Teo and I just came accross this by accident and for a different reason, but this is an excellent explanation of what Christianity is all about.
DIVINE REVELATIONAccording to the orthodox faith the Church is not founded upon written texts, rather on the admission that Christ is Theanthropos ; in other words that in the face of Christ, God was united to man "without confusion, without change, without division and without separation" (c.f. Theotokion of the Third Tone), and man came in a true communion with God. He was united "hypostatically" in Christ's person, i.e. in a one and unique "hypostasis", God and man.
The Son and Word of God continues to be hypostatically united with His Body and as the Head of the Church He is always thus united with us as well (Matt. 18: 20/28: 20). The presence of Christ is energised by the Holy Spirit in the life of the Church (1 Corinth. 12: 3); for this and the Church is "the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. 3:15; see also 1 Corinth. 2 : 7-11).
It was in the Body of Christ, to "the saints", that our holy faith was delivered "once and for all"; the one who does not belong to this Body cannot interpret correctly the holy Bible (2 Thessalonians. 3: 6. 2 Peter 3:16. Jude 3-4). In this context, the Divine Tradition is the experience of the Church, the divine memory of the Church , which is kept like a priceless treasure (2 Tim. 1:13-14).
The holy Bible does not include the completeness of the divine revelation. The importance of the spoken tradition and the care taken for its spreading from generation to generation was already underlined from Old Testament times (Psalm. 43:2 / 44:1 and Joel 1:3). The New Testament notes that it does not contain the completeness of the words and works of Christ (John 21:25).
That very book, the Holy Bible, makes use of the tradition (Numbers 21: 14-15. Matt.2: 23. Acts 20: 35. 2 Tim. 3: 8. Jude 14). Christ did not motion his disciples to write books but to preach, promising that He will always be among them (Matt. 28: 20) and that He will send them the Holy Spirit to stay with them (John 14: 16), to teach them and to remind them of His preaching (John 14: 25-26); to lead them "to the whole truth", revealing to them the deeper meaning of His words: all those things that they could not "hold" by their own powers (John 16: 12-15).
But even the Apostles did not limit themselves in writing the written texts; they spread to the first Christians (in spoken) much more than what was written "with paper and ink" (2 John 12. 3 John 13-14. 1 Corinth. 11: 34). Some of the written words proved to have an importance only at the time period of writing, for they were not kept in the Church: the number of the deacons (Acts 6: 3), the order of the widows (1 Tim. 5: 9), the cover of women (1 Corinth. 11: 5), the washing of the feet (John 13:14).
At the centre of the holy Bible is Christ's face (John 5: 38-39. Gal. 3: 24). Without Christ we cannot understand the Holy Bible (2 Corinth. 3: 14). Thus, the union in the body of Christ, i.e. in the Church, ascertains the purity of the evangelic truth (1 Tim. 3: 15).
The Holy Bible does not address itself to scattered individuals, but to devotees that are organised in one body. The Divine Tradition is the atmosphere inside which this body lives and understands correctly (orthos) the truth; it is the continuing experience of the Church, her conscience and not personal opinions, teachings, warrants or writs of men (c.f. Isaiah 29: 13. Matt. 15: 3.4.9. Mark 7: 8. Coll. 2:8).
Based on the treasure of the divine memory of the Church, the study of the Holy Bible leads to unity, not to division of the Church. In this way Christ's wish for unity of the devotees is fulfilled (John 17: 20-21). For this reason the apostles too would suggest to the Christians that they keep the traditions, i.e. the treasure they trusted upon them (1 Corinth. 11: 2. Philip. 4: 9), "whether by word, or our epistle" (2 Thessalonians 2: 15. c.f. 2 Tim. 1: 13).
The shepherds of the Church were placed in this position to stay awake, i.e. to be overseers (= bishops) of the purity of the life and teachings of the Church (Acts 20: 28-31): "...thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on my hands...hold fast the form of sound words which thou hast heard of me...that good thing which was committed unto thee keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us"; "and the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also" (2 Tim. 2:2).
In other words, the apostolic succession coexists with the apostolic teaching. In this context we understand the words of St. Ignatius (d. 110): "For Jesus Christ, our true life, is the opinion of the Father, as the bishops too, who have been placed at the ends of the earth, are in accord with the opinion of Jesus Christ. So, you too must also follow the opinion of the bishop; something that you do, because the worth of his name is your presbytery, which is also God's worthy, and is connected to the bishop, much like the strings are to the guitar" (Ign. Eph. III, 2-IV,1).
This teaching is not today's; it is first-christian belief: "From the dogmas and the truths that the Church keeps, others have been taken from the written teaching, and others that secretly reached us have become accepted [stemming] from the tradition of the apostles. Both these elements, the written and the spoken tradition, hold the same importance for the faith. And nobody from the people that have even a small knowledge of the ecclesiastical decrees raises any objection to this. For if we tried to abandon any of the unwritten things, because apparently they have no great importance, without realising it we would harm the Bible in its essence, or, rather, would transform the sermon to a name void of any meaning" (Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, 27: 66).
In Basil the Great's times, therefore, we see that whoever had even a "small knowledge of the ecclesiastical decrees", would admit that the divine revelation had been secretly kept in the Church in all its completeness. For example, Basil the Great mentions the habit of "those hoping in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" to show their faith "by doing the sign of the Cross".
Here therefore we have a basic difference with the protestant world. The axiom "only the Bible" leaves the Bible itself "exposed"; exposed to the "interpretational superiority" and to the "infallibility" of every pastor!
The Holy Bible cannot become absolute, for that would substitute the alive Christ with the word of the Bible, that becomes "a god" in its own right, if cut from the body of Christ, from the life of the saints (Jude 3). The holy Bible is "word for God that passed from the heart of the saints; it is God's word about God", as someone once put it nicely; the truth that was delivered "once and for all" to the saints (Jude 3) and actually not the whole truth, but part of it. It cannot make sense cut off from the Church (1 Tim. 3: 15).
No. I am just saying that the Rule of Faith is a bigger reality than the Bible, which is but one part of it.
I have access to a Rule of Faith, Apostolic in origin, and binding on a Christian's conscience, that you either lack or reject. To argue with you and provide "a biblical argument" would mean that I buy the classical Reformed tenet that the Bible is a container of propositional truths to be extracted by dilligent individual interpreters and to be believed by all, and that all matters of Christian belief must have positive support from some biblical proposition, while ignoring the "problem of the interpreter!" Those are the kinds of arguments that would convince you, but those are the kinds of arguments that I am not going to give.
But that is precisely what I don't buy, and that sola scriptura tenet is what I find self-defeating, for it itself lacks scriptural support, and that's why it should be of concern to you, since you buy into a self-defeating hermeneutical principle, and I don't.
To understand what I am trying to say you must learn to set aside the sola scriptura bias for a moment, and then test that bias against the experience of the Church and her self-understanding throughout the ages, down to the Reformation. Now, you might be unable, or unwilling to do that, and I can respect that, fine, follow your conscience. But that's the only way you might be able to appreciate the consistency of the Catholic Christian Tradition.
Sure, you might demand of me reciprocity, and I would reply that I have given it. For I am a Catholic Revert, and I left the Church once through a Reformed Protestant door, only to return to the Church after a 4-year sojourn in the Eastern Orthodox Church. In a very real sense, I returned to the Church while in Eastern Orthodoxy but that, is another story.
The Reformation, particularly Calvin's version of it, may pride itself--inaccurately--of having rescued Christian belief from a morass of Medieval superstition and corruptions, but what it really achieved was to desacralize a culture that was suffused with a Christocentric worldview and effectively consigned the Incarnation to a problem to be studied in biblical commentaries, tracts, and academic papers. We see its logical outcome today in the rampant subjectivism and moral relativism that we see. Reformed Protestantism, and not Catholicism, brought us to today's cultural quandary and the Age of Unbelief.
Now, coming full circle: the truths about the Blessed Virgin Mary, theotokos, Dei Genitrix, "God-Bearer," and Mother of the Incarnate Word, are not inconsistent with that part of the Rule of Faith that got written in what we now call the Bible, nor her veneration, and the veneration of images, etc. Yet, these truths were passed down orally, in sacrament, liturgy, and art, and were well known in the first centuries. They do belong to the larger, more encompassing Rule of Faith, a Rule of Faith that in their enthusiasm to purify the Church from real and imagined excesses, the Reformers tossed through the window.
I am a bad Catholic apologist, at least, bad in true form. A good Catholic apologist would condescend to meet you where you are, playing in your sola scriptura field and that's fine, and good and holy and probably the correct way to do it. But that's not me. The Catholic Church possesses the full Rule of Faith and I am disinclined to deny part of it, even for the sake of argument. And there I stand.
Thank you for your comments. May the Lord richly bless you.
-Theo
ps. This is being crossposted to Vivificat!