For the Tradition of the Church

Hail thee, festival day! blest day that art hallowed forever;
Day whereon Christ arose, breaking the kingdom of death.

-"Salve Festa Dies," R. Vaughan Williams, 1906

Happy Easter! It's a great time of the year to be a Christian. I've already been to three church services this week: Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday. Tomorrow we'll have the Easter Vigil at our sunrise service, with breakfast and another service to go after that. What are some of your favorite Easter traditions?

Today, I'd like to talk about the Tradition of the Church. In order to do so, I'll probably meander through several topics, hoping that somewhere along the way the truth can be found.

In order to explain what I mean when I say "the Tradition of the Church," I need to talk about truth. Specifically how Christians perceive spiritual truth (or any truth at all) and how we discern the will of God. Anglicans believe in a three-tiered approach to truth which is sometimes called the "three-legged stool" of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. Scripture is our primary authoritative source of spiritual truth because it is the Word of God. In places where Scripture is not immediately clear, we trust in the Tradition of the Church. This means that we believe that the Holy Spirit has worked in the Church to help the Church understand Scripture for the past 2000 years, and we are interested in what He has said. We don't believe that the Church is somehow infallible or always gets it right, but we generally trust in interpretations of Scripture that have lasted for centuries over those that have been innovated recently. Also, the Church is subject to Scripture and is not allowed to invent things that are contrary to Scripture or interpret one part of Scripture such that it contradicts another part. Finally, God has given us the gift of Reason, which basically means that we are allowed to think. We can interpret Scripture in ways that are new, exciting, and culturally relevant, as long as they are consistent with the whole of Scripture and the historical teaching of the Church. Reason also has to do with the ways in which we process our experiences. For example, if I want to determine if the Holy Spirit is leading me in a particular way, I would consider what Scripture has to say on the topic and whether the Church has said anything relevant. I might ask for advice from other Christians, so that they can also contribute their Reason.

I used to believe that tradition was bad. From passages like Mark 7 and Matthew 15:6, I believed that having traditions, especially Christian traditions, was bad because traditions necessarily distract from God and the truth of His Word. The truth, however, is that everyone has a tradition from which they interpret Scripture. Everyone has particular ideas about interpreting the Bible and about truth that either they made up or they were taught by someone. The problem with the Pharisees was not that they had traditions, but that they had traditions that were not from God's Word that they were teaching as if they were God's Word and instead of God's Word. That certainly is evil. So is it possible to have good traditions?

Consider Jeremiah 6:16:

Thus says the LORD: "Stand by the road, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls."

Traditions are what gives our lives meaning. What would life be like if we did everything differently every day? Chaotic and frenzied, not restful, and not sustainable. Not reflecting the character of God, who does not change.

Back to truth: the Tradition of the Church is important because it helps us stay Christian. I've heard it explained this way: perhaps you, as a Christian, enjoy reading the Bible, because it is God's Word, and you enjoy listening to what God has to say to you through it (I mean "enjoy" in a deep sense here, not just warm fuzzy feelings). Would you not, then, even more enjoy reading the Bible with a pastor, someone who has studied God's Word and can provide insights that you may have missed and can answer questions that you may have? If so, why not read the Bible with the whole Church? Why not listen to what the Church has said about the Bible for the past 2000 years? I believe that when Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would "guide you into all the truth" (John 16:13), He was referring to us not just individually but corporately as well. (In fact, most heresies have arisen from people claiming to have been individually guided by the Holy Spirit into some particular truth.)

Of course, as you may have guessed, the Tradition of the Church also deals with corporate worship. Indeed, before I became Anglican, my entire notion of "tradition" when it came to churches was limited to prayer books and hymnals. But I misunderstood this aspect of tradition, as if singing old hymns or praying old prayers was somehow only because someone felt that they needed to be "preserved" (in the worst case, this seemed to be handed down from on high from the denominational authorities). Let me suggest to you that this is not the case, at least in Anglicanism. We pray using old prayers in the Book of Common Prayer and sing old hymns because they are still meaningful. They have stuck around for centuries because countless people for generations have found them to be true and have been comforted by their words. There is a timeless quality to them. That's not to say that we don't also have a use for things that are new. In fact, one could say that the Tradition of the Church allows for or even requires Christian worship to be adapted to new languages, cultures, and time periods. So the Anglican church strives for balance between tradition and innovation, between the old and the new.

The point of what I'm saying is this: every Christian in a sense is given something to build on, hopefully based on the foundation of Scripture. I used to believe that it was my job to get rid of everything that was not the foundation and start building something new from there. Yet if every generation destroys what the previous generation has worked to build, what good is it? What picture of Jesus does that show to the world around us? I believe that it is our responsibility to continue building on what has been built since the time of Christ, trusting the Holy Spirit to help us get it right and to show us the cracks that need patching.