‍The Bible tells us all we need to know to be saved, so we don’t need tradition

  Gary Hoge  ·  October 17, 2026

‍I’d say the Bible tells us a lot more than we need to know to be saved. If you’ve ever read the section in Leviticus on the treatment of mildew, you know what I’m talking about. The bare-bones, minimum-we-need-to-know-to-be-saved can be expressed in a few sentences.

‍No doubt we’ve all seen Evangelical tracts, such as “The Four Spiritual Laws,” that explain the nature of God, the nature of man, man’s separation from God, and God’s plan of salvation. These tracts typically end with an invitation to pray the “sinner’s prayer,” in which the person confesses his sin to God and asks God to save him. If a person reads such a tract and sincerely prays that prayer, wouldn’t many Evangelicals say that this person is saved?

‍So really, since these tracts tell us all we need to know to be saved, they’re all we need, right? We can discard the Bible, right?

‍Of course not. These tracts do not tell us all that God wanted to tell us, and we should not assume that anything God wanted to tell us is expendable. The question, then, is whether the Bible itself contains all that God wanted to tell us.

‍The Bible itself doesn’t say that. Nowhere does it say that everything God gave the apostles to reveal was reduced to writing. On the contrary, the Bible tells us that we must accept the teaching of the apostles, whether oral or written (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Paul himself told Timothy to keep his oral teachings as “the pattern of sound teaching” (2 Timothy 1:13), and to pass those teachings on to others (2 Timothy 2:2). He also commended the Corinthians for holding firmly to the traditions he had delivered to them (1 Corinthians 11:2), and he warned the Thessalonians to keep away from those who did not live according to the tradition they had received from the apostles (2 Thessalonians 3:6).

‍So according to the Bible itself, apostolic teaching was not confined to what the apostles wrote.

‍What is Tradition?

‍When Catholics speak of Sacred Tradition, they don’t mean a collection of human customs that have accumulated over the centuries. Nor is Tradition simply a list of supplemental doctrines that aren't found in the Bible. It is the teaching of Christ entrusted to the apostles and handed down within the Church, both in their writings and in the faith, worship, and practices of the communities they established.

‍Think about how much we Americans know about living in this country that we didn't learn from reading a book. We acquired that knowledge by growing up here, observing how things are done, and learning from the people around us. Much of it may be written down somewhere, but we didn't need to read it to learn it.

‍Early Christianity was similar. The earliest Christians didn't learn their faith by reading documents. Most of them couldn’t read anyway.¹ They learned it by living within communities established and taught by the apostles. Those communities possessed a body of knowledge about Christian belief and practice that was passed down from one generation to the next.

‍So, it's not so much that Tradition tells us things the Bible doesn't; it's more that Tradition helps us understand the things the Bible does tell us.

‍Consider how Christianity began.

‍The apostles didn't travel around distributing copies of the New Testament. There was no New Testament. They preached, taught, baptized, celebrated the Eucharist, established churches, and instructed Christians in how to live their faith.

‍They spent considerable time teaching the communities they founded. Paul, for example, spent eighteen months in Corinth (Acts 18:11) and about three years in Ephesus (Acts 20:31). During that time, he would have answered questions, explained doctrines, corrected misunderstandings, and instructed believers in Christian worship and practice.

‍Yet the letters he later wrote to these communities can be read in an afternoon. Does it seem reasonable to suppose that those letters contained everything he had taught them over the course of several years? And even if it did seem reasonable, where does the Bible say that’s what happened?

‍In fact, Paul's letters frequently presuppose that his readers already knew things he had taught them. He wrote to the Thessalonians, “Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you these things?” (2 Thessalonians 2:5).

‍These letters were not intended to be comprehensive textbooks of Christianity. They were written to people who had already been instructed in the faith, often to address particular problems or questions that had arisen. There would have been little reason to explain something that everyone in a community already understood and accepted.

‍The New Testament, in other words, emerged from the life of an already-existing Church. Its original readers possessed something we don't have simply by opening a Bible: firsthand knowledge of the beliefs and practices that formed the context in which those writings were produced.

‍That knowledge could be preserved and passed down through the continuing life of the Church, even when it wasn't explicitly recorded in Scripture.

‍An example: Infant baptism

‍Consider the question of infant baptism.

‍When babies were born into the Christian communities established by the apostles, their parents would naturally have needed to know whether those children should be baptized. This was a practical question that the early Church had to address.

‍Yet nowhere in the New Testament do we find an explicit instruction either to baptize infants or to exclude them from baptism. We read about entire households being baptized, but the texts do not tell us whether those households included infants.

‍Does that mean the earliest Christians had no established practice concerning the baptism of children? Of course not. They had to do something. Either they baptized infants or they didn't.

‍And whatever their practice was, it would have been known to the Christians in those communities, whether or not anyone later thought it necessary to mention it in a letter.

‍The historical evidence is instructive. In the early third century, Origen described infant baptism as a tradition received from the apostles.² Around the same time, Cyprian and a council of African bishops discussed not whether infants should be baptized, but how soon after birth they should be baptized. Their conclusion was that baptism should not be delayed until the eighth day.³

‍These witnesses do not, by themselves, settle every historical question about the origins of infant baptism. But they demonstrate that the practice was established in important Christian communities long before the New Testament canon was formally settled.

‍Today, the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and the Oriental Orthodox Churches all practice infant baptism. So do several Protestant communities that retained the practice from the historic Church. Other Protestant communities reject it, insisting that baptism should be administered only to those old enough to profess their faith.

‍All of these groups appeal to Scripture. Yet Scripture alone has not led them to agree on what the apostles intended.

‍The point is not that we should accept infant baptism merely because it is an old practice. The point is that the beliefs and practices handed down within the Church provide historical evidence of how Christians understood and lived the apostolic faith. This is the institutional knowledge of Christianity, and it should not be discarded simply because the authors of the New Testament didn't feel the need to mention it specifically.

‍Scripture and Tradition

‍This doesn't mean that every ancient Christian custom is an apostolic tradition, or that every opinion expressed by an early Christian writer is authoritative. The Church distinguishes Sacred Tradition from merely human traditions, and individual historical witnesses must be evaluated carefully.

‍Nor does it mean that Tradition stands above Scripture. Catholics believe that Scripture and Tradition come from the same divine source and together transmit the one deposit of faith entrusted to the Church.⁴

‍Tradition is therefore not a competitor to Scripture. It preserves the apostolic faith within the continuing life of the Church and helps us understand Scripture in the context of the faith in which it was written.

‍Is knowing enough the same as having everything?

‍Let's return to the original objection: The Bible tells us all we need to know to be saved, so we don't need Tradition.

‍Even if we grant the first part of that statement, the second part doesn't follow.

‍A short Evangelical tract might tell someone enough to lead him to faith in Christ. But that doesn't mean the rest of the Bible is mere commentary. And if the Bible tells us enough to lead us to salvation, that doesn't mean everything God entrusted to the apostles must be contained within its pages.

‍The New Testament itself tells Christians to preserve the traditions delivered by the apostles, whether orally or in writing, and to pass those teachings on to succeeding generations.

‍The issue, then, isn't whether Scripture tells us enough to be saved. It probably does—and then some. It's whether it tells us everything God wanted us to know.

‍And that's a very different question.

‍__________

^‍1 William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 259–273.

^‍2 Origen, Commentary on Romans, 5.9. See also Homilies on Leviticus, 8.3.

^‍3 Cyprian of Carthage, Letter 64, to Fidus, especially sections 2–5. (Numbered Letter 58 in some editions.)

^‍4 Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, 9–10; Catechism of the Catholic Church, 80–83.