Karl Rahner Joseph Ratzinger

KARL RAHNER
JOSEPH RATZINGER

REVELATION
AND
TRADITION

HERDER AND HERDER

 ABOUT THE BOOK
,

The relation between revelation and tradition, which has

been a crucial issue in Catholic theology, particularly since
the Modernist crisis, has been clarified by the Constitution
De revelatione of the Second Vatican Council. In the present
work, Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger, both Council
periti, exp·lore some of the speculative and historical
foundations of the Constitution. For Rabner, revelation is
the act whereby man's transcendent vocation •to .the super­
natural is made clearly manifest by God in concrete
hi·storical events. The medium of this manifestation is the
believer's response- : whether explicit or not,----to the Word
incarnate in history and to ,the Spirit who acts pre-erriinently
through the historical reality of the Church. Thus is
sketched a radically fresh approach to understanding the
nature of salvation history jn its relation to the life of the
Trini•ty, to ''secular'' history, and to the history of religions
in general. Joseph Ratzinger provides a historical corollary
to Rahner's conclusions •by a detailed appraisal of the
arguments set forth at the Council of Tren,t in answer
to the Reformers' emphasjs on sola scriptura. Moving away
from the thesis of J. R. Geiselmann, Ra-tzinger shows that
while the Bible retains its central place in Christian belief,
the concept of tradit, ion implied by Trent nevertheless
embraces more than merely the notion of the transmission
of the scriptures. Tradition in its deepest sense is the
Church's living consciousness of its faith in the revealing
Word, and as such is the hermeneutical key to grasping
the written word of the Bible.

QUAESTIONES DISPUTATAE
 1966
HERDER AND HERDER NEW YORK
232 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016

••
Original edition, ''Offenbarung 11nd Uberlieferung'',
Herder, Freiburg, 1965
Translated byW.J. O'HARA

Nihil Obstat: Hubertus J. Richards, S.T.L., L.S.S.

Censor deputatus
Imprimatur: +Patritius Casey, Vic. Gen.
Westmonasterii, die 7a Martii, 1966

The Nibil Obstat and Imprimatur are a declaration that a book or pamphlet
is considered to be free from doctrinal or moral error.
It is not implied that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur agree
with the contents, opinions or statements expressed.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-18747

First published in West Germany© 1966 Herder KG
Printed in the Republic of Ireland by Cahill & Co., Ltd.
 C O NT ENT S

Preface - - - - - - - - - 7

I OBSER VATIONS ON THE CONCEPT OF

REVELATION

by Karl Rahner - - - - - - - 9

II REVELATION AND TRA DITION

by Joseph Ratzinger - - - - - - 26

1. Statement of the problem - - - - - 26

2. Theses on the relation between revelation and

tradition - - - - - - - - 35

a) Revelation and scripture - - - - 35

b) The different significance of scripture in the old
and new covenants - - - - - 37
c) Christ the revelation of God - - - - 40

d) The nature of tradition - - - - - 41

e) The function of exegesis - - - - - 46

 CONTENTS

III ON THE INTERPRETATION OF THE

TRIDENTINE DECREE ON TRADITION '

by Joseph Ratzinger - - - - - - 50

I. The pneu1natological version of the concept of

tradition in Cardinal Ccrvini's basic draft - - 50

a) Contents - - - - - - - 50

b) The influence of the draft on various Council

decrees - - - - - - - - 55

2. The connection between tradition and the life of the

Church in various contributions to the Tridentine
debates - - - - - - - - 57

3. Tradition and the Church's dogma - - - 61

4. The meaning of the Tridentine decree - - - 62

APPENDIX. Sutnmary of the Composition of the

Tridentine Decree on Tradition - - - - 67

NOTES - - - - - - - - 69
 PREFACE

The first· chapter of this short study, contributed by Karl

Rahner, is the text of a lecture delivered by him at the
University of Miinster in Westphalia in May 1964 on the
occasion of the conferment on him of the honorary degree of
•

Doctor of Theology. The author has left the text of his lecture
unchanged, as it did not seem appropriate to him to develop
it further or to provide it with a bibliography.
A rough outline of Chapter II and the text of Chapter III
were delivered by Joseph Ratzinger at the meeting of the
J. A. Mohler Institute (for ecu1nenical studies) in Paderborn
on 28 March 1963. The suggestions made during the meeting,
especially those by Hubert Jedin and Heinrich Schlier,
encouraged the author to pursue his reflections. He subse­
quently rewrote his original draft of Chapter II and the
revised version, reproduced here, was used by him on 28 June
1963 as an inaugural lecture on taking up the Chair of
Dogmatic Theology and History of Dogma at the University
of Munster. Because of the repeated call of more urgent duties
the author had to abandon his original intention of expanding
the two chapters. He hopes nevertheless that even in their
present form his essays will contribute one or two ideas to
the great debate on the. theme of revelation. No attempt was,
therefore, made at anything like bibliographical compre­
hensiveness in the notes; only the tools directly employed in
the work have been mentioned there.
7
 I

OBSERVATIONS ON THE CONCEPT OF

REVELATION

by

KARL RAHNER

The correctness, the justification in a particular situation of

the Church's history, and the historical import of the Church's
condemnation of a heresy, do not necessarily always depend
on whether the judgment passed on the heretical thesis also
takes into account, and answers, the question which the
fundamental tendency of that heresy raises for the Church.
A positive solution of the question, which an age may in fact
propound in the form of a heresy, may follow only much later.
lt need not be inquired whether such delay in finding a
solution represents tragic guilt, error, incapacity, or is simply
the tribute which the Church itself has to pay to its own
historical nature. At any rate it would not be right to assume
that a condemnation by the Church always falls solely on
opinions and tendencies which contain nothing but an empty,
dead negation of a truth long since clearly grasped and plainly
proclaimed by the Church.

9
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

A half-century and more ago the heresy of Modernism

threatened the. Church. Among its fundamental theses and
errors was its concept of revelation. For Mod_ernism, at least
if we are to judge by the systematic summary presented in
the Church's condemnations, revelation was another word for
the inevitable development, immanent in human history, of
man's religious needs, in the course of which these needs find
objective expression in the manifold forms taken by the history
of religion, and slowly grow to greater purity and compre-.
hensiveness, until they attain their objective correlate in
Christianity and the Church. Such a concept was formed in
. antithesis to what was taken to be a view of revelation
traditional in the Church, according to which revelation is the
occurrence of an intervention of God ''purely from outside'',
speaking to men and conveying to them, through the prophets,
truths in human statements which they could not attain by
themselves and giving commands which they must follow.
The necessity of interior divine grace for the salutary accept­
ance by faith of that revelation was, of course, affirmed and
expressly taught by the ecclesiastical orthodoxy opposed to
Modernism. But the intrinsic connection between the grace of
faith and historical revelation was not seen. The Church
accused Modernism of immanentism, but today we are surely
in a position to recognize in the average theology of that ti1ne,
which is what Modernism opposed, an extrinsicism in the
concept of revelation which was not the official doctrine, but
was tacitly assumed by average theology. Quietly and almost
unnoticed, an answer is being given at the present time to the
question of a correct and full understanding of the concept
of revelation, the question to which the Church at that time
IO
 \CONCEPT OF REVELATION

presumably had no clear answer and to which Modernism

gave a false or overhastily decided and heretical answer. It is
obvious that the question, and an adequate answer to it, are
still of fundamental importance in the present confrontation
and involvement of Christianity with modern intellectual life,
even if the topic does not emerge very clearly and explicitly.
To those who hold the anticlerical humanism of the present
day, or a troubled atheism, or who think that God is an
eternally indecipherable cipher, or maintain a materialism for
which the hoped-£or future of the mind is the real force that
drives the world, it is not really the Deus absconditus of
Christianity, dwelling in inaccessible light, that is the stumb­
ling�block and scandal, but the doctrine that there is a history
of revelation in which God himself prepared a single path
beside the many others in the history of religion, and then
himself appeared in the flesh and followed that path. The
scandal is, if the expression be permitted, the categorical
history of revelation within the empirical world, not the
transcendental relation to God by which, man has his ground
in the abyss of inexpressible mystery.
What is revelation, and why, despite its immediate divine
origin, is it the innermost core of human history as such?
How can it be identical with the universal history of mankind,
without ceasing to be the unique, special grace of God? How
can revelation be present always and everywhere so that
salvation can be present always and everywhere, without its
ceasing on that account to be here and now, in the flesh of
Christ, in the words of the prophet actually speaking in a
particular place, in the letter of scripture ? Can it be the
innermost ''motive'', the real driving force of history every-
II
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

where, if it is the unique, free act of God, which cannot be

calculated from below, from history, but is the miracle of his
grace in a unique and irreplaceable event her..e and now? In ,
order to open out the widest possible horizon for answering
this question, it might be suggested that the most general
relation between God and a mutable world consists in the
fact that God as most immanent-and yet precisely for that
reason absolutely superior to the world-confers on finite
beings themselves a true active self-transcendence in their·
change and becoming, and is himself ultimately the future, the
final cause, which represents the true and really effective cause
operative in all change. Consequently it might be said that our
present question is concerned with precisely the highest and
most radical case of a conception which is gradually gaining
ground in theology at the present time. This expresses the
realization that the real coming into being of what is higher
through the effective self-transcendence of an inferior cause,
and enduring creation from above, are simply two sides,
equally true and real, of the one marvel of change and history.
This is seen to be the highest instance of the principle that God
in his relation of freedom to his creation is, after all, not a
finite cause side by side with others in the world, but is the
living, permanent transcendent ground of the self-movement
of the world itself. It is precisely this principle wh,ich also
applies suo modo to the relation between God and man in the
occurrence and history of revelation; in fact it applies here in
the highest degree, because this history must in the highest
degree be ·both the act of God and of man, if it is to constitute
the highest reality in the being and becoming of the world. If
it is possible in principle to overcome in that way the sterile
12
 CONCEPT OF REVELATION

. antithesis of immanentism and extrinsicism in the ontological

interpretation of change and history in general, then theology
must also surmount such an antithesis in the question which
concerns us here.
In fact if Catholic theology takes seriously its own standard
doctrines of divinizing grace and God's universal salvific will,
the necessity of interior elevating grace £or faith, and the
Thomist doctrine of the ontological, transcendental significance
of entitative grace, and if theology applies those doctrines
to the idea of revelation, it is quite possible, without falling
into Modernism, to recognize that the history of revelation
and what is usually called revelation as such, is the historical .
self-unfolding in predicamental terms, or, even more simply
and correctly, the history of that transcendental relation
between man and God which is constituted by God's self­
communication, of a supernatural kind, made to every mind
by grace, but inescapably and always, and which in itself
can rightly be termed revelation. If transcendence always
has its very being ·in history, is always mediated historically,
and if man has a transcendental condition which is constituted
as a permanent feature of his life as a person precisely by
what we call divinizing grace by God's self-communication
(not by some other causal operation), then precisely that
absolute transcendence directed towards the absolute intimate
presence of the ineffable mystery giving himself to man
has a history and this is what we call the history of revela-
t1on.
The revelation event itself, there£ore, always has two sides.
On the one hand it constitutes man's supernaturally elevated
transcendence as his permanent though grace-given destiny,
13
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

always and everywhere operative, present even by the very

fact of being rejected. That is the transcendental experience of
the absolute and merciful closeness of God, even if it cannot be
objectively expressed at will in concepts for everyone. On the
other hand, the revelation event is also the historical mediation,
the objective, explicit expression of the supernaturally trans­
cendental experience. It occurs in history and, taken in its
totality, constitutes the whole of history; the individual's own
particular theological reflection belongs to it, though it does -
not constitute its primary basis or determine it. That is what
j s called the history of revelation in the usual sense, provided
it really is the history of the true self-unfolding of the super­
naturally transcendental experience and not its misinterpreta­
tion, and provided that it truly is the result of God's transcen­
dental self-communication in grace and, therefore, occurs
through God's will for such self-communication under his
supernatural saving providence and is grasped as such. If this
view is taken of the unity and reciprocal relationship between
transcendental revelation and revelation of the predicamental
and historical kind, or rather of the transcendental and his-
•

torical (mediating) factors of the one revelation and its one

history, a really pri111ordial determination of what is revealed
emerges: God is revealed as co111111unicating himself in abso­
lute, merciful presence as God, that is, as the absolute mystery.
The historical mediation of this transcendental experience is
also revealed as valid, as permitting and guaranteeing the abso­
lute experience of God. The unique and final culmination of
this history of revelation has already occurred, and in it is
revealed the absolute and irrevocable unity of God's transcen­
dental self-communication to mankind and of its historical

14
 CONCEPT OF REVELATION

mediation in the one God-man, who is at once · God hirnself as

communicated, the human acceptance of the communication,
and the final historical manifestation of this communication
and acceptance. And in this unity of God's transcendental self­
communication and its final historical mediation and manifesta­
tion, the fundamental mystery of the triune God is also revealed,
because what is in question is the communication of God in
himself. For in that mystery it is a matter of God as he is in
himself precisely inasmuch as he is God for us in history and
transcendence: God in his incomprehensible primordiality,
God in his real capacity to enter man's transcendence and his
history, Father, Spirit and Son. Inasmuch as history mediates
transcendence, the Son sends the Spirit; inasmuch as transcen­
dence makes history, the Spirit effects the incarnation of the
Logos; inasmuch as appearance in history signifies the mani­
festation of reality, the incarnate Logos is revealed as the self­
utterance of the Father in truth; inasmuch as God's coming
among us in the centre of our personal life signifies his love and
ours, the Pneuma is revealed in his own proper self as Love. It
is by making the experience, through the intermediary of
history, of the transcendental absolute presence of God in his
self-communication, and accepting it, by means of itself, that
we in fact know at all, in that act of faith, what we mean when
we speak of God's Trinity, and briefly express by it the form
and content of our Christian £aith and of its revelation and
revelation history, and are baptized in those three names.
The fundamental idea of revelation which we have sketched
roughly and rapidly in this way may, perhaps, be elucidated
as regards its basis and consequences by a few rather random
reflections.
15
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

If what has been said is correct, then transcendental and

predicamental revelation and' the history of revelation are
co-extensive with the spiritual history of m,anki· nd as such.
That is not a Modernist error but a Christian truth which
can be verified very simply, for it can safely be asserted that
the history of supernatural salvation is operative everywhere
in history; this has been driven even more forcefully into the
Church's consciousness of its faith by the pronouncements of
Vatican II. But salvation without faith, and faith withou�
genuine revelation, is impossible. It is not necessary to explain
the possibility of revelation and faith outside the O·ld and New
Testament history of revelation and faith by a special Catholic
theory such as that of Straub or of Billot, or by having recourse
to an explicit, empirical tradition deriving from primitive
revelation, in which Adam's actual experience is supposed to
have been transmitted in propositional, doctrinal form. That
is scarcely pro'bable in view of our present knowledge of the
history of religion and of mankind, which may have extended
over two million years. It is only necessary to assume-and
the data of present-day theology support this-that every
human being is elevated by grace in his transcendental
intellectuality in a non-reflex manner; that this ''entitative''
divinization-which is proffered to freedom, even if it is not
accepted freely in faith-involves a transcendental divinization
of the fundamental subjective attitude, the ultimate horizon
of man's knowledge and freedom, in the perspective of which
he accomplishes his life. If this is so, that supernatural feature
characterizin_g man's life as a person, absolutely every man's,
constitutes in fact a revelation of God through his self­
communication in grace. And that grace-given funda1nental
16
 CONCEPT OF REVELATION

subjective attitude of man, which is directed towards the God

of triune life, can quite definitely be regarded as a word­
revelation, provided the notion of word is not reduced to that
of a phonetic utterance and provided that it is not forgotten
that such transcendental revelation is always historically
mediated and that man's historical reality can never be without
language. It never consists of dead facts; the interpretation
of the facts is itself a constitutive factor in every historical
event. No revelation in conceptual, objective terms of particular
objects or propositions is given solely by the transcendentally
experienced openness of man to the triune God of eternal life.
But what this gives is something more, something which forms
the basis of all the articles of faith and is the condition of their
very possibility, what alone makes them really the words of
God : the supernatural horizon of experience of an a priori
kind, the light of faith as such, as we could quite simply say
in the traditional way, provided that we are still able to take
seriously and understand such well-worn words of tradition.
Let us insist once again that it is not, of course, meant by all
this that the transcendental a priori openness of man to the
God of eternal life and of a:bsolute self-communication can be
non-historical, isolated, pursuing some mystical existence or
other of its own in individualistic introspection outside history.
It is necessarily accomplished in the history of the action and
thought of mankind, and may be so in a very explicit or in a
quite anonymous way. Consequently there is never a history of
transcendental revelation in isolation. History in the concrete,
both individually and collectively, is the history of God's
transcendental revelation. Of course, such concrete history is
never revelation history pure and simple. The latter takes

2 Rabner & Ratzinger, Revelation & Tradition 17

 REVELATION AND TRADITION

place in the former, always in an indissoluble unity with error,

misinterpretation, guilt, abuses; it is a h-istory both just and
sinful, all the more so as we really must say simul iustus et
peccator here where the history of sin and that of salvation
inextricably mingle until God's judgment comes. That in no
way excludes the possibility of a genuine history of revelation
in the whole history of humanity, as can be seen, for example,
from the fact that for Christians it is only possible to discern
and distinguish, in the religious history of the Old Testa111ent,
between the genuine history of revelation and a sinful, prot1d
religious history on the basis of Christ and never merely by
standards provided by the Old Testament itself. Only in Christ
do even the holy scriptures of the Old Testa1nent possess an
inner and external canon as a guiding principle of their own
interpretation; yet they have to be recognized by the Christian
as a genuine history of the revelation of the Father of our
Lord. 1
Even those who want to work out the idea of revelation
entirely on the basis of encounter with the word of God,
preached or written, finally meet with the transcendental side
of the revelation event. For they require a canon within a
canon; to them the spoken and written word only becomes the
word of God absolutely as such in the interior grace-given
occurrence of faith, and the external message of faith is
demythologized into a transcendental form. If religious history
is that part of human history generally in which the theological
nature of man is not only accomplished in fact (as in all
history), but also becomes the focus of explicit attention, then
the history of religion is at the sa1ne time the most explicit
part of the history of revelation and the intellectual region in
18
 CONCEPT OF REVELATION

which historical misinterpretations of the transcendental

experience of God occur most plainly and with the most
serious consequences, and where superstition most clearly
flOurishes. But it is always a case of both and always an
ambiguity which for us is inextricable.
In the Catholic scholastic theology of the last centuries, in
contrast to that of the Middle Ages, preferential treatment has
been given to the question of the testimony paid to the
messenger of revelation by miracles per£ormed in the presence
of hearers suminoned to believe, but the question of the
revelation-occurrence in the bearer of revelation, the prophet
hi1nself, has not been dealt with or has been dealt with
inadequately. From what has been said, it would follow that
the theology of the process of the act of faith and that of the
revelation-occurrence are to a large extent identical. Catholic
fundamental theology is, there£ore, entirely right from the
point of view of method when it deals, as at least it often does,
with the so-called analysis fidei, when rightly understood,
within its own sphere. At all events that would be the correct
procedure, provided it were used to study the point where faith
and the reception of revelation can still be seen in their original
unity. There the transcendental side of the original reception
of revelation and that of faith, coincide : man is constituted
through grace as affected by God's ontological self-com111unica­
tion and in radical freedom accepts this constitutive feature
of his human reality.
For Catholic theology, the question of demythologization is
still largely concentrated in the concrete problem of whether
what fundamental theology calls miracles are possible, what
their significance is and whether they can be recognized. On

19
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

the basis of the fundamental idea which we have just outlined

it might be explicitly inquired whether in this whole matter
we should not really lend greater weight to the view that the
mediation of a transcendental experience of God cannot itself
adequately be mediated once again, but that it always implies
the trusting awareness of the prior presence of the unmediated.
Consequently it is impossible in principle to distinguish
adequately and explicitly between mediation through the bare
fact of so-called objective reality and mediation through the
interpretative representation of that bare fact. Nor is it neces­
sary, because the mediation has its ultimate truth in what is
mediated. For that reason someone who, with the intention of
demythologizing, distinguishes them purely and simply, and
someone who posits both the mediation and what is mediated
as equally absolute, both miss in the sa111e way the ontological
difference and unity between what is predicamental and what
is transcendental, as well as the difference yet indestructible
unity between the mediation of so-called historical fact and its
interpretation. It must then, of course, also be remembered
that this mediation, being an historical one, is necessarily
always social; it is ''ecclesial'' in the deepest sense of the word.
It, therefore, includes an acceptance of the never totally ana­
lysed or explicitly self-conscious belief of the Church, the com­
munity of believers. That belief of the Church is always,
whether in the Church or in the individual, a unity of sign and
truth beyond man's disposal or decision. And as in the word of
the sacrament and in the Word incarnate, sign and truth are
given inseparably and unmixed, and are not merely brought
together by the faith of the believer.
On that basis it might become clear just what fides implicita
20
 CONCEPT OF REVELATION

is, which nowadays, unfortunately, plays a smaller part even in

Catholic theology than it should. Fundamentally it means that
all categorically explicit faith, as such, lays hold of a sign and
is, therefore, truly faith only if it grasps the sign through being
itself held in the grasp of the unutterable mystery of the
presence of God mercifully communicating h•imself, and only
if it is always aware that the finite mediation has the character
of a sign, and one that belongs to the Church and is £ound in
the Church. And since the holy darkness of the incompre­
hensible God is not abolished, but rather, on the contrary,
definitely established by revelation and is accepted as it is with
adoration and love, the ''implicit'' character of what is really
revealed in the word of revelation, and the character of one's
own faith as ''irnplicit'' in that of the Church, both belong to
the very nature of revelation and faith and are not £actors
which are only present when the rudes and the ignorant hear
revelation and believe.
This throws light on a well-known phenomenon of the
history of religion and of Christian dogma : the continually
renewed attempt to reduce the totality of the many-sided and
extensive dogmatic theology and institutions of a religion to a
kernel, to what alone is truly important, however this single
decisive element is named and discovered. On this point it
can now be said, on the basis of the unity of transcendental and
predicamental revelation which we have indicated, that such a
single essential element in religion does exist, but is not re­
placed by any reduction which remains within the framework
of the categories, nor is it thereby experienced more directly
or with more certainty. Moreover, if Christianity is to be the
absolute religion of all and is not to represent a particular
21
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

covenant of a particular people with God, it cannot cease to

confess Christ as the mediator and ringer of salvation in such
1b

a way that he integrates in hi1nself, in his -..truly corporeal

nature present in this world, every conceivable mediation by
all that is real, so that he relativizes and at the sa111e time
definitively posits this. There is, therefore, no point at which,
in this mediation of his, other things have to be excluded
entirely and on principle, whether they be word, liturgical
sign, the Church's social reality, the ministry, imagery, or •
even secular things. Yet despite the plurality of the mediation,
and despite the legitimacy of all its aspects and the obligatory
character that per se belongs to it, the possibility nevertheless
remains that, in the various times and places which the one
God of grace has determined even under the new covenant,
the urgency and perceptibility of various particular mediations
may, even when they are enduringly valid, themselves possess
a history. Such a history of the definitive revelation in Christ,
within the final and eternal aeon, may still be 1nirrored even
now, in its legitimacy as willed by God, in the tragical
history of divided Christendom, whose divisions reflect the
genuine multiplicity of the many mediations of the one revela­
tion, and while they accuse us, nevertheless promise us the
grace of God.
On the basis of the unity and distinction between transcen­
dental revelation and predica111ental, historical revelation,
which imply that the same distinction and the sa1ne unity are
also found in faith, an indication can be discerned that the
subjective disposition of the believer must be thought of as
distinct from faith and yet as one with it. If we leave out of
account for a moment the very incidental mention of grace
22
 CONCEPT OF REVELATION

which is all that is commonly found in theological descriptions

of faith, the character of faith as coming by hearing is
explained in such an empirical and a posteriori manner in
relation to certain defined articles of faith that the word of faith
appears to be addressed to hearing almost as if it were a quite
unexceptional formal capacity to grasp any true proposition
once it is understood, and provided it is presented correctly
with its proper grounds in an appropriate way. The a priori
capacity to believe is itself scarcely taken into consideration iri
Catholic theology, the subjective disposition, that is to say. As
an a priori capacity for revelation and faith, this must not, of
course, be though•t of as a localized faculty side by side with
others, as a sort of particular sentiment, an intrinsically limited
''need'' or something of the sort. It would have to be under­
stood as the union of what we have called the transcendental
aspect of revelation with the a priori capacity (identical with
the whole transcendental character of man), for God's self­
communication in grace; for it is by these two that God's
transcendental revelation is constituted. Moreover, both of
these would have to be understood, not in a merely factual
objective sense, but in an ontological, subjective sense.
Every Catholic analysis of faith declares the ''authority of
God'' to be the highest, ultimate and sole ''formal object''
and ''motive'' of faith. As often as not, inextricable difficulties
then arise, because this ''authority'' is itself thought of as
mediated empirically by a posteriori cognition, and so deter­
mined by the horizon of human knowledge. Yet it must go
beyond such an horizon if the word is t? remain really the
,vord of God and is not to be reduced by the a priori conditions
of human cognition to the purely created level. But if when

23
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

revelation and faith occur, God himself in his own self­

communication is what is believed and is the a priori principle
of belief, and if the logic of faith is not a preclicamental logic
learnt from without, but, like the natural logic which is
spontaneously exercised, is the intrinsic ontological structure of
the act of faith itself, and if the external message of faith does
not supply the a posteriori motive of faith, but brings the a
priori motive directly into relation with itself, then the prob­
lem in question disappears. In that way it also becomes more
understandable why a materially false act of faith can be a
genuine act of faith and not just a human act of recognition
of a formal object grasped a posteriori under merely human
mental conditions.
Of necessity we interrupt these suggestions. In all that has
been said, we have only been able to give some pointers to the
direction in which a solution may be found to a problem which
has seemed topical since the days of Modernism and which
nonetheless appears in some way to have been evaded. Even
by such a slight exa111ple, but one which may be regarded as
typical of many other unsolved theological problems, it can be
seen how laboriously and slowly theological work advances.
Patience and forbearance are required-and the conviction
that while theology does not produce the Christian's faith, it is
nevertheless called upon really and truly to serve it, and to
serve it today.
In expressing my respectful and cordial thanks to the •

Theological Faculty of the University of Munster for the great

honour it has conferred on me, I do so in the consciousness
that those who are engaged in the task of building up the
structure of theology labour in vain unless the Lord builds too,
24
 CONCEPT OF REVELATION

that we must work while it is still day, that all theologia

mentis cannot be more than an assistance to the theologia
cordis et vitae, and that all theology is in fact simply an attempt
to build a way which loses itself in the mystery of God, where
there is no way, but who nevertheless lets himself be found.

25
 II

REVELATION AND TRADITION

by

JOSEPH RATZINGER

I. Statement of the problem

The question of the way in which the word of revelation

uttered in Christ remains present in history and reaches men
is one of the fundamental questions �hich split western
Christendom in the age of the Reformation. The conflict
concerned the idea of ''tradition'' in which Catholic Christen­
dom sought to express a form of transmission of revelation
additional to that of holy scripture. This provoked a double
protest. By tradition, in the first place the so-called consuetu­
dines ecclesiae were meant, fo1· example Sunday observance,
turning to the east for prayer, customs connected with fasting,
various consecrations and blessings and other things of that
kind which gave the Church's piety in the later Middle Ages
its particular stamp. The innumerable things, some edifying,
others surprising, which made the late mediaeval Church a
rambling, complicated house, full of nooks and corners, were
26
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

justified by the idea of ''tradition'' and declared to be a legiti­

mate, integral part of concrete Christian reality. 1 But in the
light of his experience of God's judgment and mercy, Luther,
struck by the simplicity of the gospel and its explosive force,
could see nothing but frivolity in all those ''traditions'' by
which men, he thought, were deceived about the real abyss of
their nature and superficially pacified. He even saw in these
things the return of the Law, the precedence given to human
enactments over God's word, against which Paul ha, d fought
so inexorably and which nevertheless had now become a
reality in the Church again. The Con£ession of Augsburg also
deals with this matter. It lists a series of precepts which, accord­
ing to current doctrine, could involve mortal sin : the pro­
hibition of manual labour on Sundays and holy days, the
obligation of saying Office, the laws of fasting etc. It then
goes on, ''Where do the bishops derive the right and power to
impose such burdens on Christendom to ensnare consciences?
For St Peter in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 15, forbade a
yoke to be put on the necks of the disciples. And St Paul tells
the Corinthians that authority was given to them �o improve,
not to harm. Why then do they increase sin by such imposi­
tions? . . . If the bishops have power to burden the Churches
with innumerable impositions and ensnare consciences, why
does divine scripture so often forbid us to make or to listen
to human precepts? Why does it call them 'devil's doctrines'?
Has the Holy Spirit warned against all such things in vain?'' 2
The theme of traditio is here trans£ormed into that of abusus.
Tradition is a human invention by which man hides himself
from God or, rather, rebels against him in order to take his
salvation into his own hands instead of hoping for it from
27
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

the favour of the Lord which cannot be c]ai111ed or extorted.

To tradition, understood as an enactment, is opposed the
message of grace. ''For the great article of the gospel must
always be maintained that we obtain the grace of God through
faith in Christ without merit on our part and do not merit
it by a service of God, instituted by men. " 3
The problem of tradition, however, also became acute from
another point of view which in turn did not lead to any more
positive a solution. When Luther discovered the gospel within·
the gospel, he had at the same time the impression that he had
liberated the word of God from the fetters imposed by the
Church's ministry, which had possessed itself of this word
and no longer allowed it to make its own valid statement, but
employed it arbitrarily. This idea that the word of God is
fettered in the Catholic Church through its connection with
the authority of the ministry is repeatedly expressed in the
writings of the Reformers. The most moving exa111ple perhaps,
humanly speaking, is that of Melanchthon. He was willing
to compromise, and when he signed Luther's Smalkaldic
Articles, it was with the proviso: ''. . . as regards the pope,
however, I think that if he were willing to allow the gospel,
for the sake of peace and common unity . . . we should allow
(and concede) his superiority over the bishops which he
possesses iure humano''.4 The idea also influenced the con­
ception expressed in the Confession of Augsburg when it
speaks of the Church as the congregatio sanctorum, in qua
evangelium pure docetur et recte administrantur sacramenta. 5
The Church is, therefore, essentially determined by two things,
pure doctrine and sacraments rightly administered. There is
no mention of the ministry. In fact, this silence is no less
28
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

important for the notion of the Church in the Confession of

Augsburg than what is actually said, for it is quite clearly
deliberate and represents the exact antithesis to what was then,
and still is, the valid Catholic conception of the Church as
defined by three elements: fides (corresponding to pure docere)
-communio (corresponding to sacramenta)..-auctoritas. 6
Ministry here appears as the criterion of the word. It guarantees
the word. With Melanchthon it is the other way round; for
him the word is the criterion of the ministry, which ultimately
is tested by the yard-stick of the word, and, measured by it,
may become liable to rejection. The word has become inde­
pendent; it stands on its own as a reality superior to the
ministry. Perhaps in this reversal of the relations between
word and ministry lies the real opposition between the views
of the Church held by Catholics and Reformers. At the same
time .it coincided with the contrast in their views of tradition.
For rejection of the ministry as the criterion of the word
logically meant tl1e reduction of the word to scripture as its
own interpreter, and scripture now remained as the only
authentic form of the word and tolerated no independent
reality, ''tradition'', beside it.
The Council of Trent in its struggle for the concept ot
tradition had these two bases of the Reformers' criticism in
mind and endeavoured to formulate an answer to them. It is
striking to observe how, in view of the Lutheran equation of
traditio and abusus, the themes of traditio and reformatio
become interwoven for the Council, and how the Fathers again
and again were confronted with the dilemma whether to
answer Luther's attack on tradition first with a definition of
tradition or to begin with reformatio, removing abuses. 1 As

29
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

regards doctrine, Trent of course rejected both the Reformation

reproaches. Trent continued to· maintain that the word is not
a reality standing independently above the Cjiurch, but that
it is delivered by the Lord to the Church. Nor is it thereby
exposed to random caprice but precisely in that way remains
in his own hands out of reach of h-l.l tnan arbitrariness. In the
view of the Fathers of Trent it probably seemed fundamentally
a form of weakness in faith to be anxious for the word com­
mitted to the Church as though the Church might, as it were,
outgrow it in such a way that recourse would have to be had
to the word against the Church; they were indubitably certain
that the Lord who instituted the Church as his Body is also
able to preserve it for his word.
Today, 400 years later, it must be admitted that in the
opposition that divided Luther and Trent, the dilen11na of
western Christendom is still manifest, by the way it appears
once again, for example, in the correspondence between Har­
nack and Peterson. Peterson pointed out, when expressing
thanks for Harnack's article ''The Old Testa1·11ent in the
Pauline Epistles and the Pauline Churches'', that Harnack, in
the way he had dealt with the relation between scripture and
its interpretation, had expressed not the Protestant, but the
Catholic principle. Harnack replied, '' It is a truism that the
so-called 'formal principle' of earlier Protestantism is a critical
impossibility, and compared with it the Catholic principle is
formally the better; but materially the Catholic principle of
tradition da111ages history much more (both as rank growth
and under the shears of the magisterit11n), because fortunately
the New Testament actually comprises the best sources''. 8 In
this rather slovenly formulation with its opposition of formal
30
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

and material aspects, the old dilemma once more appears. Can
the word be given over to the Church without fear that it will
for£eit its own power and vitality under the shears of the
magisteriurn or in the rank growth of the sensus fidelium?
That is the Protestant's question to the Catholic. Can the word
be posited as independent without thereby delivering it up to
the caprice of exegetes, evacuating it of meaning in the
controversies of historians and so robbing it entirely of binding
force? That is the counter-question which the Catholic will
ir11111ediately put, and he will also be of the opinion that in
any case we have not to consider whether we are going to
commit the word to the Church or not. The Catholic will say
that the Lord hirnself has delivered it to the Church. It is true
that this will not prevent him, if he honestly looks the facts
in the face, from regarding concern for the purity of the word
as a duty of the greatest gravity, which is not fulfilled simply
by appealing to the infallibility of the Church. To that extent
Luther's struggle for the word will seriously appear to him as
at least a salutary warning.
In the 400 years since the Reformation, however, history
has not stood still, even in theology. Two tendencies can be
observed in regard to the relation between the denominations
and their theology. On the one hand, after the rupture each
dug itself in and consolidated its own position, and each, group
from then on had its own history and continued to develop
on its own, far from the other. On the other hand, the distance
so created permitted greater objectivity in regard to the other
and so in the end, in spite of everything, there is an increasing
tendency for each to break out of its own special history and
to make contact again with the other. Proba·bly the most

31
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

achieve a new view of the problem of tradition while over­

coming one-sided anti-Reforma•tion positions has been made by
important attempt in our generation on the Catholic side to
the Tiibingen dogmatic theologian J. R. Geiselmann. His
endeavours exercised a valuable influence even on the dis...
cussions of the Second Vatican Council and gave the Council's
wrestling with this question that exciting topicality which
raised it, in the very first session, from a doctrinal dispute
between difierent schools of theologians to a serious reflection.
by Catholic Christendom on its own essential foundations. 9
Geiselmann's thesis is well-known and only needs to be out­
lined briefly here in order to provide the starting-point for a
consideration of the question in an endeavour to dig deeper
and perhaps advance the discussion a little.
Geiselmann's starting-point is a new interpretation of the
pronouncements of the Council of Trent on the nature of
tradition. Trent had laid down that the truth of the gospel is
contained in lihris scriptis et sine scripto traditionibus. That
was and still is interpreted as meaning that scripture does not
contain the whole truth of the gospel, and that consequently
no sola scriptura is possible because part of the truth of revela­
tion is conveyed to us solely through tradition. Geiselmann
took up the point that had already been indicated by others,
that the first draft of the text had been worded so that truth
is contained partim in libris scriptis partim in sine scripto
traditionibus. In that way, therefore, the doctrine of the
division of revealed truth between two sources (scripture and
tradition) would have been clearly expressed. But the Council
abandoned the partim-partim and was satisfied with the simple
link et. Geiselmann concludes from this that the Council had
32
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

turned away from the idea of a division of revealed truth

between two separate sources or at least had not expressly
defined it. And he draws the further conclusion that even as a
Catholic theologian one can hold the view of the material
sufficiency of scripture. In other words, even a Catholic can
maintain that holy scripture adequately transmits revelation to
us. Consequently Geiselmann regards a material sola scri ptura
principle as quite acceptable for a Catholic and even thinks
he can show that it has a much stronger tradition in its favour
and that the Council of_ Trent itself meant to point in this
direction. 10
It is easy to understand that such a thesis could reckon on
a good deal of agreement in various quarters in view of the
quite new possibilities of contact between Catholics and
Protestants wh-ich it seemed to open out. 11 It seems to me quite
indisputable that it represents in fact a considerable material
advance. Yet as soon as the thesis is rather more closely
examined in regard to its historical and intrinsic grounds,
a whole series of difficulties emerge that make it impossible to
rest content with it. In the second part of this essay we shall
attempt a few remarks on the historical side of the problem.
For the moment we shall turn directly to the actual problems
themselves which immediately prompt the question, what
exactly does '' sufficiency of scripture '' mean? Geiselmann
hi1nself, as a Catholic theologian, has to. hold fast to Catholic
dogmas as such, but none of them is to be had sola scriptura,
neither the great dogmas of Christian antiquity, of what was
once the consensus quinquesaecularis, nor, even less, the new
ones of 1854 and 1950. In that case, however, what sense is
there in talking about the sufficiency of scripture? Does it not

3 Rahner & Ratzinger, Revelation & Tradition 33

 REVELATION AND TRADITION

threaten to become 'a dangerous delusion with which we

deceive first ourselves and then others (or perhaps do not in
fact do anything of the kind)? At least, in ezrder to maintain
,both that scripture contains all revealed truth and that the
dogma of 1950, for exa111ple, is a revealed truth, recourse has
to be had to such a wide se1_1se of the term ''sufficiency'' that
·the word loses all serious meaning.
In this way, however, the second and really decisive question
arises. Does concern for the idea of the sufficiency of scripture
really come to grips at all with the real problem of the notion
-of tradition, or is it a case of lingering over a relatively super­
licial symptom of a state of affairs that lies much deeper? The
introductory remarks from which we started should have
made it clear that the answer must plainly be ''yes ''. The
question of the sufficiency of scripture is a purely secondary
problem within the framework of a much more fundamental
decision which confronted us earlier in the terms abusus and
auctoritas a11d which, therefore, concerns the relation between
the authority of the Church and the authority of holy scripture.
Everything else depends on the way this is understood. In
,order to advance, it will therefore be necessary to penetrate
,deeper and not to linger over such i1111nediately visible but
secondary matters as the sufficiency or insufficiency of
scripture. The comprehensive problem of the mode of presence
,of the revealed word a1r1ong the faithful must be dealt with
as a whole. Then it becomes clear that we must go behind
the positive sources, scripture and tradition, to their inner
:source, revelation, the living word of God from which
scripture and tradition spring and without which their sig­
nificance for faith cannot be understood. The question of

34
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

''scripture and tradition'' remains insoluble as long as it is not

expanded into a question of ''revelation and tradition'' and ,

thus inserted into the larger context to which it belongs.

Consequently in what follows, I should like to attempt to
develop positively in thesis form, without going into details of
possible discussions, the concept of tradition in relation to its.
intrinsic function, in the hope of giving at least a partial answer
to the Reformers' question, so that the whole essay might prove
to be a moment in a dialogue, the necessity of which is being
recognized more and more clearly by all.

2. Theses on the relation between revelation

and tradition

a) Revelation and scripture

A first thesis on this set of problems might be formulated as,

follows, bearing in mind the patristic conception of scripture
and revelation. The fact that ''tradition'' exists is primarily
based on the non-identity of the two realities, ''revelation'' and
''scripture''. Revelation means God's whole speech and action
with man; it signifies a reality which scripture makes known
but which is not itself simply identical with scripture. Revela­
tion, therefore, is more than scripture to the extent that reality
exceeds information about it. 12 It might also be said that scrip­
ture is the material principle of revelation (perhaps the only
one, perhaps one side by side with others- : a question that can
be left open for the moment), but th-at it is not revelation itself.
That is something of which the Reformers were still perfectly
35
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

well aware; it was only in the subsequent controversy between

post-Tridentine Catholic theology and Protestant orthodoxy
that it was noticeably obscured. 13 In the prese__nt century it has
been Protestant theologians such as Barth and Brunner who
have rediscovered this fact which was taken absolutely as a
matter of course both by patristic and by mediaeval theology. 14
What we have said can be made clear from another angle.
There can be scripture without revelation. For revelation
always and only becomes a reality where there is faith. Th�
unbeliever remains under the veil of which Paul speaks in
2 Corinthians 3. He can read scripture and know what it con­
15

tains. He can even understand, purely conceptually, what is

meant and how its statements cohere, yet he has no share in
the revelation. Revelation is in fact fully present only when,
in addition to the material statements which testify to it, its
own inner reality is itself operative in the form of faith.
Consequently revelation to some degree includes its recipient,
without whom it does not exist. Revelation cannot be pocketed
like a book one carries around. It is a living reality which calls
for the living man as the location of its presence.
In view of what has been said, we may, therefore, affirm
that revelation goes beyond the fact of scripture in two
respects: as a reality deriving from God it always extends
upwards into God's action; as a reality which makes itself
known to man in faith, it also extends beyond the fact of
scripture which serves to mediate it.
This non-coincidence of scripture and revelation makes it
clear that quite apart from the question whether scripture is
the sole material source or not, there can never really, properly
speaking, be a sola scriptura in regard to Christianity. As we
36
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

have already said, that was still clear in principle to the great
Reformers, and only fell into oblivion in what has been called
Protestant orthodoxy. Scripture is not revelation but at most
only a part of the latter's greater reality.

b) The different significance of scripture in the old

and new covenants

The specifically Ch · ristian problems of revelation, scripture

and tradition are further determined by the double form of
revelation in the old and new covenants, to which the double
form of scripture in the Old and New Testaments corresponds.
Just as the two covenants are different in kind, so too is the
fact of scripture not identical in the two cases. That is very
plain in the New Testament writings, which understand by
''scripture'' only the Old Testament. This for them is and
remains ''scripture'', the meaning of which has, they are con­
vinced, come to light in the Christ-event. 16 Consequently they
do not oppose to the old scripture, or set side by side with it, a
new scripture, but they place in contrast to the one single
scripture, i.e. the Old Testament, the Christ-event as the spirit
which explains scripture, a fundatnental conception which also
determined the form of the oldest creeds and alone renders
them intelligible. The formula ''Jesus is the Ch,rist'' in fact
signifies that in the historical Jesus the Christ-message of the
Old Testament is fulfilled, that who Jesus is, can be understood
on the basis of the Old Testament and the meaning of the Old
Testament perceived in the light of the Christ-event. This
conception appears very distinctly in Paul, for on its basis he

37
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

even contrasts the old and new covenants as gramma and

pneuma, i.e. as letter (scripture) and spirit (2 Cor 3 :�6-18),
and designates the Lord as the pneuma who ,makes scripture
intelligible, or is its meaning, its true, living (not merely
literary) content (2 Cor 3 : 14-18). Paul probably draws on the
idea of the new covenant as Jeremiah expresses it (31 : 33£) :
no scripture is needed any more, for the Law is written in the
heart, and no further external instruction is required, because
God himself teaches men. John expresses the saine thought, .
with reference to Deutero-Isaiah (54 : 13), when he describes
the era that began with Christ as the time in which all are
taught by God hi111self. And Peter's Pentecostal discourse,
handed down to us by Acts (2 : 14-36), develops the sar11e idea
with reference to Joel (3 : 1-5). In each case the time inaugu­
rated by the Christ-event appears as the answer to a line of
hope, which expected that in the future age scripture would,
in an ultimate sense, be rendered actually superfluous by the
immediate proxitnity of the divine teacher in man hitnself. If
the foregoing testimonies to this thought are exa111ined, it will
be seen that the restriction of the term ''scripture'' to the
writings of the old covenant is not merely a momentary
question of terminology, due to the lack of actual New Testa­
ment writings, and one which lost all significance in the second
half of the second century with the gradual formation of the
New Testatnent canon. A conviction is expressed there, the
meaning of wh•ich is of course more difficult to recognize since
the actual New Testament scripture arose, but which is not
thereby replaced or cancelled.
One thing is, therefore, clear. In the new order of salvation
which began with Christ, ''scripture'' occupies a different
38
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

position from the one it had under the old covenant. Conse­
quently it is not necessary to consider to what extent the old
covenant's own conception of its own nature is rightly repre­
sented. It certainly was not from the start the covenant of the
gramma, of scripture held to be self-sufficient in the way in
which it appears in St Paul's description. 1 1 And from Jeremiah
and Deutero-Isaiah onwards there appears a longing to go
beyond the gramma in a new immediacy of the Spirit of God,
probably sirnultaneous with an ever more intense development
of a scriptural principle which caused scripture more and more
to become the Law which does not make man live, but kills.
However th•at may be, in the New Testament view the Old
Testament appears as ''scripture'' in the proper sense, which
reached its true meaning through the Christ-event, by being
drawn into the living sphere of the Christ-reality. And if
scripture has also come into existence de facto in the New
Testatnent, scripture can no longer have that conclusive and
exclusive sense which, belonged to it, according to the Pauline
conception, in the Old Testament, but is rather the means of
opening out the Old Testament into the wide vistas of the
Christ-event. It is, as it were, the arrested process of the new
exposition of scripture with Christ as basis. At all events it
has no desire to be independent, to be shut in on itself in
literal exposition of a text, but can only subsist within the
spiritual reality of Jesus Christ, who remains with his own
''always, to the close of the age'' (Mt 28: 20), who by his going
through the Cross has come again in the Holy Spirit (as John
expresses it) and, th-rough the Spirit, expounds to the disciples
what they once were still unable to bear, when the Lord still
visibly dwelt among them (Jn 16: 1 2 £.).

39
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

c) Christ the revelation of God

The actual reality which occurs in Christi�n revelation is
nothing and no other than Christ hitnself. He is revelation in
the proper sense: ''He who has seen me, has seen the Father'',
Christ says in John (14: 9). This means that the reception of
revelation is equivalent to entering into the Christ-reality, the
source of that double state of affairs which Paul alternately
describes with the words ''Christ in us'' and ''we in Christ''. .
In this process, the reception of individual propositions is
secondary; they are only meaningful at all as ways of rendering
explicit the one mystery of Christ. That very fact throws light
on the question of the material sufficiency of scripture which,
since Geiselmann's writings, has so dominated the discussion.
The question has to be raised, after all, what from a Christian
point of view, material sufficiency can mean. It is only the
Christ-reality which is ''sufficient''. Materially speaking, its
content can be stated with greater or less explicitness, but that is
ultimately not decisive, and for that reason it is quite possible
for that content to be given further explicit for1nulation
subsequent to scripture. This will have to be dealt with more
closely in a moment.
The same state of affairs can also be regarded from another
angle, which permits an advance. The reception of revelation,
in which the Christ-reality becomes ours, is called in biblical
language ''faith''. From this point of view perhaps it is clearer
why, for the New Testament, faith is equivalent to the in­
dwelling of Christ. If we firmly hold that for scripture the
presence of revelation is equivalent to the presence of Christ,
a further step follows. We find the presence of Christ desig-
40
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

nated in two further ways. It appears on the one hand, as we

have already seen, identical with the faith (Eph 3: 17), in
which the individual encounters Christ and in h-im enters the
sphere of influence of his saving power. But it is also hidden•
under the Pauline te1·m of ''Body of Christ'' which of course
implies that the community of the faithf, ul, the Church, repre­
sents Christ's continued abiding in this world in order to
gather men into, and make them share, his mighty presence. 1 8
These two aspects taken together mean, therefore, that faith
is entry into Ch,rist's presence, into the abiding reality of Christ
to which scripture bears witness but with which scripture
itself is not simply and solely identical. It also follows that the
presence of revelation is essentially connected with the two
realities ''faith'' and ''Church'', which themselves, as is now
clear, are closely connected. This in turn leads back to what
was stated in the first thesis, that revelation goes beyond
scripture in two respects, in. relation to God and in relation to
its human recipient. That statement, which at first was rather
indefinite, is now found to possess an essentially concrete
meaning in relation to actual Christian realities.

d) The nature of tradition

The explicitation of the Christ-reality, which is revelation and

wh-ich has its double yet single enduring presence in faith
and in the Church, occurs in the proclamation of the gospel.
This preaching, there£ore, by its very nature is an unfolding,
a making explicit, and it is so in two ways, corresponding to
the double form of revelation in the old covenant and the new.
It is an interpretation of the Old Testament on the basis of the
41
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

Christ-event and as orientated towards that event. It is also an

interpretation of the Christ-event itself on the ·basis of the
pneuma, which means on the basis of the Cp.urch's present.
The latter is possible because Christ is not dead but living, not
only Christ yesterday but Christ today and tomorrow. But it is
precisely in his Church that he is living and present ; in the
Church which is his Body in which his Spirit is active. Light
still needs to be thrown on this from the nature of the Church.
As the New Testament shows, Jesus's message was at first .
a directly eschatological one, directed towards the kingdom of
God, not towards the Church. The existence of a Church is
not, of course, in contradiction to that message, but in the
perspective of the message it is nevertheless only secondary.
Similarly the activity of the Twelve after Pentecost was not in
the first place directed to the Church but to the kingdom of
God. It is one of the striking facts that can clearly be observed
from the Acts of the Apostles that the Twelve at first did not
undertake a mission· to the gentile nations but endeavoured
to convert Israel and so to realize the necessary conditions for
the kingdom. It was only the shock of various historical
events, especially the execution of Stephen, th•at of James and,
decisively, the arrest and flight of Peter, which brought the
original community, as the sources show, to recognize the
failure of the attempt to convert Israel as definitive, and conse­
quently to go to the pagans and so create the Church instead of
the kingdom. They did this, as the reports, particularly the
15th chapter of Acts, show, as a new decision in the Holy
Spirit. By doing so they opened out that new interpretation of
the message of Christ which is the essential basis of the
Church. 1 9
42
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

This proceeding, whereby the definitive establishment of the

Church rests on a decision ''in the Holy Spirit'', is the reason
why there is the Church's interpretation of the New Testament
just as there is a Christological interpretation of the Old Testa­
ment and why we must consequently note the following facts
which are to be distinguished even though they are inter­
connected in the analogia fidei.
(i) There is an Old Testatnent theology of the Old Testament
which the historian draws out from the Old Testament itself.
It already unfolds there in a series of superimposed strata, in
which old texts are read anew in the light of new events and
receive new interpretations. ·The phenomenon of further
growth of texts in new situations, of the further growth of
revelation by new interpretations of the old, already determines
in a quite essential way the internal structure of the Old
Testatnent itself. 20
(ii) There is a New Testament theology of the Old Testament
which is not identical with the actual intrinsic Old Testament
theology of the Old Testament, though it is linked to it in the
unity of the analogia fidei. 2 1 Perhaps on this basis it is even
possible to say in a new way what the analogia fidei between
the two testaments means. The New Testament theology of
the Old Testament is, as we have said, not identical with the
actual intrinsic and historically observable Old Testament
theology of the Old Testament; it is a new interpretation in
the light of the Christ-event which does not arise from the
purely historical consideration of the Old Testament alone.
By carrying out such a re-interpretation, it nevertheless does
not do something which is completely alien to the nature of
the Old Testament, approaching it merely from the outside,
43
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

but continues the inner structural pattern of the Old Testa-

ment, which itself lived and grew by such re-interpretations.
(iii) There is a New Testament theology of the New Testa­
ment, corresponding to the Old Testament theology of the Old
Testament; in other words, the theology which the historian
as such can derive from the New Testament itself. It too is
characterized and given its structure by a similar growth , by
a sin1ilar new understanding of the old in a new situation.
(iv) There is a Church theology of the New Testament which
we call dogmatic theology. It is related to the New Testament
theology of the New Testament in the sc1111e way that the New
Testament theology of the Old Testament is related to the Old
Testa1nent theology of the Old Testament. What is actually
''additional'', and what, therefore, distinguishes dogmatic
theology from biblical theology, is what we call, in a precise
sense, tradition. Here, too, it would have to ,be emphasized
once again that the Church's theology of the New Testa111ent,
although not simply identical with the intrinsic and historically
observable New Testament theology of the New Testatnent,
but going beyond it, is nevertheless not purely extrinsic to it.
For here too, in the actual New Testament itself, there begins
the process of the Church's interpretation of what is handed
down; the Church's theology of the New Testament extends
as a process into the heart of the New Testc11·1·1ent itself, as
could perhaps be most clearly shown by the history of the
synoptic tradition. 2 2
Another remark must be made. Though we have just
equated the Church's theology of the New Testa1r1ent with
dogmatic theology, closer inspection will show that a further
distinction is necessary. For dogmatic theology as a branch of

44
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

scientific study includes, of course, in addition to the Church's

interpretation of the New Testament, the private theology
of individual theologians. Consequently, in a precise sense
we could designate only dogma as such as the Church's
theology of the New Testament. In any case the scheme
indicated only represents, of course, a general outline which
would need clarification and distinctions before it could be
considered exact. For our purpose, however, this rough sketch
may suffice. Summarizing what has been said, we can now
observe several sources of the reality called ''tradition'' and,
consequently, several strata within it.
First source : The extent to which the reality of ''revelation''
is more than ''scripture''.
Second source : The specific character of New Testament
revelation as pneuma, as opposed to gramma, and consequently
what one tnight call in Bultmann's terminology, the impos­
sibility of objectivizing it. This state of affairs has been
expressed in the Church's practice and, as a consequence, in
mediaeval theology, by the placing of fides above scriptura,
that is to say, of the creed as rule of faith above the details of
what is written. 23 The creed appears as the hermeneutical key
to scripture which without interpretation must ultimately
remain dumb.
Third source : The character of the Christ-event as present
and the authoritative enduring presence of Christ's Spirit in his
Body the Church and, connected with this, the authority to
interpret Christ yesterday in relation to Christ today, the origin
of which we have observed in the Church's reinterpretation
by the apostles of the message of the kingdom.
Corresponding to these three sources of the concept of tradi-
•

45
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

tion (or, better, of the reality which we term tradition), the

following strata in tradition · can perhaps be discerned.
(i) At the beginning of all tradition stand� the fact that the
Father gives the Son over to the world and that the Son for
his part allows himself to be given over to the ''nations'', as a
sign. This original paradosis, in its character as j udgment and
gift of salvation, is continued in the abiding presence of Christ
in his Body, the Church. To that e:xtent the whole mystery of
Christ's continuing presence is primarily the whole reality
which is transmitted in tradition, the decisive fundamental
reality which is antecedent to all particular explicit expressions
of it, even those of scripture, and which represents what has
in fact to be handed down.
(ii) Tradition then exists concretely as presence in faith, which
again, as the in-dwelling of Christ, is antecedent to all its
particular explicit formulations and is fertile and living, thus
developing and unfolding throughout the ages.
(iii) The organ of tradition is the authority of the Church-, that
is, those who have authority in it. 24
(iv) Tradition also exists, however, as actually expressed in
what has already become a rule of faith (creed, fides quae), by
the authority of faith. The question whether certain express
affirmations were transmitted from the ·b eginning side by side
with scripture, whether, therefore, there is a second material
principle besides scripture, independent from the beginning,
becomes quite secondary in comparison ; but it would probably
have to be answered negatively.

e) The function of exegesis

In what has been said so far, it has almost exclusively been the
46
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

limits of the letter of scripture, the freedom of the Spirit and

the authority of the Church that have appeared. However, all
the reflections that have been made also have a significance
which points in the opposite direction, and wh-ich is related to
the well-founded anxieties of Luther which we took as our
starting-point. We have noted that revelation becomes present
through preaching, and that preaching is interpretation; it is,
there£ore, possible and necessary to add the following.
Tradition by its very nature is always interpretation, does not
exist independently, but only as exposition, interpretation
''according to the scriptures''. It is true even of the preaching
of Jesus Christ himself that it appears as fulfilment, and
consequently as interpretation, though of course as authoritative
interpretation. It does not come with something absolutely
new, never yet testified to in scripture, that is to say, in the
Old Testarnent, but proclaims the reality of what was written
and awakens this to a new life, which the mere historian was
not in a position to derive from it. What holds good of Christ's
message, that it assumed no other form than that of interpre­
tation, emphatically holds good of the apostolic preaching
and even more of the Church's preach-ing. As ''tradition'' it
too must ultimately remain interpretation ''according to the
scriptures''; it must recognize that it is under an obligation to
scripture and linked to it. It is true that it is not interpretation
in the sense of purely exegetical exposition, but in virtue of the
spiritual authority of the Lord operative in the whole existence
of the Church, its faith, life and worship. But to a much
greater extent than the Christ-event on which the Ch.urch is
based, it retnains interpretation tied to what has occurred and
what has been spoken. In that way is expressed its link with

47
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

God's concrete action in this history and its unique historical

character : the ''once'', which is just as essential to the reality
of Christian revelation as the ''forever''. It is an expression of
the unity of the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history; the
Jesus of history is no other than the Christ of faith, even
though faith is always more than history.
From this point of view it is clear that just as the Church has
a task of vigilance linked with its charismatic bearing of
witness, so too there is a duty of vigilance in the exegesis which
investigates the literal sense, and so guards the link with the
sarx of the Logos, in opposition to all gnosis. To that extent,
therefore, there exists something like a certain independence
of scripture as a separate, and in many respects perfectly un­
ambiguous, criterion in face of the Church's magisterium.
That was undoubtedly a correct insight on Luther's part, and
in the Catholic Church not enough place has been accorded
to it on account of the clai111s of the magisterium, the intrinsic
limits of which have not always been sufficiently clearly
perceived.
From this point of view something like a double criteriology
in matters of faith has to be affirmed. On the one hand there
is what the ancient Church called ''the rule of faith'', and with
it the regulative function of the official witnesses as against
scripture and its interpretation, that praescriptio of the rightful
owner of scripture, and this, as Tertullian rightly noted,
excludes any wilful playing off of scripture against the Church.
On the other hand, however, there is also the limit set by the
littera scripturae, the historically ascertainable literal meaning
of scripture which, as we have said, certainly represents no
absolute criterion subsisting in and for itself within the counter-
48
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

point of faith and knowledge, but does nevertheless represent

a relatively independent criterion. What can be unambiguously
recognized from scripture, whether by scienti1ic methods or by
simple reading, has the function of a real criterion, the test of
which even the pronouncements of the magisterium itself have
to meet. Certainly it is a question here of the lesser component,
that of knowledge; it does not sit in judgment on faith, but it
nevertheless continues to exist in faith as a critical court of
appeal and as such has an urgent task, that of guarding the
purity of the testi1nony once given, and of defending the sarx
of history against the caprice of gnosis which perpetually seeks
to establish its own autonomy.
At this point an important task accrues to the reformatio
which the Church is striving with renewed earnestness to
realize at the present historic hour. It may perhaps also open
out new possibilities for the Church in its discussion with that
struggle for reformatio which finally becarne a breach within
western Christendom. Incorporated into the Church's authori­
tative ministry of giving testirnony which draws its right and
force from the presence of the Spirit and from Christ's per­
petual presence, by which he is ever the Christ of today, the
function of bearing witness, which belongs to the unique word
of scripture set down once and for all, will have to be restored
to its full rights and force. For that word derives its abiding
validity from the unique character of the historical redemptive
act of Jesus Christ, who once gave up his crucified body,
himself, to the Father and so has perfected for all time those
who are sanctified (cf. Heb 10 : 14; 7 : 27), he who is Christ
yesterday and today and for ever (Heb 13 : 8).

4 Rahner & Ratzinger, Revelation & Tradition 49

 III

ON THE INTERPRETATION OF
THE TRIDENTINE DECREE ON TRADITION

by

JOSEPH RATZINGER

The focussing of attention by Geiselmann on the reasons

leading to the replacement of partim-partim by et, and the
consequent concentration on a search for elements in the
Tridentine discussions and their antecedents which seem to
point to a material sufficiency of scripture, has resulted in
undue narrowing of the inqui ry. This to a large extent obscures
the real background to the Tridentine decree.

r. The pneumatological version of the concept of

tradition in Cardinal Cervini' s basic draft

a) Contents

A detailed historical appreciation of the whole context of the

problem would require an investigation no less far-reaching
50
 TRIDENTINE DECREE ON TRADITION

than Geiselmann undertook in his book. 1 That is beyond the

scope of the present essay. All that can be done here is to recall
a few facts of the Tridentine discussion, reflection on which
could perhaps widen the horizons of the question again. The
speech of the Cardinal Legate Cervini on 18 February 1546
seems to me fundamental to an understanding of the debate as
well as of the decree finally decided on by the Council. The
leading ideas of that speech are still clearly perceptible in the
decree, just as they frequently are in other Tridentine decrees. 2
In addition it has the advantage of allowing the guiding
principle to be much more clearly recognized than the decree
itself, which was rendered less lucid by various compromises.
As a supplementary aid to understanding the speech, there is
also a letter addressed by the Cardinal Legates to Cardinal
Alexander Farnese on 28 February 1546. It contains the same
lines of thought-it was, of course, certainly inspired by
Cervini-and throws additional ligh-t on certain points. Cervini
explains in the speech that there are three principles and
foundations of our faith :
1. The sacred books which were written under the inspiration
of the Holy Spirit.
2. The gospel which our Lord did not write, but taught by
word of mouth and implanted in men's hearts, and part of
which the evangelists later wrote down, while much was
simply entrusted to the hearts of the faithful.
3. Because the Son of God was not going to abide with us
for ever physically, he sent the Holy Spirit, who was to reveal
the mysteries of God in the hearts of the faithful and teach
the Church all truth until the end of time. 3
In a second, more detailed version of the speech, this line of
51
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

thought was developed a little further. Revelation, we are told,

has been made known differently at different times.
1. To the patriarchs, whose faith we have in the scriptures, and
wh,ich we call the Old Testament.
2. In Christ, who implanted his gospel not in writing but
orally, not in charta but in corde. Some of what derived from
Christ (quae e Christo emanarunt) was written down, other
things remained in the hearts of men (quaedam in cordibus
hominum· relicta fuerunt). This whole, the gospel of Christ,
constituted in this double way, is, taken together, the secundum
principium fidei nostrae, the Old Testament being the first.
3. There is a third principle as well (tertium autem), which
consists of the following fact: Because the Son of man was
not to remain with, us always, he sent his Holy Spirit into the
world; he was to reveal the mysteries of God and make clear
anything which had remained doubtful in the minds of men.4
In a similar way, the above-mentioned letter to Cardinal
Farnese speaks of two steps (due passt). One is that the revela­
tion of our Lord was not all written down, but a part remained
in the hearts of men and in the Ch,urch's tradition; the other
step is to establish quello che e suggerito lo Spirito Santo in la
chiesa, maxime medianti i concilij, doppo l' ascensione in cielo
del Signore. 5
We observe in the first place, therefore, that, contrary to
our usual expectation and interpretation, not two but three
principles are affirmed: scripture:-gospel-revelation of the
Spirit in the Church.
It is also important here that by ''scripture'' the Old Testa•
ment is meant, and that side by side with this, which is
scripture in the proper sense, the gospel appears as a second
52
 TRIDENTINE DECREE ON TRADITION

principle. The Christ-event is included in the more compre­

hensive concept of ''gospel'', which itself includes what is
written and what is inscribed in the hearts of the faithful. So
the second principle itself indicates a pneumatic surplus over
what is written: gospel in this view is something other than
scripture and is, therefore, ollly partly written. (This must not
be understood here in the sense, abhorred by Geiselmann, of
a division of the contents of faith, but in the sense of an
acknowledgement of its dignity: the gospel as such, by its
very nature can only partly be written.) Finally, and this is
what to us is most astonishing, there follows a third principle,
the revealing activity of the Holy Spirit throughout the age of
the Church. We observe, there£ore, th.at what we commonly
call or think of as tradition does not appear here as one
principle. Its basis is in fact divided 1between two contrasted
principles: ''gospel'' as a principle which is always only
partially transposable into scripture, and the operation of God's
Spirit in the age of the Church. We can also observe that New
Testament scripture does not appear as one principle side by
side with apostolic tradition and even less (as is the case with
us) does New Testarnent scripture, together with that of the
Old Testament, comprise one single reality with which
''tradition'' might then be contrasted as a second reality. The
New Testament complex of event and reality appears, taken
as a unity, as a continuing double yet single principle, the
gospel, and as such, stands in contrast on the one hand to the
Old Testament, on the other to the specific events of the
subsequent age of the Church. Its inner unity is apparently
stronger and more important than its division into written and
unwritten, so that it can be contrasted as a single principle
53
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

to the Old Testament, regardless of the two forms in which

it is realized. The impossibility of designating the New
Testament as scripture, which was so decisivelJ felt by Paul
and the early Christian centuries, is still plainly operative here.
The texts quoted also per111it another observation. On
neither of the bases of the concept of tradition which we have
noted, that is to say, neither as regards the element in the
second nor that in the third principle which points to tradition,
•
does this appear as verbal tradition. In both cases it consists,
rather, of a real tradition, as the surplus of reality over the
word which bears witness to it. That should be self-evident as
regards the third, pneumatological principle, but it is just as
unmistakable in regard to the implanting of the gospel in
men's hearts, of which the second principle speaks, and which
extends beyond what is comprised in the scriptures.
The role that these ideas played in the Council's delibera­
tions can also be seen from the auctoritates quoted in Cervini's
presence. Among them were John 16 : 12 (••• Spiritus Sanctus
suggeret . . .) and Philippians 3 : 15 (Quicumque perfecti
sumus, haec sentiamus, et si quid aliter sentitis, haec quoque
Deus vobis revelabit), both of them passages very pneumato­
logical in character, and bearing on the present.6 That such
ideas were not alien to the members of the Council is also
clear from a number of other speeches. For instance, the
Bishop of Aqui said that besides the holy scriptures there are
some things in the Church of God which, transmitted from
hand to hand, have come down to us from the apostles, as
well as many other things quae etsi scripta apostoli nobis non
reliquerunt, per Spiritus Sancti revelationem nobis (tradita)
sunt (tradita is a correction, replacing revelata). 7 On this basis

54
 TRIDENTINE DECREE ON TRADITION

tradition might even be described as the pneumatological

component of the Christ-event.

b) The influence of the draft on various Council decrees

It is, of course, true that this triple conception is very faint

in the official decree on tradition. But it is clear from two other
texts of the Council that it was not abandoned in essentials,
for these make use in actu, as it were, of the realities in
question. 8 So, for example, we read in the introduction to
the decree on the Eucharist (Venzinger 873a: ... sacrosancta
synodus, sanam .. .doctrinam tradens, quam semper catholica
Ecclesia ab ipso Iesu Christo Domino nostro et eius Apostolis
erudita, atque a Spiritu Sancto illi omnem veritatem in dies
suggerente (John 14: r6) edocta retinuit ....
Here the actual activity of the Council is described as tradere
and a double background given to this tradere. On the one
hand there is instruction by Jesus and the apostles. This
corresponds to Cervini' s concept of the gospel, and by the
mention of Jesus as well as the apostles it displays to some
extent the double form taken by the original testimony, at
once written and implanted in men's hearts. On the other
hand there is instruction by the Holy Spirit who ''in dies'',
in time as it moves onwards, leads into truth.
The other text to which we can refer here comes in the
preamble to the doctrine on Purgatory (Denzinger 983) which
reads : . . . catholica Ecclesia, Spiritu Sancto edocta, ex sacris
L'itteris et antiqua Patrum traditione in sacris Conciliis et
novissi·me in hac ... Synodo docuerit. The description of the
Council's own activity as tradere is, for that matter, also found
55
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

in the declarations about the sacrarnent of order (Denzinger

910).
Finally, the threefold conception can be eiscovered in the
background of the decree on tradition itself, even though it is
obscured and weakened by all kinds of insertions intended as
supplements or in the service of other themes.
1. The decree speaks of the gospel promised through the
prophets in the holy scriptures. By this it attaches the term
holy scripture in the narrower sense to the Old Testa111ent·.
2. Mention is made of the promulgation of the gospel by
Christ, and of its transmission by the apostles in double form,
orally and in writing. And here (but not in Cervini) the
pneumatological element appears united to the apostolic,
because two kinds of apostolic traditions are distinguished,
those which derive from Christ and those which derive from
the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It is clear that, as compared
with Cervini's draft, we are in the presence of a certain
insistence on history, which strength ens the link with the
historical beginning and at the same time seems to transfer
the emphasis from real tradition to verbal tradition.
3. The part of the decree on tradition, which has just been
analysed, is followed once again by an examination of the
concept of sacred scripture and only then is the concept of
tradition finally given definitive formulation. Tradition is now
described as vel oretenus a Christo vel a Spiritu Sancto dictatas
et continua successione in Ecclesia catholica conservatas. The
reference to the apostles is now lacking; the entire piece can,
of course, be regarded as a reference back to what preceded,
and it can be said that what are meant are traditions already
dictated to the apostles and then handed on, and the addition

56
 TRIDENTINE DECREE ON TRADITION

of continua successio even suggests this interpretation. Yet a

certain indefiniteness remains which, still leaves open the
possibility of finding traces of Cervini's third component, the
real pneumatic principle. It is, of course, also clear that this
conception has receded into the background and that an
attempt was made at agreement with a conception that was
more strongly historical in character.
In view of all this, the question inescapably arises what in
fact was really meant by the pneumatological conception; and
especially ,how the idea-a surprising one for us-of continuing
revelatio can be given an intelligible meaning 9 in view of the
uniqueness and historical links of revelation, of which, of
course, Cervini was perfectly aware, as was the patristic and
mediaeval tradition that stands behind him. Before we attempt
to answer this question, a brief consideration must be devoted
to explaining what the themes (chiefly supplementary ones)
were which entered into the Tridentine decree on scripture
and tradition, and, as has been said, partly overlaid Cervini's
conception. Above all it must be asked what theological
intentions prevailed here, though, of course, in a text which
was composed as a compromise between several originally very
divergent views, they could find only imperfect expression.
A detailed discussion would once again exceed the limits of this
essay; a few summary remarks must suffice.

2.The connection between tradition and the life of the

Church in various contributions to the Tridentine debates

A first group of themes under which a number of speeches can

be classified, however different their outward tenor, is shown
57
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

in the idea which left its mark on the decree in the two
•

formulas: (a) per manus traditae ad nos usque pervenerunt

and (b) continua successione in Ecclesia cathg[ica conservatas.
What lies behind these two formulas which, for the historian
of the present day, are so difficult to digest, precisely because
of their supposed historical emphasis? It may be said that a
decisive role was played here by the idea, which was frequently
urged in the discussion, that traditions are changeable, that so
much that was apostolic has been abolished, and that on the
other hand ecclesiastical traditions have supervened which
should not be abandoned. 10 The conception of tradition
operative in this line of thought is clear, for example, in the
treatise on tradition composed for the Council Fathers by
Seripando. In this, Seripando speaks of written traditions
contained in holy scripture, such as St Ja111es's proviso, the
veiling of women, marriage legislation in I Corinthians 7, and
other similar things. He points out that many such• things have
been abrogated and concludes that, although they are close
to the word of God, they are only ''remotely close'', for nothing
may be taken from the word of God. With these he contrasts
the traditions which are not contained in the Bible. These are
partly apostolic or owed their origin to General Councils and
were observed ·by the whole Church, and partly local traditions
and, therefore, subject to change.1 1
This text leads to a surprising conclusion: for Seripando
(and for many other Fathers at Trent)12 there are traditions
in scripture. ''Tradition '' is not what is unwritten, but is found
in scripture and outside it. That leads to the further question:
What actually constitutes the nature of tradition for the said
Fathers, if being unwritten does not? 13 Or, to put it in another
58
 TRIDENTINE DECREE ON TRADITION

way, how must tradition positively be defined, if it cannot

adequately be determined by the negative idea of being
unwritten?
There are a number of pointers to the answer. Seripando
himself gives the following definition : Traditiones, hoc est
apostolorum seu sanctorum patrum sanctae et salutares
constitutiones. 14 A clearer answer to our question is offered by
a statement of Cervini which Massarelli reports. To the
objection of the Bishop of Chioggia, who quoted the supposed
remark of Augustine that everything necessary for salvation
is written, Cervini gave the following answer : Verba illa (i.e.·
of St Augustine) formaliter intelligi debent, scilicet ad fidem
accipiendam, ut salvi fiamus. Quo vero ad mores et christianam
vitam instituendam certe non omnia scripta sunt. And Cervini
again refers to John 15: 26 and 14: 26 and so alludes to the
pneumatological factor. 15 What is really meant should stand
out quite clearly here : Tradition refers to the institutio vitae,
to the mode of realization of the word in actual Christian
living. In other words, it is the form in which the word finds
reality and without which the word would remain unreal.
Two other groups of speeches lead to the same conclusion.
It is one of the striking things about the Council discussion
which, of course, is understandable in view of the situation
described above, in the introduction to the previous chapter,
that the dogmatic discussion of the concept of tradition was
continually overshadowed by the question of procedure :
Should the reformatio, the practical reform of the Church,
be dealt with first (as the emperor wished), or the dogmatic
questions discussed first (as the pope wished)? 16 In itself, that
was a question of procedure, and although it perpetually
59
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

cropped up in the debate, it did not directly concern the

conception of tradition as such. But the way in which it was
in fact linked to the question of tradition itself is nevertheless
very striking, and with some speakers the question of pro­
cedure (whether abuses or tradition were to be dealt with)
became part of their argument in the substantial problem
itself. 11 In that way the problem of abuses and the problem
of tradition became linked in fact, and appeared as funda­
mentally a single question, simply assuming a positive or
negative form as the case might be. That, of course, did in
fact correspond to the Reformation point of view, according
to which the traditiones were the abusus which deformed the
Church. The Fathers clearly felt this and were conscious that
by defending the traditions, they were ultimately defending
the usus ecclesiae, the way in which the Church in the concrete
actually accomplished its life.
The other series of pronouncements pointing in the sa1ne
direction is found in those statements which emphasized the
auctoritas of the Church as decisive, and so in their way spoke
for a closer relation of tradition and institutio christiana. 18
This permits us to return to the starting-point of this circular
line of thought, and answer the question what the formula
ad nos usque pervenerunt actually means. Objectively speaking,
the intention was certainly not to define an historical view­
point, which the formula may appear to our ears to express,
but the Church's insistence on the reality of the institutio vitae
christianae, the form of human existence actually current and
valid in the Church's present, and which alone provides for
scripture the place where it assumes reality. As such., that is to
say, as something which is living and which is more extensive
60
 TRIDENTINE DECREE ON TRADITION

than scripture, it is fundamentally apostolic, though in details

it is, of course, changeable like everything living.

3. Tradition and the Church's dogma

A second group of themes left its mark on the decree in the

formula traditiones tum ad fidem tum ad mores pertinentes.
For although in what has so far been said, the idea of tradition
appears to a large extent restricted to what the Fathers of the
Council called consuetudines, observationes, institutiones, the
procurator of the Cardinal of Augsburg, Claude Lejay, SJ, in
particular made himself the spokesman of the view which
emphasized the importance of tradition concerning faith, as
distinct from the traditiones caeremoniales. The treatise on
tradition which he, too, composed for the information of the
Fathers, contains the formula subsequently adopted by the
Council: Denique multas veritates tum ad fidem tum ad mores
pertinentes Ecclesia novit, quas scriptura aperte et expresse non
continet. As examples he quotes the words persona, essentia,
trinitas, from the doctrine of the Trinity; consubstantialitas
from Logos-Christology; two natures, one person from the
dogma of Chalcedon. He also lists: Christ as Mary's only son,
two natures in one person in Christ, a rational soul as well as
the divine mind in Christ, Anne as Mary's mother, use of the
sign of the Cross, Sunday observance, turning to the east to
pray-that is to say, ideas and facts of conciliar tradition and
•

of the tradition of piety. 1 9 Cervini, who immediately took up 2 0

Lejay's speech, on 23 February 1546, had no difficulty in
linking this line of thought with his own, as expressed in the
61
 REVELATION AND 1'RADITION

letter to Cardinal Farnese already mentioned, where, as we

have seen, it is said that the Holy Spirit has spoken in the
Church and, since our Lord's ascension, .... speaks maxime
mediante i concilij.2 1 He obviously thought that in that speech
the fact was rightly emphasized that the surplus which is
represented by the living Church, as compared with the merely
written word, concerned, and concerns, not simply the vita
instituenda or, as he puts it in this context, the caeremonialia,
but also the essentialia fidei which find full expression only in
tradition. Here too then, as can be seen, the dominant interest
lies not in an historical idea of transmission from the begin­
ning, ·but rather in the view that the fact of tradition, operative
chiefly through the conciliar practice of the Church, is of
fundamental importance for fides, too, for the doctrine which
is believed, not simply for pious practice, the ''caeremonialia''.

4. The meaning of the Tridentine decree

In view of what has been considered so far, it can be said

that it is possible without much difficulty to perceive three
different theological conceptions which were brought together
in the final text of the decree on tradition. They were not
brought into exact agreement, but to some extent were simply
juxtaposed, despite their considerable differences. Nevertheless
they were linked by the fundamental tendency which they
have in common.
I . Cervini's conception, which we termed the pneumatological

one. With its doctrine of the three principia fidei, it laid stress
on the dynamic character of the Christ-reality present in the
62
 TRIDENTINE DECREE ON TRADITION

Church, and so understood tradition primarily as the reality

of the institutio vitae christianae under the guidance of the
Holy Spirit.
2. The conception which we may call the ceremonial one.

This regarded tradition essentially as the domain (parallel to

fides) of consuetudines, as the usus ecclesiae which the
Reformers wrongly attempted to reject as abusus. This concep­
tion was concerned to defend the antiquity and apostolic
dignity of traditions; its idea was restricted by the ad nos
usque pervenerunt, which expresses the idea of variation which
makes a limitation necessary. In the pervenire and conservare,
the idea of acceptance by the Church is expressed and, together
with antiquity, is made a supplementary criterion.
3. The conception which we might perhaps call the dogmatic
one. As opposed to an identification of the concept of tradition
with the domain of consuetudo, it emphasized the fact that the
phenomenon of traditio extends to the domain of fides also.
These three conceptions shaped the text, and quite clearly
in such a way that its guiding line derives from Cervini; the
whole text must be understood against the background of
Cervini's idea. The second of these conceptions was, however,
included in two insertions, the . . . pervenerunt and . . . con­
servatas, while the third conception was introduced ill the
tum ad fidem tum ad mores.
As opposed to these three conceptions, of which there were,
of course, a number of variants, but which nevertheless taken
together expressed the really leading ideas which prevailed, the
position of Bonuccio and Nacchianti, which Geiselmann
stresses so much, appears as one of mere opposition. Bonuccio's
objection obviously referred more to the second conception,
63
 REVELATION AND TRADITION

and was aimed against over-valuing consuetudines-not to be

•

received par pietatis affectus. Nacchianti's opposition was

primarily directed to the third conception, and emphasized
the adequate character of the transmission of faith by
scripture. 22
It should finally be added that conceptions two and three
have the co10111on feature that they set against Cervini's
pneumatological perspective, based on the perpetual presence
of salvation, a more historical view, centred on the trans­
mission of what is unique, focussed that is to say, on the
Jcp&.1rag. In fact it must be said that both Cervini's view, with
its focus on the present, and the more historical perspective
of 'the other groups, would each, taken separately, have been
dangerous if not untenable, but that, taken together, their
respective differences and mutual limitation make a correct
view possible. In the present text, both points of view are
represented, though not in any detail, both the factor that
concerns the present and that of the Jcp&.7Tag. It is well to
understand the text as requiring precisely that we should
regard both elements as essential and so recognize that both
go to constitute the Christian reality, and even that part of it
which we call tradition-both the presence of the Spirit and
the link with the unique events that once occurred in history.
In this way there finally appears the answer to the question
of how we are to understand the view of the Council of Trent
as a whole. The first and most important fact seems to me to
be that the Council still very clearly perceived the connection
of the concept of tradition with that of revelation. This in
turn is connected with the fact that, in accordance with
patristic and mediaeval tradition, it still conceived the notion
64
 TRIDENTINE DECREE ON TRADITION

of revelation in a far less material way than was subsequently

the case. Only in that way is the idea of the revelation of the
Holy Spirit in the Church to be understood. From the point
of view of the branch of mediaeval theology, strongly marked
by patristic influence, which still persisted in fact in Cervini's
speeches, the thesis that revelation closed with the death of the
last apostle must have appeared far too unqualified. This
question cannot, of course, be gone into in detail here. It
would be possible in fact to formulate the solution o,f the
question, as it was then envisaged, with the help of present-day
categories and say that, according to the theology in question,
revelation is indeed closed as regards its material principle,
but is present and remains as regards its reality. To put it
another way : we are dealing with a view in which revelation
certainly has its l<paTTag, to the extent that it was accomplished
in historical facts, but has also its perpetual reality today,
because what was once accomplished remains perpetually
living and effective in the faith of the Church, and Christian
faith never simply refers to what is past but equally to what
is present and to what is to come. The later emphasis on the
historical and material character of the concept of revelation
is, of course, clearly anticipated in the Tridentine debates
themselves, but was not yet a fully accomplished fact, even if
it must perhaps be admitted that in the compromises of the
Council a decisive contribution was made to its eventual
success. We may finally add that, according to what we have
said, four strata in all of the concept of tradition can be
discerned in the Tridentine debates :
r. The inscription of revelation = the gospel, not simply in
the Bible but in men's hearts ;

5 Rahner & Ratzinger, Revelation & Tradition 65

 REVELATION AND TRADITION

2. the Holy Spirit speaking throughout the whole age of the

•

Church;
3. the conciliar activity of the Church;
4. liturgical tradition and the whole tradition of the Church's
life.
In these four strata, which must be borne in mind as the
conceptual background of the decree, there is expressed the one
reality of the Christian present, in which, of course, the whole
post-apostolic past of the Church (which in fact reaches back
into the apostolic period itself) is also present as the totality of
the Church's life, in which scripture is a central, but never
the only, element. By and large, it should have become clear
that despite·-or even precisely because of-the lack of exact
harmony and the incompleteness of its conception, Trent
presents a much richer testimony than was perceived during
the centuries that followed, so that theological work today,
with its new insight, can receive from it new stimulus,
confirmation and guidance in its endeavours.

66
 APPENDIX

Summary of the Composition of the T1·identine Decree on T,,.adition

Sacrosancta oecumenica et generalis

Tridentina Synodus, in Spiri,tu Sancto
legitime congregata,...hoc sibi perpetuo
First principle according ante oculos proponens, ut sublatis
to Cervini: erroribus puritas ipsa EV ANGELI! in
(Old Testament= scripture) Ecclesia conservetur, quod PROMISSUM
ANTE PER PROPH· ETAS IN SCRIP­
TURIS SANCTIS

DOMINUS NOSTER JESUS CHRIS­

TUS DEi FILIUS PROPRIO ORE
PRIMUM PROMULGAVIT, DEINDE
PER SUOS APOSTOLOS TAMQUAM
FONTEM OMNIS ET SALUTARIS
Second principle according VERITATIS ET MORUM DIS-
to Cervini : Gospel partly CIPLINAE ''OMNI CREATURAE
written, partly im·planted PRAEDICARI'' (Mc 16: 15) IUSSIT;
in men's hearts. PERSPICIENSQUE HANC VERI­
TATEM CONTINERI IN LIBRIS
SCRIPTIS ET SINE SCRIPTO
TRADITIONIBUS, QUAE AB IPSIUS
CHRISTI ORE AB APOSTOLIS
ACCEPTAE, AUT AB !PSIS APOST­
OLIS SPIRITU SANCTO DICTANTE
67
 APPENDIX

Seripando, Cervini and

others: Only traditions quasi per manus ·traditae ad nos usque
received ,by the Church pervenerunt,
(ad nos usque . . .) are
meant.

orthodoxorum Patrum exempla secuta,

omnes libros tam Veteris quam Novi
testamenti, cum utriusque unus Deus sit
auotor, nee non TRADITIONES IPSAS,
Lejay: Tradi,tion referring tum ad fidem, t· um ad mores pertinen•tes�
not only to consuetudo but
also to fides (conciliar
formulas!).

Cervini's third principle: TAMQUAM VEL ORETENUS A

After Christ's ascension, CHRISTO, VELA SPIRITU SANCTO
the Holy Spirit declares the DICTATAS
mysteries of God.

Seripando, Cervini, etc. :

Only what is received et continua successione in ecclesia
permanently by the Church catholica conservatas,
is meant (as above).

Cervini:
Scripture and tradition pari pietatis affectu ac reverentia suscepit
both deriving from the et veneratur...
same Holy Spirit.

68
 NOTES

CHAPTER I

1
On the difference between non-biblical and Old Testament revelation
history (which persists even on the assumption that ·there is a non­
biblical history of revelation), see K. Rahner, Schriften zur Theologie,
vol. V (1964), pp. 136--58 , especially pp. 148 £. and 153 £.

CHAPTER II

1
That is clear from the lists of traditiones drawn up at the time of
the Council of Trent; cf. the m'1!terial indicated below, chapter III,
note 19 .
2
Art. 28, 3�42 in Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen
Kirche ( 21952), pp. 126 £.
sArt 28, 52, ibid., p. 129.

' Ibid., p. 463 £.

5
Art. 7, 1, ibid., p. 61.
6
Cf. on this and on what follows J. Ratzinger, ''Das geiscliche Amt
und die Einheit der Kirche'' in Catholica 17 (1963), ·pp. 165,9.
7
References in chapter III, notes 16 and 17.
8
Published in E. Peterson, Theologische Traktate (1951), pp. 295 f.
9
Cf. the report of R. Laurentin, L1enjeu du Concile. Bilan de la
. premiere session (1963), pp. 27-45; Y. Congar, Vatican II. Le concile

69
 NOTES TO CHAPTER II

au jour le jour (1963), pp. 631 1, E.T.: Report from Rome on the
First Session of the Vatican Council (1964); J. Ratz�nger, Die erste
Sitzungsperiode des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzili. (1963), pp. 38-so.
10
See above all his synoptic account: J. R. Geiselmann, Die Heilige
Schrift und die Tradition (1962), especially pp. 91-107 and 274-82.
Among t· he earlier works of Geiselmann on the same ,theme, one is of
particular importance: ''Das Konzil von Trient ii·ber das Verhaltnis
der Heiligen Schrift und der nichtgeschriebenen Traditionen'' in M.
Schmaus, ed., Die mundliche Oberlieferung (1957), pp. 123-206.
11
A summary of all those who have agreed in principle wi-th Geisel:
mann is given by H. Kung in his article ''Karl Barths Lehre vcm
Wort Gottes als F'rage an die katholische Theologie'' in J. Ratzinger
and H. Fries, ed., Einsicht und Glaube, ( 21963), p. 105, note 25.
12
This statemen·t is not meant in a sense that would make scripture
simply an unsubstantial report of facts which remain entirely external
to it. On the contrary, it should remain abundantly clear (as we hope
w-hat follows will show) that the reality of revelation is a word-reality,
that in the word of preaching the reality of revelati.on comes to the
ind�vidual human being. The fact remains, however, that the mere
presence of the word of ,scripture is not the reality of revelation itself,
which is never simply ''there''. The above remark is simply meant to
draw attention to the difference ,between scripture and the reality which
makes itself known in scripture, a difference which is not annulled by
the verbal character of revelation.
13
Cf. G. Gloege, ''Schriftprinzip
· '' in Die Religion in Geschichte und
3
Gegenwart, vol. V ( 1961), col. 1540-3, with bibliography. On the
concept of revelation, cf. M. Vereno, R. Schnackenburg and H. Fries
in Lexikon fur Theologie und Kirche, vol. VII (2 1¢2), col. 1104-15;
J. R. Geiselmann, ''Offenbarung'' in H. Fries, Handbuch theologischer
Grundbegriffe, vol. II (1963), pp. 242-so and bib·liography.
14
Cf. W. H. van de Pol, Das reformatorische Christentum (1956),
pp. Il7--s)2.
15
Cf. on this point the important article &:11oxa,\�,,, w of A. Oepke
in Theologisches Worterbuch zum Neuen Testament, vol. III (1938),
pp. 565--s)7.

70
 NOTES TO CHAPTER II

16
See on this the valuable remarks of G. Schrenk in his ar-ticle
ypa<p�-yp&µµa in Theologisches Worterbuch zum Neuen Testament,
vol. I (1933), pp. 74�9, especially pp. 767 ff.
17
Cf., for example, the account given by G. v. Rad, Theologie des
A/ten Testamentes, vol. II (1960), pp. 402-24.
18
H. Schlier, ''Die Kirche nach dem Brief an die Epheser'' in Die Zeit
der Kirche (3 1962), pp. 15�86.
19
On this account of the matter, see the observations of E. Peterson
\Vhich are still fundamental : ''Die Kirche'' in Theologische Traktate
(1951), pp. 409-29; H. Schlier, ''Die Entscheidung fiir die Heidenmission
in der Urchristenheit'' in Die Zeit der Kirche, pp. 90-107. It seems to me
cer-tain that both the analysis of the synoptic tradition regarding Jesus's
message and its eschatological orientation, and an examina,tion of the
earliest Christian ·history by means of the material contained in the
Aots of the Apostles, allow of no other solution of the problem of the
relation between the message of the kingdom and the Church,s preach­
ing than this. It in no way follows from this, in my opinion, as is
often feared, that the significance of the Cross is changed into an
accident of secondary importance, which really could have been avoided.
On the contrary, the crucifixion-structure of the Church becomes even
more radical, because only in this way do the serious reality of human
freedom and the gravity of Christ's passion, as well as the total origin
of the Church from the Cross, receive the.ir fu,11 weight.
2
° Cf. H. Gross, ''Motivtransposition als Form- und Trad�tionsprinzip
im Alten Testamen·t'' in H. Vorgrimler, ed., Exegese und Dogmatik
(1962), pp. 134-52 and bibliography, E.T. : ''Transposition of Themes as
Principal of Form and Tradition in the Old Testament'' in Dogmatic
versus Biblical Theology (1964); G. v. Rad, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 332-9
and 396-401.
21
Th · e non-identity of these two theologies of the Old Testament has
been emphasized very harshly by R. Bultmann, ''Wei·ssagung und
Erfiillung'' in Glauben und Verstehen, vol. II (1952), pp. 162-86; the
necessary qualifications to this, in which the historical basis for what
systematic theology calls analogia fidei �s made clear, can be found in

71
 NOTES TO CHAPTER II

G. v. Rad, op. ci,t., vol. II, pp. 32�424, especially p. 420, note 25, and
p. 422, note 29. On the theme of the analogia fidei between the t, wo
testaments, see also E. Przywara, Alter und Neuer (Jund (1956).
22
Cf., for example, ,the instructive account in G. Bornkamm, /esus von
Nazareth (1956), E.T.: /esus of Nazareth (1960). On the questio11
touched upon here, see H. Schlier, ''-Ober Sinn und Aufgabe einer
Theologie des Neuen Testamentes'' (E.T.: ''The Meaning and Function
of a Theology of the New Testament, '') in H. Vorgrimler, op. cit., PP·
69----90.
23
On this question the best that has been said as regards the Fathers
will still ,be found in A. v. Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte,
vol. II ( 5 1931), pp. 84-116. Harnack actuall, y says, p. 87, note 3: ''The
'Canon' was originally ·the rule of fa�th; scripture has in truth inter­
vened, yet in such a way that its authority had a significance ly�ng still
further back, namely, in the Old Testament and the words of the Lord''.
I have tried to show ,that this was still true in the Middle Ages, and
that here (together with the concept of revelatio, which will be dealt
with in the next chapter) the placing of ''fides'' (the creed) higher than
scriptura represents the essential form of the idea of tradition. See my
essay: ''Wesen und W eisen der auctoritas im Werk des heiligen
Bonaven,tura'' in Corsten, Protz and Linden, ed., Die Kirche und ihre
Amter und Sti:inde, Festgabe Kardinal Frings (1960), pp. 5812.
24
This line of thought cannot be developed in greater detail here, as it
would really require to be, for we are only concerned to indicate the
basis of the concept of tradition. In view of the limitation of the theme,
I have been con-tent in ·the preceding theses to develop the matter
to the point where it becomes evident that tradition is concerned ,vith
the ''Church'' (cf. ,theses 4 and 5). Wha,t that means could only be
, more precise terms by an analysis of the concept of the
explained i n
Church, which must be taken for granted here. Cf. my article on
ministry and unity of the Church n1.entioned in note 6 above; in it I
attempted a few observations on the matter.

72
 NOTES TO CHAPTER III

CHAPTER III

NOTE: CT has been used below as abbreviation of Concilium Triden­

tinum ( 1901 ff.).

1
Unfortunately Geiselmann obtained his account of the mediaeval
situation at second hand, so that its historical value is questionable.
See my remarks in the Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift (1963), pp.
2241. They are not affected 1by the vivacity of Geiselmann's reactions
in Tubi·nger Theologische Quartalschrift 144 (1964), pp. 31-69, which
can scarcely be described as contributing .to advance the discussion. A
valuable accoun·t is given by Y. Congar, La tradition et les traditions.
Essai historique (1960), E.T.: Tradition and Traditions, An Historical
Essay (1966); also important is J. Beumer, Die mundliche Oberlieferung
als Glaubensquelle (1962). On Trent, besides the fundamental work of
Jedin, see especially E. Ortigues, ''Ecriture et Traditions apostoliques au
Concile de Trente'' in Recherches de science religieuse 36 (1949), pp.
271�9; IK. D. Schmidt, Studien zur Geschichte des Konzils von Trient
(1925), pp. 152-209.
2
The speech has been handed down in two versions, a shorter one in
the Acta in CT, vol. V, p. 11, and a longer one in Massarelli's diary
(Diarium III) in CT, vol. I, pp. 484 £. The two versions are, however,
identical in content. In the following ana,Iysi,s the 1two versions will be
presented successively. On Cervin.i's position at the Council, see H.
Jedin, Geschichte des Konzils von Trient, vol. II (1957), pp. 38-40,
E.T.: A History of the Council of Trent (2 vols., 1957-1961). The
account of the historical course of the discu·ssion in Jedin, pp. 42-82,
may be assumed here as the backgrou-nd of the theologjcal analysis.
3
CT, vol. V, p. 11 ''. . . tria esse princi·pia et fundament1 a nostrae
fidei: primum libros sacros . . . , sec·undum esse evangeljum, quod
Christus· Dominus N,oster non scripsit, sed ore docuit et in cordibus illud
plantavit, cuius evangelii nonnulla evangelistae scripto mandarunt,
multa quoque reljcta slllI1t in cordibus hominum. Tertium, quia non
semper filius Dei corporaliter nobiscum mansurus era·t, misit Spiritum
Sanctum, qui in cordibus fidelium secreta Dei revelaret et ecclesiam

73
 NOTES TO CHAPTER III

quotidie et usque ad consummationem saecul_� doceret omnem veritatem,

et si quid in mentibus hominum dubii occurrisset, declararet''.
4
CT, vol. I, p. 484. The formula used on p. 485,__ lines 14-16 is also
noteworthy: ''Ni,hil tamen inter scripturas sacras et apostolicas tradi­
tiones differt; illae enim scriptae, hae per insinuationem haben,tur,
utraeque tamen a spiritu sancto eodem modo emanatae''. Similarly CT,
vol. V, p. 1 1, line 19 : ''• . . ab eodem spir�tu et illos (sc. libros) et istas
(sc. ·traditiones) descendisse''.
5
CT, vol. X, p. 373.
6
CT, vol. V, pp. 14 and 15. Investigation of all the scriptural and
patristic auctoritates, which appear in this collection as testimonies to
the reality of tradition, would itself be informative for what was under­
stood by tradition. H. Holstein has devoted a noteworthy study to it:
' 'La tradition d'apres le Concile de Trente'' in Recherches de science
religieuse 47 (1959), pp. 367-(JO. In the texns he finds two main
tendencies. There is the Irenaeus line, for which the t, esti_111ony of the
apostles is the testimony of their personali·ty, life and office. There is
also the line of Tertulliain-C · yprian-Basil-Augustine, which migh.t be
called the ''ceremonial'' line. Origen belongs, he thinks, to both. In
fact in this collection of quotations ,there is a •series of texts referring to
observationes, consuetudines, institutiones, which suggest that tradition
is to be found in that d�rection. But there are also texts which
emphasize that the gospel is written in the hearts of the faithful. And
there are regularly those which point out that the Church is the place
where Christ's truth is found.
1
CT, vol. I, p. 483 (18 February 1546). We find Cervini returning to
this statemen,t on 26 February ( CT, vol. V, p. 18). Cf. also a prono11nce­
ment of the Bishop of Fano, CT, vol. V, p. 10 : ''C,irn �am receperimus
scripturas sacras, necessario recipiendae sunt traditiones, quae ab eodem
Spiritu Sancto quo scripturae dictatae sunt . . . "
8
My attention was first drawn to this by a study of C. H. R. Limbach
prepared under my direction, to which I also owe other references.
9
I have attempted a short sketch on that background in my article
''Offenbarung - Schrift - Oberlieferung'' in Trierer Theologische
Zeitschrift 67 (1958), pp. 1 3-27; cf. also J. Be11111er, ''Der theoretische
Beitrag der Friihscholastik zum Problem des Dogmenfortschritts'' in

74
 NOTES TO CHAPTER III

Zeitschrift fur katholische Theologie 72 (1952), pp. 205-26; J. de

Ghellinck, ''Pour l'histoire du mot 'revelare' '' in Reche1·ches de science
religi,euse 6 ( 1916), pp. 14�7.
10
Here is the place of a statement of Cervini on 26 February 1546,
reported in CT, vol. I, p. 33, and vol. V, p. 18, that not all traditions
which go back to the apostles are to be accepted, bu,t only those which
''ab ecclesia receptae ad nos usque pervenerunt'' (vol. V, p. 18). This
statement, which anticipates ·the phrasing of the conciliar dogma, can
at the same time be taken as an authentic commentary of this difficult
formula, jn which, therefore, it is essentially a matter of stressing the
receptio ecclesiae. Under the date 23 March a statement of the Bishop of
Ber•tinoro is reported (vol. I. pp. 523 £.), in which he stressed that the
written t• raditions have .in part been changed, •that among the
unwritten traditions there are those that have ,been changed and
1

those •that have -not (admixture of water in the wine, chrism,

auricular confession) and that finally quite unchangeable things
belong there, such as descensus ad inferos, Mary's perpetual virginity,
the replacement of the Sabhat- h by Sunday. Other matters had been
preserved in the East but changed in the West. A statement of the
Bishop of Bitonto dated 27 March is reported (vol. I, p. 39), expressing
the view that some things were handed on by the apostles for perpetual
keeping (such as what belongs .to fides), some t· hi,ngs have ceased (St
James's precept), some things were meant a1s counsel. In a similar way,
of course, some things were written .�n scripture which were not
observed because they were only counselled: ''If any one would sue you
and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; if any one strikes
you on the righ,t cheek, turn to him the other also''-certainly rather a
remarkable solution of the problem of the Sermon on ·the Mount.
Finally, similar ideas are also found in Lejay, for instance in the
speech of 23 February (CT, vol. V, p. 13), where we read: ''Nam illae
(sc. traditiones), quae ad fidem pertinent, eadem sunt recipiendae
auctoritate qua recipitur evangelium, alia autem non ita, cum earum
pluritnae immutatae fuerint, ut de bigamis, de esu sanguinis et similia ,,.
For that matter we also find Bonuccio, vol. I, p. 525 (23 March 1546)
saying: ''. . . ecclesia traditiones apostolorum quandoque mutavit,
verbum autem Dei numquam mutavit neque mutare potest . . . ''
11
Seripando, De traditionibus (February or March 1546), CT, vol. XII,

75
 NOTES TO CHAPTER III

pp. 517-21 and in particu·lar p. 52!. In content the last thought is close
to Cervini's idea of the receptio ecclesiae.
12
Cf. the tex·t s referred to in note 1 1.
13
As a matter of fact this idea no longer appears ln the text of the
decree, where when tradition is first mentioned, the antithesis is at once
set up ''in libris scrip t, is et sine scripto traditionibus''. The second
mention is not so exclusive, bu,t has the same tendency by its contrast
with ''omnes libros . . . nee non traditiones ipsas''. Yet the positive
conception of tradition, which forms the backgrou,nd of ·this discussion,
was not without influence even on the decree.
14
CT, vol. XII, p. 517.
15
CT, vol. I, pp. 494 f. (26 February 1546). The supposed saying of St
Augustine played a part in .the discussion in another matter also.
Seripando refer•s to .it as follows (De traditi.onibus, CT, vol. XII, p. 521,
lines 47-S3) : ''Pensandum denique, ne in traditionibus externis vera
religio et salutis spes statuatur, de quibus Augustinus: 01J1oia, quae
pertinent ad veram religionem quaerendam et tenenda1n, divina
Scri·ptura non tacuit''. Not everything is written down, of course (John
2 1 : 25 !), ''electa sunt autem, quae scriberentur, quae saluti credentium
sufficere videbant- ur''. More than anywhere else in the Tridentine debate
the real concern of the Reformers is grasped here: it is not exterior
practices which save; what is decisive for salvation is encountered in the
word of scripture. The ''sufficiency'' of scripture ,that is spoken of here
is, of course, something different from the material sufficiency asserted
by Geiselmann and of much more radical significance. Unfortunately
it has not yet been possible to identify Augustine's text (CT, vol. I, p.
494 suggests De doctrina christiana II, 9 and De peccatorum meritis et
remissione II, 59). Instructive in :tn �s connec,tion are the references of
H. Schauf, ''Schrift und Tradition'' in Antonianum 39 (1964), pp. 2<>0-9,
to the so-called Diisseldorf religious discussion. In the texts presented
by Schauf, the sufficiency of scripture for salvation is asserted with the
same reference to Augustine, but its sufficiency for the order of the
whole Church is nevertheless contested. In fact such an alternative
appears to be much more meaningful and, from the point of view of
the intention of the Reformers, much more fundamental •than the
alternative of material sufficiency or insufficiency of scripture.

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 NOTES TO CHAPTER III

16
On the dispute about questions of procedure, Jedin, op. cit., pp. 9-82,
should agai•n be consulted.
17
So, for example, in Cervini's great speech whioh is analysed at the
beginning ( CT, vol. I, p. 484), and in which Cervini presents the
dilemma of the Council: if it turns to the traditiones, the Fathers
would be surprised: ''quasi reformationem fugiamus; si ipsam reforma­
tionem sumimus, iterum obiicient, traditiones relinquendas non esse . . .''
The conclusion is similar in two interventions of the Bishop of Astorga,
23 February 1546, CT, vol. V, pp. 13 and 19, in Seripando (vol. I, p.
484 : '' . . . traditiones prius pertractandas consulit; tantam enim con­
formitatem abusus, qui ex sacris ljbris descendunt, cum iis, qui a
tradi,tionibus orti sunt, habent, ut sacris libris et traditionibus absolutis
duo illa a,busuum genera simul pertractari valeant'') and Bonuccio (vol.
I, p. 484 : In the first place they were to deal with the scriptures, the
apostolic canons, the General Councils and the papal decretals. ''Hisqt1e
susceptis ad abusus ex eisdem dependentes devenire'').
18
That is particularly clear with Alfons de Castro, CT, vol. I, p. 484 :
''Quoniam ultra traditiones apostolicas ecclesiae auctori-tatem habemus,
quae ecclesiae auctoritas tanta apud nos est, ut aliqui earn maioris
roboris quam sacros libros esse sentiant . . .'' Similarly vol. I, p. 491,
lines 45 f. In substance a number of Lejay's pronouncements follow the
same line, especially CT, vol. XII, p. 524 (Treatise De traditionibus
ecclesiae, February or March 1546).
19
CT, vol. XII, p. 523. Lejay obviously bases ·himself here on lists of
traditions of which a number were drawn up at that ,time, for example,
by Eck, Driedo, Cano, Soto and Nogarola. Cf. on cliis Y. Congar,
''Traditions apostoliques non ecrites et suffisance de l'Ecriture'' in
lstina 6 ( 1959), pp. 21�306, especially pp. 289 ff.
2
° CT, vol. V, p. 14. •

21
CT, vol. X, p. 373.
22
In any case it seems clear from a statement of Cervini that the Bishop
of Chioggia finally abandoned his thesis of the sufficiency of scripture,
which met with general opposition. In Cervini's letter to Cardinal
Farnese of 27 February 1546 we read: ''. . . Chioggia, che (quasi quasi)
voleva dire queste traditioni essere superflue, perorando, che tutto
quello che era necessario alla salute era scritto, et allegando etiam S.

77
 NOTES TO CHAPTER III

Agostino sopra !'ultimo capitulo di S. Giovanni a questo proposito.

Pure, per non poter negare, che molte cose, appartenenti almeno alli
sacramenti, non ci fussero venute ex traditione, et per consequente,
che non tutte le cose necessarie alla nostra salute erano scritte, •poiche
ebbe fatte molte distintioni, concluse, che ancor lui a<::cettava queste
'che jn la chiesa fusse qualche tradi1tione apostolica non scritta'; (et con
queste parole diceva, che se ne facesse il decreto); credo che molti
sono restati ·scandalizati di lui'' (CT, vol. X, no. 3 15, p. 399, lines 4-1 1).
Cf. also CT, vol. I, p. 494, note 9, and p. 495, note 2; CT, vol. V, p. 18,
note 5, and p. 19, note 1 . The same attitude •to Nacchianti as appears­
here is reflected in Massarelli's remark (vol. I, p. 494, line 1 8) cal·ling
h j m ''novarum rerum cupid us'', and jn his report (vol. I, p. 494, line
22) : ' 'Reprehensus es·t a multis''. The irnportance that Geiselmann
attributes to him appears quite 11nconvincing in these circumstancest
even apart from the other well-known grounds, which need not be
repeated here.

78
 QUAESTIONES DISPUTATAE

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Karl Rahner
HOMINISATION. The Evolutionary Origin of Man as a
Theological Problem
Heinz Robert Schlette
TOWARDS A THEOLOGY OF RELIGIONS
Josef Rupert Geiseln1ann
THE MEANING OF TRADITION
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ON MARRIAGE, SEX AND VIRGINITY