What Are Church Traditions?

00:00:00.000 | [Music]

00:00:04.000 | Happy Friday everyone.

00:00:06.000 | Well, do we need church traditions?

00:00:10.000 | And what are church traditions?

00:00:13.000 | Questions we must answer, and they come in today from a listener named Jerome,

00:00:16.000 | who lives in Singapore.

00:00:18.000 | "Hello Pastor John, what specifically does Paul mean by traditions in 2 Thessalonians 2.15?

00:00:23.000 | Does Paul have in mind the apostolic traditions, or broader historic church traditions,

00:00:29.000 | or some other type of tradition?"

00:00:31.000 | Pastor John, what would you say to Jerome?

00:00:33.000 | Well, this is good.

00:00:35.000 | One of the reasons that I'm glad this question is being asked is because it gives us a chance

00:00:42.000 | to step back and, I think, address an issue that we haven't really addressed,

00:00:47.000 | at least in a focused way, namely, what is tradition,

00:00:52.000 | or how should we think about traditions as Christians?

00:00:57.000 | And a good place to start is, yes, in 2 Thessalonians 2.15, and in Paul and the apostles,

00:01:05.000 | but also in Jesus.

00:01:07.000 | So, we'll get there.

00:01:09.000 | Let me just start with the word itself.

00:01:12.000 | Get a definition clear in front of us.

00:01:14.000 | Tradition.

00:01:16.000 | It's got two halves.

00:01:17.000 | Tra, across, or along.

00:01:21.000 | And dition, the Latin word for "give."

00:01:24.000 | The two halves together, then, would mean to give across, or to give along,

00:01:29.000 | from one generation to the next.

00:01:32.000 | Now, that's relevant, not just for English, because in 2 Thessalonians 2.15,

00:01:40.000 | the text that Jerome is asking about, Paul uses a Greek word, of course, for tradition,

00:01:48.000 | which also has two parts, paradosis, paradosis.

00:01:54.000 | Para, also, like the Latin, tra, meaning "across" or "along," and dosis, meaning "give."

00:02:01.000 | So, the same meaning in the Greek word as in the English word.

00:02:08.000 | So, we're really tracking here with Paul when we ask the question,

00:02:13.000 | "What does 'tradition,' what does 'paradosis' actually mean, and why does he use the word?"

00:02:22.000 | In fact, I would say that's a great place to start with probing into the New Testament understanding of traditions.

00:02:30.000 | Namely, in 2 Thessalonians 2.15, why did Paul use that word here?

00:02:38.000 | He says, "Stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us."

00:02:44.000 | Why didn't he say, "Stand firm and hold fast to the teachings," or to the truth,

00:02:52.000 | or to the commands that you were taught by us?

00:02:56.000 | Why did he use the word "traditions"?

00:03:00.000 | The answer seems to be that Paul wants to call attention to the fact that his teaching is in harmony

00:03:11.000 | with the teaching that has gone before, namely, from Jesus and from the other apostles.

00:03:19.000 | The effect of the word "traditions" here is to make us realize Paul does not want to be seen as a maverick apostle,

00:03:30.000 | a rogue apostle, a cult leader off on his own, establishing a new religion.

00:03:38.000 | Rather, he wants to be seen as a faithful part of a larger body of teachers with roots firmly in the ultimate authority of Jesus and his word.

00:03:53.000 | So, the first signal that we get from this text is that there is great value in tradition

00:04:01.000 | in the sense that it protects us from novelties that come out of individuals' own heads

00:04:10.000 | with no necessary correspondence to what Jude called, in Jude 1, verse 3,

00:04:18.000 | "the faith once for all delivered to the saints."

00:04:22.000 | In other words, tradition first and foremost declares that there is such a thing as truth.

00:04:31.000 | There is such a thing that our statements ought to correspond to or agree with.

00:04:37.000 | Tradition requires us to be humble and to admit that we are not the originators of truth.

00:04:47.000 | Wisdom and right views of reality do not begin with us.

00:04:55.000 | We are servants of a reality outside ourselves.

00:05:01.000 | It originates in God. It becomes incarnate in Jesus.

00:05:06.000 | It is inspired in the mouth of the apostles.

00:05:09.000 | If anybody comes along, even an apostle, Paul says in Galatians 1.8,

00:05:14.000 | "Even an apostle declares another truth beside the one that coheres with Christ in his word,

00:05:21.000 | and his apostles let him be accursed."

00:05:25.000 | Now, that's the fundamental reason, I think, why Paul uses the word "traditions" in 2 Thessalonians 2.15.

00:05:37.000 | Namely, there is such a thing as truth, and it doesn't originate with me.

00:05:43.000 | I am its servant, not its creator, not its Lord.

00:05:49.000 | To believe in tradition, in this sense then, is a mark of humility and faithfulness to the way reality really is.

00:06:01.000 | Now, let me give maybe just one example of what Paul calls tradition, namely his preaching of the gospel.

00:06:11.000 | So, in 1 Corinthians 15.1-3, he says, "Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you,

00:06:23.000 | for I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received,

00:06:33.000 | that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures," and then he finishes it.

00:06:40.000 | Now, those two words are the way Paul talked about tradition.

00:06:46.000 | "I received something, I delivered it, I handed it on to you."

00:06:52.000 | In other words, when it comes to the gospel, no apostle is called to be creative.

00:06:59.000 | He's called to be faithful.

00:07:02.000 | The gospel is not a reality that he is making up.

00:07:07.000 | It is a reality outside himself. It has objective reality.

00:07:12.000 | His job is to preserve it, to preach it, to pass it along to another generation.

00:07:18.000 | This is the great preciousness and the great necessity of tradition.

00:07:25.000 | Now, that may remind some of our listeners, including Jerome, of a text that sounds almost like a contradiction,

00:07:36.000 | namely Galatians 1, 11 and 12, where Paul says this,

00:07:42.000 | "I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel,

00:07:52.000 | for I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it,

00:07:59.000 | but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ."

00:08:05.000 | Now, that sounds almost like the opposite of 1 Corinthians 15,

00:08:10.000 | but it's not a contradiction.

00:08:13.000 | What was at stake in Galatians 1 and 2 was the validity of Paul's apostleship.

00:08:21.000 | Was he, in fact, commissioned by the risen Christ,

00:08:25.000 | and was he a direct recipient of divine revelation,

00:08:31.000 | or was he a pretender to that authority,

00:08:35.000 | and just like any other Christian teacher, totally dependent on human tradition?

00:08:40.000 | Like me, I'm dependent on tradition, namely the New Testament, a divinely inspired tradition.

00:08:46.000 | And Paul's answer is, "I'm not dependent on Peter and James and John,

00:08:53.000 | but I am in harmony with them on the gospel."

00:08:59.000 | Now, both of those are crucial, Paul's non-dependence and Paul's harmony with them.

00:09:08.000 | "I went to visit Peter," yes, he says, "not because I had no revelation from Jesus,

00:09:15.000 | but to make clear to Peter and to everybody that Peter and I are on the same page.

00:09:22.000 | We preach the same gospel.

00:09:24.000 | There is one apostolic word, and we're in harmony on it."

00:09:30.000 | And let me make one other crucial observation about tradition,

00:09:35.000 | namely that just as there is good tradition that reflects reality and preserves truth,

00:09:43.000 | there's bad tradition that distorts reality and preserves mere human opinion

00:09:50.000 | as though it were an authority, an opinion which often nullifies the very true tradition,

00:09:58.000 | the Word of God.

00:10:00.000 | And we know that because Jesus said in Matthew 15, 3 to the Pharisees,

00:10:07.000 | "Why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?"

00:10:14.000 | And then he gives them the example of what he's talking about,

00:10:18.000 | and he says, "Many such things you do."

00:10:21.000 | And Paul himself, before his conversion, was totally committed

00:10:28.000 | to those very Word of God nullifying traditions.

00:10:33.000 | He said in Galatians 1, 14, "I was advancing in Judaism beyond many of my own age among my people.

00:10:44.000 | So extremely zealous was I for the traditions of my fathers."

00:10:52.000 | And with that zeal for tradition, he was imprisoning and killing Christians.

00:11:00.000 | So clearly, tradition in and of itself can be very destructive.

00:11:08.000 | Here's one more example of false tradition.

00:11:11.000 | Paul says in Colossians 2, 8, "See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy

00:11:21.000 | and empty deceit according to human tradition and not according to Christ."

00:11:30.000 | So all tradition is to be measured by whether it accords with Christ.

00:11:38.000 | So the sum of the matter is that we measure merely human tradition

00:11:46.000 | by the tradition, which we call the New Testament,

00:11:51.000 | that is rooted in Jesus and his Word and his apostles and their teachings.

00:11:58.000 | So the answer to Jerome's question then is that 2 Thessalonians 2, 15

00:12:06.000 | is Paul's referring to the truth that Jesus and the apostles had taught

00:12:14.000 | and that he himself, under divine inspiration, was confirming by his own letter.

00:12:21.000 | Yeah, very good. Thank you, Pastor John. Thank you, Jerome.

00:12:24.000 | Thanks for listening today, all of you.

00:12:26.000 | You can ask a question of your own, search our growing archive, or subscribe to the podcast,

00:12:30.000 | all at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:12:35.000 | Well, today we talked about traditions, and next time we're going to look at shame,

00:12:39.000 | the topic of shame. Should we have shame? Should we not have shame?

00:12:43.000 | How do we talk about shame in the church?

00:12:47.000 | Is there a healthy, necessary form of shame in the Christian life?

00:12:51.000 | Those are questions that must get answered, and they will get answered next time

00:12:56.000 | when I ask Pastor John. I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:12:59.000 | We'll see you back here on Monday for that. Have a great weekend.

00:13:02.000 | (end)

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What Are Church Traditions?

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