Both Theonas and Archelaus are avowed biblicists, but it is also obvious
that their biblical interpretation are products of their own times and
traditions. The matrix of their faith is the ongoing life of the Church—in the
midst of which they believe that the Lord Jesus stands as center and savior.
But something has happened. These men formally exalt Scripture;
yet one can scarcely avoid the impression that their typical and distinctive
notions of Christian doctrine and the Christian life rest on traditionary
developments which have been uncritically assumed to be identical with the gist
of Scripture. They profess to uphold the received faith as if it were
fixed in and attested to by the Scriptures. We are, therefore, on the verge of
a two-source concept of revelation, but the two sources are not yet consciously
differentiated in the Christian mind. But a step is needed to move into the
conscious distinction which will appear in the Nicene Church. When we seek to estimate
the ante-Nicene period as a whole, we notice an interesting involution in the
pattern of development in the Christian tradition in its oral and written
forms. In the beginning, of course, the paradosis was oral. Then came
the Christian writings, in some of which, as the Church came to believe, the
essential content of that paradosis had been permanently deposited. Other
writings were produced at the same time and the Church proceeded to adjudge
them “apocryphal.” To all practical intent and purposes, this judgment had been
rendered by the middle of the second century—even though final and official
action was deferred until the fourth.
It is therefore misleading to interpret Marcion’s pro-Pauline canon as
the first challenge to the Catholic Church to provide an ampler one of her own.
The fact is that the Church had already settled on the basic shape of her
written paradosis before Marcion, and this in the course of her
traditionary activity: preaching, teaching, worship. The principle of
the canon was established in the Church before the content of the
canon was decided by the Church.
Given a written form of the
apostolic tradition, plus the elongation of the historical time of the Church,
it was inevitable that the function of the oral tradition would change—from
repetition to representation, from the conservation of the Gospel to its
adaptation in those new situations which kept on arising to confront and
confound the Church. This, in turn, gave to the written tradition at least a
logical primacy over the ongoing processes of the oral tradition. This was, of
course, a relative matter, for the vast majority of ante-Nicene Christians
never thought to oppose tradition to Scripture, or vice versa. They took it to
be self-evident that both were authentic media of revelation, each with its
distinctive value for the Church’s mission: to tradition the Gospel in new
times to new people. Together, Scripture and tradition gave the Church a
joint-agency of continuity and change.
In the ante-Nicene Church,
therefore, there was no notion of sola Scriptura, but neither was there a
doctrine of traditio solo. Every new crisis passed gave to the orthodox
Christians fresh confidence in the authority of their oral interpretations of
the biblical tradition. Thus Scripture and tradition together, centering as
they both did around the original traditum of God in Christ, sufficed to
create a never ending dialogue between traditio constitutiva (now
forever fixed in Scripture) and traditiones interpretativae (the living
magisterium in the ongoing Church). (Albert
C. Outler, “The Sense of Tradition in the Ante-Nicene Church,” in The
Heritage of Christian Thought: Essays in Honor of Robert Lowry Calhoun, ed.
Robert E. Cushman and Egil Grislis [New York: Harper & Row, 1965], 28-29)
