The Relevant Tradition

From the earliest days of the church, two seemingly paradoxical characteristics have marked the Christian faith: 1) an abiding concern for tradition and finding one's identity and story in the community that has gone before; and 2) an abiding concern for spreading the gospel to peoples and cultures who have never heard it before. These characteristics, equally important, have often been the source of tension, for the question always arises: how does one make the faith relevant and understandable to new generations and cultures without sacrificing what is distinctive about that faith?

There have been times when the church has succeeded in the struggle. The New Testament writers are the prime example. Their beloved tradition, the tradition and story out of which Christianity grew, was the story of Israel. And as the pages of the NT reveal, this story was fully embraced and carried on by the first Christians. The church, in struggling to identify herself, looked back into her tradition. Thus, Peter, writing to his church of Gentile converts says this: "But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God's own possession . . ." (1 Pet 2:9). These four images are lifted straight from Israel's Scriptures, former descriptions of Israel now applied to the church.

Yet the NT writers, in looking back to tradition, were not imprisoned by it. After all, the language of Israel's Scriptures was Hebrew, but no common person (least of all the Gentiles) knew how to read Hebrew. Thus, the NT is written in Greek, the language that everyone knew. These tradition filled documents, full of imagery garnered from Israel's story, is presented to the people in a new medium, one which they were able to understand and, as a result, the Gospel spread quickly in those first generations. When Greek fell out of use in the West in the second and third centuries, the Scriptures were translated once again into the common language (Latin).

Unfortunately, there have also been times when the church has failed at this struggle. For centuries in the middle ages, the church kept the Scriptures locked away from the people by refusing to allow it to be translated from Latin (though no common person read or spoke Latin by this time). Church leaders had begun to confuse its tradition (the story of the Scriptures) with the form of that story, the Latin language. And incredibly, it persecuted those first brave souls who dared to translate the Latin Bible into the common language.

In our generation, it is evident that the same struggle goes on. While language might not be the focal point, the question remains vital: how do we make the faith understandable without losing its content. While the church in the middle ages erred on the side of tradition (thus failing to make it understandable to the people), I fear that many in our generation have erred on the other side. There are many examples today of those who would remove everything distinctive about the Christian faith so as to make it more attractive. A few examples:

1) The Old Testament is often hidden away as the dirty little secret. Instead of going to the effort of understanding what actually was happening in those pages, many preachers just skip over it and preach solely from the New Testament, if even that. But the loss of the Old Testament is the loss of a significant part of our story. In fact, the early Christians would have found a Christian faith without the Old Testament unintelligible. If we knew our story better, I suspect we would feel the same way.

2) The names of God are being changed. Instead of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, many are opting for titles like "the Divine" or "Sophia." While the intent behind these name changes is not necessarily bad and often times good (namely the concern for the marginalization of women in a patriarchal faith), I am not sure that changing the names of God revealed in Scripture is the best way to go about this. After all, I believe that Jesus reveals God as primarily a Father and he is best understood in the terms of that Father-Son relationship. To lose this metaphor is to lose a significant part of a traditional understanding of God.

3) My brother tells me that there is a church in his town which is considering removing all crosses from their premises in order to make it a more welcoming environment. Here is a church who has forfeited too much of tradition to make the faith more attractive. But if the cross has to be removed to do this, my question is what story are they teaching, what story are they living. A faith without the cross is not Christian. (One wonders if there would have been more resistance to the removing of the American flag from that church.)

This struggle is a necessary one, for as Christians, we are a people who are defined by our story, by our past. And yet we are commissioned to take that story to the world, to the world that does not speak our language. How are we to do it?