Approaching the Great Tradition — Kyle Stoltzfus — Ep. 129

Hello, we're here with Anabaptist Perspectives. My name is Steve Russell, and I'm going to be talking with Kyle Stolzfuss. Both of us work at Faith Builders. Both of us are instructors there, and Kyle also is the academic dean. And today, Kyle wants to talk about a legacy that is larger than oneself. And I want to read a little blurb that he had written. This is about benefiting from, appreciating, and participating in a cultural legacy larger than oneself. The central burden is that we're recipients of spiritual and moral wealth. We can respond in a variety of ways to this: indulgently, critically, or constructively.

So we're going to talk about, or you're going to talk about tradition, pretty much, and it's part of a big part of it, and tradition in general. But for us, what's really interesting or important is the Bible and church. So what would you say about tradition in scripture? Let's start there because that is so important to us. Yeah.

What I found, just a kind of opening comment, as I got ready to talk about these ways of responding to tradition, it's like, well, what do we even mean when we're talking about tradition, right? And what can we learn from scripture to kind of get our footing about tradition before I just kind of tally hoe and jump right into it? So I'm backing up here a little bit, and it's probably going to say enough here to actually span two episodes, so bear with me. But to do some groundwork, we're going to talk about tradition in scripture, and it's there, and then kind of move forward from that.

So we'll start, I think, with the Old Testament. And in the Old Testament, you're finding God, he's creating the world, he's creating his people, in some ways kind of calling them into existence and winning them to himself. And he gives his people this really rich world to live in, of meaning and of remembrance of who he is as their God and the kind of work that he's done on their behalf.

He gives them the Ten Commandments. He gives them these repeated stories that they're to remember and to repeat over and over and over to themselves as God's people of his deliverance of them and of who they are as his people, his special people. He gives them the temple.

He gives them Leviticus, which is kind of hard, maybe from our perspective, to really appreciate, but for a people who'd come out of slavery, he's giving them a fabric of life that actually calls them into existence and makes them this kind of peculiar God-glorifying people.

Essentially, he's creating these people by laying in for them a tradition. And a lot of the Old Testament is about creating this sort of people through the traditions and the stories, the habits, the practices that make them who they are. And this is the work of God in the Old Testament.

We can move forward here to the New Testament. We keep on telling the story of God and his people through scripture. There's Paul, and this is where I'm going to slow down and spend some time. Paul and how he discusses what he calls the tradition, say in 2 Thessalonians 2:5 or 2:15, he says, "To stand firm and hold to the traditions that were taught by us, either by spoken word or by our letter." So he wants them to hold fast to the tradition. It just awakens the question, well, what's the tradition? What's the contents of this?

And why does it matter that they hang on to this? And what I'm going to suggest here is that when Paul's talking about the tradition, he is talking about the contents of the teaching, which is clear here in 2 Thessalonians, but he's also talking about practices. He's talking about forms of worship, and he's talking about an approach to scripture, which would have been the Old Testament at this point.

And Paul is actually, he's recommending to these people in Thessalonica that they step into this world that makes sense of themselves as people, as God's new creation, what Paul, or sorry, what Jude calls the faith once delivered to all saints. And he wants, he's inviting them into that, to grow and to actually become the kind of people that God wants them to be.

The form of worship, 2 Timothy 4:13, Paul says there to pay attention to the public reading of scripture. A little unsure exactly what he means there, but he's probably borrowing something from the synagogue style of worship, where if somebody would get up, they would read scripture, and then there would be some explanation of what it means, and people would actually work with the text a little bit. And especially, they'd be relating that to how these promises were fulfilled in Christ.

And this scripture almost surely is only the Old Testament at that point. Very likely. And there'd be some circulating epistles, and there'd be writings that are being circulated there, which actually runs into some problems after a little while here. But they don't yet have what we would call the New Testament. The status. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Those pieces don't have quite the same status yet. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, but that's the work of this community is to come together. They're reading scripture, they're working with it, they're seeing Christ in it, and they're explaining and showing to each other Christ in the written words of scripture.

So again, and we're getting there, but what they recognized was the interpretive key to making sense of scripture, this Old Testament, which wasn't old yet to them, it's the word of God. The key to making sense of that was Christ. And when Paul is referring to the tradition of interpreting scripture, he's probably pointing to something like Philippians 2:6, which I think gets close to the core of what he might mean by this tradition of interpreting scripture. And that's, "Here is Christ, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped." He tells them the story of Christ and says, "If you want to understand scripture, you've got to read it through Christ."

And that's what the Holy Spirit helps us to do. There's this form of a king in scripture, you could say, and the task of the community is to discern the king in the scripture they have and to point him out to each other.

This, you could say, the fancy term, this is the kerygma. It's that attempt to express the message and to see the message of all of Christ's entire ministry in something of a tight economical package, and then to read scripture through that. And this is the key to them to understanding what the contents of scripture are. And also, as these other things start to circulate, these epistles to say, "Well, that doesn't line up with the form of Christ," and that one needs to be discarded. And this one does.

It's kind of a rule they use to discern which scripture can be accepted as scripture, which needs to be discarded. And you're talking about something, this kerygma, this rule that predates the actual New Testament, that it predates, it's more of an oral or an experiential thing that the church has, right? Well, can you say a little more? Well, the reason I'm wondering is, well, what I wanted to ask was the tradition you're talking about, this kerygma, it becomes solidified in the New Testament, but it also precedes it. And I think it's important for us to get that just so that we recognize, when Paul says, "Be faithful in reading the scriptures," he's not telling us, "Read my letters."

And he's actually, he's dealing with, once again, a living thing, the body of knowledge that the church has and the practice it has. And that's, I think that's something about, it says something about what we as humans are, that we need those kinds of things. It's not just a book. I'm not putting down the book, obviously, but it's not just the book. It's some kind of living community.

And in that community, when you go back to that Philippians passage, I mentioned what I think that highlights here, what Paul is actually putting down for us for the first time is probably a hymn. I mean, this is a form of kind of doxological worship that these Christian communities are gathering around the form of Christ. And this helps them to remember in that kind of concise way who Christ is. And that's their key to understanding scripture. But they do that together. They do that in a community. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Well, I'm going to ask about what comes after that, especially with the church. But before I do that, is there something about us, do you think, as humans, that requires the habitual, the traditional?

Or is the reason I'm asking is we moderns think that unless you come up with something totally new, it's not worth anything. So you've got to be spontaneous. You've got to be, you've got to come up with your own thing, man. And I personally think, well, Pascal talks about how we are a high percentage of what it means to be a human is what's habitual.

And so I'm wondering, is there actually something about tradition that we need that actually fits with the category of being human? And if there is, then we risk losing something if we throw it all out. That's why I'm asking. Yeah. Well, this is one of the first real problems, a significant challenge that the apostolic church begins to face. You see the roots of Gnosticism. And while the apostolic church is working with texts and they're trying to discern which texts to use in their worship, the Valentinian Gnostics, anyway, they come along and they go, "I don't think we need to meet at all, actually, because the contents of what this is, it's just, it's about me as the spiritual being being reunified with the spiritual Christ.

And I'm not even sure if Christ actually had a body come to think of it. So I'm not sure if we need those either. So if we don't need our bodies, we don't really need to get together. And we don't need these nasty things like practices. Well, that's for these kind of lesser Christians. And that's cute they do that, but not for us spiritual ones. We don't need things like practices anymore." So this is where this might be where John, 1 John 2:19, he's lamenting. He's saying, "They went out from among us."

And he's grieving this. These people they left, they may have been Valentinian Gnostics. There's Hebrews 10:5. While the Orthodox church here is again, they're wrestling with what text to use. He's having to remind them, "Continue to gather because we're creatures that need this. We need to be together habitually. We need to do this regularly. We're not just spirits that are accidentally attached to bodies here. We're incorporated beings and we need a community to do this." And he has to remind them. So I think early on, there is that challenge that's coming up here. Well, I think that leads right on to the next issue, which would be, what about in the early church? So you've mentioned John, what he wrote and what was written in the letter to the Hebrews.

But what happens after the canon is fulfilled, the New Testament is finished, and now we have the church and the apostles are gone. So what's their take on tradition? What I'll be highlighting here is the continuity that's there. Okay. You could maybe, especially the further you go, you can make some chops there. But I think at this point, there's a lot of continuity to notice. You're seeing the apostolic church here, they're guarding this faith that's once delivered to the saints. And the church is regarding itself as entrusted with this sacred task of transmitting this faith through the discernment of scripture, through these practices, through the kind of authority that they've been invested by Christ as his church to take action in the world and to kind of transmit and move ahead the work of God in their midst.

They're the people of God. And I think you'll notice that the rule that tradition takes as we move into, say, the early church, and I'm thinking after the apostles have died and we're moving into the 100s, 200s, 300s, say, tradition takes really a similar kind of regulative rule. Okay.

The goal here remains to treasure the inheritance of this faith that's been delivered once for all the saints. So I'm saying there's a lot of continuity here.

They're responding to challenges. There's the challenge of, say, Marcion, who he gets kind of queasy about who he would see as the God of the Old Testament. There's Yahweh. Yeah, there's something happening with his people, but he's kind of violent and he's kind of hard to get along with. He's pretty possessive as a God. And he just doesn't look like he doesn't look like the God of Jesus. What Marcion says, and this is a very clean way to make this division, he says, "Well, they're not the same God. There must be two different Gods." So he just makes a total break between the God of the Old Testament, who he'd say is Yahweh, and the God of the New Testament, who he associates with Jesus.

But as the church is in the apostolic, or sorry, in the early church, as they're responding to Marcion, they're reading through the tradition and they're saying, "Wait, we're with Paul here. No, same God. There's actually continuity here." And they have to reject that.

There's the Valentinian Gnostics we've talked about. They see this major break between the God of the Old Testament. He's so material. He's so earthy. And that's just kind of disgusting to them. And they want to reject that. And they see Christ as the sort of first fruits of these disembodied spirits. And we're going to get to ourselves become the pure rational spirits that were intended to be realized a spark of divinity in ourselves. And Christ is here to show us that nature. And we'll eventually get to be reunited with him.

But the early church, they're also, again, they're reading through the tradition here and they're saying, "Well, in the apostolic tradition, there's something more going. God is working with his people through the material as well. And he was truly God. He was truly man." And that also falls out of bounds and they reject that as well. So tradition is, again, it's playing this kind of regulative role.

There's this image that Irenaeus gives, which I think I first heard from you when I was in one of your classes. But he's taking and he's summarizing the work that God has done, the economy of God, you'd say, and the rule of faith. And he takes this and he makes this image for us of reading scripture through the rule of faith.

And he says that to read scripture right for him is to look at the image of a king that's been laid out through careful handiwork of God's work. It's been laid out. These individual stones have been set. And the stones themselves are really beautiful. I mean, there's Moses and the deliverance of the people of Israel from Pharaoh.

There's all of these gemstones. There's the giving of the law. And that's a beautiful and a good thing. But it's not until Christ comes that you see the fullness of what that image actually means. So you've got to step back a few paces.

And when you read it alongside the tradition and when you read it alongside Christ with the aid of the Holy Spirit, you step back. There's the mosaic. There's the whole, and it looks like Christ, he says. And what his response to that is, when you have people like Marcion, like the Valentinians, they come along and they take the gems and they're rearranging them. And you don't have the image of a king anymore, much less it just looks like a dog or some kind of fox. And it's not even very good work, he says.

So he's reading scripture alongside the tradition. And it's allowing him to preserve in his mind the image of the king, okay, as opposed to something that's just kind of ugly and distorted. And the gems might still be there, but they don't go to the same place anymore. And they don't point us in the same way. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Well, you've mentioned several times what we might call opponents or maybe even heretics, opponents of Christianity. Doesn't this traditional thrust, the kerygma, doesn't that even help us as fallen humans stay on track? So one of the, in the early days of the church, there was a, the non-Christians had problems with the physical world. That's part of the reason for these heretics.

But you know, that's the world the Christians lived in. And so do you have anything to say about how the kerygma or the tradition also helped just a Christian keep on line and battle any kind of internal problem he might have that might push him off the proper path? Do you have anything on that or not?

Well, if I hear what you say, to be, there's a whole tradition of preaching, kerygmatic preaching. It just recognizes that for us as humans to grow in Christ is to be constantly challenged and brought back to the message of the gospel, which is that here is Christ.

And he comes and he shows us what the fullness of human life is like. And he accepts the burden of our sinfulness on himself.

And we, I mean, if you're like me, I need to be reminded of that very often.

So this is also, it's a way of, yeah, it's a way of showing some boundaries and seeing what falls off of what you could consider orthodox faith, what heresy looks like, helps us to discern that. But it applies also, yeah, within the household of God as a way of us just growing up in Christ. Because that line extends through us as well. Yeah. I was thinking too of Augustine.

He wasn't a Christian until he was 30. Before that, he was allured by these Gnostic teachings. And after he was a Christian, I think he was a bit, still a bit touched by some of that Gnosticism. But the tradition itself kept him from rejecting human sexuality.

At first, he was pretty negative towards it. A little bit uptight about it. A little bit uptight. But at the end, when he writes his retractions, I think it's pretty clear that he's saying, "This is something that's good. God made it." And I think it was that that whole long tradition of this teaching corrected him. Part of his need for correction was because he had been open to the Gnostics. But I think over, when he first became a Christian, he wasn't quite corrected, but over time he was.

Well, that's a really specific observation, I think. There's Plato and there's Platonism. Yes. And within the world that early Christians are living in, that impulse, that insecurity about what to do with materiality is really real. And you see that being a significant influence right here at the start of Christianity and the incarnation is the Christian response to that. But it's hard. It's hard to hold that together. And I think that's been one of the struggles, maybe particularly in the Western Christian tradition, is how to hold that together.

And it's the kerygmatic tradition that's just going to insist. You've got to hold them together. And you've got to remind yourself of that constantly because we tend to try to abstract ourselves. I mean, being a material human, it's just kind of messy. It's inconvenient.

It's also wonderful.