Scripture, Tradition and the Community

Extract

This is not a time to be digging the old entrenched positions a little deeper and then defending them, so it is worth noting with caution that each of the terms in this title trails with it a long history of old battles and rigid attitudes. In any case, the old certainty about the meanings of the words we use is one of the new uncertainties.

There is even an implicit assumption hidden in the order in which the terms are used traditionally. We take it for granted, perhaps, that tradition is rooted in scripture, and that the community is first formed, and then grows, by a causal combination of these two prior factors. This view holds that the people of the Old. Testament and of the New were ‘People of a Book’, who were formed by the scriptures which they accepted. They had a clear tradition, as well, handed down to them from the very beginning : ‘It was of importance that this tradition should be preserved without deformation; and fidelity to the received tradition was the ultimate assurance that the doctrine proposed was genuine.’ A little later in the same article the function of tradition as a vital factor in the formation of the community is explicitly stated: ‘… the spirit indeed taught the Church, but communicated no new word beyond that which Jesus had incarnated and uttered. The content of the revelation, once Jesus no longer dwelt on earth, was secured only by the faithful preservation and transmission of the word among his followers. Tradition must therefore be included among the constitutive elements of the primitive Christian community.’