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To: Mrs. Don-o
Not any old tradition, mind you, but that which comes from the Apostles.

If you're going to claim this, then please do us all the truly great service of posting an official list of Apostolic Traditions and demonstrate that they have existed since the Apostles were on earth. It would be an amazing blessing to finally see this list!

93 posted on 08/09/2016 9:34:44 AM PDT by aMorePerfectUnion
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To: aMorePerfectUnion
If you think "Apostolic Traditions" consist chiefly of an "official list," you are from the outset imposing artificial conditions, and misapprehending the meaning of Apostolic Tradition.

Yes, some of it consists of lists: the first and most important element of Apostolic Tradition is the canon of Scripture, both OT and NT. And that ---the canon --- is, precisely, a Table of Contents. An official list. So that part you got exactly right.

(Nice to be right, hey?)

The rest of the Apostolic Tradition,which we can derive from the practices of the early Church, would be:

There's more; it's not all contained in lists.

Now let me try a home-based analogy which may lllustrate why "Apostolic Tradition" cannot be a matter of "official lists." Say your family has been getting together for a big Thanksgiving feast every year since anone can remember: you personally have remembrance dating from approx. 1988, but it started way before that.

You could make a list of the particulars of this observance, perhaps rather scatterd and fragmentary at first:

The giving the the Five Flavor Pound Cake recipe to Patricia can be documented (e-mail, 2004) and Daddy Robert's passing (obit 1994) and Mama Flugehorn's passing can be documented (obit, 2015), and going through her personal papers, we've come across a lot of letters as well as piles of photographs dating back to the end of WWII. All of this is in boxes and manila envelopes, as yet un-sorted and un-organized.

But other than that, very little of this is strictly "documented". It might get written down IF James finishes doing the family tree that Mama was working on, AND writes up some of the archives. We don't want to lose the story of how Robert's father, a sheriff's deputy, died by drowning in the river while trying to re-capture an escaped convict; we also don't want to lose the story of the death of poor Janna, or the story of how Daddy Robert apparently had some kind of luminous vision before he died. He couldn't speak, but if you'd seen his face...

Meanwhile, we know it because we lived it, and are still living it.

In the same way, that's how we got, for instance, the "canon" --- not because somebody decreed it, but because these were, in practice, the texts the churches were already and actually using liturgically. We do things because this is the way, in practice, things have been done in the Churches. A lot could change incrementally, yet everything is the same. Thanksgiving does not morph into Eid Al-Fitr, it doesn't turn into drunken casino outing, it's always bound together by the ONGOING sense of tradition and propriety of an ONGOING loving Christian family.

Once you "get" that, , the particulars can all be put together, scouted out by the scholars, properly comprehended. Then you may make all the lists you please.

If you don't "get" that, NOTHING can be properly comprehended, no matter how many lists you have.

170 posted on 08/09/2016 3:55:36 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o (Jesus, my Lord, my God, my All.)
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