What Sacred Tradition is NOT (Part 1 in Tradition series)

(Anytime I footnote something with CCC and a number, it stands for Catechism of the Catholic Church followed by the paragraph referenced. CC will mean Roman Catholic Church, specifically. If I just say Church, we can look at that as the universal ‘invisible’ Church – the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ. If I say Christians, I mean all Christians whether they be Baptist, Catholic, non-denominational, Lutheran, etc.)

A Protestant friend once asked me about what Sacred Tradition was. I decided to research it and give a detailed answer. After all that work, I figured it was worth posting on my blog.

I did not have a good understanding of what sacred Tradition was until the last couple of years. Many Catholics probably couldn’t give you an accurate description of what it is. And even as I researched a bit to prepare for this answer, I learned more about it. I may get off track and go into other issues, but that’s unavoidable with Catholic theology because like the Bible, everything is so inter-related and closely connected and beautifully deep and consistent, so bear with me.

What Tradition is Not:

Not tradition in the sense most Americans think of tradition.

Ask the average American or even yourself or myself what they think of when you say tradition, and they may think of having turkey on Thanksgiving, or putting up a Christmas tree. Why do we eat certain foods on holidays or do certain public ‘rituals’? Well, ‘cuz that’s what we’ve always done. This is what many people may think of for reasons why we do or believe certain things in the Catholic Church. This idea creates the perception that much of what we believe has crept in gradually sometime during the Middle Ages and little by little steered us off course from what Christ set up and the apostles taught about how ‘church’ is done. And now, maybe the cultural reasons for doing certain things has changed, but we still do the rituals or whatever, ‘cuz that’s what we’ve always done.

A better statement to make about why we do or believe certain things is “that’s what the early Church did and believed and has been passed down through the centuries to us.” The Mass is a good example of this.* In a letter that Justin Martyr wrote to the pagan emperor Antoninus Pius around the year 155 that explained what Christians did, he says that on Sunday we gather and,

-The memoirs of the apostles (New Testament) and the writings of the prophets (OT probably)
-Admonishment (sermon/homily)
-Prayers for ourselves and for all others (Prayers of the faithful)
-Someone brings bread and water and wine to him who presides over the brethren. (Offertory)
-Presider offers praise and glory to the Father…. (Liturgy of Eucharist)
-When he has concluded the prayers… all present give voice to an acclamation by saying: “Amen”. (The great Amen)
-The eucharisted bread, wine and water are distributed (Communion)
CCC 1345

I didn’t want to type out his whole letter and just abbreviated each line, but as you can see, it’s very close to the liturgy at Mass that we have today. There are some short prayers that have been added centuries later, but if it was this well established by 155 A.D., chances are that they did this even earlier, in the lifetime of the apostles. In fact the Didache also gives strong support to this. This means the Mass was not something that crept into practice through the ages, but something the apostles and their successors instituted. If you read other writings of Church fathers at that time, you see that the belief in the actual body and blood of Christ being present in the bread and wine was widely held and taught – you don’t see it disputed. Combine that with John chap 6 (the whole chapter but esp. vs. 55 & 56), 1 Corinth 10:16, & 1 Corinth 11:23 – 29 (especially vs. 27) and Luke 24:30-31, 35 (the road to Emmaus, being made known in the breaking of the bread), and you can see why the C.C. is so ‘stuck’ on the Mass. It took me a while to understand. I thought they were just stuck in their ways. Why not update the Sunday celebration and not be so ritualistic? Now, though, I have been to Masses where the people are on fire and full of faith and the Mass is a totally different experience. It’s what God intended.

* Not trying to add confusion, but the Mass itself contains both traditions in the sense of changeable practices AND it is a part of our Sacred Tradition.

Not new revelation

…. And no new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ. Yet even if Revelation is already complete, it has not been made completely explicit; it remains for Christian faith gradually to grasp its full significance over the course of the centuries.
(CCC 66)

God has revealed Himself fully by sending His own Son, in whom He has established his covenant forever. The Son is his Father’s definitive Word; so there will be no further Revelation after Him.
(CCC 73)

Not above Scripture

My whole attempt at trying to explain this stemmed from a comment my friend made about what a priest said to him about Tradition. His understanding of what the priest said was that if Scripture says one thing and Tradition says another, then Tradition wins out. However, CCC 80 says “Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, then, are bound closely together and communicate one with the other. For both of them, flowing out of the same divine well-spring, come together in some fashion to form one thing and move towards the same goal.”

If that’s true, then they cannot contradict.

Perhaps what the priest meant to say is that if the first glance interpretation of Scripture says one thing, but Tradition says another, then we go with what Tradition teaches about that Scripture. Scripture says something like judge not lest you be judged. Does that mean, as most Americans will say about their favorite verse today, that we shouldn’t judge sin as sinful? That we shouldn’t work against abortion, euthanasia, homosexual marriage? Or, when Jesus says if your eye causes you to offend, pluck out your eye, does that mean we should pluck out our eyes? If so, we’d all be blind. You don’t need me (or the CC) to give any lessons to you about when to take the Bible literally and when it’s figurative on a verse like that. But what about verses about the Eucharist, infant Baptism, faith alone saving you vs. grace saving you, etc.?

A Protestant might look at the CC and say Tradition & Scripture contradict, therefore they are not in harmony. But, a non-Christian skeptic will say the same thing about Scripture in and of itself. They think Scripture contradicts itself. The problem is not Scripture; the problem is a lack of understanding on their part of the whole of Scripture.

Examples of Catholic small ‘t’ traditions:

Sacred Tradition aka Apostolic Tradition, like Scripture, cannot change. However, small ‘t’ traditions can. These are more like disciplines. In the past, you couldn’t eat meat on any Friday of the year. Now, that just applies to Lent. However, Catholics are supposed to choose their own form of fasting or self-denial on the rest of the Friday’s of the year. This is more of an issue of obedience to the wisdom of your elders. Similar to if a senior pastor in a Protestant church asked the church to fast one day/month for an upcoming church outreach event. You could do more than that if you’d like – but it probably would not be good to blow him off and not do it at all. Maybe the following year, God leads him to call for 2 hours/week of group prayer instead of fasting. Is it inherently sinful not to fast one day a month, even though you did the previous year? No, but is it sinful to disobey those with God-given authority? Same with Lenten fasting & abstinence. It’s not inherently sinful to eat meat on Fridays, but it is to disobey legitimate authority.

Married priests is another example. At one time they did have married priests. Plus, today, some eastern Catholic rites allow married clergy. And even in the Latin rite (which is what most of the Catholic churches in the U.S. are) there are about 100 married priests in America. These are men that were already married and ordained Lutheran or Anglican ministers before they converted to Catholicism. So, this could change, depending on what the leadership in the CC decides.

I bring these up because if Sacred Tradition is part of how the CC defines Truth or dogmas, then it cannot and does not change. However, these things are not a matter of defining truth, they are practices. These are more like the typical American understanding of tradition. I think the lack of distinction between these traditions and Sacred Tradition is the reason many Catholics are confused about what sacred Tradition is.

CCC 83 states this as well.