Scripture and Tradition

Anglicans and Episcopalians often refer to the metaphor of the three-legged-stool to help think about what we draw on to do our theological thinking. The three legs are scripture, tradition, and reason. I personally don’t hold all these on the same level or with the same amount of authority. I tend to think that scripture takes precedence over tradition, and scripture and tradition over reason. However, reason keeps our interpretation of scripture and tradition honest and applicable to changes in knowledge developed in other fields of study like the arts and sciences. What typically happens, however, is that in our minds these three legs end up functioning autonomously and we forget how they might interact with each other and even inform each other. For just a moment, I would like to reflect on the intimate connection between two of these three legs: scripture and tradition.

Let’s start with tradition. As two athletes will pass along a baton during a race, tradition is passed on from one generation to another. One generation lets it go by placing it in the hands of the next. For tradition to remain living and not become “dead tradition,” the new generation must take what has been handed to them and make it their own by reinterpreting it in light of new challenges and cultures. If the heart of the thing being passed on remains, then this kind of reinterpretation of something handed on is appropriate to keep traditions alive.

With this said there are two kinds of traditions. There are what I have called sacred and civic traditions. Civic traditions are things like ‘red lights’ mean stop; we drive on the right side of the road; we save family recipes. These are important because they prevent us from having to reinvent the wheel every generation. But these kinds of traditions which are passed on have a human origin and remain authoritative only as long as we all agree to abide by them. Sacred traditions, however, begin with a divine source. For Christians we may think of scripture, the prophets, or even Jesus himself. But this was also the case for Ancients like Hesiod or Socrates. There are some things which have their root and authority in a divine source (and it becomes pretty scary business when civic traditions are taken to be sacred).

Perhaps we can start to see the connection between scripture and tradition. We always must consider the source of any given tradition. Let’s focus for a moment on sacred tradition which has its starting point in something given to us by God. Here we get some helpful insights from one of my favorite 20th Century theologians, Henri DeLubac. In his book Scripture and Tradition DeLubac is concerned with freeing us from the obsession with the scientific approach to the interpretation of scripture which resulted in an overemphasis on harmonization, inerrancy, and the reading of sacred texts through modern scientific methods. DeLubac reminds us, because something comes from a divine source, it is necessarily mysterious. This is because the messenger is God. What is handed down to the prophets from mystery, is also mystery. It is mystery that allows sacred tradition to ‘progress’ in a living language in contemporary contexts. The spiritual interpretation of scripture allows for there to be an ever-repeating interpretation of divine mystery and revelation. The medieval church, for example, was never impeded from making fruitful developments from the previous generation’s theology. Bringing in ‘reason’ for a moment, there is nothing wrong with reading ancient texts along with newer developments; in fact this will often deepen our understanding of the former.

There is, no doubt, much at risk concerning this dynamic approach to tradition and scripture. This approach lends itself away from being able to have control of scripture and that a reading can never be objective in a strict sense. “The dialectic is endless, analogous to that of mysticism and mystery. We can really speak of it only in singular, as single act. We would never be able to understand it if we tried to judge it from a purely objective viewpoint, to reduce it to a scientific discipline.” The only ‘objectivity’ is that the mystical interpretation leads to the realities of a spiritual life that is the ‘subjective’ fruit of a spiritual life. Perhaps the scary bit of all this is that this approach to interpretation of scripture and tradition requires much regarding one’s own spiritual maturity.

So, coming back to our metaphor of the three-legged-stool. Scripture and tradition are not just two approaches to interpreting the world as Episcopal Christians; they are deeply intertwined. We need tradition to help us navigate the reading our scared scriptures that comes from a God who is beyond our ability to comprehend. But also, scripture is the root from which sacred tradition begins. One never really puts one down in order to pick up another.