the importance of the christian tradition

the importance of the christian tradition

We live in a world of fragmentation and hyper-individualism. Few, aside from Christians and other religious groups, are traveling the ancient paths or engaging ancient truths. Some movers and shakers of our contemporary world are consciously trying to erect a new morality based on personal subjective truth and desire, in order to replace the traditional morality that was based on God’s revelation, the accumulated wisdom of mankind, and natural law. For contemporary believers, our present situation can seem dark and sometimes we may be tempted to despair, but it need not be so. We Christians need to keep our focus on God and how He has worked in the past. This will encourage us to expect God to bring new life out of the challenges of our times. 

Since Creation God has been forming His people, His own possession. He gave us all we needed to flourish in a newly created world that was “very good” so that we could mature fully into what it meant to be in God’s image. Unfortunately, we listened to Satan’s lie, that first lie about secret knowledge that we thought offered us more than God’s truth did. The resulting fall necessitated the ultimate act of love as the Father sent His Son to redeem us from death that we had brought upon ourselves.

“The story that followed is one of God’s infinite patience and the willingness to do whatever it took to bring us into the fullness of God’s image.”

The story that followed is one of God’s infinite patience and the willingness to do whatever it took to bring us into the fullness of God’s image. In our brokenness we humans resisted God at nearly every step. Yet God persevered, giving us a fresh start after the flood and then providing a new way of relating to us by forming a nation out of Abraham’s family. The nation of Israel sometimes shone out the light of God into the world. Even more often they neglected the task God had given them. Eventually Israel was wounded by God through the exile so that she could be healed by God in the dispersion throughout the nations and in the return of some Jews to the Promised Land. The faithful Jews in the dispersion prepared the way of the Messiah by shining the light of God’s Word into the pagan world. Those in the Promised Land prepared the way of the Messiah by their lives and the renewed temple worship.

Then, two thousand years ago, “when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the Law.” At just the right time, when God had prepared the world by establishing the stable rule of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean basin, by providing a nearly universal language that was capable of clarity and precision in thinking about spiritual matters, and by revealing His truth in the Hebrew Scriptures, the long-awaited Redeemer and King came. He came into a world that was yearning for relief and release. Both pagans and Jews longed for a clear path to purpose and meaning in a world that felt empty to many. 

“Jesus gave mankind a way to become the perfect image of God. The path He gave mankind was the same path He had trod. “

God in Jesus came into the world, challenging the fallen approaches to living with hatred, suspicion, distrust, and violence. Jesus revealed God’s face to mankind. Jesus gave mankind a way to become the perfect image of God. The path He gave mankind was the same path He had trod. He lived a life of obedience to the Father, love of others, patience before a world in turmoil, and willingness to sacrifice to bring God’s will to fruition. Jesus was truly man as man was meant to be and gave us our model for the perfect human life. He brought reconciliation between God and man through His death on the cross and His resurrection. However, just as man resisted God and His plan early on, so too, even after the coming of Jesus, many lost their way and corruption came into the church of God. 

In the early church many tried to combine the Gospel story with their pagan world view by denying the Word come in the flesh or the triune Godhead. For the second time Satan tried to introduce a destructive lie of secret knowledge into the life of God’s people. Not faith, but special knowledge available only to certain people brought salvation, according to the Gnostics. But God continued to work patiently with the church, and men and women loyal to the message of the Gospel were able to demonstrate clearly who God and Jesus are and how they acted in history to save mankind. It was not secret knowledge but committed faith that saves us. The church produced creeds that preserved the teaching of the Trinity and of the God-man, Jesus, and how God worked in Him to save us.

But Satan did not stop trying to destroy God’s work in the world. As the church felt more secure in her position, fervency in faith declined. Being a Christian became not a commitment, but an inevitable part of living in Europe. Whereas Satan’s earlier attack on the faith had aimed at destroying the willingness to stand against the culture, now Satan used the apparently Christian culture to undermine what ought to have been a countercultural faith. Everyone was a baptized Christian; many fewer were truly Christians through a sound commitment to Jesus.

Then, five hundred years ago as God’s Word became more easily accessible to all through translation, the printing press, and active Gospel preaching by those who recognized the need, new life entered the church during the Reformation. Those who thought themselves Christians because they had been baptized as infants were now challenged to see that each one had to choose for himself whether he would turn to God through Jesus and worship Him. It may be difficult for us to conceive how hard such a call was in their setting. But, just as in the beginning of the Christian era when each person had to decide for himself who he would worship and dedicate his life to, five hundred years ago the call went out clearly again: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Our forefathers led in the call for clear conversion and commitment to Jesus, and many of them lost their lives as they witnessed to their faith in Jesus and their love for God.

Now, five hundred years after that revival of faith we find ourselves once again in a world of declining faith and commitment. There is less certainty about just what the faith entails. We are, like some of those in the early church, deeply influenced by the world views of those around us. A focus on hyper-individualism and self-actualization has seeped into the church from the world around us. Instead of holding to the communion of the saints and to the faith once delivered to the saints, many of us go for a “cafeteria-style” Christianity where we individually pick and choose what we will believe and how we will live. Satan is again assaulting the church with the lie of secret, individual knowledge. Sometimes this special knowledge is a revelation that only some have access to. Sometimes it is the belief that the solution to today’s problems lies not in the church, but in the social and political movements instigated by Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Foucault, and other materialistic movers and shakers in the modern world. They are the new Gnostics, and like the early church, we must learn to recognize the danger they pose to our faith and the best way to answer their challenges.

“By formulating clear, precise ways to tell our story and to answer the questions and objections that modern unbelievers have, we can reach out to those who do not share our basic doctrines.”

Often these new Gnostics, like the old ones, use nice, familiar sounding words that may lull us to sleep so that we do not see the threat to our faith. This is where an awareness of our tradition, history, and theology can play a foundational role in stabilizing our faith. By formulating clear, precise ways to tell our story and to answer the questions and objections that modern unbelievers have, we can reach out to those who do not share our basic doctrines. Rather than reinventing the wheel, we can benefit from the ideas and struggles of those who have gone before us and dealt with the same or similar issues. 

For this, we should know the Christian tradition in the broad sense. When thinking about our own part of the Christian tradition, we have a pearl of great price which we sometimes do not recognize but which many Christians, especially in our fragmented times, are looking for. Our Anabaptist forefathers rediscovered aspects of the early Christian belief and practice that had been lost or shoved into monasteries. The need for an adult, conscious commitment of faith in Jesus to form a believer’s church, and the resultant life of separation or holiness that expresses itself in nonconformity (faith), nonaccumulation (hope), and nonresistance (love) are foundational to a healthy church and desperately need to be heard today. May God give us the vision to see these truths and the courage to express them to others!