Back to Basics: Sacred Tradition

God's word is more than letters on a page or sounds to the ear. His word is creative. When God speaks the word it happens. For example, the book of Genesis in the Bible tells us that God created merely by saying the word: "God said, 'let there be light,' and there was light."

Catholics believe that the Word of God is found not only in the Bible but also in the unwritten or spoken word — Sacred Tradition...

It took some time between what Jesus actually said and did from when the Gospel writer put it on paper (actually on parchment), so what took place during that period? Before the written word was the unwritten or spoken word. Just as in the Old Testament, things happened and were said long before they were written down, so, too, in the New Testament. Jesus preached his sermons and worked his miracles, died on the cross, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven long before anyone wrote it down. No one took notes while he preached. No letters were written between Jesus and the apostles. Sacred Tradition predates and preceded Sacred Scripture, but both come from the same source — God.

The New Testament is totally silent on whether Jesus ever married or had children. The Bible says nothing about his marital status, yet Christians believe he had no wife and kids. Sacred Tradition tell us that he never married just as Sacred Tradition says that the Gospels number only four...

Catholicism For Dummies by John Trigilio

Honestly, the Sola Scriptura way of thinking just doesn't make sense to me. For example, nowhere in the Bible that I can see is our understanding of the Holy Trinity spelled out. Where did that come from, if not from except divine revelation which has been passed down by Sacred Tradition? When it comes to taking the Bible at its word as so many seem to insist on ... how about the part where Jesus tells everyone that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood (the words used mean "gnaw") so almost everyone leaves ... and he lets them go. No arguing or saying it was symbolic. Not even any behind-the-scenes different explanation as he so often gave to the disciples after everyone was gone. If we really want to get basic, how about what the Bible itself says is the holder of truth?

I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth.

I Timothy 3:14,15

At the Catholic Catechism Dialogue Blog, a former Protestant minister points out that Protestants have their own unacknowledged form of Sacred Tradition.

One. Protestants do not in fact make the Bible only their sole pillar of truth. No, they don't. They recall, study, emulate and if honest with themselves venerate the teachers of the founders {and there are several of them with several conflicting understandings of what the Bible alone teaches} of their Protestant faith. The Bible alone is not the actual sole guide.

That never occurred to me until he mentioned it but does ring true.