The Future of Tradition

The Future of Tradition

Daniel Ang
‘Tradition’ is not a word that is greeted with much enthusiasm in our time…. In today’s climate, to be ‘traditional’ is to be irrelevant, behind the times, and trapped in misguided nostalgia for a mythical ‘Golden Age’….
In contrast to that view, Catholic faith has understood ‘tradition’ as a dynamic, necessary and even creative force. Indeed, tradition has much more to do with keeping a fire going than preserving ashes. The inheritance of the past, including sacred texts, signs and practices, is read by the Church not as an obstacle to creative living in the present but as the very medium of Christian identity, growth and even development in the here and now.
Tradition continually shapes our self-understanding and identity as disciples of one who came before us and, what is more, provides almost limitless possibilities for thinking and living faithfully into the future. This is because the ‘handing on’ involved with tradition is not an object or artefact but God’s revelation in the living Christ and so it can take us into the future rather than restricting us to the past….
It goes without saying that tradition is essential to a Catholic understanding of faith…. Drawing on the language of Henri de Lubac, the Church is at heart ‘a life being passed on’ and it is the Church’s manifold tradition – including texts, teachings, images, embodied practices, narratives, theological insights, characteristic ways of speaking and acting, forms of sociality, worship and beyond – that transmits and makes accessible that sacred life from generation to generation.
Finally, given the tendency to think of tradition in static terms, it is also important to insist that each generation of believers must make this inheritance of faith truly their own, by receiving it, seeking to understand it and applying it in their own lives and in the circumstances of their time. It is only by this active and ongoing participation in tradition by disciples today, under the guidance of the Spirit, that what has been received can be passed on in a living condition and not as a museum piece or relic.
The Jesuit scholar Edward Yarnold reminds us of this living dimension of tradition when he writes,
 …  tradition is not the handing on of tablets of stone for the guidance of every age. In this process (of tradition) the act of applying the word to the situation becomes itself part of the tradition. What the Church proclaims today becomes in its turn part of the reservoir of memory on which tomorrow’s proclamation will draw.
So, as disciples of our time, we are not only inheritors of a tradition, ‘the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3) but participants and ‘extenders’ of it, called to pass on through witness, testimony, practices and signs that baptismal and eucharistic unity we ourselves have received….