Scripture and Tradition

Thirdly, there survives definite evidence that the meaning of the Bible was consciously sought in relation to its context in Christian institutions. If the Bible supplied a critical background for all Christian teaching, as in fact it did, it had in turn a background of its own, by reference to which it could itself be criticised. This second and remoter background was the continuity of Christian practice, or, as we might say nowadays, the cultural history of Christianity from the most primitive times. The Fathers did not distinguish very clearly between practices which were really primitive and others of somewhat later introduction. They had little or none of the modern sense of evolutionary development, and saw no reason for a clean-cut separation in thought between the character of an institution in its rudimentary germ and that of the same institution in a fully developed form. Their expositions of cultural history are therefore not reliable; they always need to be checked. But since they recognised in the Bible itself something which the Church had instituted -- at any rate, before the New Testament could begin to shape the thought of the Church it had itself had to be put into shape by the Church -- it is wholly to their credit that they also recognised the need for comparing its witness with that of the other great formative contributions of the apostolic and subapostolic Church to spiritual order and discipline -- that is, in particular, the sacraments, the creeds, and the episcopate. The Bible was the fullest, the readiest, and the most authoritative witness, simply because its evidence was expressed in words, and littera scripta manet. But it did not stand alone, nor could the Church, in expounding its Bible, reasonably bring the exposition into conflict with the testimony of its other great primitive heritages. They were all alike regarded as tradition.

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Basil, archbishop of another Caesarea, in Cappadocia, was the father of Eastern monasticism, as Benedict was of Western. He it was who by his efforts accomplished as much as any one in reconciling conservative theology to the more penetrating doctrine of Athanasius and the Nicene Creed. His recognition of the doctrinal pre-eminence of the Bible is amply expressed in a passage in which he is maintaining the consistency of his own teaching with that of previous theological leaders: but, he continues, "this does not satisfy me, that it is the tradition of the fathers: they too followed the sense of Scripture, taking their principles from those passages which I have just quoted to you from Scripture" (de Spir. sanct. 16). Yet he too, and in the same treatise, makes a great point of the importance of evidence drawn from cultural sources. "Of the subjects of conviction and preaching maintained in the Church," he writes, "our possession of some is derived from the written teaching, but our reception of others comes by private transmission from the apostles' tradition: both these kinds have the same force for religion." He goes on to enumerate a wealth of instances of "unwritten customs", including the following: making the sign of the cross, turning to the east in prayer, the full text of the consecration prayers in the liturgy, the benediction of the baptismal water and the oil, and the very use of chrism and finally the actual formula of the baptismal creed (de Spir. sanct. 66, 67). None of these things, he observes, is prescribed in Scripture, but all possess apostolic authority. And though we should be less ready than he was to ascribe them all without qualification to the actual ordinance of the apostles, he was so far right in appealing to them as that the same Church which formed the canon of the New Testament was engaged concurrently in establishing such customs.

-- G.L. Prestige, Tradition: the Scriptural Basis of Theology (from the Bampton Lectures for 1940)