For those who follow tradition - regardless of age.
How do you know the traditions are accurate? of even from God?
So many fly in the face of Scripture and there have been so many errors through the almost 2,000 years of tradition, how do you determine which are of God and which are not?
The traditions which fly in the face of Scripture are those referred to by Mark 7:13, that are associated with the “Oral Torah” of the Pharisees, and the Scribes who wrote it down, wherein it became the Mishnah, and then the commentary on the Mishnah known as the Talmud, which resulted in the very unusual system wherein in an attempt to avoid even the possibility of violating the Torah, Rabinnical Judaism, particularly in the forms commonly called Conservative, Masorti and Orthodox, follows an interpretation of Halakha (religious law) which seems to contradict the obvious meaning of the Old Testament. These are the traditions that as I see it “fly in the face of scripture”, and we don’t see them among the Karaite Jews, most of whom now live in Israel, but some of whom live in the US, and have a synagogue in Daly City, California, as well as an association of Karaite Jews in the US, and also the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, and also some Reform Jews, who in discarding strict adherence to the norms of Sephardic and Ashkanazi and Mizrahi and Romaniote Judaic orthodoxy, practice something which seems more logically congruent with the Old Testament.
But it is important to understand also that the Pharisees had made an error, but were still in a better situation in terms of their misguided piety than the Sadducees, who had given up on the idea of the Resurrection, and indeed tried to dispute with our Lord concerning it, which gave Christ our True God the opportunity to inform Christians of the need to reject divorce, which is done in a particularly cruel and hostile way in, for example, some branches of Chassidic Judaism, and I don’t really like the way women are treated within those communities, but conversely I dislike the increasing normalization of anti-Chassidic and anti-Charedi media material, in that some of it is obviously exploiting the suffering occuring within communities of Judaism for an anti-Semitic purpose or for a political purpose within the context of Israeli politics, and given that we have seen a frightening attempt to make anti-Semitism an acceptable cause celebre in response to Israel’s legitimate military response to the horrifying terror attacks last October, more than an attempt, a conspiracy really, I want to be clear that in criticizing these aspects of Judaism, I have nothing but love for the Jewish people, and also the study of the Jewish and Samaritan liturgies is extremely useful in studying the origin of the daily Morning, Evening and Night prayers of Christians (commonly known as Matins, Vespers and Compline), which became particularly important and which were prayed at those times, often in cemeteries where Christian martyrs were buried, due to persecution from the ancient Roman Empire, which also persecuted the Jews and Samaritans.
we also come across invalid traditions, for example, in the practices of certain Christian denominations which are on the fringe, for example, the liturgical rites for homosexual marriage adopted by the declining liberal mainline churches, which are broadly unacceptable, or the worship practices of Unitarians, or Oneness Pentecostals, or many other related groups. Quakers who refuse to engage in Baptism or the Eucharist, that is to say, the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion, are another problematic group. They have placed their own tradition above that which has been received, taught in scripture, and historically practiced by the Christian church on a unanimous basis.
We can positively assert, unconditionally, that there is such a thing as Holy Tradition, from an exegetical reading of the New Testament, which plainly says as much in 11 Corinthians 2, and 2 Thessalonians 2:15, and Galatians 1:8-9, and this traditiion includes the four canonical Gospels at its core, and also includes the vitally important New Testament canon, the Nicene Creed, and other central articles of faith.
We can differentiate between this authentic tradition, which was embraced by the early Protestants such as Martin Luther and Thomas Cranmer, but not entirely embraced by those of the Radical Reformation, who were, due to a reaction against the excesses of the Roman Catholic church, put in a position of reacting against anything perceived to be Catholic, the result being similiar to the Restorationist churches of the 1800s - some things they got right, and others, not so much, when we look at groups such as the Anabaptists or Puritans, among the Radical Reformation, or the Stone/Campbell Movement and the Plymouth Brehtren among the Restorationists (the latter two being admirable nonetheless, particularly among Restorationist churches, since several Restorationist churches went completely off the rails, whereas the Stone/Campbell movement actually managed to restore something which had become very uncommon at the time, that being the weekly reception of the Eucharist, which John Wesley had also sought to restore, but which Methodists subsequently moved away from for unknown reasons, with the idea of the weekly Eucharist instead being taken up by High Church Anglicanism and much of Lutheranism.
From an Orthodox perspective, it is particularly easy to understand our traditions, because they can be unpacked through a simple study of Patristics and ecclesiastical history. For example, we reject the supreme authority of the bishop of Rome because it clashes with both the canons of the Council of Nicaea (canons 6 and 7) and the obvious reality of how the early church functioned (if St. Celestine, who was the Bishop of Rome when Nestorius was Patriarch of Constantinople, had the power to unilaterally depose Nestorius, he would have done so, for he was a friend and ally of Pope St. Cyril of Alexandria - note that I said Pope in the latter case and not the former, because at the time the bishops of Alexandria were known as Popes, and the bishops of Rome were not yet known by that title, but I would use the title Pope in reference to Pope St. Gregory of Rome, who was called Pope and who is much loved by the Eastern Orthodox, and who made contributions to both the Byzantine and Roman liturgical heritage.
It is also in the liturgy that one finds a continuity of Holy Tradition and the basis for how Scripture is interpreted - specifically through the appointed scripture lessons and hymns that are sung throughout the liturgical year of the ancient churches. The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox liturgies in particular preserve what we agree with, but most of the key aspects are supported in the traditional Western liturgies, and in the liturgy of the Assyrian Church of the East, and indeed if one goes far enough back in terms of the history of Western liturgics, there ceases to be any disagreement between it and the Orthodox liturgies, so the Roman Rite and the Gallican, Mozarabic and Ambrosian Rite liturgies, and various uses of the Roman Rite such as the Old Sarum Rite, have been of great interest, particularly to Western Rite Orthodox Christians in the Antiochian Orthodox and ROCOR churches, and to me personally, given my Congregationalist background and my desire to promote Orthodoxy among Congregationalist Christians as something which can and should be embraced (which indeed was the direction being pursued at the King’s Weigh House, the celebrated Congregational church in the City of London, which unfortunately merged with another parish and disappeared into what became the very un-traditional United Reformed Church after WWII, due to the depopulation of the City of London.*
*The City of London is a neighborhood in the center of the London metropolitan area that has its own autonomous government, which consists of a square mile area containing St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Old Bailey, which is a major courthouse, and which represented the ancient extent of the City of London before Metropolitan London grew to encompass the adjacent City of Westminster and all the surrounding Burroughs of what was at one time the County of Middlesex.
One particularly interesting area for me is to study the history of the churches in Greater London, formerly the County of Middlesex, such as Westminster Abbey, the Savoy Chapel, and those churches in the City of London proper, such as St. Stephen Walbrook, the Temple Church, St. Magnus the Martyr, St. Clement Danes, St. Bartholomew the Great, and many others.
