Tradition informs the reading of Scripture. Go read St. Irenaeus or St. Basil. It is completely true that Scripture is sufficient in itself, being the inspired word of God, but the reader is not quite so lucky, and hence only by virtue of the living tradition can the reader understand the interior order of the Scriptures.
Well, I certainly agree with you here, Cav. This is a big problem with Protestantism as you know.
However, I must ask: what is this “living tradition” of which you speak? Knowing your objections to the development of doctrine (and our previous disagreements over the ossification of Orthodoxy), how can you claim that Orthodox have anything but a dead tradition? Will you say that Orthodox theology is alive but not growing? Or alive and growing but somehow not developing? Is this even possible?
I’m not insisting that it is dead, btw, just puzzled as it appears you want to have it both ways.
To paraphrase St. Irenaeus, each verse of scripture is like a gem which goes into a mosaic, but without some knowledge of what the image is, one could reconfigure the gems into all manner of images. Imagine that the gems originally went together to form the image of a king, but that then somebody took the gems, reconfigured them into a dog, and then told everybody that this was the original design of the artisan who made the mosaic. That is essentially what heretics do. The verses of scripture (the gems) are the same, but their interior ordering has been reconfigured into something other than the original.
I understand and accept your analogy. However, what if each apostle or Church Father saw some of the individual gems in varying degrees of clarity as well as the overall outline of the original image *without *necessarily understanding all the detail?
Isn’t that how it really works? Different saints saw different aspects of the gospel more clearly than others? Only the Church as a whole sees the full picture. (one reason why Catholics and Orthodox need each other, btw)
The apostles didn’t develop the hypostatic union. That came later. The creeds, the doctrines of the trinity, the understanding of Mary, etc. - all these were developed as the Church had time to pray and reflect upon what had been delivered once for all to the saints.
So, just like working a jigsaw puzzle which does have an image to be created, one by one the pieces are put into place, but not every father saw every piece in its proper relation to the others.
What you are setting up is actually similar to Martin Luther’s scriptural hermeneutic, where tradition is assumed to have grown decadent with superfluous accumulations, and where it therefore must be judged against a personal interpretation of the ‘plain meaning’ of the Scriptures. In essence, you are basically advocating Sola Scriptura.
No one has ever accused me of that before.
But if you do not believe me, then allow me to issue to you a challenge. Without anything but Scripture, I wish for you to demonstrate that the so-called ‘monoepiscopacy’ (having one bishop alone in one city, who controls all of the presbyters and deacons there) is an apostolic arrangement and not some later arrangement (as was argued by St. Jerome). After all, this claim seems to me to be an unspoken assumption behind your royal steward claim, so I find it reasonable to ask that this assumption be proved.
Titus 1:5
The reason I left you in Crete was that you might put in order what was left unfinished and appoint elders in every town, as I directed you.
Is that multiple elders per town or multiple elders because there was more than one town?
But that is actually irrelevant, because I have never said that monoepiscopacy is essential to my argument for the Royal Steward. In fact, I have stated the opposite when I asked:
Does the existence of other, lesser stewards (who have their own legitimate areas of authority) limit the authority of the Chief Steward in any way?
Despite the existence of other, lesser stewards, don’t Peter’s successors, the Bishops of Rome, continue to serve in the office of the King’s Royal Steward today?
Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces. That doesn’t mean that Patton, Montgomery and all the other generals didn’t have their own legitimate authority.
In the Supreme Court, there is a Chief Justice whose responsibilities and authority goes beyond that of the other justices.
There are lots of examples, each filled with its own strengths and weaknesses as is often the case with analogies, but I think these suffice to illustrate the point.
