The Relationship Between Scripture And Tradition In Contemporary Roman Catholic Theology

By Robert B. Strimple

Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia

An address presented as the third of three lectures on the theme, “Contemporary Roman Catholic Theology,” at the 1977 Christian Reformed Ministers Institute held at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Many Protestants have viewed the theological developments taking place in the Roman Catholic Church in recent years as quite encouraging, as giving hope that the doctrinal barriers that have separated Catholicism from Protestantism are breaking down. Most particularly this has been thought to be true with respect to the great distinctives of the Protestant Reformation, sola scriptura and sola fide—the so-called formal and material principles of the Reformation. The Canadian Presbyterian theologian, David Hay of Knox College, has written: “The astonishing thing is that these two principles, which enshrine the whole meaning and necessity of the Reformation, can no longer be said to divide Protestants from the Church of Rome.”[1] With respect to the so-called formal principle specifically, Jean Daniélou has said that “a more accurate understanding on the part of Catholics of the agreement between Scripture and tradition does away with the principal Protestant objection to the Catholic position.”[2] From the Protestant perspective, G. C. Berkouwer is an example of one who has been greatly encouraged by the direction Roman Catholic thinking regarding tradition has taken.[3]

The key figure in the Roman Catholic debate during the past two decades regarding the relationship between Scripture and tradition has been Josef Rupert Geiselmann, since it is he who has challenged in a definitive way (though he would appeal to others who saw the primary point clearly before him, particularly among his predecessors at the University of Tübingen) the so-called “two-source” view of revelation which is the “traditional” view in the Roman Catholic Church of the relationship between Scripture and tradition.

The question which has been at issue in the Roman Catholic debate is usually put in this form: is there a constitutive tradition? To understand the force of the different answers to that question among Roman Catholic theologians we must understand the meaning of the question. A helpful guide to us here is Gabriel Moran’s book, Scripture and Tradition.[4] In good scholastic fashion, Moran divides the vague concept of “tradition” into various categories and sub-categories. When we speak of tradition we may have in mind the active handing over of certain beliefs, teachings, rites. “Subjective” tradition we might call it, which points to an organ of transmission, the church (i.e., the magisterium). For this we might use the term παράδοσις. On the other hand, when we use the term “tradition” we might have in mind the content of that which is passed on, the body of beliefs, teachings, rituals. For this passive, or shall we say “objective,” tradition we might use the term παραθήκη (“deposit”).

This objective tradition Moran further categorizes in at least two basic ways. First of all, if we think about the source of the teaching and the nature of the teaching, we can distinguish three types of tradition. The first type would be divine apostolic tradition, that which was revealed to the apostles by Christ or by the Holy Spirit. This must be distinguished from human apostolic tradition, which is teaching that also originated with the apostles but was not divine revelation. Then, thirdly, there is ecclesiastical tradition, which is not revelation, because according to Roman Catholic dogma revelation closed with the death of the last apostle. Ecclesiastical tradition has never been considered by the Roman Church to be revelation.

We could say more about these distinctions, but let us hurry on to the second way of thinking about objective tradition, not considering its source or its nature now but considering its content. Here again we can distinguish between two types of tradition. On the one hand, dogmatic (doctrinal) tradition; on the other hand, what Moran calls disciplinary tradition. Disciplinary tradition would be church practices. Whether apostolic or post-apostolic, these disciplinary traditions are not part of revelation. Dogmatic tradition is revelation and may be further subdivided into three types. The first type might be termed inherent tradition and refers to that which is stated explicitly in the Scriptures, clearly set down in the Bible. The second type might be designated declarative tradition and refers to teaching which is implied in the Bible but is not explicitly set down in the Scriptures.

Finally, with the third type of dogmatic tradition we come to that type of tradition which is tinder dispute. This would be constitutive tradition; that is, tradition which is doctrinal, revelational, but which is not contained even implicitly in the Scripture. When the question is asked: “Is there constitutive tradition?,” what is in view is a tradition which is objective, divine apostolic, dogmatic, but not contained in any sense in the Bible. This is the question the answer to which divides most of the leading Roman Catholic theologians of our day from just a few arch-conservatives. All the theologians whose names are most familiar to Protestants would answer this question with a resounding “no!” There is no doctrinal tradition, no doctrinal revelation, which is not found in the Scriptures. There is none that has come to us de novo in tradition. All our dogma can be found in the Bible. Karl Rahner, Joseph Ratzinger, Michael Schmaus, Hans Küng, Yves Congar, George Tavard, Gabriel Moran, Gregory Baum—all are agreed on this point.

We must be very clear that no Roman Catholic theologian denies the existence and the authority of dogmatic tradition. That is not the point at issue. As Yves Congar puts it: “All Catholics agree that revelation cannot be known in all its fulness and purity unless it is sought through the Scriptures and through or in tradition … The idea upon which all Catholics are in agreement is known as the thesis of the formal insufficiency of Scripture.”[5] The “formal insufficiency” of Scripture means that the Bible is not sufficient in itself to give anyone a knowledge of God’s will because that cannot be understood apart from the authoritative understanding and interpretation of the Scripture. The debate in the Roman Catholic Church concerns only the question of the material sufficiency or insufficiency of the Scripture. All are agreed that no one can understand revelation except through the Church and through tradition. The only question is: “Does Tradition have a constitutive value, and not merely an explicative one?” “Are there revealed truths which can be known only through Tradition ?”[6]

The contemporary, Roman Catholic insistence, unanimous insistence, upon the formal instifficiency of the Scripture cannot be overly stressed. Some Catholics have said that scriptura sola is a genuinely Catholic principle; but, as Moran points out, “it simply does not mean the same thing in Catholic writing as it does in Protestant…. for the Catholic all revealed truth comes to him through the teaching of the Church. That remains true whether Scripture contains all of revelation or only a part of it.”[7] Infallible interpretation by the magisterium is just as necessary whether all revelation is in the Scriptures or not. Moran writes: “The saying ‘Scripture alone’ was not new with Luther; what was new was the idea that Scripture was the mere text, which could be understood apart from the authoritative interpretation of the Church.”[8]

Note carefully, therefore, how limited is the question in debate currently among Catholics. It does not touch upon the disciplinary tradition, the whole wide area of church rituals and church practices; that is not in view. It only has to do with the dogmatic tradition, and it in no way calls into doubt the formal insufficiency of Scripture. It only deals with the question of whether revelation originates in the one source or in two. The impression is so often left that if the Roman Catholic theologian rejects the notion of constitutive tradition (and almost all today do), then the Protestant has no further argument with the Catholic regarding tradition. How false that conclusion would be!

Even having said that much, however, is not to have said nearly all that needs to be said to show how far the position of one like Josef Geiselmann regarding the nature of Scripture is from the orthodox Protestant understanding of the nature of Scripture. Protestant critiques of the Roman Catholic position usually stop at the point we have now reached, but that is really only where the critique must begin because the issues at stake are far more serious than would be realized if we simply left matters here.

Let us look more closely, therefore, at Geiselmann’s view, that view which has proven to be so influential among contemporary Roman Catholic theologians. The traditional Roman Catholic understanding of revelation had been that revelation is contained partly in the Scripture and partly in tradition, i.e., that there are revealed dogmatic truths which can be known only through tradition. That “partly -partly,” understanding came to explicit expression in the original wording proposed at the Council of Trent by Cardinal del Monte: “… that this truth is contained partly in written books, partly in unwritten traditions.” However (and as Geiselmann sees it, this is a most important “however”), that original partim … partim construction was rejected at the Fourth Session of the Council of Trent, April 8, 1546: and the two partims were deleted and replaced with a simple et so that the statement approved was the simple affirmation that divine truth is contained in the written Scriptures and in unwritten traditions.[9]

That does not necessarily mean that Trent intended definitively to decide the question: is there constitutive dogmatic tradition? There were at lea st two vocal Italians at the Council who vigorously argued that Holy Scripture contains everything pertaining to salvation, and that is what Geiselmann wants to contend; but Geiselmann does not argue that their view prevailed. His conclusion is more modest, simply that the et was primarily a formula of compromise striking a balance between the two positions. Geiselmann writes: “One cannot emphasize enough that nothing, absolutely nothing, was decided at the Council of Trent concerning the relation of Scripture and Tradition.”[10]

Geiselmann sees this as crucial because for so long, for four hundred years, it had been assumed that the two-source view was canonized by Trent. Geiselmann says that it was Melchior Cano, writing in the same year as the Tridentine decree, who “was the first to begin the merry-go-round of those who called on the Council of Trent as the star witness for the partim-partim.”[11] Ever since Cano, the German catechisms, particularly that of Canisius, consistently taught the “partly-partly” view. Another who was very influential in establishing the two-source view as the orthodox Roman Catholic view was Robert Bellarmine.

Today those Roman Catholic theologians who defend the two-source view are very few n number.[12] These conservative theologians argue that the burden of proof falls on Geiselmann, since his is a new interpretation : and they insist he has not furnished the necessary proof that his view is the Catholic view. To show that the Roman Catholic Church has been wrong for four hundred years requires extremely persuasive proof, these theologians insist. They view Geiselmann’s “one-source” theory of revelation as an ecumenical device. To say that all Roman Catholic doctrines are found in the Bible, they argue, is patently false. Consider for example (and it is the example usually cited first) the doctrine of the bodily assumption of the blessed virgin Mary. Where in the Bible is the doctrine of the assumption of Mary to be found ? The fact that there are seven sacraments: where, the conservatives argue, is that doctrine found in the Bible? If Geiselmann or others should answer that there is a “hint” of it in the Scripture, they reply that this is hardly sufficient to satisfy the statement that all revelation is contained in the Scripture. No, they insist, tradition goes beyond Scripture in both clarity and content.

When we begin to examine Geiselmann’s own doctrine of revelation and his answers to his traditionalist critics, we discover that his theology is rooted so firmly in a modern, post-Kantian view of revelation that his denial that there is any revelation that comes for the first time in tradition and his affirmation that the whole of the gospel is found in Scripture, while that affirmation and that denial on the surface seem so encouraging to many Protestants, are, if anything, farther from the orthodox Protestant understanding of revelation and of Scripture than the traditional Roman Catholic position, and are calculated not to support a Reformed understanding of the nature of divine revelation but to destroy it.

How does Geiselmann’s argument proceed? Having established (to his satisfaction at least) that Trent did not decide the issue of the relation between Scripture and tradition, Geiselmann presents his own view. He emphasizes that God does not let his revelation flow out of two “taps” as it were, hot and cold, Scripture and tradition. No, “one may define Scripture and Tradition only as the different modes of existence within the Church of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”[13]

Geiselmann’s understanding of revelation may be diagrammed as follows:

Event (Jesus Christ = Gospel (κήρυγμα)	God’s “tradition” (παράδοσις, “handing over” his Son[14])
Scripture Tradition =	the Church (Christ’s continuing presence, God’s continuing “tradition,” “handing over” his Son)

The basic reality, revelation, is the Jesus Christ Event. God’s tradition, God’s παράδοσις of the Son, that is Tradition with a capital “T,” the Jesus Christ Event. That event was announced in the original gospel preaching, the kerygma, which is not revelation but a reflection on and interpretation of the revelation, the Christ Event. That original gospel proclamation has gone on to be recorded in the Scripture and in tradition, both of which are simply “modes of existence within the Church of the one gospel of Jesus Christ.” The Church is Christ’s continuing presence, is God’s continuing tradition, God’s continuing handing over of his Son. Therefore, although Geiselmann speaks of “Church, Scripture, and tradition” (note the order) forming “a coherent whole,” the fact is that in his view the three are not really coordinate; the Church is all.

One of the more arrogant statements attributed to Pope Plus IX at Vatican I (June 19, 1870) was: “I am tradition.” Geiselmann says that Plus “spoke in this instance as a theologically private person,” not ex cathedra. Even so, says Geiselmann, “it was scarcely the remark of a particularly enlightened dogmatic theologian.”[15] What Pope Plus should have said, according to Geiselmann, was that the whole Church is tradition, not just the Pope.

The Protestant theologian who seems to have exerted the most influence upon Geiselmann’s thinking is Gunther Bornkamm, the post-Bultmannian. According to Geiselmann, Rudolf Bultmann represents the one “extreme” to be avoided in theology, in which the kerygma is isolated from the history of Jesus: it does not matter what we know about Jesus; we have the message and that is what counts. The other extreme, according to Geiselmann, is represented by the fundamentalists, who see the Scriptures as “a gift by God of a bonus of truths.”[16]

The via media has been taken by Bornkamm and those other students of Bultmann, who in an inevitable reaction against Bultmann’s extremism have taken off on a “new quest for the historical Jesus,” a new quest with a more modest goal than the old quest of the old liberals. Those earlier historians thought that they could learn so much about the real historical Jesus that they could write a life of Jesus, a biography. Bornkamm and the new questers know that that is. impossible, and yet they think that we can and we must seek this much: to know the self-understanding of Jesus.

Much is heard today about the “self -understanding” of Jesus. The phrase must be understood on the background of existentialist philosophy, the thought of Martin Heidegger in particular, whom Edward Schillebeeckx, the Dutch Roman Catholic theologian, has called “the philosopher behind the whole of modern theology.”[17] When one asks about the. self -understanding of Jesus, what he has in mind is this: did Jesus know authentic existence or not ? Unauthentic existence is the experience of anyone who thinks that lie has any security in his existence, that there are any anchors for his life in this world. It is the one who recognizes that his being is what he creates, that lie has absolutely no security, but who is willing nevertheless to open himself to all that the future might hold -it is that one who knows authentic existence.

The crucial question, therefore, for Geiselmann as for Bornkamm is this: did Jesus know that kind of existence? Because only if he did can we say lie was God’s revelation to us; and, of course, the conclusion reached by Geiselmann is that Jesus did know such authentic self -understanding. Geiselmann quotes approvingly Bornkamm’s statement that “tradition does not actually repeat and hand on (Jesus’) formerly spoken word at all; it is his word today.”[18] Nevertheless, a certain amount of the original message of Jesus can be reconstructed, at least enough to assure us that authentic human existence was realized in this man.

Geiselmann defines tradition as testimony to historical facts, and lie says: “Ultimately the paradosis is based on the fact that the history of redemption is concluded.”[19] But, lie goes on, due to the fact that these historical events to which the Christian tradition points are unusual events (because they are said to be God’s actions, and we know as modern men that such are excluded by definition from history) Christian tradition is of an unusual kind. It is not mere report (the kind of “Life of Jesus” biography the old liberals tried to reconstruct) but neither is it mere kerygma (à la Bultmann, the Scriptures a call to existential decision). Christian tradition is rather “report and kerygma”; or, better, “report in the form of kerygma”—“proclamation of the joyful message of salvation which has been realized in these historical events and which is made present again and again in the kerygma, so that we are commanded to ‘hear’ and to believe.”[20]

What we have in Geiselmann, then, and by extension in the Catholic theologians who have followed him, is not a Roman Catholic Bultmannianism but a Roman Catholic post- Bultmannianism. The tradition is not concerned with “precision of historical detail” which would destroy the paradoxical unity of then and now in favor of the “then.”[21] The tradition (apostolic preaching and Scripture) gives us not what Jesus once said (literally) but what he says now. The paradosis has always been handed on-not mechanically, but by being interpreted in the Holy Spirit-so that it is always living tradition.

Geiselmann argues that Trent was against the sola scriptura of the Reformers but was not against the material sufficiency of Scripture. “The relation of Scripture and Tradition can be defined in a Catholic way only if both Scripture and Tradition mediate for us the entire gospel, though each does so differently.”[22]

Do you see what is happening here? On Geiselmann’s view, the contemporary Roman Catholic view, neither Scripture nor tradition is truly authoritative. That is why the theological situation in the Roman Catholic Church today is worse, if anything, than it was at the time of the dispute with the Reformers. (But, Of course, this is also why there is “hope” expressed for ecumenical unity today between Roman Catholics and modernist Protestants.)

Geiselmann quotes E. C. Rich: The Church “points us to the Scriptures not to ‘prove’ her doctrine but to tell us how it became known to her.”[23]

A simple diagram may be helpful:

	Old R.C. view	New R.C. view
Divine, Revelation, Authoritative	Scripture	Scripture
Human Record of Revelation, A guide	Tradition	Tradition

The Reformers condemned the exaltation of tradition to the level of authoritative divine revelation, but we cannot praise a more modest estimate of tradition if it entails a like devaluation of the absolute authority of the Scripture. Joseph Ratzinger, in a study of the Scripture and tradition issue co-authored with Karl Rahner, puts it this way: “The fact that ‘tradition’ exists is primarily based on the non-identity of the two realities, ‘revelation’ and ‘scripture’.”[24]

Surely the Reformed theologian must reply that we are not to distinguish between revelation and inspiration as though they were two altogether different kinds of reality, but rather we are to see inspiration as one mode of divine authoritative revelation and, indeed, that “most necessary” mode for men today “those former ways of God’s revealing His will unto His people being now ceased” (Westminster Confession of Faith, I:i). In other words, in terms of the earlier diagram, a Reformed conception of Scripture would have to place the gospel and Scripture right up there, if you will, on the level of the Christ Event. Scripture is not a later record of or pointer to or radiation from or interpretation of the history of redemption. The giving of this authoritative written Scripture is part of the history of redemption, just as Pentecost, just as the calling of the apostle Paul and the other apostles for the distinctive work of laying the foundation of the church. Our reliance upon the Scripture alone is not because we see this collection of Christian writings as the first interpretation of the Christ Event, and therefore as in some sense perhaps the best interpretation. Our recognition of the unique authority of the Scripture rests on the recognition that it is not simply the first or the best interpretation; it is God’s. It is the word of God, not simply because it points us to the Christ who is the living Word of God, which it does, but, as the Westminster Confession says, because God is its author and is so in such a way, according to 2 Timothy 3:16, that it is the out-breathed word of God, which speaks not with relative authority but with absolute authority.

It is the modern, false conception of revelation which lies at the foundation of the so-called “one-source” theory of Josef Geiselmann. Revelation is seen as the “real” reality which comes to expression in theology. The first theology, if you will, is the Scripture; but a sharp distinction must be drawn between the reality and the scriptural interpretation. That is the foundation, not only of the “one-source” theory of Geiselmann with regard to revelation, but of the modern Roman Catholic theories of the development of dogma which date from Newman and which are so basic to an understanding of contemporary Roman Catholic theology, and which we simply have not had time to explore here.

John Henry Newman’s famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine was published in 1845, less than two months after his reception into the Roman Catholic Church. The primary source of Newman’s view was British empiricism. The Christian revelation is regarded as an idea which impressed itself upon the corporate mind of the Church. The term “Idea” here does not refer to the notion formed of an object, “but the object itself as it is capable of being apprehended in various notions.”[25] Forming the notion, articulating it in propositions, this is always subsequent to the experience of the truth. The history of dogma is the history of “the progressive description, always partial and incomplete, of the divine reality which Christians experience.”[26]

The various aspects of that reality “can only be understood in particular, concrete, historical situations and relationships.” One might say that these ramifications are “implicit” in the reality, the revelation, “but not implicit in the logical sense.”[27] To paraphrase Pascal, the Church has reasons the reason knows nothing of. Newman’s analogy for the development of dogma in the Church was not natural science (Butler: reason, knowledge) but nature, which displays organic. non-rational development (not that the latter kind of illustration is not to be found in Butler also).

Karl Rahner’s essays on this crucial subject, the development of dogma, display clearly his indebtedness to Newman. Rahner was the progressive Roman Catholic theologian who shocked Hans Küng by saying that the position espoused by Küng in Infallible? An Inquiry was not only erroneous but that Küng, by espousing such a position, had excluded himself from an inner-Catholic conversation.[28] Why? Why, because a theologian ceases to be a Catholic if lie rejects a doctrine defined by a Council of the Church.

We would be wrong, however, to conclude that Küng and Rahner are really that far apart. Rahner accuses Küng of a lack of trust in the post-biblical developments in the Church because Küng openly speaks of past errors in the official teaching of the Church; but Rahner himself so appreciates the historicity of truth that he recognizes that a dogmatic statement which was “true” in a certain age, given the pre-suppositions and models of thought of that age, would not be true if taken literally today.

In an influential article in Theological Investigations, Vol. 1, Rahner explains that the dogma that revelation was closed with the death of the last apostle does not mean that “a sort of definitive catechism” was left behind.

Revelation is not the communication of a definite number of propositions … but an historical dialogue between God and man in which something happens…. This dialogue moves to a quite definite term, in which first the happening and consequently the communication comes to its never to be surpassed climax and so to its conclusion.[29]

The Church today, however, has not only the message but also the reality.

Consequently her hearing of the Word and her reflexion upon the Word heard are not merely a logical activity, an attempt gradually to squeeze out all the logical virtualities and consequences of the Word heard as though it were a numerical sum of propositions; they are a reflexion on the propositions heard in living contact with the thing itself …. A sure knowledge is acquired in the form of knowledge in faith proper to the Church as such (if she steps in) not just through the merely logical explication of propositions as such but through the luminous power of the Spirit in contact with the res itself.[30]

In similar fashion, Edward Schillebeeckx states that the basis for hermeneutics (as distinct from exegesis) “is the living relationship which we ourselves have with the same matter or reality that is discussed in the text.” One might well wish to ask: why bother with the past statement at all? Schillebeeckx answers that the reason we study the Scripture, or tradition, is that “the truth comes to light only in intersubjectivity.”[31] Solipsism is the ultimate heresy.

Rahner emphasizes that it is misleading to speak of “progress” here. We are not “better” or “cleverer” theologians than the apostles. We see the Truth (Res) differently, not necessarily better. As citizens of a different age we must see it differently; otherwise we “betray the truth… by failing to make the truth our own in a really existential way.”[32]

Gregory Baum has pointed out how significant, therefore, is the Church’s infallibility for it “is the basis of certainty for the new focus of the Gospel.” “What counts ultimately” is “not a particular text of Scripture or ecclesiastical tradition” but “how the Gospel … is experienced by the Church.”[33]

When the Reformed believer understands something of what the “New Catholic” doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture entails, how encouraging can lie find it? Rahner and Cougar, for example, argue against the conservative objection that a dogma like that of the assumption of the blessed Virgin Mary cannot be found in Scripture, that it cannot be found any more easily in tradition; and therefore the solution is not the conservative doctrine of two sources of revelation but the proper understanding of how dogma develops.

Geiselmann’s understanding of Scripture and tradition must likewise be viewed against the background which Newman’s concept of dogmatic development has provided for contemporary Roman Catholic theology. How much like Newman Moran sounds when he explains the one-source theory of revelation which lie shares with Geiselmann: All of Catholic dogma is not “stated in Scripture” but it “is within what is testified to or communicated by the Scriptures … the development of dogma is not bound to the laws of syntax and syllogism.” “The Church would seem to work with a more than human logic in understanding and interpreting revelation.”[34] And how much like Newman Geiselmann himself sounds when he tells us that the event, salvation in Jesus Christ, “is an organic whole of which the scriptural paradosis … and the homologies, hymns, and liturgical sayings are only the radiations, the concrete external forms in the life of the apostolic Church.”[35]

Certainly the Reformed theologian must call attention to Geiselmann’s error in what lie says about the formal insufficiency of Scripture,[36] but his criticism must not stop there. He must also draw attention to Geiselmann’s error in what he says about the material sufficiency of Scripture. What Geiselmann affirms regarding “the whole mystery of Jesus Christ” being “announced” in the Scripture is far from what the Westminster Confession of Faith affirms when it says that “the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture” (I:vi).

It should be noted in conclusion that the major portion of Geiselmann’s study of The Meaning of Tradition is occupied with a theme which I, like most commentators on Geiselmann, have not even touched upon thus far. It is, however, a theme which should be recognized if one is to recognize the truly Roman Catholic nature of Geiselmann’s theology and its distance from a Reformed emphasis on the uniqueness of the gospel, the exclusive character of the Christian faith, and the indispensable necessity of the Scriptures if sinners today are to have “that knowledge of God, and of His will, which is necessary to salvation” (Westminster Confession of Faith, I:i). I am speaking of Geiselmann’s lengthy discourse on “the nature of religious tradition as a universal human reality which attains its highest perfection in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”[37] Geiselmann is thus in full agreement with that strong universalistic tendency which has always been present in Roman Catholic thought, the notion that Christianity only exemplifies at its highest what is true for all men everywhere at all times.

Geiselmann says that not only Catholics but Protestants are today discussing “natural tradition… which forms the basis of supernatural tradition.” “Without this natural tradition rooted in the nature of man, supernatural tradition based on revelation would lack any firm point of contact in man and would, as it were, remain in the air.”[38]

How typical of Catholic nature/grace thinking, you see. Here there is no recognition that natural tradition is sinful, Creator-rejecting (see Romans 1), and that scriptural revelation is necessitated by man’s sin and is not simply the complement or supplement to what he has in natural tradition.

The renewed appreciation of natural tradition is particularly important in our day, writes Geiselmann, because the tendency since Descartes has been for autonomous man to reject all traditions and land in an ultimate nihilism. The answer to modern nihilism, therefore, as Geiselmann sees it, is not only a return to Christian tradition but also a return to the common tradition of man, particularly of Western man, and most particularly to “Heraclitus, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, whose thought culminated in God.”[39]

I began this lecture by reminding you of how encouraged many Protestants have been by the recent discussions among Roman Catholic theologians of the relation between Scripture and tradition. I leave you to draw your own conclusions. As stated above, it seems to me that in contemporary Roman Catholic theology we are, if anything, farther removed than ever from a Reformed understanding of the Bible; and therefore it is incumbent upon us in presenting the gospel to those influenced by such a theology to present with clarity and conviction the Scriptures as the word of God written, necessary, clear, sufficient, and absolutely authoritative.

Notes

1. David W. Hay, “The Issues of the Reformation Reopened,” Canadian Journal of Theology, X (1964), 177.
2. Jean Daniélou, “Scripture, Tradition and the Dialogue,” Theology Digest, IX (1961), 42.
3. G, C. Berkouwer, The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, trans. by Lewis B. Smedes (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), ch. 4.
4. Gabriel Moran, Scripture and Tradition: A Survey of the Controversy (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963).
5. Yves M. J. Congar, “The Debate on the Question of the Relationship between Scripture and Tradition from the Viewpoint of their Material Content,” in A Theology Reader, ed. by Robert W. Gleason (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1966), p. 115.
6. Ibid., pp. 116 and 115.
7. Moran, p. 25.
8. Ibid., p. 34.
9. Joseph (sic) R. Geiselmann, “Scripture and tradition in Catholic Theology,” Theology Digest, VI (1958), 73-78.
10. Josef Rupert Geiselmann, “Scripture, Tradition, and the Church: An Ecumenical Problem,” Christianity Divided: Protestant and Roman Catholic Theological Issues, ed. by Daniel J. Callahan, Heiko A. Oberman, and Daniel J. O’Hanlon (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), pp. 47-48.
11. Ibid., p. 42.
12. J. Beumer, C. Boyer, and H. Lennerz are the most prominent. English readers may consult M. B6venot, “ ‘Traditions’ in the Council of Trent,” The Heythrop Journal, 4 (1963), 333-347.
13. Geiselmann, Christianity Divided, p. 50.
14. See Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger, Revelation and Tradition, trans. by W. J, O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), p. 44.
15. Josef Rupert Geiselmann, The Meaning of Tradition (London: Burns and Oates Ltd., 1966), p. 114.
16. Geiselmann, Christianity Divided, p. 52.
17. E. Schillebeeckx, God the Future of Man, trans. by N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), p. 14.
18. Geiselmann, Christianity Divided, p. 57.
19. Geiselmann, Meaning, p. 9.
20. Ibid., pp. 10-11.
21. Ibid., p. 11.
22. Geiselmann, Christianity Divided, p. 49.
23. Ibid., p. 53.
24. Rahner and Ratzinger, p. 35.
25. Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman. The Idea of Doctrinal Development (Carnbridge: University Press, 1957), p. 149.
26. Paul Helm, “The Meaning of the Text” (Unpublished paper, 1970), p. 2.
27. Chadwick, p. 1,50.
28. Karl Rahner, review of Hans Küng’s Infallible? An Inquiry, in Stimmen der Zeit, 95 (1970), 361–377.
29. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, trans. by Cornelius Ernst, Vol. 1, 2nd edn. (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1965), p. 48.
30. Ibid., pp. 52 and 53.
31. Schillebeeckx, pp. 33 and 34.
32. Rahner, Investigations, p. 45.
33. Gregory Baum, New Horizon (New York: Paulist Press, 1972), p. 32.
34. Moran, pp. 74 and 84.
35. Geiselmann, Christianity Divided, p. 58,
36. Ibid. “The apostolic kerygma recorded in Holy Scripture announces to us the whole mystery of Jesus Christ, supposing that Holy Scripture is read in the context of the Church, i.e., as a part of the Church and therefore in the light of the commentary furnished by the life of the Church, its liturgical practice, and the conduct of the Christian community in morals and discipline.”
37. Geiselmann, Meaning, summary opposite title page. 38
38. Ibid., p. 40.
39. Ibid., p. 107.