Assessment

A sober concluding assessment of the Orthodox doctrine of Holy Tradition: its coherence and power, the genuine dangers that attend it, the questions this compendium has marked as honestly open, and its relation to the companion doctrine of Scripture. Offered not as the last word but as a fair weighing of a doctrine that is at once the strength and the standing temptation of Orthodox Christianity.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Strength of the Doctrine

The Orthodox doctrine of Holy Tradition is, taken as a whole, a coherent and powerful account of how the Christian faith is transmitted, and its strengths are considerable. It resolves the sterile Western opposition of “Scripture versus Tradition” by refusing the alternative: Scripture is neither a self-sufficient text over the Church nor one of two parallel sources beside a second, but the inspired written core of a single living Tradition (see Scripture within Tradition). It grounds the authority of Tradition not in an institution or an office but in the Holy Spirit, the life of the Church, so that Tradition is dynamic rather than static — the Spirit’s continual gift of knowing the truth, not the dead weight of the past (see Paradosis: The Living Memory of the Church). It accounts for the Church’s new dogmatic formulations without positing new revelation, through the category of deepening rather than addition (see Does Doctrine Develop?). And through Lossky’s distinction of Tradition from the traditions, it supplies the internal criterion by which the Church can honor her inheritance without absolutizing every part of it, discriminating the dogma from the custom, the life from its vehicles (see Tradition and Traditions). Few accounts of tradition in any Christian body are as theologically integrated: from the pneumatological foundation through Scripture, the Fathers, the councils, the Liturgy, the icons, and the canons, the doctrine hangs together as the many facets of one life.

The Genuine Dangers

A fair assessment must equally name the dangers, and they are real. The most obvious is the one the previous file treated at length: the standing temptation of traditionalism — the collapse of the living Tradition into the veneration of the past, the absolutizing of custom, the “dead faith of the living” (Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition, Yale, 1984, p. 65; see Tradition as Life, Not Archaeology). Because Orthodoxy is rightly and deeply traditional, it is peculiarly exposed to this deformation, and its own best theologians — Florovsky, Lossky, Ware — have had to warn against it repeatedly, which is itself evidence that the danger is not hypothetical. The calendar controversy, the recurring quarrels over the discrimination of the traditions, and the tendency in some quarters to treat a fasting rule or a chant style as though it were the faith itself, all show the temptation at work (see Tradition and the Life of the Church).

A subtler danger runs in the opposite direction. The very richness of the concept — Tradition as the whole life of the Spirit in the Church — can shade into vagueness, an appeal to “Tradition” so capacious that it becomes hard to say concretely what it authorizes and what it excludes, or who speaks for it in a disputed case. The doctrine of reception, powerful as it is, does not by itself settle when a teaching has been received or how the true consensus is identified in a contested present (see The Reception of Tradition); and the absence, in Orthodoxy, of any single earthly organ of decision — no papacy, no magisterial court of final appeal — means that the discernment of the true Tradition, in a live controversy, can be genuinely difficult and slow, and can leave real questions unresolved for long periods. This is a feature of the ecclesiology, not a bug; but it is a cost, and honesty names it.

The Open Questions

This compendium has marked, with [Disputed:] notes throughout, the points where the tradition is genuinely unsettled, and a sober assessment gathers them rather than papering over them. Four stand out.

First, the exact placement of particular customs on the scale from dogma to variable usage — the calendar being the sharpest case — is agreed in principle (the Tradition/traditions distinction is universal) but contested in practice, and the tradition contains no mechanical rule for deciding it (see Tradition and Traditions). Second, the development question — whether the language of doctrinal “development” (Newman) or of “articulation” and “deepening” (Lossky, Vincent) best describes the Church’s new formulations, and by what criterion true unfolding is distinguished from illegitimate novelty — remains a real difference with Roman Catholicism, sharpened over the specific doctrines Rome regards as developments and the Church has examined and not received — for the Church a standing disagreement, not an open question (see Does Doctrine Develop?). Third, the weight and mechanism of reception and sobornost — how far the whole Body’s reception conditions conciliar authority, and whether the Slavophile account overstates it — is an unresolved tension in Orthodox ecclesiology itself (see The Reception of Tradition and Khomiakov, Sobornost, and the Ecumenical Dialogue). Fourth, the ecumenical convergence on Tradition (Congar, Dei Verbum, Montreal 1963) is real but partial: the shared vocabulary of “Scripture within Tradition” was a genuine advance, but the decisive disagreements over the criterion of authentic Tradition and its interpretation were relocated rather than resolved (see Khomiakov, Sobornost, and the Ecumenical Dialogue). None of these is a defect peculiar to Orthodoxy; each is the form that a genuine and unfinished theological question takes within the Orthodox account.

Tradition and Scripture Together

This collection is the companion of The Orthodox Church and Holy Scripture, and the two are rightly read together, for they complete a single account of the sources of Orthodox theology. The doctrine of Scripture and the doctrine of Tradition are not two answers to one question but two faces of one answer: the faith is handed on as a whole life in the Spirit, of which the inspired Scriptures are the supreme written expression, read and lived within the Church that gave and receives them. To grasp either doctrine rightly is already to grasp the other; the Bible is the Church’s book within Tradition, and Tradition is the living context within which the Bible is the supreme word. Together they say what neither says alone: that the Orthodox Christian stands within a living communion, older than any of its documents and larger than any of its forms, in which the one faith of the Apostles is received, confessed, and handed on by the one Spirit, generation upon generation, until the Lord comes.

A Final Word

The doctrine of Holy Tradition is, in the end, the Orthodox Church’s account of her own identity across time — her claim to be, not a new thing in each age, but the one Body of Christ, holding the one faith, animated by the one Spirit, from the Apostles to the present. Its power lies in taking with full seriousness both the completeness of the deposit (“once for all delivered,” Jude 3) and the livingness of the Church that bears it; its danger lies in the ever-present temptation to trade the living for the merely old. The whole doctrine may be summed up in the conviction that has governed this compendium from the first page: that Tradition is not the dead hand of the past upon the present, but the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church — and that to live within it is not to guard a museum but to belong to a communion that death does not break. This assessment is offered not as a verdict but as a fair weighing, in the spirit of the repository’s methodology, of a doctrine best judged, finally, not in the abstract but in the living.

References

Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Vindication of Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. (Tradition versus traditionalism, p. 65.)
Lossky, Vladimir. “Tradition and Traditions.” In In the Image and Likeness of God, 141–168. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The distinction of Tradition and the traditions; the internal criterion.)
Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (Scripture within Tradition; Tradition as the life of the Spirit.)
Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (The doctrine of Tradition and the warning against traditionalism, pp. 195–204.)
Congar, Yves, OP. Tradition and Traditions. Trans. Naseby and Rainborough. London: Burns & Oates, 1966. (The ecumenical dialogue and its limits.)
Scripture: Jude 3.