Journey Into Divine Intimacy

In part 1 of this series, I introduced the process of traditioning and documented how it was used in the Bible. In this post I will trace how this traditioning process was used in the early church. First we will construct a narrative for the traditioning process up to and including the apostles. Second, we will explore the importance of the oral component of the tradition. The Christian Tradition in the Apostolic Era From Scripture we can reconstruct this narrative about the uniquely Christian tradition and the initial stages of its transmission: God the Father is the ultimate source of the Christian tradition, and the Son is the agent through whom it is initially transmitted: "All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him" (Matthew 11:27). As the incarnate Word of God, the Son orally transmits a portion of the tradition to his ...

A friend recently asked me this question: "I ... wondered how you now conceive of your sources of authority. How do you conceive now of the authority of the Scriptures? Are they ultimate in authority, or part of a wider 'stream' of inspiration and authority?" This question deserves a substantial reply, so I am going to use multiple blog posts to answer it. Although the question does not used the word tradition , I understand it to be asking about my relationship to tradition . In the Evangelical tradition of my upbringing, the word  tradition  was a bad word. It was mainly used pejoratively to ridicule people of other faith traditions, most notably Roman Catholics. Ironically, the pejorative users of this word rarely ever realized that they had their own traditions and unconsciously operated within them. In retrospect, one of the differences between the Evangelicalism I experienced and Orthodoxy is that of self-awareness. As an Evangelical--unaware or even in denia...