According to Scripture…Really?

Fr Anold Moyo, SJ
MANY Christians, particularly those that are not Catholics, believe that scripture, or the Bible, is the supreme authority in all matters of Christian doctrine and practice. They believe that in the Bible alone is contained the totality of God’s revealed truth. Catholics are often accused by Protestants and Evangelicals of holding beliefs that are not seemingly contained in the Bible.

“Where is that taught in the Bible?” That is the question often posed to Catholics whenever they speak about teachings such as purgatory, saints, Mary, infant baptism and so forth.

This belief in the supreme authority of scripture is known in Latin as “sola scriptura”, meaning “by scripture alone”.

But is scripture the only means of divine revelation? Is it the only means of knowing what Jesus Christ taught and what the early Christians believed in and practised in their worship?

Divinely revealed truth is not contained in scripture alone, but in tradition as well. The early Christians did not receive divine revelation from scripture alone.

In fact, their knowledge of the truth about Jesus Christ did not come about through scripture, but through the teaching that was handed down to them by word of mouth from the apostles of Jesus and their successors.

This is simply because the canon of the New Testament, a central part of the Christian Bible, only came into existence and recognition at least one hundred years after the death of Jesus and after Christianity had started.

This of course does not preclude the fact that writings attributed to the apostles were not in circulation before then. Such writings circulated from around AD50. Their genre ranged from gospels, epistles/letters, homilies, memoirs and various teachings and instructions on the Christian faith.

However, when the time came for church leaders to decide which among these writings were inspired and could be regarded as sacred writing, not all of them made it in the canon that was to be the New Testament.

It is important to note that the different books that today comprise the New Testament were written tens of years after the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, were written by different authors, to different audiences, and at different times.

The New Testament did not just miraculously emerge from somewhere as a unified book. It was a development. This development began with the Christ-event, that is, the life, teachings and works of Jesus Christ, including his passion, death and resurrection.

Upon his ascension to heaven, Jesus commissioned his disciples to continue the work that he had begun (Matthew 28: 16-20). They thus began the proclamation of the gospel, converting many to the newly founded Christian movement.

The new converts were instructed by word of mouth on the teachings and deeds of Jesus (2 Thessalonians 2:15; 1Cor 11:2). New forms of worship among the Christian communities emerged, including the worship on the first day of the week, Sunday (Acts 20:7; 1Cor 16:1-2). Some of the people who heard the preaching of the apostles, and some of the apostles themselves, began to write these down. The writings began to circulate in their fragmented forms in various Christian communities.

It was only later that church leaders (the popes, bishops and scholars) began to gather these writings together in order to come up with a specifically Christian scripture.

Among them is Pope Damusus I, whose commissioning in AD382 of the Latin Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible) led to the fixation of the New Testament canon. It is this version of the New Testament that was used by the Catholic Church as the official Bible (in addition to the Old Testament).

Centuries later, in the course of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther (founder of the Lutheran Church) was to remove seven books from this official Bible canon that had been in use for over a thousand years.

Other Protestant churches that emerged after followed suit. Such a removal of these books of course left a gap in the story of salvation history. It is Martin Luther as well who popularised the idea of sola scriptura, that only scripture gives us access to God’s revelation.

Such an assertion obviously neglects how scripture developed and the fact that for the first hundred years of Christianity, Christians had no New Testament to access this divine revelation, as it has been pointed out above.

What they had access to was the oral tradition from the apostles and their successors, and the liturgical (worship) practices that conveyed divine truth. This is what the Catholic Church refers to as Sacred Tradition, the truths about God and his salvific activity as handed down and transmitted by the apostles of Jesus and their successors (the bishops) to each generation.

Not all of these truths were captured by the authors that wrote the various books of Scripture (John 21: 25). It is by virtue of tradition that we have the New Testament, for the writers of the New Testament simply committed to writing what was already being believed by the early Christians as a result of the revealed truths that had been handed down to them by the apostles.

And it is upon the basis of this same tradition, of what was already being believed, that the canon of the New Testament was determined. As already mentioned, there were many writings that claimed divine inspiration that were circulating within first and second century Christian communities.

The church had therefore to decide which of these writings was truly inspired and could be regarded as sacred writing.

The main criterion for such a decision was tradition. The church inquired — does this piece of writing reflect and profess the faith that was handed down to us by the apostles and their successors? Thus, there exists a close connection and communication between sacred scripture and sacred tradition.

“Sacred scripture is the word of God in as much as it is consigned into writing under the inspiration of the divine spirit, while sacred tradition takes the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the apostles, and hands it on to their successors in its full purity” (Dei Verbum, Vatican Council II).

Scripture and tradition constitute one sacred deposit of the word of God and “both are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of loyalty and reverence”.

Therefore, when Catholics believe in the intercession of saints and of Mary, in purgatory, in infant baptism, or in the manner in which they celebrate Mass/Eucharist, or any beliefs and acts of worship that do not seem to have a direct mention in scripture, it is because such beliefs and acts of worship have been handed down to them in the last two-thousand year history of the Catholic Church, dating back to Christ’s apostles themselves.

It does not make any theological nor historical sense to dismiss tradition and profess sola scriptura.