Conservative or orthodox forms of Protestantism draw a radical distinction between biblical Scripture and Christian Tradition, while its progressive or liberal forms go so far as to blur any difference between them, perhaps in the shadow of Roman Catholicism. These two views of these two fundamental dimensions of Christianity are at once an acknowledgement of an essential dimension and a form of pointless reductionism, and invite us to articulate Scripture and Tradition from the angle of the relationship between culture and spirituality.

1.Distinguishing between Scripture and Tradition

Classic historic Protestantism, and what remains of it in evangelical Protestantism today, drew a clear line between Scripture, regarded as inspired, and Tradition, regarded at best as useful. Such a distinction is a sound logical consequence of the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of Scripture: it was and is appropriate to distinguish between what is given to us once and for all as proceeding from the revelation of the Spirit, and what proceeds only from the invention of men, even if it bears the stamp of the most authentic spirituality or the most meticulous theology.

This is at least one way of looking at things, or one aspect of the relationship between the Bible and Christian Tradition. The Catholic Church, in all the diversity of its history and tendencies, seems on the contrary to have quickly made only a nuanced distinction between Scripture and Tradition: in the work of the Second Vatican Council on the “Word of God”, we read a reference to the former as a species (i.e. a particular case) of the latter. Traditional Protestantism also seems to be moving in this direction, through its ‘deconstruction’ of Scripture as an inspired text.

2.Distinguishing between spirituality and culture

From the point of view of immanence, we must recognise that the production of the texts of Holy Scripture does not appear to be of a different nature from that of the other texts of Christian Tradition: since the advent of biblical criticism, it has been more readily acknowledged that the same human effort of research, compilation and composition, the same differences of purpose, style and context, can be observed in all texts, which in this sense are simply texts, with their linguistic, historical and cultural dimensions. Even the notion of a ‘canon’ exists in many ancient civilisations.

In other words, perhaps, spirituality and culture should not be confused here. This does not, however, prevent us from preserving the sanitary distinction between inspired Scripture and useful Tradition: biblical inspiration is not a denial of the natural processes by which a text is written and transmitted, but an affirmation of the providential guidance of its redaction and its insertion into its own Tradition. Conversely, recognising and taking into account such processes does not in itself imply adopting a form of naturalism that excludes the transcendent guidance of the Spirit in the constitution of an inspired canon. Here, as elsewhere, the dialectical movements that mark the evolution of theology tend to become paralysed by false antitheses.

3.Accepting the cultural dimension of Christianity

But for the advocates of the plenary inspiration of Scripture, it is necessary to take account of the two aspects of the question: from a transcendent point of view, maintaining the distinction between Scripture and Tradition by affirming a discontinuity; from an immanent point of view, including Scripture in Tradition, by also affirming a continuity. This is manifest when we consider the very origin and transmission of the Gospel, the elementary material principle of the Christian faith. For if the first generation of Christians received it through the oral preaching of the apostles and their collaborators, subsequent generations received it only through the transmission of secondary witnesses, and with certainty only through its recording in the texts of Scripture, which were already cultural productions. Thus, the Gospel, which we would like to be nothing more than a “spiritual message”, is known to us only through an eminently cultural form, even a reconstituted text, and in most cases through its translation into our own language.

It is therefore not even possible for us, unless we ourselves claim new inspiration, to separate the spiritual element from the cultural element in the transmission of the oracles of God, and faith is needed to make an interpretation of them, which remains an exercise in piety. Perhaps this also means that the ‘Christian’ elements of our cultural heritage, particularly European or Western, should not be repudiated without further ado, on the pretext that they are no more than vestiges of religions that are too ‘human’ for us to be fooled by, being supposedly enlightened by a higher spirituality. On the one hand, this heritage includes the entire Christian Tradition, to which we are infinitely indebted on spiritual, theological and religious grounds. On the other hand, whether we like it or not, we also find the expression of Christianity in the forms of culture and civilisation that have shaped our environment, our education and even our personality.