Scripture does not replace the Church, it resides within the church and Holy Tradition

Holy Apostolic Tradition, the Scriptures, and Interpretation

Chat-GTP’s rendition of Orthodox Holy Tradition and Scripture (unedited)

Please note that throughout this discussion, I will refer to both Tradition (capital T) to mean the Holy Tradition of the church. When I use tradition (lowercase t) I refer to cultural traditions and/or the “sinful ways of our fathers.”

In a previous article, we discussed how and why the LDS church effectively built a replacement for Holy Tradition as a way to create a singular authorized interpretation of scripture and to mitigate the excesses of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura. You can read this story by clicking on the headline below.

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In this article, we are going to further explore the role of Holy Tradition and the Church beyond a connection to written Scripture. Before we do, I think it’s important to reiterate that the New Testament is a product of the original Christian church, what we now call the Orthodox Church. The church produced it as a codification of some of their oral Traditions. It didn’t fall from heaven, nor was it delivered by an angel.

Please note that most of the quotes in this article were obtained from the most excellent book, “Know the Faith: A Handbook for Orthodox Christians and Inquirers,” by Michael Shanbour. Ancient Faith Publishing.

Holy Apostolic Tradition and Scripture

Tradition, in Greek, means literally “to hand down” or “to deliver.” Thus when the apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians “For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received.” (1 Cor. 15:3) He’s speaking about Holy Tradition.

Holy Tradition contains all of those things that the apostles taught the early saints that were not written down in the New Testament. Thus we can also refer to it as Holy Apostolic Tradition. For example, Paul spent 2-3 years in Ephesus, but Ephesians is only six pages long. Does it contain everything Paul taught them? Because many of the things he taught them were not written down, does that mean we should ignore those teachings? Of course not.

Why then are not all of these teachings in the New Testament? Well, the Church didn’t want everything exposed to the public. They had many teachings and practices that they considered sacred and did not want demeaned, trivialized or mocked.

St. Basil the Great said “Reverence for the mysteries is best encouraged by silence.”

The things the Church wanted to be public are found in the writings of the New Testament. The sacred things reserved for the church are retained in Holy Tradition. It is instructive to note that the New Testament contains none of the daily life of the church, such as hymns, prayers used for services, how to perform consecrations or sacraments, instructions for celebrating the Eucharist, etc. These are all conspicuously missing.