The Transmission of Revelation: Organization of the Teaching Apostolate

Organization of the Teaching Apostolate: Its Relations with the Two Powers and the Two Hierarchical Orders Instituted by Christ

The usual place to treat of the organization of the Teaching Apostolate is in the treatise on the Constitution of the Church. For our present purpose, however — to show to whom, and in what manner, belongs the right to expound and propose Revelation — it will be sufficient to give a clear notion of the two hierarchical powers.

I. The power to teach is vested, by right as well as by the institution of Christ, in those same dignitaries who are appointed to be the instruments of the Holy Ghost for the communication of His grace to mankind (potestas ordinis, the Power of Order¹), and who are the representatives of Christ for the government of His kingdom upon earth (potestas jurisdictionis, the Power of Jurisdiction²) — in a word, the Apostolate belongs to the Hierarchy. But the Apostolate is not only intimately connected with these two functions of the Hierarchy; it is itself an hierarchical function. As such, its value and importance depend on the rank held by the members of the Hierarchy by right either of ordination or of jurisdiction. The Apostolate is not, however, an independent hierarchical function — it springs from, and forms an essential part of, the other two. To enlighten the mind with heavenly truth and to generate Faith are acts belonging to the very nature of the Power of Order, inasmuch as in this way the gifts of the vivifying Spirit are dispensed; and the same may be said of the Power of Jurisdiction, since the noblest part of this power is to feed the flock of Christ on Faith, and so to guide it to salvation.

II. We have already distinguished two functions of the Apostolate: (1) the authentic witnessing to the doctrine of Christ, and (2) the authoritative enforcement of it. The first belongs to the Power of Order, the second to the Power of Jurisdiction.

1. The act of witnessing to the doctrine of Christ is not in itself an act of jurisdiction, but rather, as a communication of grace and of supernatural life, belongs to the Power of Order. The function of this power is to transmit the grace of Christ, especially the grace of Faith, while the Apostolate transmits the truth of Christ and provides the subject-matter of the act of Faith. The members of the Hierarchy invested with the power of communicating grace in general, and the gift of Faith in particular, are therefore also the instruments of the Holy Ghost in communicating the doctrine of Faith. The grace they receive in ordination consecrates them for, and entitles them to, both functions, so that they are, in a twofold sense, “the dispensers of the mysteries of God.” The witnesses of the Apostolate, instituted as it is to produce supernatural Faith, are thus invested with a supernatural character, a public dignity, and a power based on intimate union with the Holy Ghost; they represent the testimony of the Holy Ghost promised by Christ, because they are the instruments of the Holy Ghost. They cannot, however, individually claim infallibility, as will presently be shown.

   The Power of Order has different degrees, constituting the Hierarchy of Order, and to each degree belongs a corresponding share in the right and power to expound revealed doctrine. The High Priests — the Bishops, Priests of the first order — alone possess the fulness of the Power of Order, and are independent of any other order in the performance of their functions; hence, in virtue of their Orders, the Bishops alone are, in a perfect sense, “Fathers of the Faithful,” independent teachers and authentic witnesses in their own right. The subordinate members of the Hierarchy of Order receive their orders from the Bishops, and are mere auxiliaries: the Deacons are called exclusively to assist the higher orders, and the simple Priests act as the Bishop’s assistants, often with his positive co-operation. Their participation in the Apostolate is limited, correspondingly, to their participation in the Power of Order.

2. The act of imposing the doctrine of Christ — that is, of commanding adhesion to it — clearly belongs to the Power of Jurisdiction, and specifically to that branch of it called the Power of Teaching. Bishops, in virtue of their consecration, are called to the government of the Church, but this does not of itself constitute them rulers of any particular portion of the Christian flock, and so does not of itself give them the right to command submission to their doctrinal utterances; this right is the result of, and co-extensive with, their actual jurisdiction. The right to act as authentic witnesses and simple doctors, on the other hand, not imposing submission to their doctrine, is independent of their governing any particular flock, and may extend beyond the flock actually committed to their charge.

   In general, the power of authoritative teaching implies complete jurisdiction over the domain of doctrine, and therefore includes: (1) the right of administration, entitling its holder to use the external means necessary for the propagation of doctrine, especially the sending out of authorized missionaries; (2) the right of superintendence, together with the right of punishing, entitling its holder to forbid, prevent, or punish external acts opposed to the propagation of true doctrine; and (3) judicial and legislative powers, whose principal function is the juridical and legal definition and prescription of the Faith — the highest exercise of authoritative teaching, since it affects the innermost convictions of the mind, and is eminently divine and supernatural, implying that its holder represents Christ in a very special manner.

   The right of authoritative teaching admits of degrees. Simple Bishops, placed over only a portion of the Christian flock, possess only a partial and subordinate, and hence imperfect and dependent, Power of Teaching. The Chief of the Episcopate, as Pastor of the entire flock, alone possesses the universal and sovereign, and hence complete and independent, Power of Teaching, to which the Bishops themselves must submit. This difference appears most strikingly in the legal force of their respective doctrinal decisions: the Pope’s decisions, as Christ’s chief judge upon earth, alone have the force of laws binding generally, whereas those of the Bishops have only the force of a judicial sentence, binding the parties to a particular suit. In matters of Faith, Bishops cannot make laws for their own dioceses, since a law requiring assent to a truth cannot be more restricted than that truth itself, and a law of this kind must, moreover, proceed from an infallible lawgiver — universality and infallibility being attributes not of individual Bishops but of the Pope alone. Bishops can accordingly make only provisional laws for their own dioceses, subject to the Sovereign Pontiff’s approval; it is not their business to give final decisions in controversies concerning the Faith. They wield the executive, not the legislative, power. In short, although the Bishops are pre-eminently witnesses and doctors, and, within certain limits, also judges of the Faith, their Head, the Pope, alone has the distinctive attributes of supreme promulgator of doctrine, universal judge in matters of Faith, arbiter in controversies of Faith, and “Father and Teacher of all Christians” (Council of Florence).

Organization of the Teaching Body

On the basis of what has been laid down above, we now proceed to treat of the organization of the members of the Apostolate, the allotment among them of apostolic powers and privileges, and especially of the gift of infallibility.

There plainly exists, for the purposes of the Apostolate, a number of different organs adjusted together to form one well-ordered whole, whose several members share, according to their rank, in the various powers and privileges of the Apostolate. Taken in a wide sense, this body embraces all the members of the Church Teaching who in any way co-operate in the ends of the Apostolate; in a narrower sense, however, the Teaching Body consists only of the highest members of the Hierarchy of Order who are at the same time, by divine institution, the ordinary members of the Hierarchy of Jurisdiction — that is, the Pope and the Bishops. In them the fulness of the Apostolate resides, the lower members being only their auxiliaries. We shall treat first of the organization of the Teaching Body itself, then of its auxiliaries, and lastly of its connection with the body of the faithful.

I. The principles determining the composition of the Teaching Body are the following: (1) the first object of the Apostolate is the universal diffusion of Revelation, paving the way for supernatural Faith — for this purpose a number of consecrated organs of the Holy Ghost are required, authentic witnesses and teachers who, as representatives of Christ, must be endowed with doctrinal authority corresponding to their rank; (2) the second object of the Apostolate is unity of Faith and doctrine, requiring one supreme representative of Christ to preside over the whole organization with universal and sovereign doctrinal power; (3) the unity resulting from this sovereign power is threefold — the material unity of the Teaching Body, consisting in the juridical union of its members with their Head; the harmonic, external unity of their activity, arising from the power of superintendence; and the formal, intrinsic unity of doctrine and Faith, produced by authoritative definition; (4) the unity of the Teaching Body is not that of a lifeless machine but of a living organism, each member formed to the likeness of the Head by God Himself, Who gives life to Head and members alike through the Holy Ghost.

II. The original members of the Apostolate, chosen by Christ Himself for the fundamental promulgation of the Gospel, possessed the attributes of the Apostolate in an eminent degree — necessarily so, given the objects they had to attain. Their superiority over their successors appears in the authenticity of the testimony of each of them taken individually, in the authoritative power to teach conferred on all of them and not restricted to the chief Apostle, and in the personal infallibility of every one of them. As the first witnesses of Christ’s doctrine, they were not only the channels but the sources of the Faith of every subsequent age, and their testimony was therefore endowed with a special internal and external perfection: internal, from their being eye- and ear-witnesses of the whole Revelation, so filled with the Holy Ghost that each possessed a complete and infallible knowledge of revealed doctrine; external, from the gift of miracles by which they confirmed the authenticity of their testimony. The Apostles were, moreover, to give efficient support to their Chief — the permanent foundation of the Church — in the original establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, and each therefore received the same authority to teach as their Chief, though not purely and simply a sovereign authority; and their infallibility followed necessarily from the authenticity of their testimony and the Holy Ghost’s assistance. This view of the eminent character of the original Apostolate is proved more by the Apostles’ own conduct than by explicit texts of Scripture, and is, besides, the constant teaching of the whole Church.

III. As soon as the original, fundamental promulgation of the Gospel was complete, there was no longer any need for the extraordinary Apostolate; a new object had now to be attained — the conservation and consolidation of apostolic doctrine within the Church. The place of the extraordinary Apostolate was taken by the Episcopate, the body of ordinary members of the hierarchy established for the transmission of the grace and truth of Christ and the government of the Church. This Episcopal Apostolate is a continuation of the primitive Apostolate, and must therefore be derived from the Apostles; it must, in nature and organization, be homogeneous with the original, yet in some respects different. The doctrinal, personal, and extraordinary powers of the Apostles ceased at their death; only their Head, in whom these powers were ordinary rather than extraordinary, transmitted them to his own successors, in whom is invested the power of completing and perpetuating the Teaching Body by admitting new, duly authorized members. The Sovereign Pontiffs are the bond uniting the Bishops among themselves and connecting them, uninterruptedly, with the primitive Apostolate; the Popes thus represent the original apostolic power in an eminent degree, and their see is accordingly called, emphatically, the Apostolic See.

IV. The Apostolate still has, on the whole, the same objects it originally had, and must consequently still be so constituted that it can give authentic and authoritative testimony — in other words, it must possess infallibility in doctrinal matters. Although this infallibility is no longer found in individual members, it can and ought to result from the unanimous testimony of the whole body: it ought to, since otherwise universal Faith would be impossible, and universal heresy might take its place; and it can, and in fact does, since the assistance of the Holy Ghost cannot be wanting to the Teaching Body as a whole, the unanimous consent of all its members being a sure token that they reproduce the testimony of the Spirit of truth. Personal infallibility as a witness cannot be claimed even by the Chief of the Episcopate, any more than by subordinate members; nevertheless, when he pronounces a sovereign judgment in matters of Revelation, binding on all, teachers as well as taught, he can and ought to be infallible — he ought, since otherwise the unity of Faith might turn into a unity of heresy; and he can be, and in fact is, infallible, since the Holy Ghost, the Guide of all Christ’s representatives, cannot abandon the highest representative precisely in that act which is the most essential expression of His assistance, and which, in case of error, would lead the whole Church astray. A fortiori, when Head and members are unanimous, their joint testimony is infallible; but, taken apart from the testimony of their Head, the testimony of even the whole body of Bishops would not by itself constitute an obligatory doctrinal definition, but only a strong presumption. The Sovereign Pontiff alone can pronounce such a definition, by reason of his universal jurisdiction, and then only in that exercise of it which enforces the unity of Faith in the whole Church.

V. The two forms of the Apostolate must, however, differ at certain points, as may be gathered from what has already been said. The Bishops are not, as the Apostles were, immediately chosen by Christ, but are selected by members of the Church; in the case of the Chief Bishop, the person is designated by the members of the Church but receives the powers inherent in his office directly and immediately from Christ, not from them, while the other Bishops are appointed to a particular see by the Chief Bishop, and receive their jurisdiction from him. He alone, besides, inherits the fulness of the Apostolate. As to the authenticity of the Bishops’ own testimony, the office of witness is conferred on them directly by Christ in the sacrament of Orders, their admission to office by the Sovereign Pontiff being merely a condition required for its lawful exercise; nevertheless they are not themselves eye- and ear-witnesses of what they teach, but gather their knowledge from intermediate witnesses or written documents, and do not individually possess the gift of infallibility.

The infallibility of the Church accordingly assumes a twofold form, corresponding to the twofold action of the Holy Ghost as Lord and as Life-giver: as Lord, He gives infallibility to the governing Chief; as Life-giver, He bestows it on the entire Body, Head and members together. The infallibility of the Head is required to produce universal unity of Faith; the infallibility of the Body is required to prevent a disastrous conflict between the Body and its Head, and to deliver the mass of the faithful from the danger of being led astray by their ordinary teachers where the Holy See has given no decision. The two forms support and strengthen each other mutually, and together prove the Apostolate to be a masterpiece of that Divine Wisdom “which reacheth from end to end mightily, and disposeth all things sweetly” (Wisd. 8:1).

§ 10. The Auxiliary Members of the Teaching Body

The Teaching Body is a living organism, and consequently has the power of producing auxiliary members to assist in its work, and of conferring on them the credentials required for their different functions. These auxiliary members fall into two classes: auxiliaries of the Bishops, and auxiliaries of the Chief Bishop.

I. The ordinary auxiliaries of the Episcopate are priests and deacons, who receive their orders and jurisdiction from the Bishops and hold an inferior rank in the Hierarchy. Their position with regard to the office of teaching, though far below that of the Bishops, is nonetheless important: they are the official executive organs of the Bishops, their missionaries and heralds for the promulgation of doctrine, possessing special knowledge of doctrine and receiving, through the sacrament of Holy Orders, a share both in the Bishops’ teaching office and in the doctrinal influence of the Holy Ghost. Their teaching therefore possesses a peculiar value and dignity, which may nonetheless vary with their personal qualifications; the Bishops should, under certain circumstances, consult them in matters of doctrine, not to receive direction from them, but to obtain information. Given the immense influence exercised by the uniform teaching of the clergy over the unity of Faith, they may fairly be said to participate in the infallibility of the Episcopate both extrinsically — since the universal consent of all such heralds is an external sign that they reproduce the exact message of the Holy Ghost — and intrinsically, since by their ordination they share in the assistance of the Spirit of Truth promised to the Church. Where necessary, the Bishops have power to erect schools or seminaries for the religious or theological education of a portion of their flock; the professors in these institutions are auxiliaries of the Bishops, and stand, if anything, in still closer union with the Teaching Apostolate than the clergy engaged directly in the ministry.

II. The Chief of the Episcopate, in virtue of his universal teaching authority, has power to send missionaries into regions beyond the bounds of existing dioceses, and can also establish, even within existing dioceses, Religious Orders as his own auxiliaries, subject immediately to himself; he can found universities for the more profound and scientific study of Revelation, and can render all such persons and corporations comparatively independent of the Bishops, investing them with a teaching authority analogous to that of the Episcopate. The universities of the Middle Ages, for example, were neither private, nor state, nor even episcopal institutions: they derived their mission from the Popes, together with the power of perpetuating themselves through the creation of doctors and professors, and the power of passing judgment on matters of doctrine. Such decisions did not carry binding force, since their authors possessed no jurisdiction, but they possessed a value superior to that of many episcopal decisions; the importance of universities as representatives of the Church’s teaching depends, evidently, on their submission to the Apostolate, whose auxiliaries they are, and on the number, qualifications, and influence of their members.

Further, the Pope, in the exercise of his administrative power, can invest individual members of the inferior clergy, temporarily or permanently, with authoritative teaching power; but even then they remain only auxiliaries of the Episcopate, existing alongside it — Abbots exempt from episcopal jurisdiction (abbates nullius), the generals of Religious Orders, or delegates of the Pope’s own sovereign teaching power, such as the Cardinals and the Roman Congregations. All these, like the auxiliaries already mentioned, are assisted by the Holy Ghost, but their decisions acquire the force of law only when confirmed by the Head of the Apostolate.

III. From time to time the Holy Ghost raises certain individuals to an extraordinary degree of supernatural knowledge, whose peculiar position gives them a special authority as guides for all the members of the Church. They are not, however, exempt from the universal law that within the Church no teaching has value unless approved by lawful authority; so far, then, as the Pope and Bishops evidently approve the doctrine of these “burning and shining lights,” it is to be considered an infallible testimony coming from the Holy Ghost. Thus, in Apostolic times, “prophets and evangelists” (Eph. 4:11) were given to the Apostles as extraordinary auxiliaries — not to enlighten the Apostles themselves, but to facilitate the diffusion and acceptance of their doctrine; in succeeding ages the Fathers and great Doctors have been of similar use to the ordinary members of the Apostolate, helping them to a better knowledge of revealed truth. The function of these auxiliaries must, however, be carefully distinguished from that of the Prophets of the Old Testament: they are not the organs of new revelations, nor do they possess independent authority — they are merely the extraordinary supports of the ordinary Teaching Body. As St. Vincent of Lérins puts it: “it is indeed a great matter, and ever to be borne in mind, that all Catholics should know that they are to receive the doctors with the Church, not to quit the Faith of the Church with the doctors” (Commonitorium, n. 17).

§ 11. Organic Union Between the Teaching Body and the Body of the Faithful

I. The Teaching Apostolate, with its auxiliaries on the one hand and the body of believers on the other, together constitute the Church. Their union is not mechanical but resembles the mutual union of the members of a living organism. To grasp the true relation between these two parts, we must remember that infallibility, and the other attributes granted to the Teaching Apostolate, are intended only as means to secure an unerring Faith in the entire community, and that the supernatural Faith of all the members, teachers and taught alike, is the result of the action of the Holy Ghost. From this we infer that teachers and hearers together compose one indivisible, complete organism, in which the teachers figure as the principal members, the head and the heart; a homogeneous organism, since the teachers are themselves also believers, and the belief of the faithful is itself a testimony to, and confirmation of, the doctrines taught; and an organism living supernaturally, since the Holy Ghost infuses into all its members the life of Faith by external teaching and internal grace alike. From this union between teachers and taught further consequences follow. The doctrine of Christ is manifested in two ways: in authoritative proposition, and in private belief. The latter, being only an echo of the former, and itself the result of the Holy Ghost’s action, becomes in turn a kind of testimony of doctrine, reacting upon and confirming the public proposition. The Faith of the whole Church cannot be wrong, and so what all believe must infallibly be true, and must represent the doctrine of Christ no less than the teaching of the Apostolate itself. Indeed, the external manifestations of the Holy Ghost may be seen especially in the Body of the Faithful, in its martyrs and confessors, and these manifestations, together with the universal belief they accompany, constitute a powerful motive of credibility in their own right.

II. This organic notion of the Church clarifies many familiar theological expressions — the “Church Teaching” and the “Church Hearing” (or “Learning”); the “Mission and Authority of the Church,” meaning that of the Hierarchy; and the claim that “the Teaching Apostolate, or its Chief, represents the Church” — not in the sense that a member of parliament represents his constituents, but in the sense that the Faith of the Apostolate, or of its Chief, is a true expression of the Faith of the whole Church. It has lately been said: “infallibility belongs only to the Church, but the Hierarchy is not the Church, and therefore the Hierarchy is not infallible” — we might equally say, “life belongs only to the body, but the head and heart are not the body, therefore the head and heart are not alive.” This false notion arises either from comparing the Hierarchy to the parliaments of constitutional states, or from a materialistic conception of authority, on the formula that authority is simply the sum-total of the power of individual members, just as the total force of a material body is the sum of the energies of its parts. But authority, in truth, is a principle implanted in society by God to give it unity, life, and guidance. To give the infallibility of the Church as broad a basis as possible, some well-meaning writers have adopted this materialistic view, making the universality and uniformity of the faithful’s own belief the chief motive of credibility — but this theory is naturalistic, opposed to the teaching of Scripture, and, moreover, intrinsically weak, since without the independent authority of the Teaching Apostolate and the assistance of the Holy Ghost, such uniformity and universality could never be brought about, or at least could never long endure.

The attribute of infallibility belonging to the entire community of the faithful manifests itself differently in its different parts: in the Teaching Body it is Active Infallibility — the inability to lead astray; in the Body Taught it is Passive Infallibility — the incapability of being led astray.

§ 12. External and Internal Indefectibility of Doctrine and Faith in the Church — Recapitulation

I. Intimately connected with the infallibility of the Church is her Indefectibility, though the two differ. Infallibility means merely that what the Church teaches cannot be false; Indefectibility implies that the essentials of Revelation are, at all times, actually preached in the Church, that non-essentials are proposed at least implicitly and held habitually, and that the inner, living Faith never fails. The Indefectibility of truth in the Church is thus, in one sense, a broader claim than her Infallibility: the perfection of the latter requires merely that no doctrine proposed for belief should be false, while the perfection of the former requires that every part of revealed doctrine should be actually, and at all times, expressed in the Church’s teaching. Indefectibility, unlike Infallibility, admits of degrees — a single failure, for a single day, on a single point of doctrine, on the part of the public teaching authority, would utterly destroy Infallibility, whereas Indefectibility can survive lesser, more localized failures.

II. The Indefectibility of the Teaching Body is at once a condition and a consequence of the Indefectibility of the Church, but a distinction must be drawn between the Indefectibility of the Head and that of the subordinate members. The individual who is Head may die, but the authority of the Head does not die with him — it passes to his successor. The Teaching Body as a whole, by contrast, could not die or fail without irreparably destroying the continuity of authentic testimony. Similarly, the Pope’s authority would not be injured were he, when not exercising it (extra judicium), to hold some false private opinion, whereas the authenticity of episcopal testimony would be destroyed should the whole body ever fall into heresy together.

III. The Indefectibility of Faith in individual members is closely connected with the external, social Indefectibility of the Church — the two stand to each other as cause and effect, acting and reacting on one another. The interior Faith of individual members, even of the Pope and the Bishops personally, may fail, but it is impossible for Faith to fail in the whole mass together. The Infallibility and Indefectibility of the Church require, on the part of the Head, that the law of Faith be always infallibly proposed by means of his legislative and judicial power, but this does not require the infallibility of his own interior faith or of his purely private, extrajudicial utterances. On the part of the Teaching Body as a whole, what is directly required is only that it should not fail collectively — which supposes, of course, that it does not err universally in its internal Faith. On the part of the Body of the Faithful, finally, it is directly and absolutely required that their inner Faith (sensus et virtus fidei) never fail entirely, and that their external profession never be universally wrong.

The whole doctrine of the organization of the Teaching Apostolate may be summarized thus: the teaching function, bound up with the Hierarchy’s two fundamental powers of Order and Jurisdiction, fulfils every requirement and attains every purpose for which it was instituted. It transmits and enforces Revelation, and brings about unity and universality of Faith; it is a highly developed organism, its members acting in perfect harmony, in which the Holy Ghost operates and gives manifold testimony to revealed truth, upholding and strengthening the action of individuals through the reciprocal action of its different organs. Just as God spoke to our fathers through the Prophets before the coming of Christ, “at sundry times and in divers manners” (Heb. 1:1), so now does Jesus Christ speak to us at sundry times and in divers manners in the Church, “which is his body, and the fulness of him who is filled all in all” (Eph. 1:23).

§ 13. Gradual Progress in the Transmission of Revelation — Apostolic Deposit: Ecclesiastical Tradition: Rule of Faith

I. The office-holders of the Teaching Apostolate form one unbroken chain, derived from God, so that the doctrine they announce at any given time is a continuation and development of the doctrine originally revealed, invested with the same divine character. Jesus Christ, the immediate Envoy of the Father, announced what He had heard from the Father; the Apostles, the immediate envoys of Christ, preached what they had heard from Christ and the Holy Ghost; and the successors of the Apostles, inheritors of the apostolic mission, in their turn taught, and still teach, the doctrine received from the Apostles — Revelation has thus been handed down from generation to generation without a single break. The transmission and the teaching of Revelation are, in truth, one and the same act under two different aspects: whenever the Word of God is announced, it is also transmitted, and it cannot be transmitted without being announced in some form or other. Transmission and publication, in other words, are not two acts of distinct nature, as they would be were Revelation handed down only by a written document, or on merely historical evidence. The Council of Trent tells us that Traditions, “dictated by the Holy Ghost, have reached us from the Apostles, handed down as it were by hand,” and speaks of “Traditions preserved by continual succession in the Catholic Church” (sess. iv). This transmission is the work of living, authorized officials, who hand Revelation down to the lawful heirs of their office.

We must, however, distinguish between the authenticity and the authority of the act of transmission. When, for instance, a council makes belief in some dogma obligatory, this act contains a twofold element: it bears authentic witness to the existence of that dogma within the Apostolic Deposit, and it authoritatively imposes Faith in it. The authentic testimony belongs to the whole Church, which, in teaching or in professing belief, witnesses to the existence of certain truths; the power of imposing the obligation of belief, by contrast, resides only in the governing body and its Head. The word “Tradition” itself does not express the notion of “Faith made obligatory,” only that of “Faith handed down by authentic witnesses” — and it is in this latter sense that we shall use the term here, though, as a matter of fact, transmission and imposition usually go together.

II. Three phases, more or less divided in time but alike in nature, may be observed in the gradual transmission of revealed doctrine: (1) the Apostles confiding the Deposit of Revelation to the Church, with the obligation to continue its promulgation; (2) the transmission of Revelation in and through the Church; and (3) the enforcement of belief by the Rule of Faith imposed by the Chiefs of the Apostolate.

1. The Apostles were the original depositaries of Christian Revelation, and its first heralds; they handed to their successors the truths they possessed, together with the powers corresponding to their mission. This first stage is called Apostolic Tradition, or Apostolic Deposit — the latter expression derived from 1 Tim. 6:20, “keep that which is committed to thy trust” (depositum, Greek parathēkēn). All subsequent knowledge of Revelation is drawn from this Apostolic Deposit, which is consequently called the Source or Fount of Faith. The Apostolic Deposit was transmitted in a twofold form, by word of mouth and by writing. The New Testament, although composed by the Apostles or their disciples, is not a mere reproduction of apostolic teaching — it was written at God’s command by men under His inspiration, and is therefore, like the Old Testament, an original and authentic document of Revelation in its own right; both Testaments, as we shall see, were transmitted to the Church by an authoritative act of the Apostolate. The Apostolic Deposit comprises, then, the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the oral teaching of the Apostles; by a natural process of specialization, the term “Deposit” has come to be restricted to the written deposit, and the term “Tradition” to the oral teaching.
2. It is the Church’s office to hold and transmit this entire Deposit, written and oral, in its integrity, and to deal with it as the Apostles themselves would if still living. This action of the Church is called Active Tradition; the doctrines themselves are called Objective Tradition. The term “Ecclesiastical Tradition” is sometimes used, in a narrower sense, for the unwritten truths of Revelation, standing in the same relation to Holy Scripture as the oral teaching of the Apostles once stood; in the course of time this Tradition has itself also been committed to writing, and, as written Tradition, now occupies a position analogous to that of Holy Scripture with respect to the living Active Tradition.
3. The Church has, further, a still higher office. The heirs of the Apostles have the right and duty to prescribe, promulgate, and maintain, at all times and on behalf of the whole Church, the teaching of the Apostles and of the Church in former ages; to impose and enforce it as a doctrinal law binding on all; and to give authoritative decisions on points obscure, controverted, or denied. In this capacity the Church acts as regulator of the Faith, and these doctrinal laws, together with the act of imposing them, are called the Rule of Faith. All members of the Church are bound to submit their own judgment in matters of Faith to this rule, and thus, by practising the “obedience of Faith,” to prove themselves living members of the one Kingdom of Divine truth.

We see, then, that the Divine economy for preserving and enforcing Christian truth in the Church possesses, in an eminent degree, every aid and guarantee made use of in civil society for the safe custody and interpretation of legal documents. In both there are documents of various kinds, witnesses public and private, and judges of different rank. But in the Church the judges are, at the same time, witnesses, administrators, and legislators — whereas in the Protestant theory there are written documents, and nothing more.