“A tradition is a practice, custom, or story that is memorized and passed down from generation to generation, originally without the need for a writing system” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradition
Its arguable to say that tradition helps build a religion, take for example Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter, Sallah. Different religions celebrate these but they are all traditions passed down from generation to generation but does that on its own make a religion or is it above the holy book of the said religion?
Every culture and every religion has tradition as a foundation. I will be examining tradition as an authority in the next few paragraphs, particularly Christian tradition, as one might know; Christianity places a lot of emphasis on tradition e.g. the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox.
So what is Christian Tradition- “Christian Tradition is the living process whereby each generation within the church receives practices and teachings from the one before and hands on, perhaps slightly altered to the next”.
I wonder if it is then safe to say tradition is just as authoritative as the written scripture. It is obvious that the oral tradition predates written tradition, I mean even the New Testament was written over 20 years after Jesus’ death so it is obvious that people talked about it before it was eventually written down but then again is tradition confused with prophecy and narratives as the bible isn’t just made up of rules and laws to follow but stories, prophecies and doctrines. It is true that Jesus warned against man made traditions but he respected his Jewish traditions. Even St Paul in his letter to the Corinthians talks about tradition “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.......maintain the traditions just as I handed them on to you” but perhaps he was asking them to use the tradition as a guide which of course we have to as no one in last thousand or so generation was alive when Jesus was, all we have is the traditions that we practice (written) in relation to the scriptures.
Basil of Caesarea argued in favour of tradition but also acknowledges the fact that tradition and scripture are separate entities “there is an unwritten teaching alongside written teaching which is just as apostolic and just as authoritative”, but isn’t tradition greatly influenced by culture and man’s influence but one might ask isn’t that the same for the scriptures? - (inspired by God, written by man).
Because we were taught to do things in a certain way, does that make it right? Well apparently so, as the Christian Tradition claims: “That ‘the church has taught’ a particular position, or that ‘many theologians have believed ‘it, or that ‘it has been universally held that’ this thing is true, is regarded as in itself an argument in favour of the position in.....theological work”
There are so many arguments for tradition as an authority (in some cases) over the scriptures, David Benett in his article The Christian Tradition: Living, Holy, and Relevant argue that tradition is unavoidable, he goes further to say that the church would not have survived if it were not for Tradition. This makes me wonder if oral tradition is sometimes confused with story telling. So I tell a friend about a dream I had or something that happened to me in my childhood and she tells her children and the children tell their children’s children and so on does that then become the tradition? What I am trying to say is: The act of telling a story is a tradition but is the story itself a tradition or a narrative?
Of course there are arguments against tradition and scripture and that is in the form of the movement Sola Scriptura which means Scripture alone but surely in the scriptures itself there are a lot of traditions slipped in as it can’t be helped.
Tradition should be a guide which aids us .Christians need tradition as it weren’t there and tradition does I believe help to preserve faith in religion but Scripture stands alone at the head of the tradition. I think Scriptures can just about stand alone but tradition cannot.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Scripture- Source of Christian Theology
The Bible is arguably THE most important source of Christian Theology, so it was only natural that in discussing Christian Theology we made a start with this holy book. I have to say that at the end of the class, I found out I knew near to nothing about the Bible and I’ve been a Christian for 22years!!
HISTORY OF THE BIBLE: The Catholics and Protestants have 2 slightly different Bibles. The Roman Catholics use the Jerusalem bible which contains more books than the new international bible so really there are books in the bible I’ve never read and didn’t even know existed.
The other books weren’t just omitted because the protestants ran out of paper, no, there was actually a sorting system: the Scripture is made up of Latin and Greek, many years the Hebrew canon of the old testament was written by the Jews but there were some books called the Apocrypha (the books omitted) that were never written in Hebrew, they were in fact written in Greek (Greek Canon). Many years later, the Septuagint was produced which was a collection of the old testament and the Apocrypha translated in Greek, this was the bible used by the Jews in the Mediterranean world in the 2nd or 3rd century before Christ.
The Septuagint which was in Greek prevailed for awhile and became the Latin Vulgate which was used as the standard bible for the western church until the reformation. In the 17th century the Apocrypha came under attack and all of a sudden there were Bible being produced with these books, the reformation relegated the Apocrypha to subordinate status because they didn’t have a Hebrew origin like the Hebrew canon which in their opinion made the Apocrypha less authoritative or perhaps less authentic. This is just a guess but maybe they found the Greek books more hedonistic than the Hebrew canon but the Roman Catholic church in 1546 reaffirmed equal status of the Apocryphal books with those of the old testament and have stuck to them till date hence the Jerusalem Bible but most other types of Bible are still produced without these books.
Then there’s the ANALYSIS OF THE BIBLE.
‘Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening , and the morning existed without the sun and the moon and starts?’ ( Origen, from On First Principles)Colin E. Gunton, Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae,(eds), The Practice of Theology, SCM Press, 2001.
In the lecture there were a few stories from the Old Testament read and analysised, some of them were David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, God’s testing of Abraham and a few others. Apart from the fact that there’s a moral to every story, Through out these stories there seemed to be very common themes of violence, instant and physical retribution, almost impossible tasks for humans and Human sacrifice(if the stories were taken literally).
It seemed like God condoned or initiated violence or perhaps the people who wrote these stories in the time they were in associated violence with power and God being the all power, all knowing God, it made sense to make Him fearful and violent.
Origen argued that it is impossible to take the scriptures literally and it seemed to me that the some of the stories are perhaps figurative expressions which try to identify or explain particular mysteries through tradition and history instead of actual events.
Maybe the stories were based partly on people’s views of God and this would have definitely played a part in their story telling. So maybe, just maybe some of the stories in the Old Testament is based partly on inspiration from God and partly on mans imagination and his own biased view of God.
To a Christian like me who took every single word in the Bible as gospel, finding all this out turned everything around in a positive way
HISTORY OF THE BIBLE: The Catholics and Protestants have 2 slightly different Bibles. The Roman Catholics use the Jerusalem bible which contains more books than the new international bible so really there are books in the bible I’ve never read and didn’t even know existed.
The other books weren’t just omitted because the protestants ran out of paper, no, there was actually a sorting system: the Scripture is made up of Latin and Greek, many years the Hebrew canon of the old testament was written by the Jews but there were some books called the Apocrypha (the books omitted) that were never written in Hebrew, they were in fact written in Greek (Greek Canon). Many years later, the Septuagint was produced which was a collection of the old testament and the Apocrypha translated in Greek, this was the bible used by the Jews in the Mediterranean world in the 2nd or 3rd century before Christ.
The Septuagint which was in Greek prevailed for awhile and became the Latin Vulgate which was used as the standard bible for the western church until the reformation. In the 17th century the Apocrypha came under attack and all of a sudden there were Bible being produced with these books, the reformation relegated the Apocrypha to subordinate status because they didn’t have a Hebrew origin like the Hebrew canon which in their opinion made the Apocrypha less authoritative or perhaps less authentic. This is just a guess but maybe they found the Greek books more hedonistic than the Hebrew canon but the Roman Catholic church in 1546 reaffirmed equal status of the Apocryphal books with those of the old testament and have stuck to them till date hence the Jerusalem Bible but most other types of Bible are still produced without these books.
Then there’s the ANALYSIS OF THE BIBLE.
‘Now what man of intelligence will believe that the first and the second and the third day, and the evening , and the morning existed without the sun and the moon and starts?’ ( Origen, from On First Principles)Colin E. Gunton, Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae,(eds), The Practice of Theology, SCM Press, 2001.
In the lecture there were a few stories from the Old Testament read and analysised, some of them were David and Goliath, Samson and Delilah, God’s testing of Abraham and a few others. Apart from the fact that there’s a moral to every story, Through out these stories there seemed to be very common themes of violence, instant and physical retribution, almost impossible tasks for humans and Human sacrifice(if the stories were taken literally).
It seemed like God condoned or initiated violence or perhaps the people who wrote these stories in the time they were in associated violence with power and God being the all power, all knowing God, it made sense to make Him fearful and violent.
Origen argued that it is impossible to take the scriptures literally and it seemed to me that the some of the stories are perhaps figurative expressions which try to identify or explain particular mysteries through tradition and history instead of actual events.
Maybe the stories were based partly on people’s views of God and this would have definitely played a part in their story telling. So maybe, just maybe some of the stories in the Old Testament is based partly on inspiration from God and partly on mans imagination and his own biased view of God.
To a Christian like me who took every single word in the Bible as gospel, finding all this out turned everything around in a positive way
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