Scripture, Tradition, and Divine Revelation

Sisters and brothers, welcome back for another episode of renewed, where we're talking today about not only the gift of Faith, but our understanding of divine revelation, both in tradition and in Scripture. We begin with where we left last time talking about Faith. This response to God, God who has created in us a longing.

Today we go from what Faith is an act to the content of our Faith. What it is that we understand about God and how God speaks to us. We believe and hold dearly that there is one source of God's Revelation. There are not two. Scripture and tradition aren’t separate. They flow from one source, and that is God Himself who wishes us to know who this is that loves us and wills for us to share in his friendship and living his glory for all time, both here on earth and as we complete our earthly pilgrimage of Faith.

So when we talk about Faith, we want to start perhaps with Tradition. Oftentimes there's a misunderstanding. There's a thought that Scripture has been around forever. The Bible as we know it today, was possessed from right at the time of Christ's death. The story is Scripture evolved over time and in effect is a reflection of our Tradition, our understanding of God's relationship and revelation, to the people of God and the Hebrews, the age of Judaism, and then today as it comes to us in Christ. 

Let me start with what the Catechism says about tradition. It says it's got a beautiful quote. “Tradition is the living transmission of the message of the gospel in the Church.” The living transmission. Tradition, we should understand, sisters and brothers, that big T, Tradition, that what we hold most dear to have been revealed by the time of the last apostle. The deposit of Faith completed, that that Tradition continues to unfold for us today. It doesn’t change in its meaning, but it changes in its expression.

Saint John the 23rd, who called the Second Vatican Council. He called the council in part to help us express our Faith in the times in which we live. That is, our language evolves as our circumstances evolve, the content of our Faith speaks to our world in a different way. And so what we see when we talk about Faith is not only the oral Tradition that has been passed down but also the role of the inspiration of the Holy Spirit within the life of the Church.

The apostolic succession and this notion of magisterium, that when we have a teaching that goes back to the time of Christ, there must be an authentic interpreter. We’re not left to our own to interpret what revelations says to us in Tradition. Rather, we are united with our bishops. Our bishops are those who succeeded the apostles as the faithful interpreters of the gospel and Tradition.

For us as the Church, we do hold the belief, though, when it comes to our Faith and what has been revealed to us in Scripture and Tradition that the Church cannot air. When we say that it means the community of the faithful that includes our bishops, but also led by our bishops. So you and I, as faithful Catholics, as faithful Christians, have a role in the authentic interpretation of the Scripture. But we ultimately defer to the teaching is offered to us through our bishops in unity with the Pope.

So Tradition is the way God speaks to us. God spoke to us in the life of Christ. Not everything we're told in the gospel not everything that Christ did is recorded in the scriptures. So we have those things that don't come to us through tradition. Great examples of that, or our understanding of the Immaculate Conception, by which Mary is conceived. It's also our understanding of the perpetual virginity of Mary. Things that are not in Scripture per se, but have been a constant part of our Tradition from the time of Christ on the last apostles.

Let's go forward then and talk about Scripture itself. It's interesting to note that it wasn’t until 1546 at the Council of Trent that all the books of the Old and New Testament, 46 books of the Old Testament, in the 27 books of the New Testament, were declared to all be inspired in its entirety by God.

Now, when we understand what revelation means when it comes to Scripture, it's not as if an angel sat on the shoulder of each of the evangelists and told them what to write, or that an angel sat on the other shoulder of Isaiah, or Jeremiah or Ezekiel. Rather, God used humans with their human skills. Some poets, some more like historians, some like letter writers.

Using all those human skills to reveal what God willed for us to hear this great story of love that goes from the Old Testament to the New Testament, the story of God's love, our feelings, God's desire for our salvation, and ultimately His sending Christ to be the fullness of revelation for us.

That story of Scripture, then, is there for us.

In the understanding of Scripture, though, we need to keep two things in mind. The Church teaches two ways to understand the Scripture. One is the historical-critical method. That’s when we look at something like the Wedding Feast at Cana. We realize there were six water jars, and they were about 180 gallons of water that they would hold that were turned into wine and we look at the factual historical relevance. 

The other is the spiritual understanding that when that water was changed into wine, it was a symbol of the Kingdom of God. It was a symbol of the joy that we are called to experience as Christians, both in our earthly journey and at the end of our pilgrimage. So there’s a literal historical meaning, and there’s also a spiritual meaning.

The spiritual meanings can teach us a number of things. They can teach us about how they're in the Old Testament. We can find those signs that point to Christ. So there’s that kind of allegorical meaning. There’s a meaning that's moral, where the scriptures tell us about the moral life. And there’s also the meanings that relate to eternal life, as I just used at the Wedding Feast at Cana, kind of pointing to the joy of heaven in heavenly existence.

So one of the things that we have to be careful about in Scripture, in our reading of Scripture is one is over-literalism. It’s almost like we take historical to the wrong degree and speak as if there every word of Scripture is historically and scientifically accurate. That’s not necessarily true. What we know is that the Scripture communicates the truth, the religious truth that God wanted us to know, not the scientific truth, for example.

On the other hand, it’s reducing Scripture to just so much historical that there is no matter of Faith included. Ultimately, revelation comes to us through Tradition and through Scripture. And then our Tradition has been encapsulated in a couple of summary forms that we use today. One is the Apostle’s Creed. It’s the formula that's desired and reflected in our Baptism is what do we believe about God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the Church. Forgiveness of sins, eternal life. The resurrection of the dead. Those things that come to us that were formulated somewhere around the time of the apostles. So we call it the Apostle’s Creed. 

The second is a much more fuller, complete version, the one we say at Sunday Mass, which is the Nicene Creed or the Nicene Constantinople Creed, that reflects the Church’s understanding of Jesus. The Father and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity and their relationship and the life of the Church. Through the first three centuries of the Church’s life. The Nicene Creed was first written in 325, refined in 381.

These two were summaries of Faith. When you ask the question, what’s included in our Tradition, an easy place to start is those things that are reflected in the Apostle’s Creed and in the Nicene Creed. Our faithfulness to the Creed is the pathway for us, sisters and brothers, to be renewed.

Reflection Questions:

1. How does understanding Tradition and Scripture together deepen our Faith?

2. Why is it important to interpret Scripture both historically and spiritually?

3. In what ways can the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed serve as a foundation for our beliefs today?