Christian tradition and Protestant denial of it

Dave-W said:

Understanding the cultural and religious background is NOT adding to the text.

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So, you avoided / sidestepped the main question - is adding to or taking away from God's Word permitted? (yes, it happens all the time, but not permitted by God)...

The cultural and religious background is this: the world is under a death sentence for sin - all mankind is doomed.

Who understands this ?

yeshuaslavejeff said:

Adding to God's Word, by any means, including studying history, is forbidden in God's Word, by God Himself.
So it is better to say "Nobody knows, the Bible doesn't say", than to
get entangled in the ways of the world, with many deceptions (more deceptions than truths ) .

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How are you going to judge who is 'adding to God's word' and who is studying God's word? I guess you believe that God spoke prolifically for a long time and then just shut up. We don't believe that, and we have a biblical authority to tell us who that authority is.

Albion said:

That's not the issue. Tradition does not give us information about the Passover and the instituting of the Eucharist which would not be ours anyway thanks to the Bible.

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Actually, it does. The entire doctrine of the Catholic Church, which is Tradition, explains it in great detail. As I have said before, and will continue to say, because it's true, there is no doctrine in the Bible. Doctrinal elements are found in Scripture, but Tradition weaves the threads of Scripture into a clearly visible form which constitutes our doctrine.

Albion said:

However, it should be known that the churches which almost 200 million Protestant Christians belong to make the point that the Apocrypha is to be read (from the pulpit even!) but not considered to be inspired, as Scripture.

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Really? I never heard in any church I've been in (hundreds) in any denomination
that
the Apocrypha is to be read. Why would they say that it is to be read anyway ?

Mary Meg said:

I think you're elevating "tradition" to something more than what I meant here.

Sure, the text says it's the Passover meal -- but can we know more about what a Passover meal is like? Can sources outside Scripture tell us that?

Studying Jewish traditions -- which aren't all expressed in the Bible -- can give us important context for telling us what is going on here.

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A very good example is the fact that, at the Passover meal, the Hebrews were required to eat the lamb's flesh. If they didn't they would die. This is the element of the Eucharist many miss-we must eat the flesh of the Lamb of God, or we die.

yeshuaslavejeff said:

Really? I never heard in any church I've been in (hundreds) in any denomination
that
the Apocrypha is to be read. Why would they say that it is to be read anyway ?

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Then you've never been in a Catholic Church?

Mary Meg said:

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?

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None of the communities I was a part of handled them at all. When I finally noticed this little bit of irrationality and started asking questions the way you are I got such intense reactions that I knew something had to be wrong. So I started reading the early Church Fathers and Josephus, and before long I found that I was Catholic.

Peter J Barban said:

My churches/denominations and there have been many in both America and Taiwan do not see any practical use for church history. It appeals mostly to intellectuals who long for tradition/roots. It does not appeal to progressives or pragmatists. While I know a great deal about church history, from and have even translated part of the Didache, no one really needs my knowledge. There is always something more helpful to share than church history.

If I, as a teacher and Christian intellectual, have no need of my historical knowledge except to type away on forums, how can busy pastors and church leaders have time to study or use such things?

Most regular people only have the attention span to focus on the sermon of the week, current events, and how to get by every day. Just get used to the fact that you are not normal/average.

Also, knowledge puffs up.

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The purpose of knowing history and Tradition is to give explanations/supports for Christian beliefs and practices that are often questioned. When Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, try to convince us or our children that the Church perverted the true meaning of the Bible by introducing bits of pagan polytheism into the Church, resulting in the doctrine of the Trinity, it helps to know that the Divinity of Christ had been taught since the time of the Apostles, and that the Trinity was never an un-Biblical, pagan carryover doctrine that came into the Church only in the 3rd and 4th centuries. Earlier Christian writings that are part of our Tradition affirm that Christians believed in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as One God as early as the beginning of the 2nd century, and that bishops that were ordained by the Apostles themselves believed and taught One God in Three persons. Other early letters and writings inform us of what happened to the Apostles, and their lives are important to know about because they - like all lives of the saints - inspire us to commit ourselves fully to Christ. Even Protestants are inspired by the martyrs that they personally knew and loved to be great followers of Christ.

We get much strength and power to Live in Christ as we ought to when we see and hear what our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers have done when God was working in them.

Mary Meg said:

I'm not sure what you mean by this? Are you saying... if you spend a lot of time studying the history of the (Roman) Catholic Church... you'll have problems too?

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yeah I probably could have elaborated more on that. I spent a number of years as a nondenominational charismatic. Actually I spent some years, attending a traditional Episcopal Church, that was ECUSA in my hometown. This was I think probably the best church experience of my life, although being the in the Coptic Orthodox Church was a close second. The tie breaker is the number of personal friends I had in the parish. I had my old buddy from childhood and a new friend, but on top of that I made some good friends with the local pastor, and his wife, and the top leadership that were all charismatic like myself. (Basically I found some safe harbor there after having some bad experiences with some folks involved in the Word of Faith movement) (Also with my Lutheran background I was not anti-sacramental etc.)


Anyway, I believed myself called to ministry and indeed still do (but seem to be pursuing that call more in terms of internet ministry etc.). But back then I was taking the slow road to being some kind of Charismatic Protestant pastor. From my previous background I knew of some really good uses for Church History etc. The Nicene and Apostles Creed being probably the best example as far as coming up with a "Faith Statement" that summarizes essential Christian belief.

Besides that I did find one area of Church history that was really useful. I had a subscription to a "Prophetic Journal" put out by some charismatic ministers that are into the Prophetic Movement
which focuses on promoting the contemporary use of that charism today in the church etc. Anyway, this one issue covered "The Didache" aka "The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles". If your familar with that work it covers all lot of the basic beliefs and practices of early Christianity and the added nifty thing it covers how the early church regulated the gift of prophecy (Many modern people would be excommunicated if they lived back then for words that told people to give to their ministry etc.).



Anyway while I was very curious about the past, I had "Diminishing Returns" issues. I basically questioned how much good I could get from studying that stuff timewise. Also back in the those days the early 90s the internet was in its infancy, and not in standard use like today. So if you wanted to read that stuff you needed to spend your own money, or spend time at a library, or at least check out some of those books.


Incidentally, the thing that really got me interested in Church history kind of happened by accident (or Providence). I had a thing for a coworker a few years later, who just happened to be Orthodox and a daughter of a priest. I decided to test out going to church there (I was in a state of limbo at the time in Seminary Class, because my program required a personal internship with a pastor and the church I was attending was not conducive to that). Anyway, I attended this one Orthodox church near where my parents lived at the time "to see if I could stand it", but I ended up enjoying it far more that I thought I would (I had more joy and sense of the Holy Spirit there then in my previous charismatic church meetings). So that ended up being a lasting game changer, even though I realized two month later that the girl I was interested in was not a good match for me.

Dave-W said:

Everyone - please pray for Mary Meg and her family. They are under a very bad storm with tornadoes in it.

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Lord have mercy.

Mary Meg said:

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?

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I find from my protestant days, my studies took me into characterizing church history by a mirror of the old testament.

As it follows, the pope is like a king, and the reformation is like the divided kingdom, and captivity into assyria and babylon.

What you are highlighting is like the sin of Jeroboam, and once something like this is established, it just stays there no matter how absurd a sequence that follows.

This past Sunday I attended a traditional Methodist service for the first time. I'd been to their contemporary service before but never the traditional. Much of the liturgy was identical to the modern Roman Catholic liturgy. They even recited the Apostle's Creed and the Lord's Prayer. Communion was served with bread dipped in non fermented grape juice.

I think a lot of protestants feel they are studying the early Church when they read Acts. I do have to agree the Apocrypha is discouraged. I've heard it described as a propaganda or worse.

Mary Meg said:

I'd like to hear more about this.

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1) Well an easy principle is the Joehari Window. That really describes the nature of knowedge/understading between two people in some kind of relationship. There are some lessons from that in terms of self discloser. If you take a class in communications, they should hopefully give a kind of demo on Joehari. One lesson in it is the more tight lipped, not self disclosing you are you tend to suffer from a greater "blind spot". And in life I have experienced that personally.

Anyway, the same kind of dynamic also is present in relationship with a one dimensional relationship with people and history. By not studying it you can be affected by blind spots. And I've got some amusing examples of that, I've run across over time.

Johari window - Wikipedia



2) Projective Psychological Testing is another biggee. I'm talking about a number of famous tests like the Inkblott and many others that have you interpret an ambigious stimulus. If you do not have a good background in such things then many scriptures actually can be a bit of a projective test!

Rorschach test - Wikipedia



3) The "Construction of reality" is another hot topic that is in a similar background as the others.
There are some Evangelicals that are known as "postmodern" or "emergent" who actually are into this topic.

The Social Construction of Reality - Wikipedia



4) Naive Realism is a handy term (especially when dealing with strong biblical fundamentalists). In psychology it is a given (in cognitive psychology and cognitive therapy) that everybody interprets events based on past experiences, beliefs, etc. Naive realists however believe they interpret things "as is" with no filters. (Even the famous "seeing through a glass darkly" verse in the Bible refutes Naive Realist assumptions!

Mary Meg said:

How does your particular group handle the early history and tradition of the Christian Church?

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Very well.

Mary Meg said:

If you embrace it -- do you verify it?

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We embrace it and subject it to rigorous verification procedures.

Mary Meg said:

If you treat it with skepticism, why and how?

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We treat all tradition to skepticism, because we are Berean like. We weigh it against Scripture.

Mary Meg said:

If you ignore it as unimportant, why?

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Some of it is obviously frivolous, so we don't waste time with it.

Root of Jesse said:

If it is true that you don't need anything extra-Biblical, why is it that every denomination has extra-Biblical texts to tell us what Scripture means? The fact is, the ECF's provide context to help us understand the plain texts of Scripture.
As an example, tell me what the following sentence means to you:
"Put the kitty on the table."

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Semantics, semantics everywhere.

Perhaps, trying to be too concise, I miss-communicated.

Extra-Biblical texts can help us and are certainly useful, but they are NOT the Word of God. They do not supersede Scripture. Teachers are important because they can help convey the message of the word to someone who might not know the historical, cultural, linguistic et al context of the Bible. However, teachers are fallible, they can make mistakes and not everything they say is correct. Same goes for early church fathers. They are not inspired. They are not necessary unto salvation. I don't need to know Augustine and his writing, neither do I have read everything by Ignatius in order to be saved. I just need the Bible. Careful study and analysis of His Word is what truly gives me growth.

Yeah, I'd lose out on valuable information and knowledge and great help in making things easier to understand and I would have to do extra work in interpretation etc... that has already been done.

Again, it's beneficial, but not necessary (obligatory, imperative w/e).

I know where you're going with the 'kitty' sentence and I agree with you, but hopefully what I've explained above clears things up.

Mary Meg said:

a very small corner of the American Evangelical world

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This must be a teenie tiny...atom like corner. My experience is that you get what you put in. If one wants to be a mere pew warmer and put all their trust in the clergy, to lead and guide them into all truth, they will receive an "education" that it just enough to keep them coming back with their 10%...of course. This also goes for the millions upon millions of Catholics who are simply massers...they are content with a sunday ritual.

Obviously,you and I, and probably the majority of those who are active participants on this forum, are not content with being stifled by men. Now,where was I going with this...oh yeah, so those who you quote in your OP are obviously of the former sort, so why would you make such a general statement as "Protestant"? I mean, the obvious reason is to garner an attention getting thread title to spark a good discussion/debate, and I know that you qualified in your opening statement, but why not make the distinction between the pew warmer and the biblical student?

*Oh yeah, and while I did consider myself to be "protestant" (naively) at one time, I have been a biblical student rather than a pew warmer, so there is something to what you are saying as far as moving away from protesting, because when you do study history, you will eventually move back to a time wherein there is no reason to protest the Catholic church, because you are no longer connected with it in any way.

Mary Meg said:

How does your particular group handle the early history and tradition of the Christian Church?

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We embrace Holy Tradition just like Catholics and Orthodox do.

Mary Meg said:

Christian tradition

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Christian tradition is Jesus Christ of Nazareth only. Pure and simple.
Blessings