Recently, I happened to come across a weblog entry of a current student from my former seminary. It was a rather brilliant critique of seminary life, to be sure. But it was the following paragraph that caught my attention:

During lessons, I have heard lecturers made remarks like, "Being critical is okay but being over-critical is problematic," and, "the task of theologians is first and foremost to be faithful to what the church has been passing down, and not to be overly creative or novel." Now the question that I have is how does one measure the "overs"? Was Jesus being overly creative when he pronounced the forgiveness of sins, an office which the Israelites believe belongs to God alone? Were the apostles being overly novel to proclaim the resurrection of Jesus as the dawning of the eschaton? Were the church fathers like Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria being over-critical when they engaged Arius and Nestorius? Was the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea being overly creative to introduced terms like 'hypostaseos' and 'ousias' into the creed? Was Augustine of Hippo being over-critical to go against Pelagius on one hand, and being overly creative in formulating his theology of history and political theology in City of God? Was Benedict of Nursia being overly novel to set up a monastic order? Was Anselm being overly novel with his articulation of the atonement theology? Was Thomas Aquinas being overly creative to incorporate Aristotle's philosophy into his theology? Was Martin Luther over-critical with the Roman Catholic Church? Was John Calvin being overly creative to propose a new institution of Christianity? Was Friedrich Schleiermacher being over creative to write about religious nature of humans? Was Karl Barth being overly critical over liberalism? Was Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Desmond Tutu being over-critical against the social condition of their time and overly novel to have done something about it? And finally, is not discouraging 'over-criticality' and 'over-creativity' (assuming they can measure the 'overs') among the students an over-critical and an overly creative suggestion which seems to go against all the listed events above and many more in the rich history of the Christian church?

For Christians who have been steeply traditioned into the faith as has been handed down by the Fathers, the immediate diagnosis derived from this query is all but glaring: there is, herein, an acute failure in recognising the Apostolic Tradition from whence comes the Christian deposit of faith.

Such is the malady suffered by communities of Christians who have lost their sensus fidei because of the erosion or absolute eradication of the doctrine of apostolic succession from their faith. Theology, as a result, is no longer about preserving in faithfulness the body of teachings as has been passed down from Christ Jesus to His Apostles and further transmitted in all faithfulness from one generation of believers to another. The deposit of faith, in which case, has either shrunk or been obliterated all together from the memory of the faith community, leaving them either a frustratingly narrow schema within which to work, or worse yet, with no framework at all.

The nature of theology is such that when it is not guided by the voices of the Fathers who had passed down to us the depositum fidei in its fullness, there is also no understanding of how the heads of the Church today, the Bishops, form the Magisterium together with the Bishop of Rome as the successor of St Peter, Chief of the Apostles. Together, they are jointly responsible - by divine appointment - for the faithful transmission of the faith to the present generation of earthly human inhabitants.

To be a product of the Protestant Reformation's sola Scriptura without any trace of memory whatsoever of the equal vitality of the Sacred Tradition of the Church would inevitable lead one to tamper with the deposit of faith and to exercise self-election as the arbiter of one's own faith. After all, we can make Scripture say anything we want it to say; this much the Church Fathers knew.

The Church preceeded Scripture, and it was the Church that had come to recognise the canon of Scripture. For this One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, the contents of the faith had never been exhausted by Scripture itself. Sacred Scripture contained truths in faith and morals that would never contradict the deposit of faith or the Sacred Tradition, but in itself, it was only a part of the entire wealth of the deposit. For the Church, Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture had to both function as one, communicating each other and moving towards a common goal.

Together, Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are one, and are to be known as Dei Verbum (Word of God). This Word of God is the deposit of faith, and the credibility of any one theological teaching is measured and judged by its fidelity to this very Word of God. The task of the theologian, accordingly, is not so much to innovate beyond the boundaries of the truths that have been revealed by God to his Holy Church, but rather, to seek ways to explain and further expound that which has become a part of the sensus fidelium.

Hence, the "hierarchy of truth" that had been spoken of by the Fathers at the Second Vatican Council holds true. Here, we see that without apostolic succession, there would be no fidelity to the fullness of the Word of God as reflected by both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. Without this fidelity, there would be no theological honour attributed to the divinely instituted Sacred Magisterium which serves to guard the teachings of the Church. In the face of such deficiencies, any truth claim made on account of the sacred teachings of the Holy Church is inevitably confronted by the epistemological question, "Whose truth?" At worst, such disdain for the kerymatic claims of the Church is expressed through profanity and ad hominem attacks (read here for an example of such utter ignorant forms of reactions arising from self-arbitration of truth and an incomplete understanding of the present state of ecumenism). For the child of the Reformation, it is ultimately his own truth that holds true, for it is he who has judged it to be, in fact, true.

I know the lecturer of this seminary who had most probably been the one stating the claim against theological novelty. He is one who has recovered an infinite treasure lost with the currents of the Protestant Reformation: the treasure of authority. He has come to understand that the all too often exalted exercise of "theological innovation" is a mere betrayal of Protestantism's intrinsic tendency to sway leftward. He surely has come to understand, there is nothing new under the sun!

Therefore, his statement that "the task of theologians is first and foremost to be faithful to what the Church has been passing down, and not to be overly creative or novel" is, in the assessment of the Holy Catholic Church, TRUE.