What is the Great Tradition? — Kyle Stoltzfus — Ep. 127

Well, hello. This is Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm Steve Russell. I teach at Faith Builders, and I'm talking to my friend Kyle here, Kyle Stolzfuss, who also teaches at Faith Builders and is the academic dean there. We want to continue the discussion we were having on our heritage. Kyle, what do you want to say about our cultural heritage, and what about it excites you? Hmm.

I think I'd like to say, just to begin and say, we all have one, okay? We all have a cultural heritage. And then I'll zoom in and say that for us as Christians, we too have a heritage, right?

There's a lot of different places we can come from, and I'm sure for folks watching here, different backgrounds you're going to have. So I'm making some assumptions here, right? But to be a Christian and to have a heritage is to have a heritage of, you'd say, texts, Scripture. Becoming a Christian is to know the place that the Bible and Scripture have in our lives. And then there's the important documents that your own church and your heritage has.

The cultural heritage, it's things like the practices and the rules that we have, which kind of guard where we're going, but also orient us in certain ways. And these are important. There's heroes and authorities. Some of these heroes that we have, they're really remarkable.

There's the monuments that we erect sometimes around certain heroes, but many of them are actually very everyday. My dad is something of a hero in the Christian faith for me, and I'm blessed because of that. This doesn't mean he's a monument that we've got to erect something around, but that's significant for me.

There's the stories that we tell about our own heritage, the stories that we tell to others that are important to us. I find it interesting that in the Old Testament, when God really wants to emphasize who He is and who the people of God are, He just reminds them to tell their children the stories. Tell them the stories of who God is, the kinds of work that He does for His people. And that's really significant in who those children become to tell the stories. That's part of our heritage. There's the beliefs, there's the commitments, there's the places that are distinctly ours and that we remember. It's this wealth that we have of heritage, of resources, of these common pathways we have, the communal goals that we have that deeply shape who we are.

Sometimes we look at all these things and we call them baggage, right? When they're not working quite as well as we'd like, sometimes it's easier to recognize these things as a gift. But I think what I'm saying is just that our heritage, it's what gives us our way of being in the world. And to have a Christian heritage is to have this way of being in the world that's here with Jesus. He's here among us, and the heritage we have is something that reminds us of that as a community of believers. And I think maybe one of the most important insights here is that when we have a heritage, in an important sense, we receive it as something that's given to us as a gift, and we have to decide what to do with that.

Well, I want to ask you about that, but before I do, I hear an implication, maybe I'm misunderstanding, that there's more than one Christian heritage. That if I happen to live in Africa and just happen to be Ethiopian, then my heritage can be Christian, but it will be different than an Anabaptist or a European.

So do you have anything to say about that? You're not saying there's just one Christian heritage, I think. Do you have anything to say about that aspect, that in different places it may look somewhat different? That is an important observation. It's also a difficult one.

There is a certain boundedness to what we could consider, I think, Christian heritage.

We have to take that kind of as our starting place, I think. But I agree that within that, human culture is really widely varied, and there's going to be different expressions of a Christian heritage that's suited to each one of those cultures.

It's not all exactly cookie-cutter the same. Now, I think certain folks, you could be more or less tolerant of how much variety there is, and I'd be very careful to say that just to say that there's some variety of expression isn't the same thing as saying that we just get to make it up. Or that it's all equally open. Yeah, yeah. Or that it's all just equally the same.

So I'd be cautious. Yeah. Well, in the previous discussion, we talked about how the Anabaptists held the wonderful gifts that God had given them in this wonderful world with open hands. And so I would imagine that there could be cultures that hadn't heard of Christ, but that lived communally, and that they would definitely express that more communally even than we do. I would give that as a possible. So that, let's say, if there were an African or an Asian culture that was very communal and they became Christians, I could easily imagine them being more Hutterite than the Hutterites. And yet, so that would be their cultural expression. It's within the bounds, but it's different than what we would do.

And that wouldn't be at all offensive or strange for them. They'd see it and they'd recognize the pattern. It's like, well, this is actually who we are. So give praise to God for that. They fit the pattern. Maybe some other areas that would be more difficult for them too, which communal cultures do have some other struggles many times.

I might just say yet I think that I'm starting with the assumption that we have some heritage here. We don't have to have that assumption. That's the assumption that I'm having. We have a heritage, and because we have a heritage, what I'm going to be suggesting is that, and this is, I think, something I'm realizing the older I get, is that to have a heritage at all and to actually grow in heritage is, in a lot of ways, to also grow in our appreciation of the whole package of what it means to have a heritage.

There's some parts of who we are and what our past is that we do not like, and that we rightfully ought not to like. They're disappointing. Sometimes there's even violence in our past that happens to us or the people that we love. These are part of our heritage too, right? Not just the good stuff. And it's also not the really extraordinary things. Many times we can get so focused on certain really monumental figures that we can obscure and forget the everyday work that God calls us to and value and esteem that for what it is.

So when I talk about heritage, I'm talking about all of it. Not just the towering monuments that what tends to happen if we chase too hard after them is we make them look like us. And not just the really heroic things, but also the everyday and also the things that we don't like. And when God gets a hold of us, when He calls us into our heritage and when we appreciate it, I think He actually helps us to do that more. Well, you're recognizing there are good aspects, very positive aspects, and aspects that we rightfully chafe under. So do you have any concrete ways to think about what to do, maybe to avoid idolizing the really good, but maybe even more so, how to deal with those parts that we chafe under?

So how do we respond to our—how do we faithfully and fruitfully respond to our—we're going to have the heritage, I agree with you. It's got some really good parts, some really bad parts. We could idolize or we could maybe even reject everything because of one part of it. So any concrete ideas there to help us? I'll try to get concrete. I'll try to.

But I think you've already begun to answer the question that you're posing. How can we avoid idolizing it? But how do you avoid just rejecting it outright? Okay, so maybe we'll get concrete here as we go. And again, we're jumping right over some of these questions, I think, that can be interesting questions sometimes, but I'm just not sure how helpful they are if we all have a heritage. Questions like, are we going to follow Jesus or are we going to follow heritage? Well, that's an interesting question, but I don't know if they're really incompatible like that.

Questions which can become more personal to decide whether we can actually commit ourselves to a certain heritage, say, that's feeling kind of stale, that seems obsessed with certain boundaries or rituals or something like that. These are really hard questions to answer. And unless I'm actually talking to somebody, it's hard for us to really staple that down.

So I'm going to put some of those questions in the closet and just put out two basic possibilities here and then offer a third one.

And the first possibility, well, the first two possibilities are two ways to reject heritage, okay? I think the second way of rejection is the one that tends to get the more attention, but either one of these first two ways is still a rejection nonetheless.

And the first way of rejecting a heritage is just what I'll call indulgent indifference, okay? You receive a certain heritage, you're born into it, you enter it. We might wring our hands from time to time about the things that are wrong with it, but ultimately we just begin to enjoy the good things about the heritage for our own sake, basically.

We enjoy our ability, say, in the conservative traditions, we enjoy our ability to work hard to make money and surround ourselves with beautiful things and accumulate them endlessly. There's so many things we can get these days. We could enjoy the friendships, the meaning that we've come by that's been given to us. And I'm not saying that these things are necessarily bad in and of themselves.

It's just that if this is all it means, we've rejected the heritage, okay? We've rejected a heritage, particularly if that heritage includes things like mutual sharing, like you've talked about, this way of sharing our goods freely with both within the community of faith, but also outside. We've rejected a heritage that talks about things like cross-bearing, okay? About self-denial and selfless love.

We just can't forget, I think, that those who save their lives will lose them. And even if we do feel shame for being indulgently indifferent from time to time, shame can help us kind of feel better about ourselves in a strange way, but it doesn't really get us past the reality of this first option of rejecting a heritage which is just indulgent indifference.

These aren't easy things to say, right? But I think that's true. That's the first way to reject a heritage. Become indulgent and indifferent to it. And it doesn't even look like it sometimes, from what you've said. Not really, no. You're just kind of sliding along and not really engaging with the deep part of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not investing in it in a real meaningful way or continuing it.

The second one, the second possibility, and this is the one I think that tends to get the most airtime, is just to respond critically and probably walk away from a certain heritage. I think one of the more popular ways to reject a heritage these days is to hate religion and love Jesus.

Maybe just get rid of all these tottering, nasty things that are really inconvenient. Not even sure sometimes how good they're doing for us in our walk with Jesus. Just love Jesus and we'll just get rid of that stuff.

Get rid of the whatever it is we don't like, the rituals, the behaviors, the dress, the emphasis on guilt, whatever it is that makes us mad or uncomfortable or just inconvenient, we can kind of sweep that away. The difficulty I just have here is that hating religion and following Jesus, well, that is a tradition in and of itself, and it's one with a real heritage of weakness.

You can't, just by rejecting one tradition, somehow escape a tradition entirely. All we can really do is move from one tradition to another one. So that's some response critically there to the second option, which is to try to respond critically and in a lot of ways get away from tradition entirely. And I'm saying, well, that's a tradition too, okay? Can't really do that.

So what I think I'll suggest is that we have a third option, which is to follow Jesus in building and constructing diligently, you could say, like a house, a body that's actually worthy of Him. We don't squander the gifts of our heritage by living indulgently, but we don't just abandon them either.

And I think it looks something like this. And this is the third option, is that we do run light, okay? We don't run or fight uncertainly like one who beats the air. And that means that we're getting rid of the stuff that's accumulated on us and our encumbrances, including the encumbrance of reaction and including the encumbrance of just indifference. These two get in our way of following Jesus.

And instead of responding indulgently or reactionary, we follow Him, okay? We discern His form with the Holy Spirit wherever we are in our heritage, and we give our energy to following and to building constructively after Him.

There's a chance that as we follow Christ, we might have the opportunity, like Paul says, to complete Christ's sufferings on His behalf. The cross is something we bear outside, but it's also something that we have to sometimes bear inside the community of faith. That can get kind of hard sometimes.

But we build on heritage not because what we've been given is perfect, but because it's good. It's got something already intact for us there. It's got gifts that God has invested into it. And the practices, the commitments, the heroes that we've come into, these kinds of things take a very long time to accumulate. And many times when people try to just start over again, many times that fails. It doesn't work well. Or many times when people try that, it ends up just looking like themselves.

So I'm suggesting, I think, that instead of just discarding all of these things, we actually find ways to commit ourselves to them. Sometimes that comes at a personal cost, and to build faithfully on what it is that Christ invests into the heritage that's distinctly our own, whatever that heritage might be.

So this commitment you're talking about avoids the indifference, which might look good, the way you described it. I mean, the indifference itself doesn't sound good, but the way you described it, I'm just kind of skating along and nobody notices.

But so to avoid the indifference and to really get to the heart of the thing, also to avoid reaction, because there are problems. And so the commitment is really what we need. Okay, well, I appreciate what you've said, Kyle. What do you have to say about our attitudes towards what we've been given?

Well, these require, I think, a lot of practice to grow. But the attitudes we come to as we try to build constructively on the heritage that we're given through Christ, they're really significant, okay? Our approach to our heritage really shows through it. And I think I'll tell just a little bit of a story here.

It was, oh, it's been a number of years ago, I think right over Valentine's Day, that Marlene, my wife, was sick with a stomach bug. And instead of pestering her to make us some food, I just was like, well, we're going to take our two oldest children, just going to go to town and we're going to get some food out there.

My oldest child, she picked out Wendy's just because we hadn't been to Wendy's for a long time. I was like, well, okay, one fast food place is just about like any other one. We go to Wendy's, we order our food, and in my mind, we're just enjoying a good civilized meal with my children here. But I didn't realize it, but we were being watched, okay?

First by the hostess who had greeted us and gotten our food for us, so Arcella, her name. First by her, and then there's the people around us as we're wrapping up our meal, we're just enjoying each other. I'm enjoying my children. They're being respectful. They're asking for things with words like please and thank you and all of that. And Arcella comes out and she's got two of these frosties that they have there. She bought these things. She bought two frosties for my children just as a way, I think, of recognizing them and appreciating who they were as children and just helping us to kind of have the good time that we are already having, right?

And that was interesting enough. We picked up and we're leaving and there's this elderly couple just off to the side of us. And as we walk by, they stop us and they say something, I forget exactly what it was, they just remark about how lovely and well-behaved and well-mannered my children are. And there's this parting comment, and here's what needs to stick, I think. This parting comment that they gave to me that was, honestly, very confusing because this parting comment, they say, "You must be doing a great job of raising your children." That's how they made sense of that. And I guess it was true, but really, I'm doing a great job of raising my children.

They give me the credit for that. And this is where I'm going is that I can't take the credit for that.

I think that that hostess, Arcella, was kind of special in noticing us, that elderly couple was very kind in saying the things that they said. But, and yeah, it's true, we do try to do a good job of raising our children. We try our best. We fail frequently. We make mistakes.

We keep on trying. But I haven't read many parenting books, okay? And I've come to the forms of being a parent that I have, not by some kind of self-formed thing that I can congratulate myself for, but through heritage.

It's because of what my parents have showed me in their own fallible way, and as broken creatures tend to do, they did their best. And I'm surrounded by a community of people that, by and large, we tend to try to do our best. And it has tangible effects on us. But I can't take credit for that.

So that's an attitude, I think, that I need to remind myself of frequently. And it's just, this is a gift. Heritage is a gift. So it's gratitude for the forms that you have been given. Yes, that's right. And that's just a powerful antidote in my mind against some kind of idolatry, or we could set it up as being the thing in and of itself. Yes, it's good, but it's a gift. It's grace, and it's just filled with grace.

Maybe another attitude that I'll just throw out is, I think, the attitude of humility, okay? Where when we take on ourselves humility and cultivate it, we can give up on this terrible burden of being the self-made person, right?

You can give up on the lie, I think, in humility that freedom is just going where we want to go. It's doing what we want to do and of just accumulating resources to do more and more things. And we say that's what freedom is like.

Humility takes us a different direction. It allows us to actually admire heroes for who they are and try to cultivate the kind of personality that they are. It allows us to submit ourselves to authorities that are actually put there both for our guidance, but also, I think, to show us the ways that are actually going to cultivate us as people. This is very hard to do, and it requires humility to do that. But maybe you see it as a cost maybe of joining ourselves to a heritage. But in the end, humility is what gives us the freedom that we really need to perform as the kinds of people we really want to be, okay? It allows us to live into a legacy that's larger than we are as individuals.

So two attitudes and gratefulness and humility somewhere toward the middle, I think.

And you had mentioned some questions. Did you have some questions you wanted to bring up? Well, maybe I'll just wrap it up with, yeah, these three questions as a way of making application. Now, the questions deal with who we are. It deals with where we're going and how we're getting there. And what I'm saying in this talk is basically this. When we ask the question, who we are, what I'm saying is, you are not your own. We're not our own. And so much of our story has been told as Christians before we're born. Part of living into a heritage is acknowledging that we are not our own.

The second question that I'll ask and respond to is, well, where are you going? And what I'm saying is that we're going as Christians to build Christ's kingdom, and that has a form to it. And that's the form of service and humility.

The third question is, well, how are we going to get there? And I'm suggesting that when we build with heritage, we recognize the tools that we've been handed. We learn to exercise ourselves and apply ourselves to the tools that we actually have in our hands. And we also, at the same time, we're developing the tools that we have and making them maybe just a little sharper, a little bit better than they were when we got them. Sometimes they're a little bit rusty too. And it's okay, I think, to say that. But we use those tools, and we use them to actually build something constructive.

Well, thank you. With these last questions and with your pointing us to commitment, it seems to me that you're saying something very Anabaptist. We need to make a decision. We've been given this heritage. What are we going to do with it? And I think the healthiest thing is to make a clear-cut decision. I'm going to take part in it or I'm not. And then I'm going to be thankful, and I'm going to be humble. And hopefully, if I go elsewhere, I'll do the same thing.

Which in some ways doesn't just point to baptism, though. Yes. We enter by death. Yes. And we give ourselves to it. It's not always as wonderful as we might hope. But it does open a door to eventually the resurrection. Amen. Yeah. So thank you. All right. Well, thank you for this, and we'll close on that note. Resurrection.