traditio legis

Tradition.

This is a useful reminder for a lifelong Protestant who only recently has appreciated the roles of Scripture and tradition in the Catholic and Orthodox churches. A Catholic friend in high school who was debating with me about the experience of prayer and Bible study in the Christian experience. Exasperated with my line of questioning (“How do you know what you believe if you don’t read the Bible every day? How do you know that God is calling you to do something if you don’t seek his answer every day in prayer?” etc.), he retorted, “How do I know? How do you know you’ve reached the right interpretation, or that you’ve actually heard from God? You guys are the damn split-offs, anyway--we [the Catholic Church] never went anywhere!” His implication was that, of course, I had accused him of being “cut off from the vine” because of his traditions, but had no real basis for knowing this. If in my mind the entire Catholic Church was a severed, dead branch, cut off for the “sins of the fathers” committed in the Crusades, the Inquisition, and clergy pedofilia, how did I defend the solvency of the church in America after the Salem Witch Trials, the slave trade, and Jim Bakker? Too, wasn’t my branch of the Church responsible for enabling the widespread, radically subjective, individualized interpretation of Scripture, whose endless permutations and bickerings led, inevitably, to more disunity? His point, of course, was that I would have to start looking for God in the Catholic Church, too, if I wanted to be sure he was still in the Protestant one. Thankfully, via my grandmother’s Anglicanism and mass attendance at the cathedral while studying in Seville, I had the chance to do this, permanently altering my view of the universal Church.

Now, where church tradition offends me, I look first to the roots of that tradition. If the root is in Scripture, I keep digging until I can at least understand, if not agree with, the particular lens through which a brother or sister read God’s Word and saw a place for that tradition. If the root is not in Scripture, I explore the cultural roots, to see if anything there transcends time and place and can help me in my journey with Christ. If either is true, I can then say that the tradition has some merit, and I will not make an issue of it with other believers even if the tradition does not appeal to me. If the tradition is neither based in Scripture nor in any redemptive cultural purpose, I feel justified in fully discarding it, and the degree to which I do this publicly or passionately is governed by a cost-benefit analysis a la Paul to the Ephesians: “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.” This is why I consider several of the most urgent disagreements between the churches regarding tradition (ordination of married/unmarried/female clergy, music in church, translation of the Bible used in church, liturgy, dress codes, etc.) fair game in a debate, but only in the spirit of good conversation. By this, I mean that neither of us is trying to convince the other that the way to God is only by our own music, dress, preaching style, Scriptural translation, etc., but that we are sharing only what we feel may benefit the other’s pursuit of God. This is not even enough: the argument must be delivered in a way that also benefits and does not harm our filial relationship as daughters and sons of God. It requires that we search our own motives and interpretations, since our experiences in the communion of saints are never comprehensive or free of baggage. If we make our practical conviction, for the sake of argument, a stumbling block to another believer, we have lost our way, and the purpose of our tradition is likewise misplaced.

When tradition is misplaced and imposed on other believers without reasonable benefit, people begin to begrudge their fellow believers, and eventually God, their participation. For example, I will not abide being verbally patted on the head by my elders--or by my peers who openly fancy themselves my elders by virtue of their “wisdom”--when they seem to prefer that I affirm their view of Christian femininity, their politics, their musical preference or their dress codes over the working out of my own salvation before God and other believers. I know that they often do this out of a desire for unity, for simplicity, to “share everything in common,” including appearance, convictions, and resources. (Little do they know, that if given the choice between their narrow view of what it means to be a woman, for example, and my own pursuit of further encounters with God in the Church, I would choose my womanhood, for I am a far more authoritative expert on that than on what the Church should be or who God is.) Thankfully, I do not allow these issues to become a stumbling block for me, and so far no one has succeeded in reversing this trend. This keeps the conversation going, so that I can still hear differing insights about God, which can inform my understanding of self in relationship to God and others. I know many other people for whom the stumbling block proved too difficult to hurdle, however. It’s a great tragedy that we’ve asked such people to be so dishonest about their own questions, traditions, and experiences as to either participate in our particular brand of Christianity or discard the Church altogether. Many times, we do this by mere insinuation, but I have heard it far too many times from an overconfident pulpit. Forgetting the spirit of Martin Luther’s legendary words: “Here I stand. I can do no other, so help me God,” we write them off others’ convictions and questions as rebellious or misguided, instead of inviting them to the table for dialogue and potential friendship with Jesus.