Tradition Part 3

In the last post, we saw that even those claiming to have no tradition are actually just following the proud tradition of being traditionless.

What blew me out of my comfort zone was the realization that the tradition I had followed for so many years was actually only “the tradition of a few hundred years.” I was brought up in a tradition that began a little over 100 years ago. Whether we look to the mountains of North Carolina-Tennessee (where the Church of God started) or to Azusa Street in Los Angeles (where Pentecost became a worldwide phenomenon), we have slightly more than one hundred years of Pentecostal Tradition.

Many Pentecostals would dispute this by pointing to the New Testament and to various groups of Pentecostal-like persons throughout history (this is probably a topic for another post). The truth is, however, that we are much more reliant on the tradition of the recent past than on the tradition of the Apostolic past.

So if this tradition is so young, is there an older tradition we could adopt? Well, of course, there is. The Holiness Tradition, the Adventist Tradition, the Wesleyan Tradition, the Episcopal Tradition, the Reformed Tradition and the list could go on. When I started looking, I didn’t want to stop halfway to the goal; I wanted to get all the way back to authentic, apostolic tradition.

I had to face the fact: what we had called Apostolic and Pentecostal was NOT the same as the tradition that had been held by the Church since the days of the Apostles. For instance, I can find nowhere that the Early Church had “shouting services” in which the preacher didn’t get to preach. As one reads and examines the New Testament and the writings of the earliest Church Fathers (pre-200 AD), he/she will be immediately struck by the dissimilarity of these writings to anything in the Pentecostal/Charismatic church today.

This brings us to the most important question: What tradition will we follow? Which one should we grasp—the one in which we are comfortable or the one which is more closely aligned with the early Christians? It is a question that is haunting and should stir every serious Christian to serious reflection.

Unfortunately for some people the following quote by Hugo Demartini sums up their choice of tradition: “People are always talking about tradition, but they forget we have a tradition of a few hundred years of nonsense and stupidity, that there is a tradition of idiocy, incompetence and crudity.” Their tradition whether chosen consciously or not, has become for them a prison from which they feel they cannot escape.

G. K. Chesterton defined tradition as the “extension of the franchise…giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors.” We have to decide to which ancestors’ votes we will grant the most significance: those distant from us (in time, practice and theology) or those of the more recent past. It seems like a straightforward choice; when you are confronted with it, however, it becomes a very complex choice indeed. One might even call it a byzantine problem (pun intended).