Is Church Tradition Always Handed Down Through Oral Means?

One misconception about the Church Fathers concerns the way they bear witness to Tradition. We often speak in a way that contrasts Scripture and Tradition by saying that the former is written while the latter is oral. It is certainly true that Sacred Scripture is written down, and it is true that oral preaching has a role in how Tradition is passed down, but there is more to it than that.

It is true that the Church Fathers preached the faith to their own generation, but we do not have audio recordings of their sermons. We know what their teachings were, but this has not come to us through a two-thousand-year-long process of one person orally teaching only what he had orally received.

We know the teachings of the Church Fathers because their sermons were written down. They also wrote letters, theological treatises, liturgical books, and various other writings.

It is through these means—written ones—that knowledge of the Fathers has been transmitted to us.

That’s because we are a literate culture that uses writing rather than a storytelling tradition to pass down knowledge over long periods of time. Our scholars don’t have to memorize long cycles of unwritten stories. We write them down. And so, the writings of the Church Fathers are the main way their teachings have been preserved.

Despite the fact that the writings of the Church Fathers are written and are an important witness to Apostolic Tradition, they cannot be treated the same way Sacred Scripture is treated. The books of the Old and the New Testaments are unique in that they are fully inspired by the Holy Spirit. This gives them certain properties that all other writings lack.

Since no other writings are inspired, the writings of the Church Fathers do not have God as their author in this way. There is no guarantee that the Fathers expressed everything and only those things that God wanted expressed, that everything in their writings is something that the Holy Spirit would assert, or that they teach the truth without error.

While the Holy Spirit certainly worked in the lives of the Fathers, per Jesus’s promise, and while the Holy Spirit preserved the Christian faith in the Church as a whole, he did not intervene in a way that would protect each Father, or each Father’s writings, from all error. The Fathers could and did make mistakes. Some entertained ideas or expressed themselves in ways that would later be ruled incompatible with the faith. They also disagreed with each other—sometimes vehemently—and not just on matters of expression or emphasis but on substance.

Consequently, one cannot simply prooftext using the writings of the Fathers or treat what one Father says as if it definitively settles a matter all by itself.

This is one reason we need the Magisterium of the Church to settle disputed cases regarding what authentically belongs to Scripture and what authentically belongs to Tradition.