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Scripture and Tradition:
"Dynamic Duo"
(A summary of this month's Youth Update) Our faith tradition serves to help us build a meaningful, honest and open relationship with God by showing us how to put together a "plate" of life experience that's balanced, healthy and not loaded with stuff that has limited or no spiritual value. The Church helps us find this balance through two basic ways of connecting with God: Scripture and Tradition. Scripture refers to any divine revelation from God to human beings that has been written down in the Bible. Tradition is the entire Word of God as it was entrusted to the apostles by Christ and the Holy Spirit. Our belief in Tradition expresses that those who are our official teachers in the Church are able to preserve, express and explain the Scriptures and their application to our lives. 1. Text and Context When a book of Scripture, or the Bible as a whole, is discussed, read and prayed about in the Church community, the depth, meaning and context of the words emerge more clearly. Interpretations that are way out of bounds, or that don't really hold up when you consider the Bible and the beliefs and practices of the Church as a whole, can be weeded out and discarded. The influence of Tradition assures a continuing process of adaptation. As times and societies change, ways in which to apply the ancient stories in the Bible to modern circumstances are worked out within the living Church community. 2. Two-way Street The key to any good friendship, of course, is that it works as a two-way street. Each person helps the other. The relationship between Scripture and Tradition is the same. Just as Scripture relies on Tradition to make it accessible and understandable to every generation of Christians, so Tradition relies on Scripture to find its way out of a very dangerous dilemma. Let's call it the problem of Tradition versus custom. Here's a basic example. You've probably reached the point in your life where your ideas about the kinds of clothes you look good in and your parents' ideas don't quite match. ("You're not going out in that, are you?") The difference of opinion here is mostly about custom. It's probably not that the way you want to dress or the way your parents want you to dress is wrong, but that each of you is operating according to different habits and tastes. These kinds of conflicts can usually be worked out because customs can be changed. That means there is always room for compromise and growth. Tradition is different. If you told your parents that starting tomorrow you'll be going to school naked, your ground for compromise is gone. To grant this request, your parents would have to compromise their basic standard of decency and their responsibility to love and protect you, and that is something they would never do. Tradition involves core values and beliefs which can never be compromised. Custom involves tastes and habits which can be. How can we tell the difference between Tradition—inspired by the Holy Spirit—and custom? This is where Scripture comes in. Like an anchor that allows a boat room to swing in arcs and circles but not to drift away, Scripture provides a grounding for everything the Church does and believes, giving us a standard we can use to tell the difference.
3. Lifeline We can only really understand what God is trying to communicate to us—and thus be able to follow Jesus intimately and faithfully—by developing a personal relationship with God and by developing a deeper relationship with the larger Church community into which we have been baptized. So the answer to the question, "Can't I just get to know God in my own way?" is yes. (In fact, this is the only way that we can get to know God.) But unless we pay attention to God in the two ways in which God speaks—through Scripture and Tradition—we'll never know what "our own way" really is. This issue of Youth Update was previewed via e-mail by JoAnn Casey (17) of New Ulm, Minnesota. JoAnn asked these questions of James Philipps. His answers follow.
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