ABSTRACT

Taken in its basic, exact, and completely general sense, tradition or transmission is the very principle of the whole economy of salvation. Tradition, in this sense, encloses and dominates it completely, from its very beginning, which is none other than God; God as the word is understood in the New Testament, referring to the Father, the absolute Origin, the uncreated Principle, the primordial source, not only of all things visible and invisible, but of the very divinity of the Son and the Spirit, by procession. God (the Father) then gives his Son to the world, he delivers him to the world. Here, the New Testament uses our verb ‘to deliver’ to show that the Father did not spare his Son, but gave him up for us (Rom. 8:31-32), to show that the Son ‘gave himself up for us’ (Gal. 2:20; Eph. 5:2, 25), and finally that he delivered or bestowed his Spirit on John and on Mary, at the foot of the Cross, representing the Church (John 19:30).41