Position · 180

Holy Tradition

The Orthodox teaching that the faith is handed down as one living tradition, of which Scripture is the central part, together with the creeds, the councils, the Fathers, the liturgy and the icons.

History

Roots

The New Testament already speaks of a faith “handed on.” Paul delivered to the Corinthians “as of first importance what I also received” (1 Corinthians 15:3) and told the Thessalonians to “hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter” (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Jude urged his readers to contend for the faith “once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). Orthodox writers read these texts as describing one deposit passed on in two forms, spoken and written.

The appeal to tradition as an argument began with the Gnostic crisis. Around 180, Irenaeus of Lyon faced teachers who quoted the same Scriptures but claimed a secret knowledge behind them. His answer in Against Heresies was public succession: the apostles taught openly, appointed bishops, and the churches they founded still held the same faith, which anyone could check by listing the bishops of Rome (III.3). The apostles, he wrote, “like a rich man [depositing his money] in a bank, lodged in her hands most copiously all things pertaining to the truth” (III.4). Tertullian pressed the point further in The Prescription Against Heretics (c. 200, New Advent): heretics had no right to argue from Scripture at all, because Scripture belongs to the church that received it.

Causes

The fourth-century Trinitarian fight made tradition a matter of interpretation, not only of possession. Arius and his successors argued from Scripture, and Athanasius answered by appealing to the faith the church had held from the beginning, which the Council of Nicaea (325) put into a creed. Basil of Caesarea, defending the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, gave the classic statement in On the Holy Spirit (c. 375). Some of the church’s beliefs and practices come “from written teaching; others we have received delivered to us in a mystery by the tradition of the apostles; and both of these in relation to true religion have the same force” (ch. 27). His examples were liturgical: the sign of the cross, praying toward the east, the words of the eucharistic prayer, triple immersion at baptism.

In 434 Vincent of Lérins gave the West its rule of thumb: the catholic faith is “that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all” (Commonitorium 2.6). The ecumenical councils at Nicaea, the Council of Constantinople (381), the Council of Ephesus (431) and the Council of Chalcedon (451) each presented their definitions as guarding what had been received, not adding to it.

The iconoclast controversy of the eighth century was the decisive test. Opponents of images said there was no biblical warrant for them. John of Damascus and the Second Council of Nicaea (787) answered from tradition. The council’s definition reads: “we keep unchanged all the ecclesiastical traditions handed down to us, whether in writing or verbally, one of which is the making of pictorial representations” (Nicaea II, definition). That sentence is still the shortest summary of the Orthodox position.

Influence

After the Great Schism of 1054, tradition became the main Orthodox argument against Rome. The Filioque and Papal Primacy were rejected as innovations that the whole church had never received. When the Council of Florence (1439) agreed a union, the Eastern clergy and people refused it, led by Mark of Ephesus (summary, secondary). Orthodox theologians later treated that refusal as proof that a council’s authority depends on the church’s reception of it.

The Reformation forced the East to state its view against Protestants too. Lutheran theologians at Tübingen sent the Augsburg Confession to Patriarch Jeremias II of Constantinople, and his replies (1576–1581) rejected Sola Scriptura and the Protestant teaching on justification, appealing to the Fathers and councils (George Mastrantonis, Augsburg and Constantinople, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1982). When Patriarch Cyril Lucaris published a Calvinist-leaning confession in 1629 (summary, secondary), the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) answered with the Confession of Dositheus. Its second decree says Scripture must be interpreted “as the Catholic Church has interpreted and delivered the same,” and that “the witness also of the Catholic Church is, we believe, not of inferior authority to that of the Divine Scriptures” (Decree 2).

The modern Orthodox account took shape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, partly in reaction to these Latin and Protestant categories. Its influence reached the West through the Orthodox diaspora after 1917, through ecumenical dialogue, and through Protestant converts. The best-known case is the Evangelical Orthodox Church, a group of former Campus Crusade leaders who were received into the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese in 1987 (summary, secondary); Peter Gillquist told the story in Becoming Orthodox (1989).

Key ideas and contributors

One tradition, not two sources. The Orthodox reject the picture of Scripture plus a second, oral source of revelation. Scripture is the written heart of tradition, and tradition is the church’s continuous life in which Scripture was written, gathered into a canon, read and understood. Alexei Khomiakov’s essay The Church Is One (written in the 1840s, published 1864) gave this its most quoted form: the Spirit of God “manifests Himself within her in divers manners; in Scripture, in Tradition, and in Works,” and “neither individuals, nor a multitude of individuals within the Church, preserve tradition or write the Scriptures; but the Spirit of God, which lives in the whole body of the Church” (text).

Tradition is the life of the Spirit. Vladimir Lossky’s essay “Tradition and Traditions” (1952, in The Meaning of Icons) defined Tradition, capital T, as the life of the Holy Spirit in the church, distinct from the many customs and texts (“traditions”) through which it is expressed. On this view tradition is a way of knowing more than a list of contents. It is how the church recognises the truth (John 16:13).

The mind of the Fathers. Georges Florovsky (summary, secondary) called for a “neopatristic synthesis”: Orthodox theology should recover the mind of the Fathers, not repeat their words. His essays in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View (1972), especially “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church,” argue that tradition was first of all the church’s way of reading Scripture rightly. In Ways of Russian Theology (1937) he charged that Orthodox theology had suffered a “Western captivity,” borrowing Latin and Protestant textbook forms.

Authority lies with the whole church. No single office guarantees the truth. Bishops teach and councils define, but the faithful as a body must receive what they teach. The Eastern Patriarchs put this bluntly in their 1848 reply to Pope Pius IX: “neither Patriarchs nor Councils could then have introduced novelties amongst us, because the protector of religion is the very body of the Church, even the people themselves” (Encyclical of the Eastern Patriarchs). This links Holy Tradition closely to Conciliarity.

Liturgy and icons carry doctrine. Orthodox writers stress that much of tradition is prayed before it is defined. The liturgy, the church calendar and the icons teach Theosis, the Trinity and the Incarnation to people who never read a council. The Orthodox Church in America’s catechetical summary lists Scripture, the councils, the Fathers, the liturgy, canon law and iconography as parts of one tradition that “will continue to grow and develop” as the church lives by the Spirit (OCA, “Tradition”).

Other contributors: Gregory Palamas, whose fourteenth-century defence of hesychast prayer was framed as fidelity to the Fathers; and Sergei Bulgakov, whose The Orthodox Church (1935) presented tradition to Western readers.

Key controversies

Against Sola Scriptura. Protestants object that the New Testament warns against human tradition overriding God’s word: “you leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8; Colossians 2:8). They hold that only Scripture is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16) and so only Scripture can judge the church. Without that check, they argue, practices such as the veneration of icons and prayers to the saints entered under the name of tradition. Orthodox writers reply that the canon of Scripture was itself settled by the church’s tradition, and that every Protestant reads Scripture through some tradition of interpretation, so the real question is which one. The Jeremias correspondence is the first full exchange on this point, and it ended with both sides restating their positions. Modern evangelical treatments include Daniel Clendenin’s Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective (1994).

Against the Magisterium. Roman Catholics share a high view of tradition. The Council of Trent received “the written books, and the unwritten traditions” with equal reverence (Session IV, 1546), and the Second Vatican Council described Scripture and Tradition as flowing from one divine source, interpreted by the teaching office of the bishops in union with the pope (Dei Verbum 9–10). The disagreement is over who decides. Catholics argue that without a final arbiter the Orthodox cannot say which councils are ecumenical: the Second Council of Ephesus (449) and Florence both had the form of general councils and were later rejected. Orthodox writers answer that this is exactly the point. A council is ecumenical because the whole church recognises its teaching as the apostolic faith, and no office can guarantee that in advance. Critics reply that reception can only be judged after the fact, which leaves live disputes without a way to settle them. See Magisterium.

Which councils count. Tradition does not give all Orthodox the same list. The Eastern Orthodox accept seven ecumenical councils; the Oriental Orthodox accept the first three and reject Chalcedon. The Joint Commission’s Second Agreed Statement (Chambésy, 1990) recorded that “both families accept the first three Ecumenical Councils, which form our common heritage,” while the Oriental Orthodox accepted the Eastern reading of the later four only as an interpretation (text). Among the Eastern Orthodox, some theologians count the council of 879–880 and the Palamite councils of the fourteenth century as an eighth and ninth ecumenical council; others do not (summary, secondary).

Development or fixity. If tradition is living, can it develop? Florovsky’s neopatristic school stressed continuity with the Fathers and treated much modern Orthodox thought as Western contamination. The Russian religious philosophers, Bulgakov above all, held that tradition must engage new questions creatively; Bulgakov’s sophiology was condemned by the Moscow Patriarchate in 1935, a dispute that still marks Orthodox theology. Today the same question runs through Orthodox debates over ecumenism, the calendar and ethics, where both sides claim to be the faithful heirs of tradition. Critics outside Orthodoxy add that “the mind of the Fathers” is hard to pin down, since the Fathers disagreed with each other.

What remains unresolved

The Orthodox position is strongest as a description of how the early church actually worked: the canon, the creeds and the councils all came out of a church that read Scripture inside a common life. Its weak point is the one its critics name from both sides. Protestants ask how tradition can be corrected if Scripture does not stand above it. Catholics ask how it can be identified if no one has the final word. The Orthodox answer, that the Spirit keeps the whole church in the truth and the church recognises it over time, satisfies those who already belong and frustrates those who want a test they can apply today.