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Q u i c k Q u e s t i o n s
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This Rock
Volume 6, Number 5
 May 1995 
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Is Tradition inerrant?
Q: Is apostolic Tradition, apart from the Bible, inerrant or can it contain errors?
A: It is inerrant, and because it is inerrant, apostolic Tradition will never contradict the Bible, which is also inerrant. Human traditions may contain mistakes, but apostolic Tradition does not. Any teaching that the apostles authoritatively passed down to the Church is inerrant, irrespective of whether it is written down.
The key to telling which Traditions are apostolic and which are merely human is the same as they key to telling which writings are apostolic and which are merely human. It is the magisterium that recognizes the "canon" of apostolic Tradition, just as it recognized the canon of apostolic Scripture.
Scripture and Tradition are important because anything the apostles authoritatively passed down to the Church, whether written or not, is inerrant. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, "'Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, then, are bound closely together . . . flowing out from the same divine well-spring, [they] come together in some fashion to form one thing and move towards the same goal.'
"As a result the Church, to whom the transmission and interpretation of Revelation is entrusted, 'does not derive her certainty about all revealed truths from the holy Scriptures alone. Both Scripture and Tradition must be accepted and honored with equal sentiments of devotion and reverence'" (CCC 80, 82, citing Vatican II, Dei Verbum 9).
Most of apostolic Tradition contains the same material that is found in apostolic Scripture, only in a different form. This makes the two useful for interpreting each other because they contain the same material phrased different ways.
For example, the doctrine of baptismal regeneration is found several places in Scripture, such as in John 3:5, where Jesus says, "Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." But because Jesus uses the metaphor for baptism, "born of water and the Spirit," many Protestants have tried to deny that it is a reference to baptism at all and have claimed that baptismal regeneration is false.
This is disproven through the apostolic Tradition preserved in the writings of the Church Fathers, who not only teach baptismal regeneration but also unanimously interpret John 3:5 as referring to baptism (see "The Fathers Know Best" column in the October 1994 issue of This Rock).
Q: Can the Catholic Church list all the teachings given to the apostles by divine revelation and contained in Sacred Tradition?
A: No it can't, because some of the teachings have been passed down in implicit rather than explicit form, and it is impossible to list all of the implications of a set of doctrines.
A good example of why this is so can be found in the Monothelite controversy. The Monothelites were seventh-century heretics who claimed that Jesus had only one will, the divine. The orthodox position is that Jesus also has a human will which is distinct from but never in conflict with his divine will. This position was infallibly defined at the Third Council of Constantinople (680-681).
Neither the Bible nor the writings of the earliest Church Fathers explicitly stated that Christ has a human will distinct from but in harmony with his divine will. That doctrine was not handed on from the apostles in explicit form, but it was handed on in implicit form.
The apostles taught, as the Bible and the Fathers indicate, that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. This contains the implicit teaching of two wills, because if Christ is fully human, he must have a human will, and if he is fully divine, he must have a divine will. For Christ to lack one or the other would make him either not be fully human or not be fully divine. Because of Christ's supreme holiness and the unity of his Person, his human and divine wills are never in conflict.
All of this is recognized even by Protestants. They acknowledge that the doctrine of the two wills of Christ must be accepted as something coming to us from the apostles, even though it did not come in explicit form. It was a legitimate doctrinal development that emerged when a heresy struck and the Church was sought a deeper, more explicit understanding of what it already implicitly knew.
Because the Church cannot make an exhaustive list of implicit doctrines, it does not try, but allows new implications within the apostolic deposit to be realized over the course of time, as the Holy Spirit leads the Church into all truth (John 16:13).
If the Church tried to make such a list, it would be attempting to run ahead of the Holy Spirit by forcing the process of doctrinal development to a sudden and premature end. Attempting to cause doctrinal development to advance at a more rapid pace would inevitably lead to problems. One problem in making such a list is that it would become fodder for heretics. If the Church had tried to make such a list before the outbreak of the Monothelite controversy, the list would not have included the proposition "Christ has a human will distinct from but entirely in harmony with his divine will."
No one would have thought to include that proposition because no dispute had arisen about the issue. Once the Monothelites appeared and the Church was pushed into realizing what Christ's full humanity implies, the Monothelites would have said to the orthodox party, "You can't say that Christ has two wills. The list of apostolic Teachings doesn't mention such a doctrine."
Q: I heard that in his recent encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), Pope John Paul II condemned "direct abortion." What is direct abortion? Is there such a thing as indirect abortion, and can it ever be justified?
A: Let's look at what the Pope said: "[B]y the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, in communion with the Bishops . . . I declare that direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being" (Evangelium Vitae 62). The Pope defines direct abortion as "abortion willed as an end or as a means." Abortion is willed as an end (that is, as a goal) if one's goal is to end the pregnancy. Abortion is willed as a means if ending the pregnancy is the instrument one uses to obtain some other goal. Abortion would be used as a means if, for example, the child was killed in order to harvest its body for medical consumption, such as organ transplants or tissue research.
An abortion would be indirect if it were used neither as an end nor as a means. If a pregnant woman has a cancerous womb that must be removed, removing it would produce an indirect abortion. The child would die after the womb is removed, but the child's death would neither be an end nor a means.
Whenever a child is actively killed, even as a means of protecting the mother's life, that constitutes direct abortion.
Q: Having an abortion means automatic excommunication from the Church. Are there other sins that carry this penalty?
A: Yes. In the 1983 Code of Canon Law (CIC) eight other sins carry the penalty of automatic excommunication: apostasy, heresy, schism (CIC 1364:1), violating the sacred species (CIC 1367), physically attacking the pope (CIC 1370:1), sacramentally absolving an accomplice in a sexual sin (CIC 1378:1), consecrating a bishop without authorization (CIC 1382), and directly violating the seal of confession (1388:1).
Apostasy is the total repudiation of the Christian faith. Heresy is the obstinate doubt or denial, after baptism, of a defined Catholic doctrine. Schism is the refusal of submission to the Roman Pontiff or the refusal to be in communion with members of the Church who are in communion with him (CIC 751).
Violation of the sacred species is the throwing away the consecrated species of Christ's Body or Blood or the taking or retaining of them for a sacrilegious purpose (CIC 1367).
Physically attacking the pope is self-explanatory, as are absolving an accomplice in a sexual sin and consecrating a bishop without authorization from the Vatican.
A direct violation of the seal of confession is one in which both the penitent and the penitent's sin can easily be determined by the confessor's words or behavior. Again, the penalty of automatic excommunication does not apply if no one perceives the disclosure (CIC 1330).
Automatic excommunication for abortion (CIC 1398) applies not only to the woman who has the abortion, but to "all those who commit this crime with knowledge of the penalty attached, and [this] includes those accomplices without whose help the crime would not have been committed" (Evangelium Vitae 62).
No one is automatically excommunicated for any offense if, without any fault of his own, he was unaware that he was violating a law (CIC 1323:2) or that a penalty was attached to the law (CIC 1324:1:9). The same applies if one was a minor, had the imperfect use of reason, was forced through grave or relatively grave fear, was forced through serious inconvenience, or in certain other circumstances (CIC 1324).
Q: Jehovah's Witnesses told me that Jesus' commands to eat his flesh and drink his blood in John 6 could not be literal because Jesus would be advocating something against God's law by commanding us to eat blood (cf. Gen. 9:4, Acts 15:28-29). What can I say to this?
A: You can say four things. First, any divine command that comes later modifies divine commands that came earlier. When Jesus declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19), his command superseded the earlier command that certain foods be regarded as unclean (Lev. 11:1-8). If Jesus today commands us to drink his blood, his command supersedes any prior command concerning drinking blood.
Second, the command against drinking blood, like all of the Old Testament dietary regulations, has passed away, for "These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink" (Col. 2:17, 16).
The mention of not eating blood in Acts 15:20, 29 was a pastoral provision suggested by James to keep Jews from being scandalized by the conduct of Gentile Christians. We know that these pastoral provisions were only temporary. One concerned abstaining from idol meat, yet later Paul says eating idol meat is okay so long as it doesn't scandalize others (Rom. 14:1-14, 1 Cor. 8:1-13).
If it is objected that blood is not a food (though it is in some cultures), note that Jesus was asked (Mark 7:5) why his disciples ate with unwashed hands. He replied, "Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean? For it doesn't go into his heart but into his stomach, and then out of his body" (7:18-19). In context this refers to a non-food substance (the dirt on one's unwashed hands).
Third, the Old Testament is very specific about why one was not to eat blood: "The life of every creature is the blood of it; therefore I have said to the people of Israel, You shall not eat the blood of any creature, for the life of every creature is its blood" (Lev. 17:14, cf. Deut. 12:23). The Israelites could not eat animal blood because it contained the animal's life, but there is one Person whose life you must have in you, "Christ who is your life" (Col. 3:4).
Finally, even if the Jehovah's Witnesses were right that drinking blood were intrinsically evil instead of the subject of a temporary prohibition, they would still have problems with John 6 because, in their interpretation, Jesus would be commanding us to eat his flesh symbolically and to drink his blood symbolically. He would be commanding us to act out symbolically an intrinsically evil deed as part of a sacred worship service. But this leads us to a ludicrous conclusion, so it must be that drinking Christ's blood is permissible (not to say desirable).
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Catholic Answers
