In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Tim Staples to discuss the Catholic understanding of tradition and how it relates to Sola Scriptura. Tim clarifies the misconceptions surrounding tradition and explains its significance in the Catholic faith, addressing common Protestant objections.
Transcript:
Caller: I was a Southern Baptist pastor for 10 years and was very much entrenched in a Reformed theology. I’m going back and I’m trying to now understand how to respond to those things. And I’m dealing with the issue of sola scriptura. And as I read Protestants arguing against it, they often talk about the tradition of the church. And one of the arguments, they say is that the church’s tradition is not clearly defined, that there’s disagreements as to what constitutes that. And I was wondering if you could help me understand a little bit better what it is that makes up the body of tradition and what they’re talking about when they say that there’s disagreements as to what tradition is.
Tim Staples: Right. Well, there’s really not much disagreement as to what constitutes tradition. What they’re talking about is like some fine tuning of things. Like what precisely? To be honest with you, I think this is one of the problems we have in the Western or in the Latin Church is we tend to over define things at times because what we’ve always done. You’ve probably heard the old saying, and this is certainly exaggerated, but the scholastics arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pen. Right. That sort of that old saying is there. It’s kind of a poetic way of saying that we’re just defining too much. And I think that’s what can be the problem here. But remember, the tradition from a biblical perspective is all encompassing. You know, as you know, Brother Second Thessalonians 2:15, St. Paul says, Stand fast in the tradition. You have been taught either by word, that is the spoken word or written letter. So notice the tradition encompasses both the written tradition and the spoken tradition. So in that sense, the tradition, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, contains the entirety of the revelation of God. So Scripture itself is part of the tradition in that sense. But now, you know, in more recent times, especially since the Council of Trent and the Reformation, you know, there’s been a lot of fine tuning here. Well, what part of the faith is found in scripture and what part of the faith is found in the oral tradition? Talking about, in one sense, how the tradition is all encompassing, but in another sense now, especially like I said in the last five, 600 years, where we’re fine tuning things, that’s the way we do things in the Catholic Church. You know, the kingdom of God is as a grain of mustard seed. It starts small and it grows. That’s the way it happens. And as the Catechism says in paragraph 78, this living transmission accomplished in the Holy Spirit is called Tradition, since it’s distinct from Sacred Scripture, though closely connected to it through Tradition, the Church inter doctrine, life and worship perpetuates and transmits to every generation all that she herself is and all that she believes. There in that one line there in paragraph 78, you get that sense of. It’s almost like a tension, but a healthy, I say tension between. In the Tradition, the Church transmits everything that she is in the Tradition with a big T. And yet it’s distinct from Sacred Scripture, though very much related to it. Right. So people’s brains are exploding. Wait a minute. So the Tradition is all encompassing, and yet the Scripture is distinct from it and yet closely related to it. What we have here. And a little bit later, the Church will go on to say that Scripture, Tradition and Magisterium are so closely related to each other that one cannot stand without the others. Right. So they’re so intimately involved. Now how this then becomes confused in the minds especially of folks who don’t have the best intentions, let’s say, when they’re coming after Catholicism. Right. They’re saying, see, this is just a bunch of mishmash confusion. Well, it’s really not, but it’s describing the way the mysteries of God are communicated through Holy Mother Church. And let’s take the Trinity for example. You simply do not have fully defined in Sacred Scripture what the Trinity is. It’s not there. Yes, right, right. The Tradition is absolutely essential in order to. And remember, the Tradition was communicating the truth of the Trinity long before we had a definition of what the Trinity is. That is an infallible definition that would come many, many centuries later at the councils of Florence and Trent. We’re talking 15th and 16th century. And yet we had, for centuries we had Hilary Poitiers and Augustine writing full treatises, even Tertullian, although he’s a little bit weak there in the third century when he’s writing on the Holy Spirit, he gets into a lot of Trinitarian theology. And wait a minute, there was no definition. That’s how it works in the Church is. Yeah, we have this belief in the Trinity. It’s rooted in Sacred Scripture, no doubt, but it was being taught before the Scriptures were even written down. And then later it would be defined more and more. The first time we see the word trinitas used anywhere is 181, Saint Theophilus of Antioch. He’s the first one to use the term, but yet you can see before him Saint Irenaeus, clearly the three persons of Blessed Trinity, I mean, Irenaeus, and again, against heresies as well. In his apostolic preaching, you find the Trinity, not the Word, but the theology of it is all over the place. And so here’s where the problem comes in. All right? What you don’t have in Sacred Scripture are clearly defined the four essential eternal relations in the Godhead, three of which constitute the persons, right? Now, that’s a definition that would come centuries later, reflecting on the Scriptures and reflecting on. We have in the writings of the Fathers that, as I learned in the seminary, the key to understanding the Trinity is one essence, two processions, three persons, four relations, right? That’s what we learned all those years ago in the seminary. But when you flesh those out, do you have the two processions in Scripture? Sure you do. You know, the two processions, that is, the Father begets the Son, that’s called a generative procession. And we have the Holy Spirit in aspirative procession, proceeds from the Father. Well, and later, and the Son, as we developed in our Catholic theology. And so here’s the challenge, Scott, is to help folks to see that you’re not going to have from the Catholic Church ever. I don’t care how Latin you are, you are never going to have from the Catholic Church. You know, like a surgeon, we’re going to cut out, okay? This part here is just tradition. And it’s not anything scripture. That word is, but this word isn’t. That’s just not the way the gospel. The church proclaims the gospel of Jesus Christ and develops in her understanding of the mysteries that were. That were communicated to us in full in the first century. That will be, you know, laid out and developed and such. But what she does is she draws on the entirety of the tradition, written and oral, in developing our understanding of what all the mysteries of the faith are. So I encourage folks, don’t get hung up on thinking that you have to delineate somehow between. Okay, well, then what? The fact is, without the Tradition, you don’t have an understanding of the Trinity. Without Scripture, you don’t have the understanding of the Trinity. And without the Magisterium, you don’t have the understanding of the Magisterium. You need all. All three. Scott, thanks so much for that question. I hope that that was helpful to you. Hey, I wanted to ask you before I go to the next call, you’re familiar with.