Christianity is Inescapably Traditional

In 1976, a friend and I were passing out tracts in Naples, Italy when we encountered a Catholic priest.  He didn't speak English, and we didn't speak much Italian, so I pulled out my Italian Bible and started reading to him from Matthew 16: "for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God..." but before I got to the end of the passage he started laughing and finished it from memory.  I had never seen this man, and I really knew nothing about Catholicism, but I was certain he needed to hear Jesus' rebuke.  After all, Catholic tradition distorts the gospel. 

What I had been taught was that Protestants believe in the Bible and Catholics believe in a combination of Scripture and Tradition.  What that tradition involved was unclear to me, but obviously it was something that undermined the purity of biblical teaching.  A few years ago a popular faculty member at Wheaton College was fired after he converted to Roman Catholicism, and in the controversy that followed the president of the college, Duane Litfin, appealed to this same idea: Protestants and Catholics differ primarily over the issue of authority, Protestants believing in sola scriptura and Catholics believing in both Scripture and Tradition.  Richard John Neuhaus, however, pointed out in response to Dr. Litfin's appeal to "Reformation distinctives," that that what is really at issue is a conflict of traditions: "Another term for Reformation distinctives or 'the Reformation heritage' is the Reformation tradition.  Thus does it become evident that the dispute is not over sola scriptura, on the one hand, and Scripture and tradition, on the other.  The dispute is over which tradition is normative; one that interprets Scripture in continuity with a tradition that extends from the apostolic era to the present, or one that interprets Scripture according to a tradition... that began in the sixteenth century" (First Things, #161, March 2006, p. 65).

Even the most anti-traditional Protestants rely implicitly on tradition.  After all, Scripture does not provide a list of books to be included in the Canon.  The Church, over a period of centuries, was led by the Spirit in a process of discernment, and when we open our Bibles today with the confidence that we're reading God's Word, we're relying on the Church's verdict.  Saying, as many Protestants do following John Calvin, that Scripture is self-attesting, doesn't solve the problem.  Even if we grant that this is so, the overwhelming majority of Christians simply accept that the Church came to the right decision.  The question is not whether or not Scripture is self-attesting, but who engages in the work of discerning the limits of the Canon.  Christians, whether Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, trust the verdict of the early Church, and, whatever their scruples about the authority of tradition, are willing to hold at least to this one tradition, that the Church was right in its choice of books to include or reject (laying aside, for now, the dispute over the deuterocanonical books).

But it's not only the issue of the Canon; the truth is that we all read Scripture from within a particular tradition, and many things seem clear to us which have not been clear to Christians in earlier centuries, because we've been traditioned into a particular way of looking at and reading the Bible.  Tradition trains us to read particular parts of Scripture in the light of  the larger context as understood by our denominational understanding: "tradition is like the conscience of a group or the principle of identity that links one generation to another" (Yves Congar, The Meaning of Tradition, p. 2).  The question is whether or not the tradition we've received is in continuity with the teaching of the apostles.

Although Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for allowing their tradition to distort God's revelation, the New Testament also speaks of tradition in a positive way.  Paul, before he speaks to the Corinthians about head coverings and the Eucharist, says "I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you" (11:2).  Later, he urges the Thessalonians to "stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter" (2 Thess. 2:15).  Then, before he closes, he goes on, "keep away from any brother who is walking in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us" (3:6).  In speaking to the Thessalonians and the Corinthians, Paul is concerned with things he had told them in both unwritten and written form.  Unfortunately, the NIV obscures this by translating paradosis, in these verses, as teaching.  But apart from questions of translation, Paul is speaking about things he had communicated to the church in an unwritten form; he's speaking about what is normally described as tradition.  It's the same word that is used in Matthew 16, quoted at the beginning of this post. 

Clement of Rome wrote a letter to the Corinthians before the end of the first century.  No doubt some who read it remembered receiving Paul's epistles to the same church.  A few years later, Ignatius of Antioch wrote seven letters while he was being escorted to Rome to be executed.  He was a friend of Polycarp, who was a disciple of John the Apostle.  Irenaeus met Polycarp as a child and went on to write the first Christian systematic theology later in the second century.  And the Didache, which contains instructions about the practice of the Eucharist, was begun during the apostolic period.  In addition to writing, these early leaders gave verbal instruction in the Church.  How did the early Christians know how to celebrate the Eucharist?  Did they figure it out by reading the handful of references in what we now know as the New Testament?  No, they were taught by the apostles.  The early Christians knew how to practice the Eucharist, not from Scripture, but from the apostolic tradition which had been handed down to them from the apostles and those who'd been taught by the apostles: "the written  teaching in the New Testament on the Eucharist fills a small number of verses, and the faith of the churches in this absolutely central mystery depends directly on the oral teaching of the apostles, on the example of their celebration of it and on the eucharistic reality itself, placed in the heart of the communities as an unfailing fountain of truth, much more than on the Gospel texts, which were written at a period when the Eucharist had been celebrated in the Church for at least thirty years" (Congar, pp. 103-104).

The issue for me is different now than it was in 1976.  The question is not why Roman Catholics follow the tradition of the early Church, but why Evangelical Protestants feel free to despise tradition and depart from that which was handed down from the apostles and their successors.  One doesn't have to visit many Evangelical churches to see that the Sacraments, and even the Scriptures, have been reduced to the margins of church life and that entertainment has become central.  In the absence of a larger, more rooted tradition, which is "the communication of the entire heritage of the apostles, effected in a different way from that of their writings" (Congar, p. 22), local churches are subjected to the whims and idiosycracies of contemporary Christian pastors.