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SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION IN RECENT CATHOLIC THOUGHT THOSE who had occasion during the past decade to examine current trends in Catholic theology, especially in French and German literature, were aware of the rapid emergence of an impressive body of new facts and opinions concerning the classic problem of Scripture and Tradition. Between 14 and 20 November last year, the importance , if not the nature, of these rather esoteric developments suddenly acquired wide publicity by reason of their reverberations in the Second Vatican Council. For it seems to have been the chapter on Scripture and Tradition, of the schema presented by Cardinal Ottaviani's Theological Commission that occasioned the first deployment of opposition at the Council along lines of properly doctrinal controversy. The colorful debate that followed issued in a vote that discovered the protesting group to be a large but technically insufficient majority, only to be dramatically confirmed by the Pope's personal intervention, requiring the schema to be withdrawn and submitted for revision to a special committee tantamount to a coalition. While our knowledge of these events and their sequel must remain unofficial and incomplete, quite enough has appeared to show that the question of Scripture and Tradition is not only an insistent but a volatile one for the fathers of the Second Vatican Council. So was it also, of course, for the fathers of the Council of Trent. And yet, for the fathers of the intervening First Vatican Council it had become a neutral issue, considered to have been settled at Trent, and to require no more original treatment than verbatim citation of the Tridentine formula. Only one bishop seems to have proposed an ampler statement on Tradition, and that in the vaguest of terms and without eliciting any sympathetic re141 142 JAMES GAFFNEY sponse.1 These strikingly different attitudes towards the question of Scripture and Tradition, in the two great modem Councils separated by less than a century are, of course, the result of many factors of several kinds brought to bear during the interval. The brief account that follows will be concerned only with theological factors-most of which happen to be very recent factors-and with these only under their broadest aspects. I hope to indicate the immediately appreciable questions that have been most definitively raised, the literature in which they have been most satisfactorily treated, and the mutual pertinence that they most obviously display; to offer, in other words, an introductory essay, compr1smg a logical outline and a basic bibliography. THE SHAPE OF THE PROBLEM Scripture and Tradition. A Church of Scotland biblical scholar, J. K. S. Reid, expressed what has oftenest been meant by " the problem of Scripture and Tradition " in a way that is concise, and about as accurate as such concision permits: There are at least two conceivable relations between tradition and Scripture. The first is that tradition arises out of and is ultimately dependent upon Scripture; the other is that tradition exists as an independent factor alongside of Scripture. Between these two views, out of the Bible or alongside the Bible, the Roman Church has never quite decided.2 One critical reflection that is prompted at once by Reid's framing of his dilemma, and which he doubtless means to anticipate by his qualifying " at least," is that it is not strictly complete from a standpoint of disinterested logic. That is to say, whatever one may conclude about a subsequent tradition 's arising out of Scripture, it remains a logical possibility, and seems moreover to be an historical fact, that out of ante- 'See Mansi L, 268. Del Valle, Bishop of Huanuco, Peru, proposed that an amplification of the doctrine on Tradition he included in the second chapter of the Constitutio dogmatica de fide catholica. 2 Reid, J. K. S. The A1tthority of Scripture (London, 1957), p. 184. SCRIPTURE AND TRADITION IN CATHOLIC THOUGHT 148 cedent tradition, and indeed what can fairly be called an ecclesiastical tradition, Scripture itself arose.3 Although implications drawn from this fact by students of the Formgeschichte school raise problems of a literary historical nature for everyone and of a theological nature more especially for the biblical fundamentalist, such consequences of the fact, unlike the...

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