Senses of Tradition

Since the early Christian centuries, Roman Catholicism has accepted both scripture and tradition as authorities for church teaching on God, Christ, and salvation. Catholicism has never held a fundamentalistic view of scripture, holding instead that scripture is susceptible to interpretation. In the Middle Ages, this idea was formalized with the definition of four "senses" of scripture: literal, allegorical, anagogical, and moral. In response to the Reformation, however, tradition gradually came to be identified most closely with papal authority and ultimately with the papal prerogative of infallibility. In this book, John Thiel attempts to counter this tendency towards "ecclesiastical fundamentalism" by exploring the susceptibility of tradition to a variety of interpretive meanings. He argues that tradition should be understood as a developing reality rooted in the experience of the whole community of believers, and doctrine as a revisable expression of historical faith in time and culture. He goes on to define four possible interpretive "senses" of tradition - comparable to those recognized in scripture - and considers their theological significance. These senses, he argues, can provide a new and clearer framework for thinking both about how tradition abides and how tradition develops in history.