INTERPRETING AUTHORITY: TRADITION

Human society as existing in time and history must necessarily be a society which exists in the context of tradition, for tradition, according to the dictionary definition, is ‘opinion, belief or custom handed down….from ancestors to posterity.’ To exist in time and history involves tradition, even if tradition in this broad sense is never fixed and immutable, but can always be questioned, modified and even repudiated. To speak of ‘culture’ or ‘cultures’ is again implicitly to speak of tradition, for cultures are shaped by custom, ritual, ceremonial, and habits of thought  This is as true of scientific culture as it is of art or literature or music.

Michael Polanyi in his Gifford Lectures of almost half a century ago demonstrated how scientific advance was not only dependent on the creativity of personal heuristic passion, but on working within the canons of scientific investigation. He noted that skills, be they artistic or scientific, could only be ‘passed on’ – ‘traditioned’, if you like – by personal apprenticeship. ‘An art which cannot be specified in detail cannot be transmitted by prescription, since no prescription for it exists. It can be passed on only by example from master to apprentice…The articulate contents of science are successfully taught all over the world in hundreds of new universities, the unspecifiable art of scientific research has not yet penetrated to many of these.’[1] There is something here about tradition and discipleship, and about the essentially personal element of education which Newman so magisterially expounded in The Idea of a University. In another much smaller work, the Tacit Dimension, Polanyi writes of how scientific tradition renews itself by ‘its belief in the presence of a hidden reality of which current science is one aspect, while other aspects of it are to be revealed by future discoveries.’ He goes on:

Any tradition fostering the progress of thought must have this intention: to teach its current ideas as stages leading on to unknown truths which, when discovered, might dissent from the very teachings which engendered them. Such a tradition assures the independence of its followers by transmitting the conviction that thought has intrinsic powers, to be evoked in men’s minds by intimations of hidden truths. It respects the individual for being capable of such response: for being able to see a problem not visible to others, and to explore it on his own responsibility.[2]

Polanyi was concerned to defend a society of explorers, living within a tradition of thought which sought through that tradition to discern and discover and interpret truths not yet fully recognised.

            If Polanyi urges us to see a significant place for tradition in understanding scientific thought, the German philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer questions the legacy of the Enlightenment in construing all knowledge in terms of a certain model of scientific objectivity.  In a provoking paper contributed to the 1983 conference commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Oxford Movement, Andrew Louth, explored some interesting parallels between John Henry Newman and Gadamer, noting how both had a positive view of preconceptions or prejudices, Newman stressing the importance of antecedent probability and what he called the ‘illative sense’ in coming to a judgement of faith, and Gadamer criticising the Enlightenment ‘prejudice against prejudice’. ‘The exceptional case of nonsensical tradition has become the general rule for historical consciousness.’[3] ‘All past tradition is being treated as if it were nonsense and could only be understood by modern scientific man by an exercise of historical imagination. Past tradition has ceased to be tradition, something handed down: the link with the past has been cut. The past is a foreign country: worse, it is a country we can only pretend to visit.’[4]  Gadamer goes on:

In fact history does not belong to us, we belong to it. long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgements, constitute the historical reality of his being.[5]

We work with ‘anticipated meanings’ that ‘are themselves drawn from, suggested by, our familiarity with tradition’, so that ‘the anticipation of meaning that governs our understanding is not an act of subjectivity, but proceeds from the communality that binds us to the tradition.’[6] What is interesting about Gadamer’s philosophical and epistemological exposition is, of course, the rehabilitation of the necessity and importance of tradition in the context of human understanding in the humanities, and Louth is quite right to point up the interesting resemblances and coincidences with so many aspects of Newman’s thought in much more overtly religious and theological context.

The language of tradition is therefore not simply a religious language. Perhaps here also grace is not opposed to but fulfils nature. In the religious context we could argue that the trio of scripture, tradition and reason is an inevitable systemic outworking of any religion that possesses holy books, and exists through time. Holy books need interpreters, and interpreters have to have guides to interpretation. In Islam the Qu’ran is the holy book, possessed of an infallible character, so much so that it is strictly speaking impossible to translate from the Arabic. Because, like other holy books in other religious traditions, it is a guide to conduct, where it is in any way unclear there is a subsidiary appeal to the hadith, the traditions about Muhammed, which will amplify and shed light on those places where the Qu’ran does not give clear guidance. And where a judgement still has to be made there is an appeal to the ulema, the body of Islamic scholars, who make their judgement in accordance with the Qu’ran, the hadith and the body of interpretation. In Judaism the canonical Hebrew scriptures were filled out with the provisions of the Mishnah and later the Talmud.

Christians inherited a body of Scripture from Judaism, a canon which varied from the Hebrew canon to the wider canon of the Septuagint, and which for some parts of the Christian church, such as the Ethiopian, even today includes a book like that of Enoch, which is in neither the Septuagint nor the Hebrew canon. Those ‘Old Testament’ scriptures embody the tradition of the people of Israel in their history and devotion as they have been refined and interpreted and re-interpreted over the centuries until they assumed a written and relatively fixed form. We could say that the Old Testament scriptures are embodied tradition. Into that context, and as an interpretation of that context, came the traditions about Jesus, primarily, of course, those recorded in the four gospels. But there were other gospels and there was a process lasting some two centuries before the final establishment of a canon. The New Testament, like the Old, consists of different kinds of documents, and witnesses within itself to the process of ‘traditioning’ – of ‘handing on’ (paradosis) – one of the most clear instances being St Paul in I Corinthians writing of the Eucharist. ‘I handed on to you that which I also received.’ And here, let us note, what is ‘handed on’ is not abstract doctrine, but something done. As Archbishop Bramhall said in the seventeenth century writing of tradition, that was ‘handed on’ was partly credenda – things meet to be believed, and partly agenda –things meet to be done, or, if you like, liturgy and doctrine.

 Part of the process of the establishment of the canon involved the repudiation of other texts and sources of revelation, most notably, perhaps that amalgam of religious and philosophical speculation that we know as Gnosticism. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in the second century, is an important witness of how the markers were put down. In his anti-Gnostic writing known as Adversus haereses (‘Against the heresies’), Irenaeus argues that there are only four gospels, as there are only four winds and four zones of the world. He defends the ‘rule of faith’, maintaining that this is that which binds the  church together.

The Church…..having received this preaching and this faith, although scattered throughout the whole world, yet, as if occupying but one house, carefully preserves it…..Although the languages of the world are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same. For the churches which have been planted in Germany have not believed or handed down anything different, nor do those in Spain, nor those in Gaul, nor those in the East, nor those in Egypt, nor those in Libya, nor those which been established in the central regions of the world.[7]

Gnostics often justified their speculations by reference to a secret and esoteric tradition. Irenaeus is clear that the tradition to which he appeals is a public tradition of teaching, linked particularly with the apostolic succession in the major sees, amongst which, in particular, he names Rome, the see of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul. 'It is necessary,’ he maintains, ‘that every church, that is, the faithful everywhere, should resort to this church, on account of its pre-eminent authority, in which the apostolical tradition has been preserved continuously by those who exist everywhere.’[8] Tradition in this context is the rule of faith – the embryonic creed – which is the key to the interpretation of scripture. Ask what is the Gospel and the answer is summarised in the creed.

            Furthermore Irenaeus sees this process of living tradition as a work of the Holy Spirit. The faith ‘having been received from the church, we do preserve, and which always, by the Spirit of God, renewing its youth, as if it were some excellent vessel, causes the vessel itself containing it to renew its youth also.’

For this gift of God has been entrusted to the church, as breath was to the first created man, for this purpose, that all the members receiving it may be vivified; and the means of communion with Christ, that is the Holy Spirit, has been distributed throughout it, the earnest of incorruption, the means of confirming our faith, and the ladder of ascent to God……For where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God: and where the Spirit of God is, there is the church, and every kind of grace; but the Spirit is truth.[9]

We are reminded that in St John’s Gospel (16.12-15) Jesus speaks of the Spirit as coming to lead his followers into all truth, including things they do not know at the present time.   

            I have yet 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…..He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.

There is a sense that is current throughout the New Testament of a faith once delivered to the saints, a once and for all revelation, but which is yet a mystery to be lived out, and a truth whose dimensions have yet to be fully understood and revealed. The Eucharist, for instance, is received and handed on, is ‘done’ in obedience to the Lord’s command, but what is done is a mystery of presence and sacrifice, of memorial and anticipation, whose dimensions both personally and ecclesially can only be known by being lived out at an ever-deeper level.

The Orthodox churches in particular have always emphasised that ‘tradition’ for Christians is not an accumulation of the dead weight of the past but is the presence of the life-giving Spirit in the Church. The definitions of the Councils are regarded as being under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, remembering the affirmation of the council of Jerusalem in Acts: ‘it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.’ As Vladimir Lossky comments:

Although the councils bear witness to tradition by their binding and objective decisions, the truth itself which they declare is never subjected to canonical forms. Tradition, in fact, has a pneumatological character: it is the life of the Church in the Holy Spirit.[10]

And he goes on to say:

Tradition is not merely the aggregate of dogmas, of sacred institutions, and of rites which the Church preserves. It is, above all, that which expresses in its outward determinations a living tradition, the unceasing revelation of the Holy Spirit in the Church; a life in which each one of her members can share according to his capacity. To be in the tradition is to share the experience of the mysteries revealed to the Church. Doctrinal tradition….cannot be separated from or opposed to mystical tradition: acquired experience of the mysteries of faith. Dogma cannot be understood apart from experience; the fullness of experience cannot be had apart from true doctrine. It is for this reason….[that] the tradition of the Eastern Church [is] a mystical theology – doctrine and experience mutually conditioning each other.[11]

Metropolitan Ignatios of Lattakia, speaking at the Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 1968 likewise emphasised the pneumatological character of the life of the Church.

            Without the Holy Spirit, God is far away,

            Christ stays in the past,

            The Gospel is a dead letter,

            The Church is simply an organisation,

            Authority a matter of domination,

            Mission a matter of propaganda,

            The liturgy no more than evocation,

            Christian living a slave morality.

            But in the Holy Spirit:

            The cosmos is resurrected and groans with

            The birth-pangs of the kingdom,

            The risen Christ is there,

            The Gospel is the power of life,

            The Church shows forth life of the Trinity,

            Authority is a liberating service,

            Mission is a Pentecost,

            The Liturgy is both memorial and anticipation,

            Human action is deified.[12]

            Broad-brush generalisations are dangerous in church history as in other places, but in the mediaeval church in the West the scholastic and mystical traditions became distant from one another in a way which did not happen in the East. What happened in catholic terms in the mediaeval period repeated itself in Protestantism with the tension between the rationalism of Protestant scholasticism and the affective devotion of pietism, with its counterpart in England in Methodism and Evangelicalism. In the language of Romanticism head and heart were opposed not held together, producing theologies of cerebral rationalism, or a fundamentalism of the word, on the one hand, and charismatic enthusiasm on the other. Divisions in Christendom produced church histories to support them, with often doctrines of a fall of the church, which then needed reformation, and opposed catholic histories stressing institutional continuity. Revivalist groups of various kinds from the Radical Reformation onwards often had little place for history and so no real theology of tradition, even though they might in practice operate with criteria of ‘soundness’ and ‘Gospel truth’ unsupported by creeds and continuity of ministry. Some Pietist church history attempted to bridge the gap between the primitive or early church and their present by seeing church history as a history of the twice-born, lights in the darkness. Anglicans acknowledged the first four – or was it seven? – councils, appealing to the undivided church, leaving a mark on the way church history was told in such classically Anglican places as the University of Oxford, where doctrine ran up to the Council of Chalcedon and then recommenced at the Reformation. At least half of church history and theology was at one stroke ignored.

            Reformations are almost always ‘reformation by tradition’ in the sense that reformers appeal to an early and pure state of the church as the model by which the church is to be reformed. Sometimes that appeal is to the church of the New Testament and anything extra-biblical is discounted. Sometimes, as with Anglicans, the appeal has been to the theology and polity of the undivided church, the church of the first three or four centuries, maybe longer. In a church in which the scriptures were not in the verncular and were not generally accessible, the impact of an English Bible made widely available through printing cannot be underestimated. It seemed to provide a criterion by which much of the devotional and canonical practice of the late mediaeval church could be judged. As is well known the two branches of the magisterial Reformation took different views as to the way in which the authority of Scripture should be applied, Lutherans working easily with a category of adiaphora, ‘things indifferent’, and Calvin applying the harsher test of only allowing things thought to be explicitly commanded by Scripture. Puritan objections to the sign of the cross in baptism, the ring in marriage, and vestments, together with a general iconoclasm, left its mark on the post-Reformation English church. It was these things which had to be defended by some kind of appeal to tradition, but often tradition understood in much narrower sense than we have been considering it up to now.

            Richard Hooker, in Book 1 of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, acknowledges the supreme authority of scripture as a guide for what is necessary for salvation.

There is in Scripture therefore no defect, but that any man, what place or calling soever he hold in the Church of God, may have thereby the light of his natural understanding so perfected, that the one being relieved by the other, there can want no part of needful instruction unto any good work which God himself requireth, be it natural or supernatural, belonging simply unto men as men, or unto men as they are united in whatsoever kind of society.[13]

Scripture is sufficient for the purpose for which God gave it, and may be understood by natural understanding. Consequently, ‘they which add traditions, as a part of supernatural necessary truth, have not the truth, but are in error.’ It is the claiming of tradition or traditions ‘as part of supernatural necessary truth’ that Hooker opposes, though he seems to suggest in what immediately follows, that if anything in unwritten tradition can be proved to be of God then of course, it must be received. He quotes Whitaker against Bellarmine to the effect that ‘the Apostles did in every church instituted and ordain some rites and customs serving for the seemliness of the church regiment, which rites and customs them have not committed to writing.’ If customs are known to be apostolical, ‘it is not the manner of delivering them unto the Church, but the author from whom they proceed, which doth give them their force and credit.’[14] Hooker’s central theme is the sufficiency of scripture for truths relating to salvation, thus obviating the need for ‘new revelations from heaven’ or adding ‘to the word of God uncertain tradition.’[15] In Book V he is clear that traditions are to be valued and accepted provided that they are not seen as an additional source of saving truth. He is at one with the Lutheran doctrine of adiaphora.

            Lest….the name of tradition should be offensive to any, considering how far by some it hath been and is abused, we mean by traditions, ordinances made in the prime of Christian religion, established with that authority which Christ has left to his Church for matters indifferent, and in that consideration requisite to be observed, till like authority see just and reasonable cause to alter them. So that traditions ecclesiastical are not rudely and in gross to be shaken off, because the inventors of them were men.[16]

When Hooker is dealing with Puritan objections to aspects of worship and church order he sets out a threefold test, ‘intrisinc reasonableness’, ‘the judgment of antiquity, and…the long continued practice of the whole Church, from which unnecessarily to swerve, experience hath never as yet found it safe’, and the ‘authority of the Church itself.’[17] As Archbishop McAdoo comments behind Hooker likes John Jewel, the earliest apologist for the Church of England, who believed that the Elizabethan Settlement has ‘come, as near as we possibly could, to the church of the apostles, and of the old catholic bishops and fathers.’[18] In the seventeenth century this appeal to ‘antiquity’ became a standard part of Anglican apologetic, bishop Lancelot Andrewes famously claiming that the Anglican approach could be summed up in an appeal to ‘one canon, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period.’[19] As McAdoo comments, ‘the appeal to antiquity meant….that while the place of Scripture was central, Anglicans did not regard it as existing in a vacuum apart from the life of the Church within which it was formed in the first place.’ The writings of the Fathers, the decisions of the councils, and the history of the church in the patristic period did not constitute a second canon which was above criticism but served rather as a guide to the interpretation of scripture. ‘it anchored Anglican theological method to the fact of the Church, and…..kept theological method aware of history and sensitive to its implications.’[20]

            The Anglican recognition of the authority of antiquity was an expression of a concern to provide guidelines for the interpretation of Scripture. Hooker’s magisterial work, like much Anglican apologetic, was a concerned to rebut narrow Puritan sola scriptura interpretations on the one hand and Roman innovations on the other. It was a defence of the via media, the Anglican ‘golden mean’ between extremes, or what Archbishop Matthew Parker called a ‘golden mediocrity.’        

The Oxford Movement in the early nineteenth century led to these issues becoming once again a concern for Anglicans. In 1827 Edward Hawkins, Provost of Oriel, preached a sermon on tradition, which made an impact on the young John Henry Newman. Hawkins’ target was the Bible Society which was distributing bibles without the prayer book, which in its liturgy and creeds, provided the ecclesial context for the interpretation of Scripture. It was a mistake, Hawkins said, to think that distributing the Bible was the equivalent of distributing Christianity. Harkins’ sermon was in some ways a classic exposition of the maxim ‘the Church to teach the Bible to prove.’ Some years later Benjamin Harrison, then a Student of Christ Church and a contributor to the Tracts for the Times, found himself engaged in discussion with a French abb¾, Jean-Nicholas Jager, later Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Sorbonne, about the whole series of questions of the authority of antiquity, the Roman claims, and the Anglican via media. Harrison soon found himself out of his depth and the public correspondence he had initiated was taken over by Newman.[21] It was this correspondence which underlay Newman’s Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1836), later republished in 1877 as The Via Media of the Anglican Church, Newman’s most substantial study of ‘tradition’. The Harrison-Jager correspondence had come to focus particularly on the arguments of John Jebb, bishop of Limerick, concerning the test of the Vincentian Canon, laying down the rule of faith for what Christians believed was quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus – ‘what was believed always, everywhere and by all’. In his discussion Jebb had been quite clear that ‘the Reformation did not get rid of the pope to set up 10,000 popes in his place,’ that there needed to be an ecclesial interpretation of scripture, and that ‘private judgement’ was the shipwreck of churches.

            Tradition is concerned with corporate believing, and Newman sees clear analogies with the common law tradition of England, and the identity of societies, colleges and communities. ‘By Tradition,’ he writes, Catholics ‘mean the whole system of faith and ordinances which they have received from the generation before them, and that generation again from the generation before itself. And in this sense undoubtedly we all go by Tradition in matters of this world……….Tradition is uniform custom.’[22] But later Newman distinguishes between ‘episcopal’ tradition and ‘prophetic’ tradition. Creeds and conciliar definitions are ‘episcopal’ tradition. ‘Tradition, this formally and statedly enunciated and delivered from hand to hand, is of the nature of a written document, and has an evidence of its Apostolical origin the same in kind with that adducible for the Scriptures….rites and ceremonies [likewise]..are something more than mere oral Traditions, and, as being so, carry with them a considerable presumption in behalf of the things signified by them.’[23] But ‘episcopal’ tradition is set within a larger matrix, which Newman labels ‘prophetic’ tradition. This is the wider context of Christian reflection, and includes for Newman theological teaching and controversy, devotion (both liturgical and personal), and the exercise of the Christian imagination, bearing in mind that John Keble had linked together the prophetic and the poetic, an understanding which was shared by Newman. He equates it with ‘the mind of the Spirit’, ‘the thought and principle which breathed in the Church, her accustomed and unconscious mode of viewing things, and the body of her received notions.’ It is an indwelling of the mystery of revelation, ‘consisting of a certain body of Truth, pervading the Church like an atmosphere, irregular in its shape from its very profusion and exuberance; at times separable only in idea from Episcopal Tradition, yet at times melting away into legend and fable.’[24]

            Newman was aware, from his earlier work, The Arians of the Fourth Century, that creeds and dogmas live only in the mystery they are intended to expound. Divide off the words of the creed from the living faith of the Christian community and the reality of the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church and they are merely words. Scripture is by its nature unsystematic, and doctrine emerges in articulate expression only as the church is faced with new situations, new questions and new challenges. Yet those new situations are not to compel the church to change, but to elicit the truth of the revelation uniquely given in Jesus Christ in a new situation. In Newman’s pithy words, ‘it changes always in order to remain the same.’ This is the context of Newman’s defence of tradition, and it was to lead him to make a study of the development of Christian doctrine, carrying with it the question that if there was indeed development, who, where, or what was the developing authority which could discern and discriminate between legitimate developments and distorting corruptions. Or, as we might put it, all churches need a magisterium and criteria for assessing doctrinal development, criteria which must be rooted in scripture and tradition.

            Dr David Brown, Van Mildert Professor of Divinity at Durham, has recently published two major volumes which examine the whole area of the authority of tradition. Like Newman he sees tradition as more than the record of creeds and councils, vitally important as those are. He particularly draws on the whole area of Christian art as a way of illustrating how the Christian imagination has endeavoured to draw out the implications of the Christian tradition, and challenges us to take the experience of the church far more seriously than we are inclined to do in the articulating and shaping of Christian faith and doctrine. He also, quite rightly, demonstrates how complex is the process by which, in Newman’s words, the church changes in order to remain the same, and to give contemporary expression to a gospel that is both eternal truth and necessarily embedded in history and expressed in changing social contexts. As he writes in the concluding paragraph of Discipleship and Imagination:

[Tradition] has been the imaginative motor that has assured the continuous adaptation of God’s revelation to the world under new circumstances and new conditions. The process was a messy one since it entailed God’s deep involvement with people like ourselves, and so a fallible Bible and a fallible Church interacting with a no less fallible wider world. [But we are called to discipleship and] discipleship, if it is about anything, is surely not so much about instantaneous results as about a continuing process of transformation, as both as individuals and as a community we gradually learn more deeply of God’s meaning and purpose for our lives.[25]

Only in this way does the Holy Spirit, the life of Christians and the koinwnia of the Church, lead us into all truth, by taking of the things of Christ and making them known to us.

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