Scripture and Tradition

"Tradition" has a bad reputation in a lot of the church world I grew up in. It sounds like dead ritual, going through the motions, "religion instead of relationship." The verse that comes to mind is Jesus rebuking the Pharisees for "holding to the tradition of men" while setting aside the commandment of God (Mark 7:8).

But look at how the rest of our lives actually work. We're built on traditions.

My family has the way we do Christmas, the way we celebrate birthdays, and our flagship meal whenever we host: Costco tri-tip, corn on the cob buttered, salted, peppered and wrapped in tin foil, grilled onions, and a salad. Couples have their own small rituals. Sports teams have the way they warm up, the way they huddle, the things you just do because that's how this program does it. A good company has a culture that nobody wrote all the way down but every new hire picks up. Even the words I'm typing are a tradition: nobody invented English from scratch, we received it.

Those traditions aren't empty. They do real work for us:

• They carry what works. Nobody has to rediscover from zero how to raise kids, run a practice, or hold a family together. Someone already learned it the hard way and handed it down.
• They give us identity. They tell us who we are and who we belong to.
• They hold memory. They keep the people who came before us present, even after they're gone.
• They give stability. When life is chaotic, the familiar rhythm holds us steady.

The same is true of relationships, which is ironic given the "religion instead of relationship" line. Good relationships don't run on spontaneity alone. A marriage thrives on consistent effort: the weekly date night, the way you say goodnight, the anniversary you mark every year, the phone call you make even when you're tired. Friendships last because someone keeps showing up for the standing breakfast or the yearly trip. Kids feel secure because of the bedtime routine and the family dinner, repeated so many times they stop noticing it. Nobody would say a couple's traditions make their love less real. The traditions are how the love is kept alive. If that's true of every relationship we have, it would be strange if it weren't true of the relationship between Christ and his bride, the whole Church together (Ephesians 5:25–32).

Tradition matters most when you're training for something. Picture two guys signed up for the same Ironman: a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a full marathon, back to back. The first commits to a proven training plan. He swims the same mornings every week, does his long ride every Saturday and his long run every Sunday, and keeps that rhythm for months, especially on the days he doesn't feel like it. The second trains when he's motivated, changes his routine every time he reads something new, and skips the sessions that feel boring. By race day the difference isn't talent. The first guy has been formed by a regimen he didn't invent, one that coaches and athletes refined long before him. The second has only been formed by his own moods. The regimen didn't box the first guy in. It's what carried him to the finish line. Paul reached for the same picture when he wrote that every athlete "exercises self-control in all things" (1 Corinthians 9:25).

That idea is catching on across the Protestant world. Dallas Willard, in The Spirit of the Disciplines, argued that we don't become like Jesus by trying harder in the moment but by training: arranging our lives around the practices Jesus himself kept, like solitude, prayer, fasting, Scripture, and Sabbath. John Mark Comer has brought the same message to a new generation through Practicing the Way, calling Christians to a "rule of life," a set of shared rhythms meant to form us over years. A lot of evangelicals are now fasting, keeping a Sabbath, praying at fixed hours, and reading Scripture slowly and prayerfully.

What's striking is where those practices come from. None of them were invented by modern evangelicals. They were kept, refined, and handed down for nearly two thousand years by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, the same churches many Protestants grew up thinking of as "just tradition." The spiritual disciplines are traditions. A Protestant picking up fasting or fixed-hour prayer is, whether they put it this way or not, rediscovering the value of what was handed down.

I believe this is exactly the right way to approach the Christian life, and salvation itself. Paul tells the Philippians to "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:12–13). He isn't telling them to earn something they don't have. He's telling them that salvation is something to be lived out, grown into, and trained for, every day, with the seriousness it deserves. And the second half of the verse matters just as much as the first: we can train with confidence because God is the one at work in us. Paul says it even more plainly to Timothy: "train yourself for godliness" (1 Timothy 4:7). The word he uses is the one Greeks used for athletes in the gymnasium. Salvation isn't a box I checked at eight years old on Good Friday. It's a lifelong formation, and the disciplines handed down by the Church are the training plan.

Rhythms between the Bride and the Bridegroom

For Catholics and Orthodox Christians, these practices aren't self-improvement habits that individuals pick and choose. They're the shared life of the Church, the rhythms by which Christ's bride keeps company with her Bridegroom. The goal isn't productivity or even just good character. It's union with God. The Orthodox call it theosis, drawing on Peter's words that we may "become partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). Catholics speak of growing in holiness and communion with God until we see him face to face. Either way, the point is the same as in a marriage: you keep the rhythms because they draw you closer to the one you love.

Think about how traditions form in a relationship. Nobody starts a marriage with them all figured out. Over the years you get a feel for what draws you closer and what doesn't. Some rituals stick, some fade, and the ones that last get refined until it feels like they were always there. The Church's traditions formed the same way. Christ and his bride didn't arrive at them all at once. They were learned over centuries, practiced by ordinary believers and shaped by bishops, councils, monks, and saints, the people the Church recognized as having authority to guard and develop what had been handed down. Who actually holds that authority, and why it matters so much how we decide, is a big enough question that I'll give it its own article. But first it's worth being clear about what these traditions are for.

Not to earn, but to draw near

It's easy to look at fasting, liturgy, and set prayers and assume they're a way of earning your way to God. That isn't how Catholics or Orthodox understand them. Both are clear that grace comes first: God moves toward us before we ever move toward him, and nothing we do buys his love. The traditions aren't a ladder up to God. They're how we respond to him and make room for him, the way you don't earn your spouse's love by keeping your anniversary, but you do keep it alive.

They do that in two ways.

Self-denial. Jesus said that anyone who would follow him must "deny himself and take up his cross daily" (Luke 9:23). Fasting, waking early to pray, confessing out loud: each one loosens the grip of our own appetites and pride. The Orthodox describe the goal as freedom from the "passions," the cravings that run us. It's the same logic as the Ironman training plan. You say no to small things so you're free for the thing that matters.

Sharing in Christ's life, including his sufferings. Paul wanted to "know him and the power of his resurrection, and share his sufferings" (Philippians 3:10). Many of the Church's rhythms are built to walk with Jesus where he went. The Orthodox fast on Wednesdays and Fridays to remember his betrayal and his crucifixion. Lent leads the whole Church through the wilderness and into Holy Week before it ever reaches Easter morning. Catholics speak even more directly about uniting our own sufferings to Christ's, the old instruction to "offer it up." The Orthodox put it a bit differently, more as dying to self than as suffering offered up, but in both cases the point is to be close to Jesus in his suffering, not to pay for anything.

And then there is the other half: feasting. The Bride doesn't only fast. The fasts always end in a feast, Christmas after Advent and Easter after Lent, and the self-denial makes the feast taste like what it is. Here are some of those rhythms, briefly, and what each one is for.

The Eucharist

What it is: the weekly sharing of bread and wine that Catholics and Orthodox believe truly become Christ's body and blood, celebrated every Sunday since the earliest Christian gatherings.

What it's for: this is the closest union the Bride has with her Bridegroom on this side of heaven. It isn't just remembering him. It's receiving him. It's meant to be the center of every week, not something that comes around once a month, and every other tradition points toward it.

Fasting and the church year

What it is: a yearly calendar that walks through the life of Christ, from waiting in Advent to his birth, his forty days in the wilderness, the cross, the empty tomb, and the coming of the Spirit, with seasons of fasting (Lent, plus weekly fasts) and seasons of feasting.

What it's for: when Jesus was asked why his disciples didn't fast, he answered with a wedding picture: "The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast" (Matthew 9:15). Fasting is the Bride longing for the Bridegroom. The hunger becomes a kind of prayer, and it trains us to want him more than our next meal. The calendar does what an anniversary does in a marriage. You don't mark it because you forgot you were married. You mark it so you don't drift.

Fixed-hour prayer

What it is: praying at set times throughout the day, mostly using the Psalms, a practice organized by monks over many centuries. Alongside it are short prayers repeated through the day: the Jesus Prayer in the East ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner") and the Rosary in the West.

What it's for: turning the whole day back toward him, again and again. It's like calling your wife in the middle of a busy workday, not because there's news, but because you want to hear her voice. It also cuts into our own agenda on purpose, which is its own small self-denial.

Confession and the sacraments

What it is: both churches recognize seven sacraments, or "mysteries," where they believe God meets us through physical things: water, oil, bread, wine, words, and hands. Confession is the one many Protestants find strangest: telling your sins out loud to God in front of a priest and hearing that you're forgiven.

What it's for: grace isn't only an idea we agree with. It's something we receive, in our bodies. Confession in particular is humility practiced. It's like a marriage where both people know how to say "I was wrong, I'm sorry" and mean it. The relationships that last are the ones where that happens regularly, not only when things fall apart.

The saints and the icons

What it is: remembering the faithful who went before, keeping their feast days, asking for their prayers, and, especially in the East, honoring icons of Christ and the saints.

What it's for: the Bride isn't only the people alive right now. Hebrews 12:1 says we are "surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses," and the Church has always read that as more than a figure of speech. The saints who have finished their race aren't gone or asleep. They're alive in Christ, they see us, and they pray for us. The Catholic Catechism puts it this way: they "contemplate God, praise him and constantly care for those whom they have left on earth" (§2683). In an Orthodox church you can see the idea on the walls. The icons of the saints surround the congregation on every side, so when the Church gathers to worship, it worships with the whole family of heaven, not just the people in the room.

St. John Chrysostom, the great fourth-century preacher whose liturgy the Orthodox still pray every Sunday, noticed the wording of that verse in his sermons on Hebrews. Paul doesn't say the witnesses are high above us, Chrysostom pointed out, but "compassing us about," all around us, "so that we are in greater security." Like a crowd lining the course of a race, they're close, and they're for us.

G. K. Chesterton called tradition "the democracy of the dead," giving a vote to the generations before us. In the Church, those generations aren't just remembered. They're still part of the family, and they show us what union with Christ actually looks like in a human life.

I want to be upfront about why I've laid these out this way. You don't have to agree with every Catholic or Orthodox belief to see that the reasons behind these practices are good ones. Denying yourself to make room for God, walking with Jesus through his suffering, coming back to him at set times every day, saying sorry out loud, remembering the people who went before you: those aren't empty rituals. They're the same things that make every other relationship in our lives work. I want you to see that the reasons are valid, whatever you end up concluding about the rest.

Where these practices came from

None of these appeared overnight. Here's roughly when each one shows up and how it grew. Dates for the earliest centuries are approximate.

The Eucharist. Jesus instituted it at the Last Supper, around AD 30, and the first believers in Jerusalem broke bread together from the start. A church manual called the Didache (around AD 100) already includes prayers for it, and Justin Martyr (around AD 155) describes a Sunday service of readings, a sermon, prayers, and communion that looks much like a Mass or Divine Liturgy today. The full liturgies still used were written down by bishops in the fourth century, most famously St. Basil and St. John Chrysostom in the East.

Sunday and the church year. Christians gathered on Sunday, the day of the resurrection, from the apostles' time. Easter was being celebrated by the second century, and the Council of Nicaea (325) set a common way of dating it. Lent's forty days are mentioned at that same council and were widespread by the late 300s. The first record of Christmas on December 25 comes from Rome in 336. Advent took shape in the 400s and 500s.

Fasting. The Didache (around AD 100) tells Christians to fast every Wednesday and Friday. The Orthodox still do. Lent grew into the main fasting season in the 300s, and the Orthodox Church's other fasting seasons (before Christmas, before the feast of Peter and Paul, and before the feast of Mary's falling asleep in August) took their settled form over the following centuries.

Fixed-hour prayer. It comes straight out of Jewish practice. The Didache tells Christians to pray the Lord's Prayer three times a day, and early third-century writers like Tertullian and Hippolytus describe praying at set hours. The monks of the Egyptian desert built that into a full daily cycle in the 300s, and St. Benedict's Rule (around 530) organized it into the pattern Western monasteries and the Liturgy of the Hours still follow. The Jesus Prayer grew out of those same desert monks and flourished in the 1300s. The Rosary developed in the West between the 1100s and 1400s and was standardized in 1569.

Confession and the sacraments. Baptism and the Eucharist go back to the beginning, as do anointing the sick and laying on hands. In the early centuries, confession was public and mostly reserved for serious sins. Private confession to a priest spread from Irish monasteries in the 500s and 600s, and in 1215 the Catholic Church asked every believer to confess at least once a year. The list of exactly seven sacraments was set out by the theologian Peter Lombard in the 1100s and formally defined by Catholic councils in the 1200s through 1500s. The Orthodox generally count the same seven, though they've never treated the number as strictly closed.

The saints and the icons. In the 150s, the church in Smyrna wrote that it would gather every year on the anniversary of its bishop Polycarp's martyrdom, one of the earliest saint's days we know of. Christian paintings of Christ and the saints appear in the Roman catacombs in the 200s. After a century of fighting over icons, the Second Council of Nicaea (787) defended honoring them, and their final restoration in 843 is still celebrated by the Orthodox every year on the first Sunday of Lent.

Don't tear down the fence

In the sixteenth century, the Reformers looked at all of this and decided much of it had to go. They had real complaints. There were genuine abuses in the medieval church, and indulgences were being sold. But in reforming, many Protestant churches also cut away practices the Church had kept since its earliest centuries. Five of the seven sacraments were set aside. Weekly communion became quarterly in many churches. Icons and statues were smashed. Feasts, fasts, and the daily hours largely disappeared. Some went further: the Puritan Parliament in England abolished Christmas in 1647, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony fined anyone caught celebrating it from 1659 to 1681. Not every Protestant church went as far. Lutherans and Anglicans kept much of the liturgy and the church year. But the overall result was a Christianity with far fewer rhythms than the one before it.

Chesterton offered a useful rule here. If you come across a fence in the middle of a field and can't see why it's there, don't tear it down until you find out. Practices that the Church kept for fifteen hundred years, across every continent and culture it reached, deserve the benefit of that doubt. Whether the Reformers had the authority to clear those fences, and whether they were right to, is a question I'll take on in a later article. It's too important to rush.

What I'm convinced of now is this: those traditions are worth remembering and practicing, not discarding because some people in the sixteenth century decided to. The historian Jaroslav Pelikan put it well: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." The goal isn't to go through the motions. It's what every good marriage and every good training plan already teaches us: the rhythms, kept faithfully over years, are how love grows and how we are formed. They're how the Bride stays close to the Bridegroom.