So let me preface by saying, I know not all Protestants are the same and I know they don't all deny Christian tradition in the same way. Once again, where I'm coming from is a very small corner of the American Evangelical world -- but most of what I have seen personally looks like this.
One of the first things I got interested in that led me to want to study the Early Church is wondering what happened to all the Apostles after the New Testament ends. The story seems to just end abruptly with Paul sitting in house arrest, then some time later we see John stranded on the Isle of Patmos. And most everybody around me seemed, oddly, to be content with that. I asked questions, and the general answer I got was, "Nobody knows, the Bible doesn't say."
That didn't really sit well with me. I studied history, and we knew exactly what happened to Augustus Caesar and all his family, even where they were buried. We had stories about people from the same time period as the Bible in the history of the Roman Empire... but when it comes to Jesus's disciples, they seem to have simply sailed off the map of history. When I pointed this out, somebody responded, "I guess they just weren't that important to history."
Weren't that important to history? Christianity changed the face of the whole world, and these Apostles were the men who carried it to the ends of the earth! And what happened to them wasn't important to anybody to record or remember?
And then, with a sickening feeling, I began to realize that that wasn't exactly true.
Protestants (meaning Evangelicals) just don't read those books. Not only do they not read them, they pretend they don't exist. It's probably true that most of the people I asked simply didn't know any better, but somewhere along the line, somebody consciously declared, "We know there are these traditions, and we're going to ignore them."
Why ignore them? Because they're "Catholic"? Is everything "Catholic" automatically untrue? I really don't understand this absolute severance that seems to define the Protestantism I know -- separation from everything that came before, denial of anything that isn't expressly what we believe. Scripture as the absolute and only source of knowledge -- not just about faith, but about history and science and other things too.
The line I hear again and again is "we don't need 'traditions of men'". But that isn't at all what Jesus was even saying. Tradition is the handing down of knowledge, about who we are and where we came from. It doesn't have to be an obstacle to faith, but can enhance it and even inform it.
So yes, I guess I'm complaining a lot in this post, but it had a point when I started. How does your particular group handle the early history and tradition of the Christian Church? If you embrace it -- do you verify it? If you treat it with skepticism, why and how? If you ignore it as unimportant, why?
