Given a large supply of raw materials and even a complete factory with all needed equipment, a company could not make a Chevy Suburban without the plans, information, and experience of previous generations.
The idea that we should all start from scratch and determine truth with “just the Bible” is the ultimate extreme of individualism. But the promise of the Paraclete’s testimony is a corporate promise. Yeshua’s teaching comes through the teaching and words of apostles and then other leaders and thinkers from then till now.
My own tradition is Judaism (Messianic Judaism). We have numerous traditions about practice (prayer, how to keep Sabbath, what to read in the Bible when). We have traditions that inform us about doctrine and ethics. We have classic models for viewing God (transcendent to the point of ineffability, but mediating his presence through manifestations such as the Glory, the Presence, the Name — which fits well with trinitarian doctrine about Jesus as the radiance of the Father).
I speak in a lot of churches that try to have as little tradition as possible. I am sad for them. I hope there is an awakening of liturgy, creed, and historical theology in evangelicalism.
Derek Leman

T, I like your “multiple counselors” approach: that is what Tradition is for me. As I read the Bible and ponder decisions, I want to know what the Great Tradition of the Church has taught and in listening to them they help me hear what God speaks to the Church. Yet, I want the Bible to speak into them. In Blue Parakeet I put it this way:
We can read the Bible through tradition
With Tradition
Or ignore Tradition.
I like the “with” Tradition approach.
Captcha: Overhaul despised

Tradition has been very helpful to me in my Christian life. Much in Christian or Church Tradition is designed to keep us Christ-centered and to disciple us. We do this in many areas of life in general: remembering birthdays – not because we’re legalists or idolators – because we love the person and we celebrate their life with us; we remember anniversaries because of the same reasons. Most Christian traditions developed as “relationship enhancers” and reminders of our relationship with Jesus and of His goodness to us throughout our lives.
Traditions are also defenses against infection from heresies. In my jurisdiction of Christ’s Church, we recite the Nicene Creed together because: 1) it unites us in one faith; 2) it teaches us THE faith of the Church Catholic; and 3) it hold accountable anything we’ve heard taught in that service.
Traditions, when viewed from this perspective, serve to increase our love of God, to instruct us of His ways and His heart, and to nurture our faith and devotion to Him and each other.
I fear that, far too often, we react to errors without really seeking the value and worth of something. And we end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Derek @ 1, “I speak in a lot of churches that try to have as little tradition as possible.”
The thing is, they’re wrong. Not just wrong about tradition being inherently bad, but wrong about themselves not having a tradition.

Wow. Great comments early. I’m glad Derek pushed the questions further back to Judaism and that Gary pushed the question wider to family traditions. It’s obvious after any serious thought that we get much, much more good than bad from tradition in the Church and the family. It seems that many folks today are looking back (or across) to have their faith and practice made stronger and deeper by finding older traditions they can enter into. And, yes, Scot; “with Tradition” is my goal as well.
I’ve often admired some of the Quaker traditions, whether “clarity meetings” or even how they structure some of their services to corporately wait on God to speak through anyone in attendance, and how they close such meetings by the handshake of a couple of the elders. But, growing up in “low-church” I’ve also come to appreciate the BCP’s steady depth.
I’d love to see a church use or even combine some of these or others, or use several regularly in different settings. Two streams of the Church that seem like two sides of the same coin to me are the contemplative and the charismatic, though few within each camp today seem to realize it. I feel like they would each do very well to enter into some of the traditions of the other.

Good post, and I have found myself appreciating tradition more and more.
Michael Patton (Parchment and Pen), just wrote an interesting post about hymns, but in the context of “tradition”.
“Hymns are epic as God is epic. Hymns played in a traditional way, with the traditional sound, are even more epic….
Hymns enter the church into a saga. While I think church can and does take these kind of things to far, there is something to be said for tradition. When I attended an Eastern Orthodox church not too long ago I remember thinking about all the things that they did wrong to the detriment of the Gospel. However, there is something that I believe they get right: they allow people to experience the church. No, not the building they are in or even their congregation, but the historic church. Because of their liturgy, which goes back thousands of years, they join hands with all the saints of the past. Other traditions do this as well in their own respective ways. This is one aspect of the value that the great hymns of the faith sung and played in a classical way have.”
I think his line, “Because of their liturgy, which goes back thousands of years, they join hands with all the saints of the past. Other traditions do this as well in their own respective ways” is a great starting point in looking at healthy traditions.

Traditions, like culture, come in two varieties. One variety is that body of traditions which is so familiar and unconscious that we follow it without even realizing we are doing so. The other variety is the traditions that are older or from groups other than our own. The first allows us to function without being forced to make a myriad of decisions about what to do next – a road that leads to disorder and contention. The second variety is the voice that speaks to us from outside. It helps us to discover and grow. I wonder which of the two varieties we favor. I’m guessing most readers of Jesus Creed prefer the second variety. Am I right?
Captcha: “baptism and”
Yes, really.

Tony Campolo used to say that he took his kids to see their grandparents every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas. He didn’t care about the weather or the circumstances, somehow they were going to get to the grandparents. Why? Because he knew one day he would have grand-kids and he wanted to see his grand-kids at the holidays. When his kids grew up and had kids, he wanted them trained like Pavlovian dogs to take their kids to see the grandparents. He wanted this instinct to be so strong that his kids would suffer nervous breakdowns if the didn’t get to the grandparents during the holidays.
Traditions do bind social ties. Think about the traditional wedding vows. Some think they need to have vows that are special an unique to them. But every time the bride and groom say words like these:
“I, John, take you, Mary, to be my lawfully wedded wife, my constant friend, my faithful partner and my love from this day forward. In the presence of God, our family and friends, I offer you my solemn vow to be your faithful partner in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, and in joy as well as in sorrow. I promise to love you unconditionally, to support you in your goals, to honor and respect you, to laugh with you and cry with you, and to cherish you for as long as we both shall live.”
For everyone in their presence who is married … whether for 5 years, 25 years, or 50 years … all time evaporates back to that moment when they said these words. There is reinforcement and renewal of those vows. The taking of the vows becomes a communal act that strengthens the whole community and the marriages within the community.
To this day, every time we say the Apostle’s Creed it sends chills down my spine. To think that for 2000 years brothers and sisters from across the globe in every imaginable circumstance have said these words together reminds me that I am part of something so much bigger than I can wrap my mind around.
It is true that some traditions become outmoded and even counterproductive. But the view that tradition itself is bad is nonsense.

Colossians 2: 6-23 is a great help here. Helps us sort through what is and is not a worthy tradition.

I think people confuse “how we do things” with “how we think theologically about things”. Tradition “we have always done this this way” can be harmful to reaching new people and rarely have any benefit in helping us remain orthodox. Tradition “how we think theologically about things” can also sometime be harmful to helping us reach new people, but usually is very helpful in keeping us orthodox.

Tradition needs to be separated from traditionalism.
The living faith of the dead vs the dead faith of the living.

I think one of the interesting things about traditions, young or old, is that they all had reasons/assumptions behind them at their formation, whether theological or cultural or practical or otherwise. Things get interesting after one or more of the reasons loses validity (real or imagined) or practicality. Then the tradition gets modified, abandoned, or maybe the reasons for keeping the tradition become different from the reasons for starting it.
I feel like that’s what’s going on right now with evangelical “evangelism.” We have several traditions for how to do it, but a lot of the theological and cultural assumptions that shaped those traditions have shifted, not entirely, but significantly. It leaves a lot of uncertainty about the practice.

I would agree that we need to listen to the voices of the past and I join you, T, in becoming more attentive to tradition. The issue is which voices do we listen to and why we allow some things to become tradition.
Last week I had an encounter with my first concern. Last Father’s Day our church hosted a car show as a recognition of the value of fathers. This year, the same guys who organized it last year automatically repeated the event. Of course, more than one person complained. “Why do we always do something for dads but never do something for mother?” was the exact message of one parent.
Not getting into her concern, my frustration was that because we did something once, it is now a tradition. There was no purpose for the repeating the event. It just seemed that it worked once so we should do it forever.
I love the musical tradition of the church, but part of that tradition has been to hold on to the best songs of the past while always welcoming new. A well edited hymnal will illustrate this point. Thumb through and you’ll see songs written, or remix over many, many years.
Now the tradition is that we can be traditional (i.e., connected representative of a church some decades ago), or we can be contemporary (i.e., representative of a certain demographic of today). The Church does not do a good job of picking the meaningful things of the past and creating meaningful things for today, blending them together.
Also, we give equal weight to anything of the past when we talk of tradition. If it is old, it must be good for the church. So we light candles in the fashion of one paying penance. This isn’t part of a conversation with the church of the past. It is just because it feels good because it is old. A good conversation will lead the church to say “No” to the past when no is the proper answer.
I agree that we need to listen to the past, but that doesn’t mean we accept everything of the past. It also doesn’t mean that we reject anything new. And it really doesn’t mean that we just force the old and the new together. A conversation is meaningful with thoughtful conclusions.

I am agreed with all those lauding the value of tradition. But, to sound a note of caution, I do think that sometimes people within traditions can forget that people have to be taught how to enter those traditions. Traditions are languages, and languages are arbitrary. Words have no inherent meaning, they have socially constructed meaning.
So take the Rick’s quote from Michael Patton: “Hymns are epic as God is epic. Hymns played in a traditional way, with the traditional sound, are even more epic….”
Well, yes and no. A stirring traditional hymn can be epic if we have been socialized to find it epic. The organ music, the martial beat, and the soaring chorus are all signifiers that make us think of glory and majesty. If you have no familiarity with Euro-American hymnody, they would sound strange, as strange as sitar music sounds to Western ears.
Traditions of all kinds work the same way, I think. I am absolutely not saying they are meaningless, but that their meaning happens in, and only in, a community that teaches their meaning. Liturgical churches, I fear, are the first to forget this. There’s lots of beautiful and ancient meaning going on, but I as an outsider feel much the same way as I would at a Shinto ceremony.
My point is, tradition is great, but it has to be taught, not just passed on. It has to be accessible, which means you have to own it for what it is: socially constructed, timebound, and open to revision. Those are features, not bugs.
This, to me, is the real danger to those who would discard tradition — because of course they are not doing any such thing, they are just substituting other traditions and not calling them tradition. You are much more likely to be motivated by the bad sort of tradition if you are unable to name it as such.

Travis (14) has a good point many things that people are calling traditional here are not my tradition. Therefore if I adopt them, they are innovations, no matter how old they are. For many people today in church, hymns are not traditional for them, they are just old. Old can be very good of course, but that’s not the same as traditional.
Someone complained to our pastor that our church was “leaving its reformed roots.” Our pastor responded, “I’m not sure how to break this to you, but this denomination doesn’t have reformed roots.” The man replied, “Oh, then I guess I must be in the wrong church.”
Maybe that’s a ‘you had to be there’ story, but it seems that we really all have completely differing ideas about what traditional even means.

I have a church planting friend who says that at the second meeting of their core group someone jumped in and said, “Wait a minute. We didn’t do that way last week.”
Actually, it may be useful to distinguish between habit and tradition. We humans are habit creating creatures. Habit facilitates our daily functioning. Waking each morning, getting dressed in the same way, sitting at the same chair at the table for meals, driving the same route to work, etc., are all routines/habits that free me from having to reflect on each and every action I take. Both the idea that we should be reflecting on each an every action as we take it and the idea that traditional patterns of behavior are beyond review are wrong.
Travis and others speak of bringing people into tradition. Tradition should be bringing us into reflection … participating in something larger than ourselves. Yes, sometimes tradition can become empty and simply habitual. Periodically we need to re-engage with what we are doing at more intentional levels. But I think there is fundamentally different between habit and tradition.

As many of the others here I feel there is a big difference between tradition and habit.
Of course, this is highly individual. But for some there is a strong need to feel connected to the community in horizontal and vertical dimensions. If I go to a RC church here it is like one there. Likewise I have the comfort of knowing what I am doing is rooted in history and ties me directly to the other generations.
For me, I like the tradition to the extent that it does not become exclusive. There is tradition, then there is prison.
Dave

Good thoughts, T!
Like for you, tradition’s stock is rising in the way I do theology. I grew up in a tradition that frowned upon tradition (and reason and experience ). It was “nothing but the Bible.” In reality, we were blind to our own traditions and experiences and how they colored the way we read the Bible.

Matt, we had similar backgrounds, it seems! As many others have noted, once we realize the role tradition plays for all of us, we can be more honest and humble about our own traditions and more charitable to others as well.
Many would argue that evangelicalism, both in terms of overall practice and theology, especially via the church growth movement and especially in the non-denominational camps, has come to be dominated by “Reason” or pragmatism, with Tradition ranking a distant 4th on Wesley’s Quadrilateral and the other two somewhere in between. Michael Spencer, for instance, was a frequent voice crying from the evangelical wilderness predicting and lamenting evangelicalism’s doom because of this trend. Is the devaluation and/or ignorance of Church Tradition (old school, big-T) a central weakness of evangelicalism?
As Travis and others pointed out, Tradition must be taught and explained and not merely “caught.” Is this where recent attempts to connect with the Ancient Faith tend to miss something: trying to use traditional forms for an experience without adequate reason/explanation? How best should churches attempt to connect with deeper Tradition(s)? I’ve found Renovare to be a great resource on this front; are there others anyone has found helpful?

T @ 19,
Interesting. I would have described evangelicalism in terms of “experience” than “reason”, thinking of the individualistic emphasis on quiet times and reading the Bible for yourself and the like, but with reason as pragmatism that makes sense. There is a sense that in choosing methodology, the most important consideration is effectiveness, whatever that means.
For myself, I appreciate it when traditions are approached without the air of mystery and pomp, and more with an air of experimentation. Nobody is going to get in trouble if you don’t do it exactly right, and potentially confusing bits are explained along the way. We should be able to talk about our traditions in a calm way, without the fear that questioning a tradition is some kind of attack.