Sex Au Naturel (8 page)

When the New Testament uses the word “tradition” to denote orally transmitted truth, it is not even argued but assumed to be on equal footing with God’s written Word. The following review, which borrows heavily from a useful tract published by Catholic Answers titled
Scripture and Tradition
,
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summarizes the main positive biblical references to tradition.

• Saint Paul urges the Thessalonians to “stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter” (2 Thess. 2:15).
  

   
  

• He writes to Timothy, “What you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2). There is no mention here of reliance upon on anything written, since the writing of the New Testament was barely underway.
  

   
  

• Paul refers to what he has received from the Lord and His disciples and now hands on to the believers in Corinth: “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.… Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed” (1 Cor. 15:3, 11).
  

   
  

• The apostle praises those who follow the Sacred Tradition given by him: “I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you” (1 Cor. 11:2). He then goes so far as to hold up his own conduct as a living exemplar for the new Corinthian Christians, promptly telling them to obey his spoken, preached word: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you” (1 Cor. 11:1, 2).
  

   
  

• According to Saint Peter, the Gospel of Jesus will always be taught orally: “‘But the word of the Lord abides for ever’ That word is the good news which
  was preached
  to you” (1 Pet. 1:25, emphasis mine).
  

   
  

• Jesus identified His own teaching with that of His apostles: “He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me” (Lk. 10:16), and He later commissioned them, not to write books, but to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Mt. 28:19). How? By preaching and teaching. For “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ” (Rom. 10:17).
  

   
  

• The first Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42) long before there was a New Testament. The fullness of Christian teaching was to be found not in a book but in the teaching Church, the living presence of Christ. Saint Paul himself quotes a saying of Jesus that does not appear in any of the Gospels: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35). The Gospels themselves are oral tradition that has been written down.
  

   
  

• Saint Luke opens his Gospel by stating what was derived from reliable oral testimony: “Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed” (Lk. 1:1–4).
  

   
  

• Christ did not promise that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Bible, but that they would not prevail against the Church (Mt. 16:18). The New Testament itself declares
  the Church
  to be “the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15).
  

   
  

• The truth of the faith has been given first of all to the leaders of the Church (Eph. 3:5), who, with the Lord Jesus, form the foundation of the Church (Eph. 2:20). The Church is guided by the Holy Spirit, who protects the teaching of Christ from corruption and error (Jn. 14:25–26, 16:13).
  

   
  

• Acts 15 describes one of the first crises of the early Church, which concerned whether new converts must be circumcised in accord with the Mosaic practice. The Old Testament obviously had no answer, and the New didn’t exist yet. What then was the rightful authority that could decide? Paul and Barnabas knew. They took the question “up to Jerusalem” and asked the apostles and presbyters. After hearing Peter’s negative answer, they discussed the matter and were in unanimous agreement: no requirement for circumcision. A letter was sent, which read, “We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. For it has seemed good to the
  Holy Spirit and to us
  to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things …” (Acts 15:27, 28, emphases mine), and then the letter lists some other customary prohibitions. Here are joined two key elements of Catholic authority, tradition and infallibility.
  

   
  

The classic verse used by Protestants to reject the validity of Sacred Tradition is 2 Timothy 3:16–17: “All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” Enlisting Paul to refute Tradition, though, is refuted in two ways.

The first is that Paul is merely telling Timothy that Scripture is inspired and profitable for the uses he mentions (which it is!), not that it’s sufficient. The second problem is summed up by the literary maxim, “a text without a context is a pretext.” The previous verses show that Paul is actually endorsing Sacred Tradition along with Scripture: “But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:14–15).

Since several other Epistles had not been written when Paul wrote to young Timothy, the “sacred writings” and “Scripture” to which he refers must be the Old Testament.

So God’s Word comes to us from two closely related sources, Scripture and Tradition. But how are these concretely applied to each generation?

Any authoritative document requires a living authority to interpret its contents. We see this clearly in the political and commercial realm. How long would a country remain stable without a Supreme Court of some kind to interpret its Constitution? How profitable would a company be without a Board of Directors to interpret its founding by-laws?

In the case of God’s Word, that interpretive body is the Magisterium: the pope and all bishops in union with him. Jesus our Savior is also our Teacher (
magister
is Latin for “teacher”) who has “the words of eternal life” ( Jn. 6:68). He spent three or so years teaching His disciples, revealing to them the love of the Father and the way of salvation that was Himself.

But much was left untaught. Not in the sense that His teaching was less than the fullness of truth, but it was incomplete insofar as it did not, and could not, answer controverted questions that arose only later, such as: Was He truly God incarnate? If so, how? Is God a Trinity? What’s the ethical status of first-strike nuclear war? Is embryonic stem cell research morally licit? In light of advanced pain relief technology, can euthanasia be okay? How about masturbation? Or in vitro fertilization? Should infants be baptized? Ought we clone human beings?

And, more pertinent to this chapter: Which books belong in the New Testament?

Christ touched explicitly on none of these questions, yet getting the answers right is vital to being a disciple. This is especially true when it comes to the meaning of Scripture itself. Individual interpretation of what any given passage means, or does not mean, doesn’t work for the simple reason that all heretics claim biblical support for their heresy. Saint Peter points out the danger of the “me and my Bible” approach when he writes, “First of all you must understand this, that no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation” (2 Pet. 1:20). Referring to Paul’s letters, Peter adds, “There are some things in them hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other scriptures” (2 Pet. 3:16).

Jesus did not leave us orphans. He entrusted the truths He taught—the Truth He is—to His Church, which would be the extension of the Incarnation through time and would faithfully proclaim what her Founder taught while on earth. “Our faith in the Church is grounded in the Church’s faithfulness,” writes philosopher Peter Kreeft. “The Church does not have authority over Sacred Tradition because she is not its author. Its author is Christ. She can interpret it and draw out its inner meanings, but she can never correct it. She can add to it but never subtract from it; and when she adds, she adds from within, organically, as a tree adds fruit, not mechanically, as a construction crew adds another story to a house.”
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Leaving His earthly mission unfinished, the Lord Jesus entrusted the deposit of faith to His representatives (preeminently the pope and bishops) who would spread the Gospel and “make disciples of all nations,” relying all the while on the Lord’s promised presence (cf. Mt. 28, Jn. 14–17). Instituted by Christ, the organic structure of the deposit of faith is composed of Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium.

The Second Vatican Council clarified the proper relationship between the three:

A simple analogy might be a great king who commissions a troubadour to write a song about the king’s love for his subjects, to be sung for generations. The correct notes put down in musical notation by the troubadour correspond to the written Word of God. The actual performance of the song—lifting inert black notes up into the beautiful thing we call a melody, and the job of handing on how to phrase the notes—corresponds to Sacred Tradition and the living Magisterium through time.

We see other examples of this all the time with family customs. Most families pass on traditions, from how to celebrate birthdays, to how and when to trim the Christmas tree, to favorite vacation destinations and other tried-and-true rituals. No one in the family suddenly jumps up and demands to know where these are written down. No, such traditions are “handed down” without a formal rule book.

Now that we have looked at the sources of Revelation, we turn to fry an even bigger fish: where in Scripture do we find the Catholic Church’s condemnation of birth control?