Tradition III - Existing even when denied

Christian Tradition: Present in the Church even when denied

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            In our previous first two considerations of Christian tradition our first consideration of Christian tradition was that the Scriptures taught a positive as well as negative perspective of tradition.  Tradition is natural to human existence.  Humanity distinct from all the other creatures of the earth educates, creates rituals, and builds cultures including cultural sites, activities, and ideals.  Thus it would seem likely that if Christ came to restore human life to its fullness, he would come to restore, purify, and sanctify tradition rather than to simply try to abolish it.  In our second consideration of Christian tradition we fixed our focus on Pavel Florensky’s understanding of Christian tradition being rooted in the new life given by and lived in relationship to the Holy Spirit.  The Christian tradition in its broadest sense as described by Florensky is the history of the Spirit’s instruction and guidance of the Living Church since the time of Christ.  Thus for Florensky authoritative tradition was evidenced in but not limited to such things as the words of Holy Scripture, truthful summations of Christian doctrine by the ordained bishops and clergy of the Church, and recognized church councils.  In the broadest sense the tradition of the church is the continuing history of Christ’s presence in the Church through the work of the Holy Spirit as the ecclesia (called out church) is gathered for and preserved until the time to be presented to the Father through the Son in the day of Christ’s glorification.

            I hope that Protestant and Evangelical readers of this blog would not find such a view to be regarded as contradictory to the Scriptures.  My goal in looking at the subject of Christian tradition is to consider a phenomenon that is part of each and every Christian life.  If ultimately the tradition of the Church is the continued consistent teaching of the Living Church by the Holy Spirit then every Christian has surely been blessed by that tradition.  Truth taught by the Scriptures describes the blessings of God’s people even when God’s people do not fully understand such truths.

An example of how the church is blessed in the truths of Scriptures when those truths are only partially understood may be described in how while Christians understand that God’s people are saved by grace through faith, there are many varieties of viewpoints trying to reconcile that teaching with how God has made clear that the Christian has been created for good works.  (Ephesians 2:8-10)  In the broadest perspective there is a general recognition that salvation is a gift of God through Christ, but also that good works are important because, well because they are good works.  So depending on your perspective regarding how grace, faith, and works are brought together you will find a lot of Christians continue to do good works although they almost always refer negatively to “good works” as if “good works are really a name for adding something to the work of Christ outside of grace.  On the other hand there are those people who seem to deny the full extent of how one is saved by grace, and yet though they describe salvation as being by faith and works; it becomes clear that their understanding of those works is that these works are essential to the life of faith because true Christian faith leads us to do good works rather than evil fruits, because a tree is known by its fruit.

Such doctrinal disputes do not necessarily mean that the participants on the various sides of the theological debates are necessarily outside of the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ.  It may simply mean that two different perspectives held among Christians have not yet been better reconciled to one another through a more perfect understanding of the Holy Scriptures.  In charity, we may with good cause come to hope that one enjoys a true Christian life in the Spirit of God and in Christ’s grace through faith even if one does not necessarily have a precise understanding of the Scriptural doctrines speaking on the matter of grace, faith, and works.

It would seem clear that the Scriptures speak of salvation being by grace through faith and not of works.  It is the clear teaching of Ephesians.  But to say the Christian is therefore saved by grace through faith and not of works; is not the same as saying that therefore every true Christian has to have a precise understanding of that doctrine or he does not possess salvation.  An analogy to that would be to see a little infant kicking his legs and tossing his arms about into the air.  He is able to do such things because he has a beating heart that pumps blood carrying oxygen to every organ in his body, so in the possession of life he naturally moves his fingers, toes, arms, legs, and shows all the evidence of life.  But if you are Protestant and Evangelical you might imagine that the child does not really show evidence of life unless he is able to explain how the circulatory system functions.  Then there will be arguments whether it is enough to have a grammar school capacity to explain the circulatory system or if you need the precise understanding of a medical student having finished his final exams.  In reality, we possess life long before we gather an understanding of life.  We enjoy the possession of life but must gradually learn and be taught about life for us to understand the life we have enjoyed since we were in our mother’s womb.  The doctrines of the Scriptures are given to help us better understand and make better applications of our Christian life but for the most part our growth in understanding is made possible because we have life already in Christ and so the possibility that one has life but has not yet come into a full understanding of life is very plausible indeed.

It seems to me that the experience of Christian tradition is much like that.  A fundamentalist preacher will say in one sentence to his congregation, “We don’t believe in tradition, we hold only to the Bible and what it says.”  The congregation which has learned to believe in Christ and follow him according to the Scriptures says “Amen.”  Then a little while later the same minister in the same sermon will say, “Do you remember when Brother Parker spoke to us last year about the importance of getting godly advice rather than just doing things on a whim.  God has given you brothers and sisters in this church and over the years they have studied the Scriptures, they have prayed, they have learned some things, and God has given them to you to help you when you need some good advice.  You need to make use of such gifts God has given you when you are praying about what direction you should take in life.  The Book of Proverbs speaks of there being blessing in the multitude of counselors.”

Do you see how without knowing it, the minister in that sermon described Pavel Florensky’s description of Christian tradition?  Christian tradition exists wherever the Spirit of God has undertaken the work of helping God’s people to live in Christ.  As the Spirit of God teaches the church of God, men and women are given various gifts to be expressed within the community of a church or parish.  Christ has distributed his various gifts and graces to varied people in varied measures so that we might learn and experience Christ from one another.  The tradition which Florensky recognized as essential is the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit teaching the Church of Christ and ministering Christ to one another based on Christ planting himself to be discovered through the church in one another.  The Spirit has given gifts to the Church and such is discovered through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit’s work in the church as men and women with new life encounter Christ not only in the Scriptures by various propositions of truth but through the Body of Christ through the gifts distributed to one another in Christ through the Church.  The Church is therefore not an added on nice place to visit, but is according to the Scriptures “the ground and pillar of the truth” (I Timothy 3:15).  The Church is God’s appointed context for learning of and experiencing new life in Christ.  In the parish of the gathered men and women coming to hear of Christ, coming to make their prayers, to hear the Scriptures, to partake of the sacraments, to experience the building of the body by the varied gifts and to minister within the body and towards those outside of the body one comes into the context of the Christian life as envisioned by the plan of the Gospel and the establishment of churches where Christ has promised his blessing wherever two or three are called together in his name.  This is the tradition, the handing of Christ one to another that the Apostle regarded as something not to be set aside.  The broader tradition of the Church is the whole history of the Spirit of God’s patient instructing of the Church and her members from the beginning when the Gospel was first proclaimed unto the day of Christ when the whole church will be presented blameless in the day of Christ unto God the Father.

The grace of God in the Church of our Lord Jesus Christ is a sharing among the brethren called out by the grace of God by the Spirit of God to be included in the body of Christ, the church.  The Christian tradition is forged by the work of God the Holy Spirit in planting the life of Christ among the people of God that the church may be one.  This happens locally in local churches, and it is not a thing to be disrespected.  It is to be considered a marvelous thing of great grandeur and beauty when struggling members of a Christian congregation learn to love one another in Christ, to be encouraged by one another through what they have learned in Christ and to begin to learn to employ their gifts toward one another in Christ.  I did not present the fundamentalist preacher as someone to be looked down upon for how his sermon unfolded.  He believed upon Christ, and taught the people of God from the Scriptures and pointed them to make use of the gifts planted by the Spirit among them.  He did not see that as how God establishes a Christian tradition in a congregation, wherein the Spirit continually works to educate, equip, and form a Christian way of life in a congregation to be passed on to others in a continual manner.  But even though he did not understand tradition, he participated in the life of tradition.  It is on this local church or parish level where some of the best teaching of people to value the tradition of the Holy Spirit in the Church begins to be learned.  Here men and women experience the work of Christ teaching and equipping his people through the grace administered in a local church or local parish so that God’s people begin through their life in Christ to serve and minister to one another.  Never let that be dismissed as a little thing, even if the folk in the church seem to have a very limited perspective of what they are experiencing.  In such a local church God is planting a tradition of life shared in Christ by the Spirit unto the Father so that each and every brother and sister in that body learn to serve one another and be that which Christ has given to them to give to one another.  Through this Christ is handed from one believer to another in a true experience of Christ’s blessing of one another.

From the experience we learn in our local church or parish, we begin to grow in awareness that our local parish is not alone.  God had long ago commissioned his apostles to take the Gospel of Christ and to proclaim the Gospel of Christ to the nations, making disciples, establishing churches, instructing the churches regarding life in Christ even to the remotest parts of the earth even to the end of time.  So today there are churches in most every nation on earth.  Some churches are strong, others weak, some troubled by errors and heresies, others stalwart in truth but lacking in love, some understanding little but practicing faithfully what they understand.  Churches come with varied packages of strengths and weaknesses.  These churches are composed of men and women who sin but have a Savior.  They wish to be rid of their sins, to grow in grace, to learn better to love one another.  Where such brethren meet to hear the Word of Christ, to obey the Scriptures, to break bread, to baptize and to teach the commandments of Christ, to partake of the body and blood of Christ, and to do all things in order according to the mercy of Christ – wherever such is happening we have every reason to believe that the Spirit of God is instructing the brethren, establishing patterns of worship, instructing disciples of Christ regarding the proper ways of conduct; and in these things the Spirit of God is creating new life, and establishing a living tradition among the people of God.

The reality of it all is that if you and I have been placed in such a living congregation, strong or weak, and through this placement we have become partakers of the Christian tradition.  There is blessing to be had because Christ has given gifts to men and women and has distributed his grace to men to discover in participating in the fellowship of Christ one with another that we might partake of the gifts God has given to his people.  We begin to learn about this phenomenon in our little local churches, but then we discover this is worldwide in scope extending to all nations, tribes, and tongues.  We begin to grow in awareness that this is happening in churches much like our own and sometimes in churches sometimes that look a lot different from our own.  It is happening now across the globe.  It has been happening for a long time, since our Lord spoke to his selected Apostles and commanded them to baptize the nations, teaching them all he commanded them, and we are told also how Jesus breathed upon his Apostles and gave them the Holy Spirit, and how on the Day of Pentecost the Spirit of God descended upon the church and began to bring men and women to believe in the Gospel, to be baptized and to follow and obey Jesus Christ.

If we understand that such a life to which we have been called is a life within the discipline and tradition of our Lord then we will understand that what God has done in Christ by the Spirit in the church is something to be appreciated and held dear to our hearts, that we might love those people whom God loves and has worked so as to plant his tradition among them that we might no longer be led astray by the traditions of men.  We are to appreciate and understand that there is a tradition, a way of life, teaching, practice, and worship given to us by God that we might flourish and see Christ planted in the lives of men and women across the globe unto the end of the age.

In final summation of what I have tried to share with my readers in this blog is this.  You have been called, if you are a Christian, to life in Christ.  It is a shared life in the Church of Jesus Christ.  You know Christ by faith, and you know him by the gifts he has distributed to your brethren beside you.  You have been given in the church a multitude of counselors bearing the gifts they have been given by Christ.  To love tradition is to realize that Christ not only extends you grace and help in your daily personal devotions, but is also reaching out to you in your brother and in the history of the work of the Spirit is working to teach the people of God in every locale throughout the world wherever Christ is proclaimed and the church gathers to celebrate the Lord’s presence wherever two or three are gathered until the great day when he again returns.  Until then there is the presence of God in the church by the Spirit creating the tradition of life in which Christ is given to one another by the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  You have been made a participant drawing faith and understanding by the presence of the Spirit’s ongoing creation of a tradition of life in Christ and He seeks to employ you and me in the shared life of Christ that we might hand this life, faith, and understanding of life and faith to someone else in the greatest of all traditions to be known among men.

Tradition is sometimes looked upon as dirt to be gotten rid of.  But tradition is the dirt in which the wheat of the Gospel is planted, takes root, grows, bears fruit, and feeds another generation and then another and another.  Who is it that has created such a tradition?  Who is it that waters, cultivates, reaps, and eats?  It is the Spirit of God dwelling in the house of God with the people of God unto the glory of God.  It is the word of God being wed to the humanity of man.