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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.