“The Importance of the Great Tradition for Renewing the Church”
January 23, 2006
John H. Armstrong
My last two ACT 3 Weekly articles have demonstrated the importance that tradition plays in renewing the church and in recovering vital Christianity in the modern age. Many evangelicals question this emphasis, believing that the relationship between Scripture and tradition is irretrievably confused. They honestly wonder if there is any positive connection between post-apostolic Christianity and the modern church. In this final installment I want to show why there is a connection and define what I mean by “The Great Tradition.” In the process I hope to demonstrate why this concept of tradition is important for renewing the church in the third millennium, thus why we have chosen this name for our ministry.
I have previously observed what Fredericka Mathewes-Green, an extremely gifted Orthodox writer, calls her Protestant friends’ worst fears about tradition when they routinely refer to it as “dead tradition.” Frankly, much of what evangelical Protestants think about tradition is colored in very dark hues. Mathewes-Green notes, “Before I became Orthodox, I imagined that the first-century Christians sat around on the floor, probably in blue jeans, playing guitar and talking about how Jesus touched their hearts that week.” Well, not exactly, as any elementary study of the early church, and its developing tradition, will readily reveal.
We may, Mathewes-Green adds, “reflexively think of ‘dead tradition’” but we should realize that there is also such a thing as “living tradition.” This living tradition “supports and fosters life,” she concludes. I concur, though I remain very much an evangelical Protestant. But the simple fact remains-no single expression of the church (Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant) agrees on every aspect of this living tradition anymore than they agree on every aspect of biblical interpretation. D. H. Williams has correctly grasped this point when he concludes: “The conflict between the early Reformers and Rome was not one of Scripture versus Tradition, but rather a clash over what the traditions had become, or between concepts of tradition.” We are hopelessly confused, adrift on a sea of modernity without a historical framework for understanding the role of tradition, and thus the Tradition (or Great Tradition). Note: I am making a distinction here between tradition (lowercase t) and Tradition (capital T), which I believe to be historically justifiable.
If modern evangelical Christianity is to be renewed through a proper sense of doctrinal and practical orthodoxy it will need, in my estimation, to use both Scripture and Tradition. I believe doctrinal orthodoxy will not become relevant and strong again through constant appeals to the Bible and the work of the Holy Spirit that refuse to learn from the interpretive tradition of the historic church. Those who would lead the church in mission need to show why and how the church must recover its genuinely “catholic” roots if we are to engage the modern and postmodern situation we face in an increasingly post-Christian world.
Put another way, the late Baptist theologian Bernard Ramm, said this well when he wrote: “An evangelical with an a-historical faith is a superficial one.” Can any reader seriously doubt that modern evangelicalism has settled, on a massive scale, for a superficial faith? By jumping right from the New Testament to the sixteenth century we have not only created an evangelical ghetto intellectually, we have also created a reactionary movement with little or no intellectual firepower in the modern world. This problem is the burden of a growing number of modern evangelical theologians who understand it very well; e.g., J. I. Packer, Tom Oden, D. H. Williams, Christopher Hall, Timothy George, Alister McGrath, etc.
So, is it possible to recover an ecumenical orthodoxy, one built upon a doctrinal foundation expressed in Scripture as well as the ecumenical councils and creeds of the post-apostolic era? And can this ecumenical orthodoxy be robust enough to advance the missional mandate of Jesus Christ in the new millennium, especially among evangelical Protestants? I believe so. And I believe others who have gone before me in seeing and articulating the answer that I give can help chart the way.
C. S. Lewis understood this idea well when he wrote of a common, central, or “mere” Christian faith. He noted that this emphasis on truth, or common Tradition, united believers and allowed for the serious advancing of the faith in both church and culture. Lewis rightly observed: “It is at her center, where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine. And this suggests that at the center of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences or temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.” James S. Cutsinger, in the book Reclaiming the Great Tradition (InterVarsity Press, 1997), has rightly noted that Lewis’s words are “deceptively simple.” This may, at first glance, hide how “profound and controversial they [really] are.” The truest and best ecumenism may well come in the future from those who at first seem to strongly disagree on a number of important issues, issues that still divide Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians significantly. Thus my appeal is not one that countenances a liberal ecumenism that waters down the faith. It is rather a call for a vibrant and serious confessionalism that pursues the differences we still hold by establishing the center first. When this is done in good faith we then can pursue the Savior (note Lewis’s reference to Someone) and properly engage the discussion we must have about our problematic differences. This is how ACT 3 believes the gospel is advanced in new (ancient?) ways.
Thomas Oden has spent the last twenty-plus years trying to give back to Protestant churches the ancient sources of her faith. He discovered, after a sojourn in radical liberal thought, that the itch for something new was never healthy. He found that the true antidote to idolizing the new was to listen to the past more carefully. The need to continually come up with innovative stuff was replaced, in Oden’s life and worldview, by listening to the past with humble attentiveness. This is what lies behind his Ancient Christian Commentary series (InterVaristy Press), which seeks to recover the teaching of the patristic writers on Holy Scripture. Oden, a vibrant evangelical Methodist, even refers to a dream he once had, while he was recovering from liberalism. In this dream he saw that his calling as a theologian could only be fulfilled “through obedience to apostolic tradition.” I have had the same dream! I am tired of trying to come up with something new all the time. I want to immerse myself in the Great Tradition of the Christian faith while at the same time I seek to understand the modern world better and better and relate the gospel effectively to it. By this effort I understand that I am both orthodox and missional. Thus, I believe that a great deal of what Christians need is to be found in a living Tradition that nourishes faith and humbly guides the church into the future.
So, what is this Great Tradition I refer to? J. I. Packer has answered this question far better than I can. He writes that it includes the following items:
Recognizing the canonical Scriptures as the repository and channel of Christ-centered divine revelation.
Acknowledging the triune God as sovereign in creation, providence and grace.
Focusing faith, in the sense both of belief and of trust, on Jesus Christ as God incarnate; as our crucified and living Savior, Lord, master, friend, life and hope; and as the one mediator of, and thus the only way to, a filial relationship with God his Father.
Seeing Christians as a family of forgiven sinners, now supernaturally regenerated in Christ and empowered for godliness by the Holy Spirit.
Seeing the church as a single supernatural society and the two dominical sacraments as necessities of obedience, gestures of worship and means of communion with God in Christ.
Practicing prayer, obedience, purity, love and service, and sanctifying all relationships in the home, the church and the wider world, as the Christian’s proper individual lifestyle.
Reckoning with the personal reality of evil and maintaining purposeful hostility to sin and the devil.
Expecting death and final judgment to lead into the endless joy of heaven, where the glorified saints will live with Christ and each other forever.
Packer adds to this list of explanations a few important observations.
The great tradition has from time to time embraced different ways of explicating these things, but the things themselves are the non-negotiables of Christianity according to Christ. . . . The great tradition has witnessed many misconceptions (about the Trinity, and grace and justification, for instance) that, if consistently held, would make true saving knowledge of Jesus Christ inaccessible. Responsible theology is motivated in part by the desire to prevent such a thing from ever happening (“On from Orr,” in Reclaiming the Great Tradition, InterVarsity Press, 1997, page 156-57).
Packer’s insights here are crucial. But they are not the only word on the matter, at least to my mind. They focus primarily on an inherited body of important propositional truths. But in a very real sense Tradition refers to more than these truths as stated above. When the apostolic Tradition is passed on what is actually handed down to us is what Patrick Henry Reardon has properly called “the living, Spirit-bearing Christ himself, forming his people.” The church was first shaped and given life by the Holy Spirit. This is too easily lost in traditionalism. The object of the Spirit’s energy is always the living Tradition. This is passed along to each generation, to each church, and to each Christian, in what Luke refers to as “the apostles’ teaching and fellowship . . . [and] the breaking of bread of prayer” (Acts 2:42). The church, in other words, is a living dynamic body, not a fellowship of propositions!
Perhaps the most important academic study of Christian Tradition ever penned is the five-volume magisterial work of Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. This hugely important series seeks to explore and explain the historical development of doctrine over the course of the two-thousand-year history of Christianity. The first volume, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), refers to the post-apostolic developments in early Christian doctrine as the “orthodox consensus.” Pelikan argues that this period, filled with both struggle and vitality, provided for the church through the ages a solid historical basis in Tradition for confessing a living and faithful Christianity. In one of the better known, and oft-quoted, sections of his introduction Pelikan writes:
Tradition without history has homogenized all the stages of development into one statically defined truth; history without tradition has produced a historicism that relativized the development of Christian doctrine in such a way as to make the distinction between authentic growth and cancerous aberration seem completely arbitrary. In this history [i.e., in Pelikan’s five volumes] we are attempting to avoid the pitfalls of both these methods. The history of Christian doctrine is the most effective means available of exposing the artificial theories of continuity that have assumed normative status in the church, and at the same time it is an avenue into the authentic continuity of Christian believing, teaching and confessing. Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living (emphasis mine, page 9 in The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 100-600).
That paragraph defines the direction ACT 3 intends to take in the years ahead, if God allows and Christ tarries. What we believe we need to consciously advance today is the Great Tradition, not traditionalism. Any other agenda fails to reckon with the nature of how God has directed the church by the Holy Spirit in the past and how we can expect him to renew it again in times to come.
