First, allow me to define “tradition”. I generally understand a tradition to be a belief or practice that someone has mainly because someone before them had it. Traditions also tend to be rigidly kept. If someone firmly holds a belief or practice that wasn’t passed down to them, that might be more properly called a habit. If the belief or practice was passed down but not rigidly adhered to, then it’s not the sort of tradition that this blog post pertains to. Also, if the belief/practice was passed down and is rigidly adhered to, but not primarily because it was passed down, then that is also not the sort of tradition I am concerned with. I am specifically writing about beliefs and practices that are rigidly held primarily because it was passed down by some authority.
I’ll begin with a story. Christmas Sunday of 2013, I went to the service that my church had, and that day I encountered more tradition than I usually saw on most Sundays. Of course, being Christmas, the band played Christmas songs. I didn’t know them very well, but I noticed that the singing seemed to be louder than usual. It occurred to me that that was probably because more people knew Christmas songs, having heard them over and over. Accompanying that realization was a growing, disturbing feeling that there wasn’t as much…feeling in those songs. Not as much passion, not as much worship. I later described it as if I suddenly encountered the awful smell of a decomposing body when I wasn’t expecting it, hence the title. I was so disturbed that once the songs were over, I immediately went to the prayer room to get away and, in a sense, recover by spending time with God alone. I ought to add that since then, I have often listened to Christmas songs. It wasn’t the songs that I had a problem with, but rather the tradition of singing them only during Christmas season.
Jesus wasn’t a completely traditional guy. Yes, He was Jewish, and He followed Jewish laws and customs. His mission was to reach the Jews, not the Gentiles (that was the task of the early church). Yet, He still violated traditions on multiple occasions. He did work on the Sabbath by healing a cripple’s hand in Matthew 12:9-14 and Mark 3:1-6, and surely did “work” on other Sabbaths. Another major tradition that He broke would be the method of redemption, abolishing the sacrificial system with His end-all sacrifice. When He cleared the Temple might be a third example. The early church wasn’t entirely traditional either. Consider how they responded to Jewish converts that wanted to require Gentile converts to be circumcised. As recorded in Acts 15:22-29, the early church’s leaders decided to not require that Gentile converts be required to follow the Mosaic Law, which included circumcision, but instead required only that they follow four specific rules. Even these four rules were really mostly intended to help the Jews and Gentiles get along with each other (a source).
The Bible wasn’t canonized until 400 AD despite its constituent books and letters having been written by 150 AD. One reason was to establish authentic texts and make it clear which texts were not authentic, or false gospels (a source). Which texts were authentic may have been a matter of tradition before then, but the councils that established the canon chose the texts they did for reasons other than mere tradition. Hymns that are sung in traditional churches (Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Methodist, and so forth) are generally not from the early church. More like Middle Ages and later. These days, it is not too uncommon to see the signs of an old church advertise an earlier “traditional” service and a later contemporary service. Today’s contemporary services will likely be seen as traditional in a hundred years. My point is that the traditions we have now weren’t always traditions, meaning that they replaced other traditions. Thus, it is entirely unreasonable to expect that today’s traditions will or should continue forever.
In general, traditions seem to be hindrances to progress. Consider the Civil Rights movement, for instance. It was traditional for wealthy white men in Europe and America to own African slaves from the 1400s to the 1800s. Technically, that technically ended with the Emancipation Proclamation around 1863. It was traditional to be racist, to look down on the blacks because they were inferior to the whites, which was solely because they were a different race. Put a white toddler with a black toddler and they will have no problem playing with each other. The point has been made elsewhere that racism is taught, not intrinsic. In other words, tradition, enforced by authority, played a very significant role in prolonging the oppression of blacks by whites. Proponents of the so-called “traditional marriage” are doing much the same thing – denying the privilege of marriage to homosexuals primarily because the traditional-therefore-proper marriage is one man and one woman. This tactic is failing today just as it failed back then.
On another subject, science can survive and grow only because it rejects tradition. It was traditional to believe that the Earth was flat, but then the ancients worked out that it was round. It was traditional to believe that everything revolved around the Earth, but then Copernicus famously spoke against this. It was traditional to believe that space and time are absolute and do not change, but then Einstein dispelled this notion. It was traditional to believe that atoms were basically just solid, indivisible balls, but then a series of scientists including Bohr, Rutherford, and Lewis showed that atoms were composed of smaller particles. It was traditional to believe that particles had definite positions and velocities, but that too turned out to be wrong, and that is known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. I have listed only five traditional beliefs that were rejected and replaced when science showed them to be wrong. There are many, many more examples, but this is not a good place for me to list more. The main point is this: science could not progress without rejecting traditional beliefs.
Science, specifically biology, also shows that “tradition” can be deadly. A major component of evolution is that species adapt to survive. (Aside: the validity of macroevolution is irrelevant here as adaptation and natural selection have been observed on smaller time scales. Years, not millennia.) A great example is the Peppered Moth. There is a detailed article on the evolution of the peppered moth over at Wikipedia, but I’ll summarize the main, relevant concepts. The peppered moth, biston betularia, comes in two varieties: typica (light-colored) and carbonaria (dark-colored). These moths depend on camouflaging themselves against tree bark and lichens to hide from predators. Before the Industrial Revolution, the trees and lichens were light-colored, so the light-colored moths blended in quite well. Thus, they survived in much greater numbers than the dark-colored moths, to the point where it was 99.9% versus 0.01%. Then, along with the new coal-burning factories in England came soot. The lichens died from the sulfur dioxide emissions and the soot blackened the tree trunks. At that point, the dark-colored moths were better hidden and the light-colored ones didn’t fare so well. The proportions completely flipped to 2% light-colored versus 98% dark-colored, a huge and dramatic change. Since then, emissions standards have been imposed to reduce the level of pollution, so now the light-colored moths are becoming more populous once more. This was clearly a case of adapt or die.
As the above example shows, inflexibility can be deadly in an environment that changes. Those that deal with the world’s pressures better simply propagate their traits better. This is the essential idea of natural selection, and similar effects can be seen in many places, scientific and not. Blades of grass bow before even light breezes, whereas a tree is unmoved. However, should a hurricane come along, chances are good that the tree will be uprooted and killed, but the grass will remain, albeit battered. The best swords are not the hardest, stiffest ones, but rather the ones that are a little flexible. The hardest, stiffest materials are often also brittle. A great example is diamond, the hardest natural material on Earth known to man. Tap a diamond with a hammer in the right place and in the right way, and it will shatter. Moist clay, on the other hand, can take a beating and stay together with no problem. Being strong and tough is all good and well until either a stronger and tougher force comes along, or until a weakness is exploited. An asteroid killed the dinosaurs, but little burrowing mammals survived, a literal instance where the meek inherited the Earth.
It’s quite clear that our world is full of changes in all areas. There are literally dozens of significant scientific advancements, technological innovations, and break-throughs in other areas every week, and the pace is accelerating. Cultures are changing on a grand scale, with some disappearing and new ones forming. Interactions between diverse peoples are increasing. Skeptics, atheists, and agnostics are becoming more and more numerous, pushing back against religion. Oh, and let’s not forget the Internet. Very little remains unchanged, and what does remain unchanged soon gets left behind. So many churches that were established a century or two ago are now dead, almost dead, or dying. The ones that are still alive and thriving are ones that adapted.
Finally, I’ll say that it is naive and wrong to assume that just one time period has the right idea as to what God wants. God doesn’t change (Hebrews 13:8), but I’m quite sure His plans aren’t the same throughout all history. God’s plans for Adam and Eve were different than His plans for those in Noah’s time, which were different from His plans for the Israelites, which were different from His plans for those around 1 A.D., which were certainly different from His plans for us. The people of today have access to the Internet, mass media, contraceptives, greater knowledge regarding the workings of the universe and the brain, and so many other innovations and scientific advances besides. Compared to the world of today, the ancient world was quite small, so to speak.
There is a great deal of timeless advice in the Bible, no doubt about that. However, as the years and centuries go by, there are more and more situations where the best advice would have been utterly useless to those in Biblical times. Is it ethical to use unmanned, automated drones to kill the enemy in times of war? There is hardly any practical advice in the Bible about such situations, and if there had been such advice in the earliest texts, why should it have been kept? The Catholic Church condemns the use of most contraceptives based on the traditional belief that the primary purpose of sex is reproduction. Until recently, there wasn’t really any way to have sex without a high likelihood of babies. Nowadays, couples can actually be more responsible in waiting to have a child to ensure better support, and yet still enjoy the pleasures of sex and its intimacy-building nature. The traditions of old are simply not able to really inform the beliefs and practices of today.
Here’s a good cartoon with a similar idea.
New theological works, especially those by apologists, very rarely introduce new ideas. Instead, old and traditional ideas are defended in new ways. This, I believe, is a grave mistake. Atheists, agnostics, and other non-Christians are coming up with new arguments on a regular basis, and I think the refusal of modern apologists to adapt and innovate is really doing a disservice to the Christian faith. Also, rigid adherence to tradition primarily because it is tradition is, I believe, a great way to miss what God really wants us to do. Jesus, after all, berated the Pharisees for just this sort of thing. For good and logical reasons, they derived new laws from old laws in an attempt to stay in God’s favor, not realizing just how far away they were straying. Jesus came along and spoke the truth, but the Pharisees rejected Him because He spoke against their traditions. Are we going to be so arrogant and prideful to believe that we have not committed the same error as they have?
Well, I, for one, am committed to seeking and following the Author, not the authored, regardless of what Tradition says.
El'endia Starman's Blog 