St. Vincent of Lerins
Let me make some comments, as an aside, in order to make myself clear before I return to what I was discussing. The Holy Spirit works through many means. I am only mentioning three of them: Scriptures, Holy Tradition, and Ecumenical Councils.
I list the Scriptures as separate from Holy Tradition, not because I have a Protestant background, but because of their nature. There is no doubt that they have been passed down to us and eventually collected and verified by the Church, and are truly part of Holy Tradition. Yet, as has been ably pointed out by many a scholar, the way in which the Early Church Fathers referred to the writings that were collected as Scripture is clearly different from the way in which they refer to other writings of that time, even by other “bishops.” That is, there was a clear sense of the Holy Spirit working through the human writers of the New Testament in a special sense, even from the earliest times. Thus, there is merit to the theological claim that there is a testimonium of the Holy Spirit supporting Scripture.
Now, there are those who love to argue about how different parts of the Church had an extra or less New Testament book or two. And there are conspiracy theorists who try to convince all that certain books were excluded due to a plot to subvert Christianity into something that it was never meant to be (for instance the Da Vinci Code people). But, those people miss precisely how Holy Tradition functions. It is not merely a type of mathematical statistical function, in which a book made it in if it crossed a certain threshold of acceptance.
Rather, that which was passed down verbally and was being lived by the Church resonated with the books that were accepted by Scripture so that as a whole the Church accepted them. The fact that parts of the Church were not sure (or were sure) about this book or that book only points out that the Holy Spirit working through the Church is sometimes, as St. Paul pointed out, like looking through a mirror dimly. The image is correct, but not as clear as we would like. It is also why the insistence of St. Vincent of Lerins (who is pre-schism) is that which possesses “universitas, antiquitas, et consensio (universality, antiquity, and consent)”. In previous posts, I have been working on the aspect of consensio (consent).
Finally, there have been some, like Protopresbyter Georges Florovsky, who write as though Scriptures were merely and only written Holy Tradition. At times, they seem to conclude that the Church could even go against the Scriptures, if in its best wisdom it decided that the Holy Spirit were leading in a certain direction. But, again, that is to miss the place that those writings had, even in the writings of the Early Church Fathers. When the Fathers quote from the writings of the Apostles (or Apostolic team members), they quote from them with an undeniable reverence and the expectation that their writings are part of the Rule of Faith which they must follow. So must we.
—More to come tomorrow—
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