If the Bible is the Word of God and if no other literature produced by human authors can be called that in the same way, then there must be something distinctive about this Book. If the gift of inspiration is limited to these books, then God must have had something special in mind in this revelation. It is in the light of this unique character of the Bible that the scholars refer to the Bible’s completeness as one of the effects of inspiration.
This seems clear enough. If he inspired only these books as a means of self-revelation, then in them he had come to a close, an end in some way, of his self-revelation. He must have felt that these books contain, in some way, all that he has to say of himself to the human race. We keep saying “in some way” and for a special reason which we will explain shortly. At the least, we can say that the Bible is complete in its revelation in as much as it contains all that God willed to reveal of himself in this inspired form.
It is because of this completeness of the Bible that one scholar has referred to what is called “constitutive revelation”. What this means literally is that, the Bible is the constitution of, or the essential basis for, our understanding of God and his will for salvation. It contains the basics of revelation, what we must know about God if we are to respond as perfectly as possible to his loving concern.
But - and this is where we want to explain the phrase “in some way” - God does continue to reveal himself to the world in the period after the Bible, although not in the form of biblical inspiration. He reveals himself in the Church through the Councils, through what Catholics call the magisterial, or “teaching authority of the Popes and Bishops”, and through the lives of our people. In the Catholic faith this has been called “Tradition”. It embraces all that long rich history of the Church when God’s Spirit was, in accord with Jesus’ promise, guiding us to all truth(Jn 16, 13).
This ongoing revelation of God in history and in the Church, however, does not mean something totally different from the revelation in the Bible. Rather, it is necessarily and intimately associated with that revelation. We might describe it in this way. When God speaks in the Church throughout history, he is not adding anything essential to what is found in the Bible. He is, instead, applying the Scriptures to the changing times, explaining them anew in the light of different conditions, providing clearer insights into what he had revealed there. Thus, the Bible and Tradition go hand in hand; they are not two distinct sources of revelation. As the Fathers of Vatican II put it, “Sacred tradition and sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, which is committed to the Church” (Dei Verbum, #10). In a sense, Tradition is Scripture lived in the Church.
It should be clear now why we said that in the Bible, God had come to an end “in some way” of his self-revelation. It was an end in the way of inspired books. It was not an end of his revealing himself to his people. It should also be clear why Tradition is so important. We do not live in, and cannot recapture, the biblical period. That period had its own history, its social and cultural and political background that is now gone. We live in a new period, a new time and history where that biblical God must be seen in a new light, against a completely different background. It is in and through Tradition that the biblical God lets himself be constantly revealed anew. And yet, always, it is the same biblical God, which is why we say the Bible is complete.