Tradition Part 2

Last post we saw that the idea of tradition being necessarily negative from a Biblical point of view is sheer fallacy and only a tradition.

Now I want to turn to the endemic nature of tradition in religion. While it is true that tradition is not confined to religion, we will confine ourselves to that part of the subject.

Even the most anti, non, or untraditional church group has something in common with the most traditional church group: they all have tradition. “Even those in denominations that came from the radical Protestant Reformation (such as the Anabaptists) owe a large debt to Tradition, even though many are slow to admit it.” (David Bennett, The Christian Tradition: Holy, Living and Relevant http://www.ancient-future.net/tradition.html)

No matter how strong their contention to the contrary may be, they cannot escape the fact that they continue doing certain things in certain ways because someone passed it down to them. It may have been a person who died 100 or 1000 years ago or the person may still be living. But everyone has traditions and tradition.

Let’s look at my tradition. We are a part of what David Bennett calls the "anti-tradition tradition.” In Pentecostal circles, we generally have no written order of service—that’s a tradition that our tradition has rejected. But then again it is our tradition not to have an order of service generally speaking. We don’t read prayers but pray more or less spontaneously and extemporaneously. Some may be thinking this would lead to total chaos and disorder. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

You see our tradition is to be extemporaneous and sometimes spontaneous. Let’s say that we have a “good service where the pastor doesn’t get to preach.” That might be considered out of the ordinary and outside tradition but it’s not. We have different types of traditional services and that is just one of them. Most of the time there is preaching; tradition allows for some services where there is none.

Our extemporaneous prayers will be punctuated with traditional phrases, prayed at traditional volume, and based on traditional ideas. If someone were to read a prayer because he/she felt like doing that (a rather spontaneous act for a traditional Pentecostal), it would be outside of the tradition. While there are expendable parts of tradition, they are the parts that are traditionally expendable. One is not allowed to get rid of the traditionally non-expendable parts. Similarly, anything that is added has to follow the tradition of what can be added.

So the concept that we Pentecostals have no tradition is a tradition that has no basis in fact. We have strong traditions that are made even stronger by the fact that we refuse to admit that we have them and to denominate them as “tradition.” The fact is “the most powerful ones (traditions) are those we can't even describe and aren't even aware of.” (Ellen Goodman)