In the discussion about sola scriptura, I made a point a number of times that I feel was never addressed, so I want to give the Catholics here a chance to address it. It seems to me that there is nowhere in scripture that it is even implied that the Holy Spirit will supernaturally protect an Oral Tradition from error. Why is this a problem? It’s a problem because if scripture doesn’t guarantee that Oral Tradition will be protected from error, then the only thing left to make the claim that Tradition is protected from error is, of course, Tradition itself. If the primary sources of God’s Word for Catholics are Scripture and Tradition, then Scripture must be used to prove that Tradition is always protected, otherwise you get stuck in a big circular loop of logic, with Tradition being the only thing that proves Tradition.
So, I challenge the Catholics here to prove that an infallible Tradition is promised in scripture. I contest that it isn’t. Verses like 2 Thess 2:15 aren’t promises, they are commands, a completely different matter. Paul isn’t promising that the Thessalonians will hold onto his oral teachings, he tells them to hold onto them. There is no guarantee that they will. Considering how bad we humans are at following orders, it is a bad idea (IMHO) to assume that they did in fact hold onto those oral teachings over the course of 2000 years.
So please, show me a single verse that implies that an Oral Tradition will develop that is protected by the Holy Spirit. If you can’t, then clearly the only thing supporting the notion of an infallible Tradition would be Tradition itself.
