What is the place of ‘the tradition’ in Church life and our theology? Should us new church types even care about the last two thousand years of Church life?
I recently read a book about the Lord’s Supper written by a pioneer of the British New Churches back in the 1980s. I agreed and disagreed with equal measure, but the thing that frustrated me was the way the author spoke about other Christians. He was part of a movement that at the time called itself ‘Restoration,’ though the term has fallen out of favour in the UK and means something different in the US. The British New Churches of the charismatic renewal saw themselves consciously as restoring the church to her New Testament roots.
The book was keen to show that almost everything you’d find in a ‘high church’ setting was dead tradition and had nothing to do with the Bible. The chapter that annoyed me most charted a brief historical survey of the celebration of communion in the first thousand years of church life. Apparently, it all went wrong in the second century and just got worse. Friends, that’s not how we do history. The history wasn’t particularly good either, I wondered about its sources, though popular books should be forgiven for painting in broad brush strokes.
When the book got to describing the theology of the Supper it sidestepped the usual problem of only being aware of transubstantiation and memorialism, rejecting one in favour of the other. This book was, unusually for the UK, aware that Lutherans exist. It was still fairly sweeping, didn’t give the reader much sense for why someone might believe that, and dismissed all claims to Christ’s presence in Communion as just silly. The Reformed position(s), which to me is the most naturally charismatic one, wasn’t mentioned. That’s not particularly unusual for the time or place of the author.
This is my ‘team’ in the broad sense, though this author was from a different stream of that early restoration movement. I wasn’t involved until this century, joining a Newfrontiers church at 18 having grown up in mainline Baptist circles. The rest of my adult life has been in various connected settings, though not always within that movement. I think restoration was vital, and probably still is. If you listen to those early pioneers, they relate the way that their movement changed the face of Christianity in the UK. While some mainliners probably wouldn’t appreciate the way they talk about the vitality of the churches around at the time the new churches got going, it is undeniable that the movements that left the mainline churches have in turn influenced and brought vitality into the denominations they left.
I love the impulse to get back to the Bible and ‘do it like that.’ I also find the posture that acts like two thousand years of Christian reflection on the Biblical text either hasn’t happened, or was all terrible, as naïve at best. The tradition matters, even to low church charismatics. I think it matters because of the Bible.
The ten words given to Moses at Sinai tell us to honour our father and our mother, because then we’ll have a long life in the land (Exodus 20). Paul reiterates the command in Ephesians. It’s long been the contention of the church that the ten words are to be interpreted broadly. We should honour those that go before us and give us life. I think this ‘commandment’ requires that we honour the church before us, including honouring what they thought. It requires that we pay attention to the tradition.
Here are 5 things that looks like in a new church setting:
To honour it we have to know it
Perhaps obvious. To honour our fathers and mothers in the faith we need to have some sense of what they thought and did. This requires those that read theology to read outside of their own time, or at the very least to read books that deal with these figures. Read the Church Fathers. Read books like Ancient Wisdom for the Care of Souls.
To honour is to strive to understand before we disagree
We can disagree with the tradition. If we couldn’t there wouldn’t be a tradition. Before we do, we have a duty to attempt to understand what we’re disagreeing with. Brothers and sisters who believed things that we think are mad—and its not that hard to find them—need to be understood in their context as best we can before they’re dismissed. It’s my experience that there’s usually something for me to learn of the Bible or the Lord in their work.
To honour is to allow the tradition to be a plausibility structure
Every question we have that isn’t provoked by the modern world—and even some of those that are—has a host of literature on it from many different eras. Is that witness united, or divided? The more united it is, the stronger argument we need to believe differently, and the more likely we are to be wrong.
The most obvious one here would be credobaptism. I’m a credobaptist, I believe that baptism is for believers after repentance and faith. I think that’s what the Bible argues for. However, we have to admit that for at least 1000 of the last 2000 years the church has been united on baptising infants. When the tradition is united, it raises the strength of the arguments required for us to disagree. The argument for credobaptism, or memorialism, or whatever it might be, has to be very strong.
This also means we don’t mock those who disagree. We understand why they think it. We understand that we’re in the minority and have an appropriate amount of epistemic humility about those questions. We respond to what people actually think; your arguments against baptismal regeneration are good, but your presbyterian brother down the road doesn’t believe in that either.
To honour is to be catholic
The ‘just get back to the Bible’ attitude, while in its core godly, can end up in some silly places. We should confess that to be a Christian church is to confess the ecumenical creeds.
As the Apostles’ Creed states, we should be truly catholic. This will confuse some readers as we often use ‘Catholic’ as a shorthand for ‘Roman Catholic.’ To be catholic (literally: universal) is to claim to represent the universal body of Christ. The Protestant claim was that they were more catholic than those who came to be called Catholics; Matthew Barret’s The Reformation as Renewal argues for this, successfully in my opinion. We don’t reject the tradition, we claim that it leads to where we are.
Arguably that’s no less arrogant than those who throw it all away, but hopefully knowledge of church history leads us away from posturing. It is my genuine claim that to be a Reformed Eucharismatic is to inherit the tradition of the early church, the early and late medieval church, and the Protestant church of the modern era. I understand how wild that is, and why others don’t agree. We should be humble in how we hold and make claims, willing to be convinced otherwise, but we should make that claim.
The problem when we don’t try is what I’ve often seen in the new churches: we have no sense that anyone has ever thought about this before and so think its up to us to start afresh. We end up in whacky places sometimes. Often our fathers have fallen into all the ditches to show us where they are, other times they have set up guardrails to help us out. We should pay attention to their work much as we hope that those in 500 years time will pay attention to the work of the best amongst us.
Honour the tradition
It’s not the Bible. It’s the history of people interpreting the Bible. We should give it appropriate weight, but that isn’t ‘no weight at all.’ We should know our forebears. We should listen to them carefully until we understand them. We should assume we’ll sit at the feet of the Lord together for endless ages to come, even when they’re maddeningly wrong. We’re almost certainly maddeningly wrong about something too.
Photo by Levi Jones on Unsplash
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