Practicing Christian Doctrine: An Introduction to Thinking and Living Theologically

by Beth Felker Jones

For Roman Catholicism, the Council of Trent (1545–63) rejected the Protestant principle of sola scriptura and affirmed that Catholic theology relies on both Scripture and living tradition as interdependent and authoritative sources for theology. The Catholic Church “receives and venerates with a feeling of reverence all the books both of the Old and New Testaments, since one God is the author of both; also the traditions, whether they relate to faith or to morals, as having been dictated either orally by Christ or by the Holy Ghost, and preserved in the Catholic church in unbroken succession.”14 In the twentieth century, the Catholic Church reaffirmed this understanding of the equal value of Scripture and tradition at the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), where official teaching describes both sacred Scripture and sacred tradition as coming from one source of revelation, the Word of God: Scripture “as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit,” and tradition as “the word of God entrusted by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit to the Apostles.”