However, my question still remains after looking at several of your links. How are Calvin or Luther not Tradition 0 any more than my Pastor? They all consult the Church Fathers and tradition, but ultimately did not accede to any tradition from the Church that they felt could not be demonstrated from the Scriptures. For this reason, Calvin rejected prayers to the dead, as the tradition was there but it was opposed to the Scripture. How can we avoid such a conclusion without saying the word "yikes" and ignoring the serious implications?
Tradition isn't just history. When I talk about the Reformed tradition, I mean a living tradition. So it's relevant not just whether someone looks at historical statements on the subject, but whether they do it as part of the community whose tradition it is.
The topic of this thread is really being confessional. Confessional, I claim, is about doing theology as a community. I did say your pastor looked like he was following tradition 0. But my concern was that he seemed to be looking at tradition and Scripture as an individual. I have no problem with checking tradition against Scripture. Tradition 1 can do that. But the Reformed tradition does it as a Church. If we think tradition has gone wrong, we're free to say so. But that starts a discussion within the community, and groups like presbyteries and GAs review the situation, write position papers, and in some cases adjust confessional documents.
This doesn't prohibit any individual disagreement. That surely does exist. Our denominations differ in how much variation we allow. But the primary way we do theology isn't individual; it's as a Church. Members and officers pledge to accept that process, though in my own Church the definition of what that means is fairly loose.
Saying that Sunday is the Lord's Day but not the Sabbath isn't a deal-killer for Reformed theology as a whole. As you note, there is variation within the tradition. However it may be a deal-killer for certain Reformed churches. The PCA has committed to the Westminster Confession, which represents a specific strand of Reformed thought. They also have a process for dealing with questions about it, so they have a living tradition and not just a historical reference book. I don't know whether a PCA church would accept someone who said while Sunday isn't the Sabbath, we are required to worship regularly, and churches implement that by setting up a specific day for worship and making rules to guard it. But they would have every right to exclude that if they thought it was inconsistent with their Westminster-based confessional tradition in a serious enough way.
Luther and Calvin are a difficult issue, because they thought the tradition had gone badly off the rails. That made it difficult for them to maintain continuity. However they did maintain as much of the tradition as they could. But what's more to the point, they were not just individual teachers. Calvin (who I know better than Luther) operated in Geneva, where his decisions were all subject to review by both the other ministers and the town council. He also operated as part of a broader reform movement, with which he maintained contact, and used the results of Biblical scholarship from a fairly widespread scholarly community. If you contrast him with the Radical Reformation, I think you'll see a difference. They were much less committed to continuity with as much of the tradition as possible, less likely to identify older traditions that they could return to, and much more likely to have idiosyncratic opinions rather than a carefully developed general Anabaptist position. Over time the Anabaptists developed a more coherent tradition. Today, the Moravians are probably not significantly different from the PCUSA in how they work with their own tradition. I would also never accuse them of being tradition 0.
It's actually hard to maintain tradition 0 on a consistent basis. Most people who think they are using Scripture only, and see tradition as a bad word, are in fact operating within a tradition. Or more likely, an eclectic mix of traditions. They're just not as clear about what they're doing. However my observation is that those who claim not to have a tradition tend to be following traditions that don't have as much substance behind them as the people who are acknowledged parts of major historic traditions. The same criticism could, of course, have been made of Luther and Calvin at the time they started. However I think history has judged that their work was worthy of anchoring major traditions, something that's not typically true of Pastor Jones' latest insight. At some point the difference isn't theoretical methodology, but competence.
In fact your pastor is almost certainly operating within tradition 1. I'm sure the points he's making are ones that he's heard elsewhere. He's hardly the first person to make them, and he's quite likely in fellowship with others. But the specific arguments I saw didn't seem to reflect that. But it was just a few sentences, after all.
