Re: Tradition
[Rod Dreher  03/22 01:57 PM]

Reader Lawrence, a Protestant, says Caleb sure doesn’t sound like much of a Protestant to him. Caleb, I’ll leave answering Lawrence to you; I would only say that “Sola Scriptura” becomes problematic because there is no apparent way to determine whose interpretation of what the Bible says is binding. I don’t want to refight the Reformation on this blog — I don’t think any of us do — and let me restate again that I am not a Protestant, but I find that on most pressing questions of public morality, I have far more in common with my conservative Protestant friends than I do with liberal members of my own tradition. Nevertheless, because the Religion chapter is to a large extent about Tradition, these points are worth discussing:

You asked earlier today, "absent an authentic, authoritative tradition, how is it possible to keep religion from becoming merely the divinization of the Self’s desires? How do we keep God from looking a lot like ourselves in a time and place where individualism and self-expression are among the highest social values?"

There is a simple answer that you would get from the typical Protestant who understands and defends what it means to be a Protestant: Sola scriptura. How do we mitigate against our own selfish desires without authoritative tradition? The Bible. How do we discover what God really looks like in a time of rampant individualism? The Bible.

I would have the same answer to the question if the time and place were where collectivism and deferrence to the group are the highest social values: THE BIBLE.

Caleb Stegall doesn't sound like a Protestant; he sounds like a Catholic. As much as he sings about Tradition, he sounds like Tevye. There *is* a way for those who reject the authority of tradition to be rooted in something more permanent than themselves, and for Protestants that way is to uphold the authority of Scripture.

One could — and probably should — argue that far too many conservative Protestants are reading too much of Rick Warren and not enough of Peter, James, John, and Paul; that we not only embrace new technology (with good reason, since I believe the Reformation would have been next to impossible without the movable-type printing price) but we also make the medium more important than the message.

But unless you want to rewage the Reformation, you should understand first that Caleb Stegall's emphasis on tradition is at odds with much of historical Protestantism, and second that the Bible provides a foundation for faith even in the absence of tradition.