oates, 1966), quotations from 414, 421–22.
3. Josef Rupert Geiselmann, Die Heilige Schrift und die Tradition: Zu den neueren Kontroversen über das Verhältnis der Heiligen Schrift zu den nichtgeschriebenen Traditionen, Quaestiones Disputatae (Freiburg: Herder, 1962), 91–107, 274–82, in keeping with the argument of Dutch church historian J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink, Traditio in de Reformatie en het Katholicisme in de zestiende eeuw, Mededeelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandsche Akademie van Wetenschappen (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1952). Geiselmann had floated early versions of his thesis since the mid-1950s. Its publication in book form in 1962, though, caused quite a stir at the Second Vatican Council.
4. Second Vatican Council, Session 8, 18 November 1965, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 2:974–75.
5. Catechismus Catholicae Ecclesiae, Part One, Section One, Article 2; English translation, Catechism of the Catholic Church, with Modification from the Editio Typica (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 29–35; available online at http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM.
6. Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Wort Gottes: Schrift-Tradition-Amt (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2005); English translation, God’s Word: Scripture-Tradition-Office, ed. Peter Hünermann and Thomas Söding (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2008), quotations from 51–53 (italics original).
7. Pope Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini: On the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church (2010), § 17–18; http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20100930_verbum-domini.html. I offer an evangelical assessment of Pope Benedict’s approach to our issues in Douglas A. Sweeney, “Ratzinger on Scripture, Tradition, and Church: An Evangelical Assessment,” in Emery de Gaál and Matthew Levering, eds., Joseph Ratzinger and the Healing of the Reformation-Era Divisions (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2019), 347–69.
8. Georges Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, vol. 1, in The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky (Belmont, MA: Nordland Publishing Company, 1972), 51–54 (italics original).
9. Richard Bauckham, “Tradition in Relation to Scripture and Reason,” in Scripture, Tradition, and Reason: A Study in the Criteria of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Richard P. C. Hanson, ed. Richard Bauckham and Benjamin Drewery (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988), 127–29, 145.
10. Howard Marshall, Beyond the Bible: Moving from Scripture to Theology, Acadia Studies in Bible and Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), 78–79.
11. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Into the Great ‘Beyond’: A Theologian’s Response to the Marshall Plan,” in Marshall, Beyond the Bible, 93; and Kevin J. Vanhoozer, “Improvising Theology according to the Scriptures: An Evangelical Account of the Development of Doctrine,” in Building on the Foundations of Evangelical Theology: Essays in Honor of John S. Feinberg, ed. Gregg R. Allison and Stephen J. Wellum (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2015), 44–45.
12. Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 129–30, 69, 58–59.

Scripture, Tradition, And Church: From Peter Abelard To Karl Barth

By Douglas A. Sweeney

[Douglas A. Sweeney is Dean and Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.]

[This is the third article in the four-part series “Sources of Authority for Teaching Christian Doctrine: A Brief Historical Sketch,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 4–7, 2020.]

“The saying is sure: whoever aspires to the office of bishop desires a noble task. Now a bishop must be above reproach, married only once, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, and not a lover of money. He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way—for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how can he take care of God’s church? . . . I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim 3:1–5, 14–15, NRSV).

In the first lecture of this series, we talked about the sending of the Spirit and the spread of Christian doctrine during early church history. In the second lecture, we treated creeds, canons, church councils, and the best-known contests over biblical exegesis in the post-canonical era. In this third lecture, it’s time to tell the part of our story most know best—the part in which Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants alike debated the relative authority of Scripture, Tradition (now spelled with a capital T), and leaders of the church in the teaching of its doctrine to the faithful.

A fitting place to resume our story is the early twelfth century and Abelard, for no one symbolizes medieval disagreements over doctrine and sources of authority more fully than the Frenchman Peter Abelard, whose Sic et Non (Yes and No, c. 1120) undermined the faith of many in the unified witness of the teachers of the church. Posing one hundred fifty-eight theological questions, he arrayed the church fathers on opposing sides of each question, demonstrating that they contradicted themselves and encouraging a dialectical search for truth. Despite the errors many frequently decried in Sic et Non, it awakened earnest students to the problems that attend glib appeals to “the tradition” or “the witness of the fathers,” and it was placed much later on the Index of Forbidden Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum).[1] In the meantime, it fueled the rise of orthodox, organized compilations of “sentences” on Scripture and tradition culled from early church fathers, learned commentaries upon the most famous of these sentences, and summaries of doctrine by theologians eager to show that Christian faith coheres. The most influential of these were the Four Books of Sentences by Bishop Peter Lombard (c. 1155–57), an Italian serving in Paris, which became the leading dogmatic textbook in Europe and inspired scores of commentaries in centuries to come.[2]

Many now yearned for a stable and reliable way to inculcate the Word by the Spirit in the church. There are always some who face ambiguity with ease, keeping faith with God and neighbor in the midst of uncertainty, conflict, and mystery. But most want guidance. And by the thirteenth century, many Westerners attained it in a resolution regarding the relationship between Scripture, tradition, and the church close to that of Thomas Aquinas, for whom orthodox tradition, determined by the church, was a source of authority analogous to Scripture. This interrelationship of authorities was varied, to be sure, and shaped doctrine indirectly through the dictates of popes, church councils, and other organs of the Catholic magisterium (which by now stood apart from the bishops of the East, who favored a somewhat more conciliar, less papal, understanding of the promulgation of doctrine). In the main, ecclesial authority was used to guide biblical exegesis. But it also guided doctrine, as it harmonized conflicts under the aegis of the church in favor of Roman Catholic orthodoxy. As Thomas wrote famously in Summa Theologiae (1265–74), “Doctrine is especially based upon arguments from authority, inasmuch as its principles are obtained by revelation: thus we ought to believe on the authority of those to whom the revelation has been made.”[3] He insisted that such conduits of special revelation “ought not to say about God anything which is not found in Holy Scripture either explicitly or implicitly.”[4] Thomas claimed that the bishops usually followed this rule. “In every council of the Church,” he said, “a symbol of faith has been drawn up to meet some prevalent error condemned in the council at that time. Hence subsequent councils are not to be described as making a new symbol of faith; but what was implicitly contained in the first symbol was explained by some addition directed against rising heresies.”[5] Church teaching explicated the deposit of the faith. And even unwritten tradition played a part in this, though always under the tutelage of apostolic heirs. “The Apostles, led by the inward instinct of the Holy Ghost, handed down to the churches certain instructions which they did not put in writing, but which have been ordained, in accordance with the observance of the Church as practiced by the faithful as time went on.”[6] Thus tradition always functioned as a necessary, apostolic guide to revelation when deployed by those entrusted with the teaching of the church. God’s Spirit gave the Word through the bishops of the Catholic Church, who inculcated Scripture in accordance with tradition.

By the late Middle Ages, even critics of the papacy and pillars of conciliarism rooted their positions in the soil of tradition. Academics disagreed about the relative authority of popes, church councils, Christian princes, canon law, and the doctors of the church in discerning church tradition. Some questioned whether anything not based on the Bible was essential to salvation. During the Western papal schism (1378–1417), many sought a more episcopal approach to solving internal doctrinal disputes. Still, most parties involved laid claim to the past. Even those at the Council of Constance (1414–18), convened at the apex of conciliar dominion to put an end, once and for all, to the Western papal schism, resorted to “the catholic faith,” councils, and the fathers—condemning the English theologian John Wycliffe and the Czech, or Bohemian, theologian Jan Hus, who resisted their rendition of late medieval catholicity—compelling future pontiffs to profess their allegiance to orthodox tradition. “As long as I am in this fragile life,” they had to pledge, “I will firmly believe and hold the catholic faith, according to the traditions of the apostles, of the general councils and of other holy fathers, especially of the eight holy universal councils . . . as well as of the general councils at the Lateran, Lyons and Vienne.” Furthermore, “I will preserve this faith unchanged to the last dot and will confirm, defend and preach it to the point of death and the shedding of my blood.”[7]

Thus when Luther claimed not only that the papacy had erred, but that councils, canon law, and the mass itself were flawed, pandemonium ensued, tearing scabs from several wounds on the global body of Christ that had formed very slowly and had never quite healed. Luther’s brief against the Catholic Church was leveled most loudly in the Ninety-five Theses (1517). Upset about the sale of indulgences in Germany to raise funds for Rome, he contended that this practice misconstrued Christian teaching on salvation by grace. But his case against the Church’s view of Scripture and tradition would continue to develop over the next several years. At the Leipzig Disputation versus Johann Eck of Ingolstadt (1519), he opposed the supremacy of popes and church councils. Then he published three treatises in 1520 against the tyranny of Rome over German-speaking Christians, the “Babylonian”/Roman captivity of the church, and the freedom of the Christian to live for God without subservience to man-made rules. Before these tracts were released, Pope Leo X condemned him in a papal bull (Exsurge Domine, 1520), which summarized his “heresy” in forty-one doctrines and threatened to exclude him from the sacraments if he did not recant in sixty days. Luther publicly burned the bull six months later. He was excommunicated early in 1521 and commanded to appear before the emperor at Worms. In response to the Pope’s condemnation of his views, he claimed to “preach nothing new” and asserted that the Bible had been muffled by the curia—even by the pope—and that Scripture alone, not the Roman magisterium, was infallible and determinative in matters of faith and practice. “This is my answer to those also who accuse me of rejecting all the holy teachers of the church,” Luther wrote. “I do not reject them. But everyone, indeed, knows that at times they have erred, as men will; therefore, I am ready to trust them only when they give me evidence for their opinions from Scripture, which has never erred. . . . Scripture alone is the true lord and master of all writings and doctrine on earth.”[8] Before Emperor Charles V, he added, “unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason (for I do not trust either in the pope or in councils alone, since it is well known that they have often erred and contradicted themselves), I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God.”[9] This is standard fare today among the heirs of Luther’s doctrine. But in 1521, it made him an outlaw.

Church officials at the Council of Trent (1545–63) soon circled the wagons, protecting an inviolate, concatenated concept of the catholic tradition. “Following the example of the orthodox fathers,” they decreed in an effort to repel Luther’s teaching, “the council accepts and venerates with a like feeling of piety and reverence” both the contents of the Vulgate (the common Latin Bible, Apocrypha included) and “traditions” of “faith and conduct, as either directly spoken by Christ or dictated by the holy Spirit, which have been preserved in unbroken sequence” in the church. And “if anyone should not accept” the Vulgate and “aforesaid traditions” of the church, “let him be anathema.” Protestants were severed from the Roman Catholic Church. “No one, relying on his personal judgment,” the council fathers continued,

shall dare to interpret the sacred scriptures either by twisting its text to his individual meaning in opposition to that which has been and is held by holy mother church, whose function is to pass judgment on the true meaning and interpretation of the sacred scriptures; or by giving it meanings contrary to the unanimous consent of the fathers. . . . Whoever acts contrary to this decision is to be publicly named by religious superiors and punished by the penalties prescribed by law.[10]

More than three centuries later, these strictures were confirmed at the First Vatican Council (1869–70). “Supernatural revelation,” its delegates explained, “according to the belief of the universal church, as declared by the sacred council of Trent, is contained in written books and unwritten traditions.” And “that meaning of holy scripture must be held to be the true one, which holy mother church held and holds.”[11]

Luther had not intended to disown the tradition. On the contrary, he thought his evangelical reformers held the best claim to rightful continuity with the past. But as they made use of what they came to call the Scripture principle, wielding God’s Word to weed and prune the tradition and revise Christian doctrine with their own exegesis, they accelerated the doctrinal diversity of Christendom—and expanded the means by which the Spirit was discerned—at a rate unprecedented in history. The French reformer Jean Calvin, in an address to King Francis I prefaced to his Institutes (1536 ff.), did “not at all doubt” that his Reformation doctrine sounded new to Catholic critics, “since to them both Christ himself and his gospel are new.” But it clearly had the weight of Christian history on its side. “All the fathers,” he insisted in a hyperbolic flourish, “with one heart have abhorred and with one voice have detested the fact that God’s Holy Word has been contaminated by the subtleties of sophists and involved in the squabbles of dialecticians. When they attempt nothing in life but to enshroud and obscure the simplicity of Scripture with endless contentions and worse than sophistic brawls, do they keep themselves within these borders?,” Calvin queried. “If the fathers were now brought back to life,” he concluded, they would surely sympathize with the reformers.[12] Even high-church Protestants subscribed to tradition only insofar as the latter followed Scripture. As Richard Hooker clarified in his Elizabethan Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593 ff.), lest “the name of tradition should be offensive . . . consideringe how farre by some it . . . is abused, wee meane by traditions ordinances made in the prime of Christian religion, established with that authoritie which Christ hath left his Church for matters indifferent, and in that consideration requisite to be observed till like authoritie see just and reasonable cause to alter them.” Traditions were derived from the teaching of the apostles and revisable based upon the very same thing—though, for Anglicans like Hooker, only in rightly-ordered ways by ecclesial officials.[13] Even the most radical Protestants interpreted the Bible with assistance from the past. But the Reformation raised some rather disconcerting questions. Did the church’s rightful teachers ever get the Bible wrong? Did popes and councils err? And if they did, what should be done?

As Protestantism spread, so did the spirit of reform, critical thinking, and revision of the church’s teaching ministry that stemmed from the crises of the late “middle ages” (a term that had been coined amid these European culture wars by those who appealed to ancient sources of renewal, leaping over a millennium of meantime to do so). And in the age of “the Enlightenment,” this spirit ran away from its ecclesiastical home, as historicism and evolutionary thought undermined the faith of many in traditionary knowledge, whether in Scripture or the dogmatic history of the church. Western Europe’s literati dared to think for themselves, as Immanuel Kant suggested.[14] They distrusted the traditions of medieval Christendom, employed critical methods in the study of the Bible, and labored to advance upon the thinking of the past. Many thought that human knowledge and behavior were improving. And they hoped that human reason and scientific learning would enable them to overcome the worst of world history. The best-known among them were free-thinking intellectuals in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries: Spinoza, Voltaire, Locke, Hume, Kant, and Hegel. But many church leaders, too, became developmental thinkers, handing on the faith in more historical, progressive, less authoritarian styles—and promoting new methods of listening to the Spirit.

In the grand scheme of things, only a fraction of the people of God participated in this Western intellectual movement, at least in the beginning. Many Christians lived beyond the reach of European culture. And few, even in Europe, read the work of the elite. Most of the Orthodox, for instance, carried on much as before. They continued to affirm the importance of perpetuating orthodox tradition. And they championed the role of ancient practices in doing so, especially ascetic and devotional exercises. “Tradition,” wrote Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow in the eighteenth century, “does not consist uniquely in visible and verbal transmissions of the teachings, the rules, institutions and rites: it is at the same time an invisible and actual communication of grace and sanctification.”[15] These priorities were detailed in the Philokalia (1782), an Orthodox compendium of texts by spiritual masters of the hesychast tradition of prayer without ceasing as a means to union with God. Compiled by the brothers of Mt. Athos in Greece (mainly Nicodemus the Hagiorite and Macarius of Corinth), it facilitated an ancient manner of Christian prayer and piety—lost to the philosophes of early modern Europe—made famous in an anonymous Russian novel, The Way of a Pilgrim (1884).[16]

But “modern” ways of thinking did filter through the church—slowly but surely, drip by drip—in the West and its colonies. And mainstream Christians began to reconceive tradition not so much as a deposit that is meant to be preserved; but as an ongoing process of clarifying and explicating apostolic teaching (with assistance from believers outside the church hierarchy). John Henry Newman, a convert to and cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, is the best-known symbol of this modern transformation. In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), he suggested that the teaching of the Church has improved over time and that her doctrine grows clearer and more detailed with age. “Time is necessary,” he wrote, “for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas.” Especially with respect to church teaching, he emphasized, “the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as being received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation.” He drove this point home with a now-famous metaphor. “It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring,” he admitted. Nonetheless, 

this image . . . does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary. . . . Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. . . . From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. . . . In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and fall around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

Newman was not a relativist, leveler, or liberal. He submitted to the papacy and served as a cardinal. He studied church history, though, specializing in fourth-century Trinitarian doctrine, and he knew that in the past the heat of controversy had often helped to purify and clarify the teaching of the church. He also knew the magisterium had made some big mistakes and that, in seasons of confusion, the religion of the faithful kept the church on course. In “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine” (1859), he contended that the piety of Christians “is one of the witnesses to the fact of the tradition of revealed doctrine.” Their “consensus,” furthermore, when the going gets tough, “is the voice of the Infallible Church.” The teaching office “is more happy,” he appended in a hint to the bishops, “when she has such enthusiastic partisans about her . . . than when she cuts off the faithful from the study of her divine doctrines and the sympathy of her divine contemplations, and requires from them a fides implicita [implicit faith] in her word, which in the educated classes will terminate in indifference, and in the poorer in superstition.”[17]

Conservatives in Rome viewed Newman with suspicion. For as Jacques Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, had put it for them, most notably in History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (1688), Catholic teaching is “always the same” (semper eadem), which made it far more credible, reliable, and sure than the multiple alternatives on offer from the Protestants.[18] Developmental thinking, furthermore, had paved a way not just for doctrinal diversity, but also for modernism and liberalism. And some Catholic thinkers later radicalized a Newmanesque notion of tradition, undercutting age-old doctrines in the process. The French priest Alfred Loisy, and the Irish Catholic convert and Jesuit Father, George Tyrrell, both well-known academics, were removed from the Church for developmental views. The French philosopher, Maurice Blondel, a married layman, would receive the last rites. But his History and Dogma (1904) criticized both “historicists” and old-fashioned “extrinsicists” (apologists for static, inorganic church tradition) in favor of a theory of tradition as “vital reality,” a living organism that evolves over time under the guidance of the Spirit and whose truth is verified in Christian practice, or action.[19] Many say that the anti-modern statements of Pius X, such as Lamentabili Sane (1907) and Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907), assailed Blondel. For, perhaps most importantly, officials at Vatican I (1869–70) had banned progressive views of doctrine in no uncertain terms. “That meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained,” they insisted quite clearly, “which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.” Further, “if anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the church which is different from that which the church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.”[20]

Not only left-leaning Catholics but even the most conservative Protestants were subject to this ruling. The latter placed Scripture over creeds, confessions, and other forms of tradition, historicizing them all and thus continuing to transform their churches’ teaching ministries. Those in universities advocated the value of independent, critical thinking, improving on the past by means of humanistic scholarship. Those in congregations or in new, modern seminaries perpetuated their churches’ own confessional traditions. But they often criticized other churches as they did so—a practice then common in every major branch of Christendom—attempting to revise the larger catholic tradition. Philip Schaff, for example, perhaps the best-known Protestant at work in the churches to address these issues during the nineteenth century, valorized tradition more than many of his peers. He believed that it was pulsing well past the Church of Rome, though, ascending to a higher, “evangelical-catholic” future. After moving from Berlin to accept a teaching post at a German Reformed seminary in central Pennsylvania, he released a short treatise titled What Is Church History? A Vindication of the Idea of Historical Development (1846), appearing at first like his Catholic colleague Newman. “So precisely as the single Christian does not become complete at a stroke,” he contended, “but only by degrees, the church, as the complex of all Christians, must admit and require too a gradual development.” This process “is organic,” Schaff continued to echo Newman. “Christianity is a new creation, that unfolds itself continually more and more from within.” Not content with a Rome-bound theory of tradition, though, Schaff claimed “the main stream” of his catholic river, though “formed first by the Greek-Roman universal church,” had wended through “Romano-Germanic Catholicism” only to flow more recently in “evangelical Protestantism.”[21]

A passionate ecumenist, Schaff proved friendlier to those in other churches than the bulk of his contemporaries. Most nineteenth-century Protestants were stoutly anti-Catholic, using Scripture and tradition not simply to surpass but to tear down much of the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Charles Porterfield Krauth is a well-known example. Like Newman, Schaff, and others, he adopted a developmental view of Christian doctrine. In his massive work on The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology (1871), he explained that “the identity of the Church faith resembles not the sameness of a rock, but rather the living identity of a man. The babe and the adult are identical,” he underlined to stress continuity in Protestant theology:

They are the same being in different stages of maturity: that which constitutes the individual does not change. . . . Adult perfection is reached not by amputations and ingraftings, but by growth, in which the identifying energy conforms everything to its own nature. The faith of the Church now is identical with what it was in the Apostolic time, but the relation of identity does not preclude growth—it only excludes change of identity. . . . In a word, the advances are wrought, not by change in the Church faith, but by the perpetual activity of that faith, a faith which because it is incapable of change itself, assimilates more and more to it the consciousness of the Church, her system of doctrine, her language, and her life.

Doctrine grows without change, a paradox resembling the argument of Newman. Krauth clarified, however, that as the faith grew it also outgrew the many errors of the Roman Catholic Church, escaping from the “Babylon” of late-medieval blight. During the Protestant Reformation, “the fire of the Divine Word destroyed the accumulated rubbish of tradition, swept away the hay, wood, and stubble, which the hand of man had gathered on the foundation and heaped over the temple, and the gold, silver, and precious stones of the true house of God appeared.”[22] This sounds harsh today, but it was commonplace among early modern Protestants. And as nineteenth-century Catholic leaders “grew” their Mariology (codifying the doctrine of the immaculate conception in 1854) and strengthened their commitment to the popes’ jurisdiction (codifying the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870), this anti-Catholic tendency increased.

The most important Protestant thinker to write about these issues for twentieth-century readers was the Swiss Reformed churchman and professor, Karl Barth. In his Church Dogmatics (1932–67), Barth took on board a progressive view of doctrine. But in struggling against the modern domestication of God and his Word (by liberal predecessors who would only speak of God “from below,” on the basis of experience and consciousness), he insisted on the power and priority of Scripture over all other rivals, including church tradition. “The present-day witnesses of the Word of God can and should look back to the witnesses of the same Word who preceded them,” he granted right away. “These fathers and brethren have a definite authority, the authority of prior witnesses . . . who have to be respected.” But the weight of their tradition and the authority of the church must never be confused with the authority of Scripture. The Word of God “is given to the Church in such a way that it is always His Word as against its word.” Underneath the Word of God the church does have authority. She “exercises it,” though, in obedience to the Word, “by claiming for [her]self not a direct, but only a mediate authority, not a material but a formal, not an absolute but a relative.” Hence “what we know as dogma is in principle fallible and is therefore neither final nor unalterable,” he claimed. “Every Church confession can be regarded only as a stage on a road which as such can be relativised and succeeded by a further stage in the form of an altered confession.”[23] This argument was not just academic for Barth. In the face of German Christians who accommodated the faith to the Nazi regime, he had helped in the drafting of the Barmen Declaration (1934), a new church confession that improved Christian witness to the lordship of Christ over all earthly powers.[24]

By the early twentieth century, then, the differences among Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant understandings of the relationship of Scripture and tradition had become deeply entrenched. The modern ecumenical movement had just begun to take flight, but massive differences remained about the nature of and best ways to teach the Christian faith. Would the churches’ leading teachers find a better way forward? How did we get from trench warfare in the early twentieth century to the much more irenic sort of engagement on our questions we have come to know today? These questions will be taken up in the final lecture of this series.

Notes

1. Peter Abelard, Sic et Non (c. 1120); partial English translation at https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/Abelard-SicetNon-Prologue.asp.
2. Peter Lombard, Libri Quattuor Sententiarum (c. 1155–57); partial English translation available for purchase at https://www.franciscan-archive.org/lombardus/I-Sent.html; full English translation: Peter Lombard, The Sentences, trans. Giulio Silano, 4 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2007–2010).
3. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 8; English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm#article8.
4. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 36, a. 2; English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1036.htm#article2.
5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 36, a. 2.
6. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q. 25, a. 3; English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/4025.htm.
7. Decreed in Session 39, 9 October 1417. The Latin original with English translation is provided in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, 2 vols. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 1:442. The eighth of the “holy universal councils” mentioned in this statement is Constantinople IV (879–80), not recognized as a universal council in the East.
8. From the introduction to Martin Luther, Grund und Ursache aller Artikel D. Martin Luthers so durch romische Bulle unrechtlich verdammt sind, Luther’s German translation of his Assertio Omnium Articulorum M. Lutheri, per Bullam Leonis X, Novissimam Damnatorum, in D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (hereafter cited as WA), 69 vols. (bound as 88) (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1883–2009); 7:94–115; English translation in Martin Luther, Career of the Reformer II, in Luther’s Works (hereafter cited as LW), vol. 32, ed. George W. Forell (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1958), 3–98 (quotation from pages 11–12).
9. WA, 7:838; English translation in LW, 32:112.
10. Council of Trent, Session 4, 8 April 1546, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, 2:663–64.
11. First Vatican Council, Session 3, 24 April 1870, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, 2:806.
12. From the Praefatio ad Christianissimum Regem Franciae, qua hic ei liber pro confessione fidei offertur, in Calvin’s Christianae Religionis Institutio (Basel: T. Platteru & B. Lasium, 1536), 5–41; English translation in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, 2 vols., Library of Christian Classics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 1:9–31 (quotations from pages 16 and 22).
13. Richard Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, Preface and Books I–V, ed. Georges Edelen and W. Speed Hill, 2 vols., The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 2:302.
14. Immanuel Kant, “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?,” Berlinische Monatsschrift 12 (1784): 481–94; English translation at http://www.columbia.edu/acis/ets/CCREAD/etscc/kant.html.
15. English translation in Georges Florovsky, Puti Russkago Bogoslovia (Paris: YMCA Press, 1937), 178.
16. For English versions of these sources, see The Philokalia, comp. St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware, et al., 3 vols. (London: Faber and Faber, 1979–84); and The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way, trans. Olga Savin (Boston: Shambhala, 2001).
17. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 6th ed., Notre Dame Series in the Great Books (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 29–30, 40; and John Henry Newman, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” Rambler, 3d ser., 1 (July 1859): 198–230, quoted here from its definitive, critical edition, John Henry Newman, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, ed. John Coulson (Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 63, 106. This principle (of the importance of the consensus of the faithful) is one with which the Orthodox agree.
18. Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Histoire des variations des églises protestantes, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez la veuve de Sebastien Mabre-Cramoisy, 1688).
19. Maurice Blondel, Histoire et Dogme (1904), as presented in The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 267, 275.
20. First Vatican Council, Session 3, 24 April 1870, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner, 2:809, 811.
21. Philip Schaff, What Is Church History? A Vindication of the Idea of Historical Development, trans. John W. Nevin (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1846), 87, 91, 106–7. An expansion of a German lecture given in Mercersburg, this treatise was first released in English.
22. Charles P. Krauth, The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology: As Represented in the Augsburg Confession, and in the History and Literature of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1871), 270, 14, 19.
23. Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, I/2 (Zürich: Evangelischer Verlag A. G. Zollikon, 1938), § 20; English translation, Church Dogmatics, vol. I/2, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. T. Thomson and Harold Knight (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956), 538–660 (quotations from pages 573, 579, 586, 593, 657–59).
24. Theologische Erklärung zur gegenwärtigen Lage der Deutschen Evangelischen Kirche (Barmer Theologische Erklärung); English translation at http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/barmen.htm.

Creeds, Canons, Councils, And The Contest Over Tradition

By Douglas A. Sweeney

[Douglas A. Sweeney is Dean and Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.]

[This is the second article in the four-part series “Sources of Authority for Teaching Christian Doctrine: A Brief Historical Sketch,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 4–7, 2020.]

“Beloved, while eagerly preparing to write to you about the salvation we share, I find it necessary to write and appeal to you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. For certain intruders have stolen in among you, people who long ago were designated for this condemnation as ungodly, who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (Jude 3–4, NRSV).

The first lecture in this series talked about the sending of the Spirit and the spread of Christian doctrine during early church history. Kerygmatic statements by apostles and other early servants of the church led to a much more comprehensive teaching, both written and unwritten, as well as practices intended to preserve sound teaching in the midst of persecution and confusion. But by the fourth century AD especially, the church had grown in numbers, wealth, and power. Now factions competed to control the Christian message, at least much of the time, and invasive species of various kinds harmed the Lord’s vineyard.

Meanwhile, church leaders advocated orthodoxy, fighting to defend the deposit of the faith handed down by conservatives in mainstream churches while new sects and heterodox philosophies arose. Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, who was martyred for his fortitude, had cautioned the Philippians (ca. 110), “Whosoever perverts the oracles of the Lord to his own lusts, and says that there is neither a resurrection nor a judgment,” as some had done lately, “he is the first-born of Satan.” Adding admonition to insult, he beckoned to the wayward to return “to the word which has been handed down to us from the beginning” of the church.[1] Irenaeus had advocated “rules” to guard the faith, simple aphoristic summaries of apostolic teaching over against which theological claims could be measured. He employed a “rule of truth” (regula veritatis) ten times in Against Heresies (c. 175–85),[2] and a “rule of faith” (regula fidei) twice in Proof of the Apostolic Preaching (c. 180).[3] Hippolytus of Rome did the same soon thereafter, wielding a doctrinal “rule of the truth” in Refutation of All Heresies (early third century).[4] And Tertullian, Novatian, Clement, Origen, and Cyprian also regulated orthodox theology with vigor, making a way for conciliar definitions of the faith in the fourth and fifth centuries.[5] Gregory of Nyssa represented their rationale at the climax of the fourth-century Trinitarian controversy. “It is enough for proof of our [doctrine],” he averred in Against Eunomius (c. 381), “that the tradition has come down to us from our fathers, handed on, like some inheritance, by succession from the apostles and the saints who came after them.”[6]

These regulations culminated in full-blown creeds, some of which were published widely and one of which was used in both Eastern and Western churches. The best-known are the Old Roman Symbol and the “ecumenical” creeds: the poorly-named Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed (or Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, received in East and West), and the Athanasian Creed.

The first of these statements was the Old Roman Symbol, a baptismal creed of the Roman church that dates to the late second century. There are minor variations in the versions that survive, but the oldest reads as follows:

I believe, therefore, in God Almighty and in Christ Jesus, his only-begotten Son, our Lord, who was born from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. Who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and buried, and on the third day rose from the dead. He ascended into the heavens and is seated at the right hand of the Father, whence he will come to judge the living and the dead. And [I believe] in the Holy Spirit, the holy church, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the flesh, and life everlasting.[7]

These affirmations reverberated in most later creeds. The next of these statements is the so-called Apostles Creed, professed in many Western congregations most Sundays. Legend has it that the apostles wrote this document on Pentecost, each of them supplying one of its twelve sacred lines. But the creed is not cited till the late fourth century (at least not in extant documents), and its text first appears in an eighth-century handbook by Pirminius of Reichenau, a missionary monk. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty,” it begins,

Creator of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended into hell. On the third day he rose from the dead; he ascended into heaven, sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.[8] 

Now available in every major language in the world, the Apostles Creed is even used occasionally by Orthodox thinkers. It has shaped Christian teaching like no other source outside the Bible.

The Nicene Creed was forged on a fourth-century anvil in the heat of controversy. Arian understandings of the status of the Son of God arose in Alexandria (where an ascetic theologian named Arius promoted them), attracted theologians in the eastern Mediterranean, and, in the early 320s, piqued the interest of officials all over the Roman world. These understandings were censured by the bishops of two councils, the Council of Nicea (325) and that of Constantinople (381), the latter of which declared its firm, Trinitarian faith in what is now called the Nicene Creed. In response to the Arian view that Christ was created by and lesser than the Father, the drafters of this document declared (among other things), “We believe in . . . Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in being with the Father.” And “we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father” and thus is also fully God (a claim the Arians denied).[9] The council fathers, that is, defined the faith against Arianism. Western leaders added that the Spirit of God proceeds from the Father “and the Son” (filioque), changing the wording of the creed during the late sixth century, a move that gained prominence in much of Western Europe and was sanctioned by the popes of the early eleventh century (contributing to the church’s Great Schism soon thereafter in 1054, and dividing Eastern and Western Christianity ever since). Westerners have never used the Nicene Creed quite as often as the Apostles Creed. Its fulsome definition of the doctrine of the Trinity, however, won the approval of the Orthodox churches (sans the filioque clause), which renders its confession the most universal symbol of the faith in all the world.

The Athanasian Creed is the longest of the so-called ecumenical creeds. Another Trinitarian statement, it was once thought to be the work of Bishop Athanasius, arch-rival of the Arians, but is now thought to date to the fifth or sixth century. Its bulk makes it difficult to use in corporate worship. Its tone has repelled many cautious Christian readers. But its vigilant concern to guard the faith once delivered still functions as a symbol of the struggle over orthodoxy. “Whoever desires to be saved must above all things hold the catholic faith,” it claims. “Unless one keeps it in its entirety inviolate,” moreover, “one will assuredly perish eternally.”[10] These creeds and many others—marked with varying degrees of precision and severity—have served the church for centuries as summaries and boundaries of the orthodox faith.

The impulse to regulate Christian faith and practice also led to the forming of the New Testament canon. The English word “canon” comes from the Greek word κανών, meaning “measuring rod” or “rule.” And the New Testament canon is the list of books that measure up to standards implemented by the early church fathers: evident inspiration by the Spirit, most importantly—discerned by testing truthfulness, canonical consistency, and sanctifying power—and a certified apostolic pedigree. Consensus on the canon of Hebrew Scriptures was achieved shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem (late first century), though the Eastern lists of Hebrew books have minor variations and the canon of the Greek Old Testament was contested for centuries (and never quite resolved, except by Catholics at the Council of Trent in 1546).[11] The New Testament canon came together much later, largely in response to environmental pressure. Some of its material was believed to be inspired and authoritative for Christians shortly after it was written (see Col 4:16; 1 Tim 5:18; and 2 Pet 3:16). Most of it was firm by the late second century. But the canon as a whole did not congeal in final form until the late fourth and early fifth centuries.

The first powerful incentive to decide on an orthodox canon of Christian Scripture came from one who would later suffer censure as a heretic. Marcion of Sinope, a bishop’s son on the Black Sea in the Greek region of Pontus, made a canon of his own as a guide to his philosophy (c. 130–40). Convinced by a second-century gnostic named Cerdo that the Old Testament god differed starkly from the god and father of Jesus in the gospels—the former was cold, distant, militant, partial to the Jews, and concerned with physical needs, while the latter was full of love, accessible to all, and concerned with heavenly things—he organized a dualistic movement of the spirit, taught his followers to reject the Jewish god and his materialism, said that Jesus came to teach a way of life that freed the soul from its bondage to the flesh, and excluded from his canon any apostolic documents that contravened his message. Because Jesus only appeared to have been born of a virgin, encumbered with a body, and put to death in the flesh—things far too corporeal to warrant assent—most of the gospels must be scrapped. And inasmuch as other apostolic writings were too Jewish, too concerned with mundane life, they were cut from the Marcionite canon of Scripture as well. Paul of Tarsus, claimed Marcion, was called by the good god to clarify the true implications of Jesus’s teaching. He was taken up to heaven on the road to Damascus, instructed by the savior, and sent back to earth to craft “The Gospel of the Lord” (the gospel of Luke, some think, without its story of Christ’s nativity and other fleshly elements) and ten holy letters (shortened versions of the ones then attributed to Paul, minus 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus). These documents alone composed the Marcionite canon, which incited church leaders to form a canon of their own.

Soon orthodox Christians placed Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and most of Paul’s epistles on a level of authority with Old Testament writings. Irenaeus and Tertullian attacked Marcion’s views by contrasting them with unrevised apostolic teaching.[12] And an anonymous, more orthodox canon was composed (c. 170). Called the Muratorian Canon or the Muratorian Fragment, it includes all our New Testament books except Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter. It also includes the Apocalypse of Peter, however (a fragment of which survives, but is not in any Bible), and the Wisdom of Solomon (also called the Book of Wisdom, which is published in most editions of the Apocrypha).[13]

By the early fourth century, discussions about the canonization of New Testament books had become more sophisticated, though not yet unanimous. Eusebius of Caesarea, a bishop and historian, created a taxonomy in History of the Church (c. 313) that reflects the state of learned conversation at the time. He distinguished what he called widely “recognized books” (homologoumenoi) from “disputed books” (antilogoumenoi) and those deemed specious or heretical. The recognized books were Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, the Pauline epistles, Hebrews, 1 Peter, 1 John, and John’s Apocalypse (though Eusebius remarked that the status of the book of Revelation was contested). The disputed books were organized in two different groups: those widely yet not quite universally sanctioned, namely James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude; and others deemed spurious by most at the time, The Acts of Paul, The Shepherd of Hermas, The Apocalypse of Peter, The Epistle of Barnabas, The Didache, and, by some, John’s Apocalypse as well. The heretical list featured an array of bogus texts, such as the Gospels of Matthias, Thomas, and Peter.[14]

By the late fourth century, unanimity was near. Athanasius of Alexandria, the on-again, off-again, controversial bishop and opponent of the Arians, circulated an Easter letter in 367 in which he specified the very twenty-seven books later ruled the New Testament canon. “These are fountains of salvation,” the bishop told his people, “that they who thirst may be satisfied with the living words they contain. In these alone is proclaimed the doctrine of godliness. Let no man add to these, neither let him take aught from these.”[15] Several major church councils then adjudicated the canon, most importantly in Rome and Carthage in 382 and 397, respectively, sanctioning the twenty-seven books of Athanasius. The clergy in the East received the canon more slowly. They were less inclined than Westerners to dogmatize decrees of non-ecumenical councils. And the New Testament canons of the Orthodox in Syria, Armenia, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Georgia had minor variations. By the late fifth century, though, an overwhelming majority of believers, East and West, embraced the same New Testament. At the Quinisext Council held in Constantinople (692), moreover, Eastern bishops stamped the canon with approval.

In the providence of God and the power of the Spirit, the traditions by means of which the apostolic teaching shaped the faith, hope, and love of ancient followers of Jesus yielded a stable set of Scriptures by the time of the decline of the ancient Roman Empire (in the long fifth century—the city of Rome itself was sacked by Visigoths on August 24, 410). Most Christians now agreed that the canon was the main source of Christian faith and practice, the ultimate authority in ecclesial disputes, and the most reliable handbook of the teaching of the prophets and apostles of the Lord, not to mention Christ himself. This did not put an end to their diversity of thought, however. They continued to debate the way the Spirit had presided over Scripture’s canonization, the relative authority of extrabiblical customs in the teaching of the church, the place of popes, bishops, councils, and the faithful in discerning what the Spirit says in Scripture, and the best ways to transmit the elements of Scripture not codified in ancient Christian doctrine.

Furthermore, the fall of Rome and dissolution of its cultural system meant chaos, especially west of Constantinople. Arian and pagan tribes invaded from the north, wreaking havoc on the catholic civilization of Western Europe and Roman North Africa, and worrying the faithful about the future of the church. If there ever was a time for agreement in the ranks—for a stable set of doctrines that would stem fear and confusion—it was now, and on the basis of a canonized Bible. The church was “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic,” Christians claimed in an oft-repeated line from the Nicene Creed. Nearly the entire church affirmed that some of Scripture was self-evident. Some portions of Scripture had yielded teaching codified by ecumenical councils. But some texts proved ambiguous—susceptible of more than one sound interpretation—yet important to the practice of the faith nonetheless. Who retained the final say in presenting Scripture’s mysteries? How much difference of opinion was permissible? What should Christians do, when their teachers disagreed, to determine what the Spirit was declaring in the Bible? The churches and their leaders had confronted similar questions since the time of the apostles. Heretics had long bent Scripture to their benefit. Catholics had responded that these heterodox exegetes “falsify the oracles of God, and prove themselves evil interpreters of the good word of revelation.”[16] Theologians had offered up methods of exegesis. But now that the orthodox agreed on the kerygma, rules of faith, and canon of Scripture, expectations surged with respect to doctrinal unity. And now that their churches lacked protection from the Romans, the stakes of their quest for unanimity were raised.

It is important not to exaggerate the discord and disintegration of the church as it entered what scholars used to call the “dark ages” of the post-Roman West. Christianity had always been much bigger than the West. Though the culture of the Romans did facilitate its rise—and its spread beyond the boundaries of their international empire—disciples took the gospel well beyond the Roman world from the beginning of their missionary movement. Most Christian leaders now agreed about the teachings of their Savior, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the life of the world to come. And some of these beliefs were solidified further—for Christians East and West—at the ecumenical councils of the sixth to eighth centuries (all convened east of Rome, in Asia Minor, modern Turkey, under the protection of the Eastern, or Byzantine, rulers). From far enough away, the church appeared strong, well-prepared to meet the onslaughts of the post-Roman age.

Such strength was not enough, though, to guarantee unity, or even make it likely, in the centuries to come. In fact, the rest of catholic history could be told as a story of disciples with an old-fashioned, centripetal faith—and a passionate commitment to the ideal of unity—responding to centrifugal dynamics of success and accommodating changes in the church as it spread, spanned the globe, and adapted to new cultures and priorities. Most members of the body of Christ trusted in its unity. Their theologians taught them of its indefectibility. But many wanted freedom to inhabit that body—to nourish it, clothe it, and present it to the world—in keeping with their own local customs and traditions. Just as Christians reached consensus on the New Testament canon, divisions in the way its finer points were interpreted undermined the oneness of the church in all but spirit. “I ask . . . that they may all be one,” Christ himself had pleaded on the way to the cross, “as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:20–21). Most honored this prayer and believed in its fulfillment. They trusted that the Spirit would take them into all the truth on the basis of the Word, thus unifying the body of Christ all around the world. Still, they often disagreed about what the Spirit said.

The first major episode of post-canonical conflict transpired over the course of the fifth and sixth centuries and centered on Augustine’s view of predestination. A British theologian named Pelagius moved to Rome in about 380, and soon became concerned about its people’s moral laxity. He engaged in strict asceticism and gained a minor following. When Rome was sacked in 410, he fled with a follower named Caelestius to Carthage, and sparked a major controversy that spread across the Roman world by teaching an extreme form of moral rigorism. He said that everyone can live a sinless life and find salvation without waiting for a special interposition of God’s grace (though he granted that the freedom of the will, moral law, Christian nurture and instruction were results of God’s grace that helped Christians on their way). Augustine and his followers resisted this teaching. They said that even in the Garden of Eden—before the first sin and tragic fall of the race—Adam and Eve needed supernatural grace to live for God. East of Eden, furthermore, human need had grown much worse. On account of original sin, we are now born depraved. We have disordered affections, minds and wills inclined to sin. We never choose to honor God unless our hearts are transformed. God foresaw this predicament before he made the world. In his mercy, he chose to create us anyway and then rescue a portion of the race by his grace. There is nothing we can do to earn this blessing retroactively. The elect owe their status to the sovereignty of God, and their righteousness to God’s decree to transform their souls and help them want to live according to his plan for their lives.

In the near term, Augustine’s view prevailed in the Western church. Pelagius and his men were condemned at major councils held in Carthage (418) and Ephesus (431). But the doctrine they espoused never simply disappeared. Nor did the biblical exegesis that supported it. In fact, a group of monks in southern Gaul (near the city of Marseilles), championed a compromise that proved quite resilient. Concerned about the moral implications of Augustine’s view of predestination, they re-emphasized the freedom sinners have to repent and make good upon the grace God has woven into the world without waiting for an extra, supernatural act of God. Of course saving grace was required, the “Gallicanis” granted, but seekers could elicit it by turning to the Lord. John Cassian and Vincent of Lérins were their spokesmen, the latter of whom coined a test of orthodoxy (in controversies with Arians and others) that he thought would make their compromise position more tenable. Called the “Vincentian Canon” (c. 434), it stipulated that “care must especially be had that that be held which was believed everywhere [ubique], always [semper], and by all [ab omnibus]” faithful Christians.[17] Augustine’s view of sin and election failed this test, and so should not be required of the faithful moving forward. Augustinians like Prosper of Aquitaine resisted this Gallicani compromise (also called “Massilian” for its locus in Marseilles), contending that it downplayed the consequences of sin and gratuity of grace. Both groups appealed to the canon, rule of faith, and traditions of the church. But they disagreed about how to handle these authorities and settle their dispute. Prosper concluded that the popes were the ultimate interpreters of Scripture. The Gallicanis countered that consensus should be sought. But their Vincentian Canon proved difficult to use, and the Gallicani doctrine was condemned at the Council of Orange (529).[18] This controversy plagued the church for centuries to come. During the late middle ages it resurfaced yet again and promoters of the Gallicani doctrine were condemned—and labeled “semi-Pelagian”—by Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders.

The next major episode of post-canonical controversy centered on the veneration of icons by Christians. As Islamic forces overspread the Byzantine world, Eastern rulers sought to purify their churches of corruption (which they blamed for Christian losses) and avoid adding fuel to the conflict with their foes (who were largely aniconic, or opposed to using icons). Iconoclastic sentiment intensified in fits and starts, especially among those most worried about Islam, yielding a ban on Christian icons in the late 720s by the Byzantine Emperor Leo III. Such images themselves, of course, are not found in Scripture and opponents of their use (often called “iconoclasts,” which means “image destroyers”) claimed that paying them respect was like bowing down to idols. Still, God had made humans in his “image” and “likeness” (Gen 1:26–27). Moses put images of angels in the tabernacle (Exod 25–31, 35–40). And Christ himself is said to be the “icon” (εἰκὼν) of God (Col 1:15). Few artists made icons of the person of the Father, who does not have a body and “dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see,” wrote Paul (1 Tim 6:16). Depictions of the Father were forbidden much later (at the Eastern Synod of Moscow, in 1667). But many came to believe that the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus Christ made a way for depictions of the Savior and his saints. They also said that the handling of the relevant Scripture texts should be governed—in the main—by tradition.

By the mid-sixth century, tradition had begun to assume a life of its own, not far beneath the canon and the bishops as a norm in the development of doctrine. A number of different sources could be cited in this regard, not least the canon of Vincent first deployed by Massilians. The bishops at the Second Council of Constantinople (553) claimed, when promulgating doctrine, to “hold and declare the faith given from the beginning by the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ to the Holy Apostles, and preached by them in the whole world; which the sacred Fathers both confessed and explained, and handed down to the holy churches.”[19] And many later theologians, when working on matters not discussed in the canon, resorted to tradition in support of their opinions.

John of Damascus, for example, the most important of the eighth-century champions of icons, appealed to tradition in his battle with opponents. In On Holy Images (c. 730), he aggregated statements from the fathers on their use. In The Orthodox Faith (c. 740s), he explained that while conservatives wanted “nothing beyond” the teachings of the “Law and Prophets and Apostles and Evangelists,” they refused to flout what John called the “everlasting boundaries” of proper interpretation, haughtily “overpassing the divine tradition (Prov 22:28).”[20] By the late eighth century, John’s instincts won the day as the leaders of Nicea II (787) exalted the tradition in support of sacred icons. Referring to the fathers of the church as “inspired,” and contending that the Spirit “dwells in” the tradition, they condemned those “who dare to think or teach otherwise,” underwriting the veneration of icons by Christians.[21] Even so, opposition to them never fell away. Emperor Leo V led another purge of icons in the early ninth century (814–42). In the sixteenth century, many Protestants destroyed priceless icons, crucifixes, statuary, and paintings in the name of abolishing idolatry.

A third major episode of post-canonical dissidence pertained to the use of the filioque clause. This epochal, church-dividing, theological conflict (which resulted in the Great Schism of 1054) took its rise not mainly from an exegetical row (though the Bible was involved), but from debate about the authority of Western church leaders to change the liturgy, the creed, and thus the doctrine of the Trinity without seeking input from the churches of the East. Not only had tradition taken on a life of its own, then, by this time in history, but East and West had now diversified dramatically, and many doctrinal feuds involved discussion about the canon, the authority of bishops and traditions in its use, and the relative authority of contrary bishops and traditions in the teaching of the church. The development of doctrine proved as complex as ever. It would lead to more divisions in the centuries to come, whose history we will take up in the next lecture.

Notes

1. Polycarp, Epistles to the Philippians 7, 1–2; English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0136.htm.
2. Irenaues, Adversus Haereses passim; English translation at http://www.new advent.org/fathers/0103.htm.
3. Irenaeus, Proof (᾽Επίδειξις) of the Apostolic Preaching 3, 6; English translation at http://www.ccel.org/ccel/irenaeus/demonstr.iv.html.
4. Hippolytus, Refutatio Omnium Haeresium 10, 1; English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0501.htm.
5. See, for example, Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum 13; Novatian, De Trinitate, 1, 9, and passim; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 4.15, 6.15, 18; Origen, De Principiis, Preface.2; and Cyprian, De Unitate Ecclesiae, 19.
6. Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium 4.6; English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2901.htm.
7. The Roman Symbol in Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:681–82. These volumes are hereafter cited as Pelikan and Hotchkiss.
8. Pelikan and Hotchkiss, 1:667–69.
9. Pelikan and Hotchkiss, 1:670–72.
10. Pelikan and Hotchkiss, 1:673–77.
11. The Greek Old Testament, also known as the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament writings), includes a number of items not found in Hebrew Scripture (some of which are not in all the oldest extant copies of the Greek Bible either—these copies vary quite a bit and some include material that is not in any canon). Called deuterocanonical (“of the second canon,” or canonical but secondary) and anagignoskomena (“readable, worthy to be read”) by Catholics and Orthodox, apocryphal by Protestants (“obscure” or noncanonical), they were published in the Vulgate (the ancient Latin Bible of Jerome and his associates), despite Jerome’s view that they should not be in the canon, and appeared in many subsequent editions of the Christian Bible as well. Most Protestant reformers either excluded them completely or set them apart visibly from the main canon of Scripture, usually in between the testaments. On April 4, 1546, at the Council of Trent, Catholic leaders made a decree, De Canonicis Scripturis (“Concerning the Canonical Scriptures”), in which they defined their Old Testament canon clearly and dogmatically (English translation at http://www.thecounciloftrent.com/ch4.htm).
12. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 1.27, 3.2, and passim; Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem.
13. The Muratorian Fragment is a seventh-century Latin translation of a late second-century Greek text, named for L. A. Muratori, who discovered it in Milan in the early eighteenth century. The English translation by Bruce Metzger is found here: http://www.bible-researcher.com/muratorian.html.
14. Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica 3.25.
15. Athanasius of Alexandria, Festal Letter 39; English translation at http://www. newadvent.org/fathers/2806039.htm.
16. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 1.Preface (see also 1.8.1); English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103.htm.
17. Vincent of Lérins, Comonitoria 2; English translation at http://www.newad vent.org/fathers/3506.htm.
18. Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (New York: B. Herder, 1957; orig. Enchiridion Symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 13th ed. [Freiburg: Herder & Co., 1954]), §173b–200 (pp. 75–81).
19. Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, §212 (p. 85).
20. John of Damascus, The Orthodox Faith (part of Πηγή Γνώσεως, see above), 1.1; English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/33041.htm.
21. Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, § 302–4 (pp. 121–22).

Jesus’s Promise Of The Spirit And The Teaching Of The Faith: From Kerygma To Catechesis

By Douglas A. Sweeney

[Douglas A. Sweeney is Dean and Professor of Divinity at Beeson Divinity School, Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama.]

[This is the first article in the four-part series “Sources of Authority for Teaching Christian Doctrine: A Brief Historical Sketch,” delivered as the W. H. Griffith Thomas lectures at Dallas Theological Seminary, February 4–7, 2020.]

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. . . . [T]he Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. . . . I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. . . . I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you (John 14:15–16:14, NRSV).

There would be no history of doctrine if Jesus had not promised the Spirit to his disciples in the upper room before his crucifixion.[1] Or, at least, the history of doctrine would have proven far poorer. Still frightened and confused, the apostles needed help understanding and believing—let alone handing on—what the master had been teaching. They had lived with their rabbi for about three years. Still, they failed to comprehend much of what the Lord had said. They abandoned him, in fact, when the going got tough. One sold him out to members of the Jewish Sanhedrin who sought to have him killed. Even the boldest of the group, named the “rock” by Jesus (Πέτρος in Greek, Matt 16:18), denied him three times. Jesus seems to have foreseen their bewilderment and weakness. In keeping with an inner-Trinitarian arrangement, he assured them that the Spirit would soon come alongside them, abide with them, speak to them, reignite their faithfulness, and help them sort things out.

Less than two months later, this promise was fulfilled. On the day of Pentecost, or Jewish Festival of Weeks (Shavuot), the disciples “were . . . together in one place,” wrote Luke, a close associate of Paul who had investigated the sources of his story carefully (Luke 1:1–4; Acts 1:1–5). “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability” (Acts 2:1–4). Jews “from every nation” had assembled in Jerusalem to keep Shavuot (in honor of the harvest and, according to tradition, to commemorate the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai). Astounded by this miracle, “each one heard them speaking in the native language of each” (v. 6). Peter addressed the throng, now behaving like the rock Jesus had told him he would be. Reminding everyone who listened of the prophecy of Joel (“Then afterwards I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,” Joel 2:28), he testified that Jesus had arisen from the dead, ascended to the Father, and effected what the prophet had foretold long ago—and what Jesus had predicted only seven weeks earlier. “Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God,” he preached, Jesus, the Messiah, “has poured out this that you . . . see and hear” today (Acts 2:33).

For nearly two millennia, Christian leaders have debated the importance of the sending of the Spirit for their ministries, especially the ministry of handing on the faith. Just what did Jesus mean when he promised that the Spirit would guide us “into all the truth”? How much of “all the truth” has been codified in Scripture? How much was revealed after the closing of the canon? Does the Spirit still speak outside the leaves of Scripture? If so, how are we to understand what he is saying?

Modern liberals have suggested that the Spirit still guides us into truths not seen in either Scripture or tradition, primarily by inspiring the development and spread of our most charitable and liberating global cultural values. Conservative, or “old-school,” Protestants demur, saying Jesus sent the Spirit not to shape secular values, but to guide the first disciples as they wrote the New Testament. With the founding of the church and the closing of the canon, they contend, God’s Spirit stopped sharing new truths and, instead, helped Christians understand what was written. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and most other Christians stand somewhere in the middle of these first two positions. Roman Catholics say the Spirit still leads us into truths not codified before, but only through the office of the Catholic magisterium (composed of all the bishops in communion with the pope). The Orthodox affirm that the Spirit led the early church fathers in their work, superintending the results of the first seven, so-called “ecumenical councils,” but pausing this dogmatic work in 787 (at Nicea II, which restored the use and veneration of icons, a hallmark of Eastern Orthodox Christianity) and resuming it, perhaps, at the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church held in Crete in 2016 (a resumption still contested among the Orthodox faithful, some of whom did not attend this latter-day council). Pentecostals are convinced that the Spirit has been poured out again in recent days (the “last days,” inaugurated in the nineteenth century, at least according to most), but mainly to enable us to live according to Scripture and to hasten Christ’s return with evangelistic power. And most other Protestants are somewhat less certain what to make of the leading of the Spirit in the present. The majority believe that the Spirit still speaks, but they hesitate to separate that speech from the Scriptures. Word and Spirit work together, these Protestants aver. When the Spirit speaks now, he appropriates the Word, helping those with ears to hear to understand, obey, and make use of the Bible and the best of church history to improvise responses to uniquely modern questions.

We will flesh these positions out further in what follows. For now, what matters is that nearly all Christians owe the teachings of their churches to the sending of the Spirit. He steered the first Christians after Jesus’s resurrection, ascension, and session at the Father’s right hand. He inspired the disciples as they wrote the New Testament. And he helped the church fathers—and later doctors of the church—as they handed on the faith then “entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3). In these lectures, we will explore this history and the debates that attend the task of sorting out the Spirit’s work in Scripture and tradition.

Lest we lose ourselves in intramural controversy, however, let’s remember that the Spirit is still at work in the world today and wants to help us make good use of the history of our faith. As most faithful Christian teachers have affirmed over the centuries, the Spirit grants cognitive and ethical advantages to those who seek to grow in the practice of the faith—even two thousand years after the pouring out at Pentecost (1 Cor 2). So the surest way forward for believers in the present is to study Christian doctrine, try to walk with the Spirit, and encircle oneself with other like-minded disciples—past and present, near and far—interpreting one’s learning in communion with the saints and checking one’s perspective against the teaching of their churches, thereby grounding one’s practice in the ripest fruit of the Spirit’s work in Scripture, tradition, and the worldwide family of God. God’s Word is too important to engage in isolation, the faithful too finite (not to mention hardhearted) to apply it on our own. We “see in a mirror, dimly” (13:12), limited by personal and socio-cultural blinders. So we need the Lord’s help to improve on what we learn. “No one comprehends” the things of God except God’s Spirit, but “those who are spiritual discern all things” (2:11, 15).

Christians have long disagreed about the optimal relationship of Scripture, tradition, and discernment of the Spirit in the teaching of the church. But honesty requires that all parties to the controversy assent to something like the following history lying behind it, a history of the impact of primitive proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ (κῆρυγμα), the unwritten traditions of the Lord’s own apostles (pertaining, some claim, to institutions like fasting, prayer, sacraments, devotion to the saints and their images, virginity, and more), ancient worship (lex orandi), rules of faith (regulis fidei), creeds and councils, canons of Scripture, and the leading of the Spirit in the pedagogical ministries of ecumenical churches (the churches that intend to be “catholic,” meaning universal and orthodox).

The biblical materials consistently spotlight the word of the Lord as revealed through Christ, his prophets and apostles as the ultimate authority for guiding God’s people. Relatedly, they highlight “the sacred writings” themselves, given by inspiration of God, which “are able to instruct you,” as Paul wrote Timothy, “for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 3:15–16). Traditions not given by direct inspiration simply pale by comparison, when not condemned for sinfulness and often even hypocrisy. As Jesus asked the Pharisees and scribes who condemned his disciples for transgressing the traditions of the elders, “why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? . . . [Y]ou make void the word of God. You hypocrites!,” he chided. “Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said: This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines” (Matt 15:1–9; Isa 29:13). The Lord and his prophets said the like many times, calling people to repent of their glib devotion to convention and submit to the word of God itself.

But neither Christ nor his witnesses eschewed all tradition. Tradition understood as paradosis (παράδοσις)—as handing on the Word, teaching and doing what it says—was advocated repeatedly throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and early Christian history. The Old Testament brims with admonition from the Lord to disseminate his teachings. “Recite them to your children,” God commanded through Moses after giving the Shema (“Hear, O Israel, . . .”), “and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:7–9). And early Christian leaders spoke frequently of guarding and imparting the deposit of the faith they received: both Old Testament teaching and the kerygmatic witness and tuition of the apostles. Shortly after the resurrection and before his ascension, Jesus told the eleven to “make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matt 28:18–20). During and after Pentecost, they did just that. Soon thousands of believers “devoted themselves” to their “teaching . . . to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42).

The New Testament writings bleed costly Christian witness to the efforts of disciples to perpetuate the pattern of instruction they received. From the martyr Stephen’s speech to the Jewish Sanhedrin (Acts 7) through the treacherous peregrinations of the ministry of Paul to the epistolary labors of the New Testament authors—often undertaken from prison—and the pedagogical programs that were built upon their teaching (1 Cor 3:10), they preserved and transmitted the tradition they possessed. “Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to you,” Paul urged his charge. “Hold to the standard of sound teaching. . . . Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit.” And “what you have heard from me,” he appended programatically, “entrust to faithful people who will be able to teach others” (1 Tim 6:20; 2 Tim 1:13–14, 2:2). “Contend for the faith,” pleaded Jude the brother of James, “that was once for all entrusted to the saints” by the apostles (Jude 3). For as Irenaeus echoed in Against Heresies (c. 175–85), “the Church has received from the apostles and imparted” the one and “only true and life-giving faith.”[2] And as Tertullian would stress in Prescription against Heretics (c. 200), nothing was withheld from this transmission process. Everything needed for salvation was included, and troublemakers boasting secret teaching should be stopped, lest they turn some aside from the riches of the Lord.[3]

This strenuous commitment to protect and promote the instruction of the apostles stemmed in part from the importance of the Scriptures in the synagogues. Jews had long valorized the teaching of the Word. But it also came from Christian trust that Jesus’s resurrected life and teaching brought salvation. “I should remind you, brothers and sisters,” Paul wrote,

of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you. . . . For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles (1 Cor 15:1–7).

Instruction about Jesus’s resurrection changed the world. Christian doctrine was life and death, and the contest surrounding it demanded close attention. Paul went on to warn that

if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ. . . . If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied (vv. 14–19).

A great deal depended on early Christian paradosis.

The apostles also inculcated unwritten traditions, though we lack the means to verify the ones taught by Jesus and adjudicate rival Christian claims about their value. As explained in John’s Gospel, the Savior did many things witnessed by disciples that were not written down. If all of them were registered, “the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 20:30, 21:25).

And Jesus told the twelve that when the Holy Spirit came, he would “guide [them] into all the truth” (16:13), helping them remember things not put to writing and, presumably, revealing even more from the Lord. This promise came true at the Council of Jerusalem, whose verdict in the case of the Gentile Christians “seemed good to the . . . Spirit and to us,” wrote Luke (Acts 15:28). It resulted in the writing of the New Testament books. And it yielded oral teaching bearing apostolic warrant. Paul told the Thessalonians, “Stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter” (2 Thess 2:15). He encouraged those at Corinth just a few years later, “I commend you because you . . . maintain the traditions just as I handed them on to you” (1 Cor 11:2).

In early church history, episcopal supervision of the church’s faith and practice gained prominence as surety for apostolic orthodoxy, both written and unwritten. Heresy emerged, the primal Christian witness needed careful transmission, and the worship of the faithful demanded sound guidance. Oral teaching found its way into everyday piety through prayers to the saints, eucharistic rites, and more—all supervised closely by the bishops and their aides. These never formed the cornerstone of any cardinal doctrine. But they did play a role in the teaching of the churches as the law of supplication—in worship and devotion—turned rule for belief (lex orandi, lex credendi). According to the testimony of Basil of Caesarea (c. 375), “of the beliefs and practices whether generally accepted or publicly enjoined which are preserved in the Church some we possess derived from written teaching; others we have received delivered to us in a mystery by the tradition of the apostles; and both of these in relation to true religion have the same force. And these no one will gainsay—no one, at all events, who is even moderately versed in the institutions of the Church.”[4] And in the words of an episcopal admonition issued shortly after the Council of Ephesus (431), “let us be mindful of the sacraments of priestly public prayer, which handed down by the Apostles are uniformly celebrated in the whole world and in every Catholic Church, in order that the law of supplication may support the law of believing.”[5]

These ecclesiastical trends took shape in relation to several short, pithy summaries of kerygmatic faith that were employed as rules of faith and the interpretation of Scripture. The apostles wrote the most important kerygmatic statements. A few were simple sketches of the doctrine of the Trinity (Matt 28:19; 2 Cor 13:13; Eph 3:14–17; 1 Pet 1:1–2). Others spoke of Christ in light of Old Testament Scripture, or of Father, Son, and Spirit in creation and redemption. Paul summarized in Romans what he called “the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for the sake of his name” (Rom 1:1–5). To the Philippians, he quoted an early creedal hymn of Christ,

who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Phil 2:5–11).

To the Colossians, Paul made an even grander gospel summary: God, he wrote,

has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross (Col 1:13–20).

Other apostles, too, published kerygmatic statements. Peter wrote to “exiles” dispersed in Asia Minor that Christ

suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight people, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him (1 Pet 3:18–22).

John likewise assured Christians of the basics of the faith as an unstable mix of other teachings cluttered their minds nearly a generation later:

we declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, [namely,] God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his son cleanses us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:1–9).

As the church and the needs of its members grew apace, post-apostolic leaders, well-versed in Christian teaching, took the learning they received and adapted it for use in various liturgies, apologies, and catechetical aids. The ancient church orders represent their efforts well. They epitomized the faith for use in early Christian liturgies and codified the creed required of those seeking baptism. (A few of these orders boast an apostolic pedigree, though none bears a clear and free title to such a claim.) The earliest, The Didache (late first-century Syria), contains only a brief sketch of Trinitarian faith.[6] But The Apostolic Tradition (c. 215), often attributed to the presbyter Hippolytus of Rome, lays out in more detail the faith of many early baptizands:

When the person being baptized goes down into the water, he who baptizes him putting his hand on him shall say: “Do you believe in God, the Father Almighty?”

And the person being baptized shall say: “I believe.” Then holding his hand on his head, he shall baptize him once.

And then he shall say: “Do you believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and was dead and buried, and rose again the third day, alive from the dead, and ascended into heaven, and sat down at the right hand of the Father, and will come to judge the living and the dead?” And when the person says: “I believe,” he is baptized again.

And again the deacon shall say: “Do you believe in the Holy Spirit, in the holy church, and in the resurrection of the body?” Then the person being baptized shall say: “I believe,” and he is baptized a third time.[7]

Kerygmatic summaries led to laws of supplication, which, in turn, ruled early Christian faith, practice, and worship.

Early church fathers also published creedal summaries in apologetic texts. Most famously, Justin Martyr, whose First Apology (c. 155–57) included several well-known creedal fragments, made a series of such statements in his Dialogue with Trypho (c. 155–67), which would later reappear in the ecumenical creeds. He penned this, for example, in chapter 85:

In the name of this very Son of God and first-begotten of all creation,

Who was born through the Virgin,
And became a passible man,
And was crucified under Pontius Pilate by your people,
And died,
And rose again from the dead,
And ascended to heaven,
Every demon is exorcised, conquered, and subdued.[8]

Such patterns of instruction and belief frequently recurred.

With the conversion of the empire, longer teaching aids appeared, which systematized the Christian faith for use among the swelling ranks of public catechumens. Cyril of Jerusalem promoted such productions. In his Catechetical Lectures (c. 348), he exhorted younger Christians, “Attend closely to the catechisings, and though we should prolong our discourse, let not your mind be wearied out. . . . You have many enemies; take to you many darts. . . . [T]he armour is ready, and most ready the sword of the Spirit: but you also must stretch forth your right hand with good resolution, that you may wage the Lord’s warfare, and overcome adverse powers, and become invincible against every heretical attempt.”[9] Gregory of Nyssa’s Great Catechism (c. 385) cultivated a similar perspective on the need for catechesis. “The presiding ministers of the ‘mystery of godliness,’” it emphasized, “have need of a system in their instructions, in order that the Church may be replenished by the accession of such as should be saved, through the teaching of the word of Faith being brought home to the hearing of unbelievers.”[10] And Augustine wrote a treatise on the art of catechizing.[11] These publications culminated in later, longer, even more comprehensive compendia of Christian faith and practice by Theodoret of Cyrus, John of Damascus, and others used by scholars and their teachers more than laity.[12]

The church was growing quickly and becoming very powerful. Moving forward, it would enjoy state support in many places. It accrued great wealth. And thus, perhaps not surprisingly, many of its leaders now vied to shape its narrative and control its faith and practice. All agreed that the Spirit had led them into all the truth about their Christian faith and practice. He steered the first Christians after Jesus’s resurrection, ascension, and session at the Father’s right hand. He inspired the disciples as they wrote the New Testament. And he helped the church fathers—and later doctors of the church—as they handed on the faith then entrusted to the saints. They disagreed, however, about the details of the faith that the Spirit had enabled. In the next lecture we will learn that their ancient disagreement has had a deep and lasting effect on the history of Christian doctrine, unity, and witness.

Notes

1. New Testament scholars disagree about where Jesus and the apostles were by John 16. At the end of John 14, Jesus said to the apostles, “Rise, let us be on our way.” But not until 18:1, “after Jesus had spoken these words” (presumably, the words that had begun in the upper room), did they go “out” and cross the Kidron Valley to the Garden of Gethsemane. Many think it likely that they stayed in the upper room throughout the whole “upper room discourse” (John 13–17).
2. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, III.Preface, an English translation of which is available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103.htm.
3. Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum, 25–26.
4. Basil of Caesarea, On the Holy Spirit, 27.66, an English translation of which is available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3203.htm.
5. “The Catalog or the Authoritative Statements of the Past Bishops of the Holy See Concerning the Grace of God,” chapter 8, in Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (New York: B. Herder, 1957; orig. Enchiridion Symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 13th ed. [Freiburg: Herder & Co., 1954]), §139 (p. 56). Pope Pius IX attributed this statement to Pope Celestine I in an apostolic constitution called “Divini cultus,” on December 20, 1928, noting the “intimate relationship between dogma and sacred liturgy, and likewise between Christian worship and the sanctification of the people.” Denzinger suggested that the “Catalog” in which it appears was organized “at Rome by St. Prosper of Aquitaine . . . shortly after CELESTINE I, between 435 and 442, and, about the year 500 to have been recognized universally as the genuine doctrine of the Apostolic See” (52n4).
6. The Didache (“Teaching”), 7.1–4, in Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, 4 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:42. These volumes are hereafter cited as Pelikan and Hotchkiss.
7. The Apostolic Tradition, 21.12–18, in Pelikan and Hotchkiss, 1:61.
8. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 85, as presented in Pelikan and Hotchkiss, 1:22–23. An alternative English translation is available at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/01286.htm.
9. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses (Κατηχήσεις), Procatechesis (Prologue), 10; English translation at http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/310100.htm.
10. Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio Catechetica, Prologue; English translation at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene_and_Post-Nicene_Fathers:_Series_II/Volume_V/Apologetic_Works/The_Great_Catechism.
11. Augustine, De Catechizandis Rudibus (c. 400).
12. Theodoret of Cyrus, Hæreticarum Fabularum Compendium (c. 452), the five books of which are known collectively in English as The Discernment of Falsehood and Truth; and John of Damascus, ΠηγήΓνώσεως (or Pege Gnoseos, Fount of Knowledge, c. 740s), the most doctrinal part of which is called The Orthodox Faith. Origen of Alexandria, De Principiis (c. 220s), is also a lengthy, early compendium of Christian faith and practice.