Live in the present - but listen to the past!

I praise you for remembering me in everything and for holding to the traditions just as I passed them on to you… I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you… 1 Corinthians 11:2 and 23

So then…stand firm and hold fast to the teachings we passed on to you… 2 Thessalonians 2:15

Just occasionally you come across something someone has said and think “Ooh, I wish I had said that!” Not just because it’s clever or witty, but because it expresses perfectly an important truth – hits the nail on the head, as the saying goes.

Jaroslav Pelikan was an American church historian noted for his natty turns of phrase. Perhaps his most famous one-liner was: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living”. Not bad, eh?

What exactly did he mean?

Well, in many Christian circles – perhaps evangelical circles most of all –tradition is rather a dirty word and gets confused with mere traditionalism. We proudly imagine that we modern Christians don’t need tradition. We’re open to the up-to-date moving of the Holy Spirit! We’re not imprisoned by the customs and beliefs of the past – not like that old-fashioned lot, that bunch of traditionalists, in the church down the road…

We need to be careful of swelling our chests with spiritual pride! Who knows? – we might discover one day that that that old-fashioned lot down the road have more of Jesus in their little fingers than we have in our whole bodies.

No! The Bible encourages us to value tradition as living truth that was passed on by those now dead, not to dismiss it as stale doctrine that’s past its use-by date.

I’ve picked out three verses from Paul, in each of which he reminds his readers that they only know about Christ because of tradition: it was “passed on” to them, whether by him or by somebody else. That in fact is exactly what the word tradition means: “something that has been passed on” or “handed down”.

The idea of tradition was particularly important in those early days - for the very simple reason that at that time there was no such thing as what we now call “the New Testament”. It just didn’t exist; it was still in the process of being collected, edited and shaped into the form we know today. (It’s a sobering thought that we would never have known the story of Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, or of Zacchaeus up his fig tree, or Paul’s wonderful hymn of love, if somebody hadn’t passed them on – turned them into traditions.)

Of course, we today especially cherish the “tradition” which we take into our hands every time we pick up the Bible; it is inspired and preserved by God himself and therefore reliable and authoritative. But we have to face the fact that, as the Bible is handed from one generation to the next, it brings along with it various interpretations that may or may not be correct; it is, if you like, a rolling stone that gathers a whole load of moss!

So we need to exercise careful - and prayerful – judgment. As the Bible itself tells us, we need to test everything (1 Thessalonians 5:19-22, 1 John 4:1) so that we don’t lose our way.

Going back to the start… what stands out from all this is a simple but vital truth: we need the past.

For us, the fact that we live in the twenty-first century means that we have two thousand years of Christian tradition to draw upon, and we are foolish and arrogant if we imagine that we don’t need it. The books those saints have written! The experiences they have recorded! The songs and hymns they have sung! Yes, we need to sift them – to test them – by scripture, but we only impoverish ourselves if we dismiss them out of hand.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of the best known preachers of the twentieth century, used to urge that, after the Bible itself, the next thing to read is church history; it is a very treasure-store which can feed our minds, stir our hearts and enlarge our sympathies (who knows, we might even discover that that load of traditionalists down the road actually have something to teach us).

You hear occasionally of new churches being planted as churches “from scratch”: all we need is scripture, they claim (along with our particular interpretation, of course!). But it’s a lost cause: we all bring with us some weight of baggage, even if we don’t realise it. And so such churches either fade away very quickly, or subconsciously adopt various traditions and so cease to be “from scratch” at all.

The key is to discern the difference between healthy, nourishing tradition on the one hand, and the deadening hand of traditionalism on the other. In order to do this we need good teaching, humble hearts and minds,  the leading of the Holy Spirit, a sense of perspective, and earnest prayer. And even with all these we still won’t get everything right!

Having said all this, the main value of Prof Pelikan’s aphorism is to challenge us about our own faith… Is it a living faith passed on by generations who have gone before us; or a dead faith that’s just a bundle of accumulated customs and beliefs that really aren’t worth having?

Something to think about…

Thank you, Father, for the many generations who have passed on your word, those who have written wisely about it, those who have composed beautiful songs and hymns, those whose lives are an example of Christlikeness. Help me to benefit from all that they have left, and grant that even I, in due time, will leave something good behind me for others. Amen.