Friday, August 1, 2008

Tradition Isn't a Bad Word

Though some Protestants have taken an extremely negative view of the concept of tradition--some to the point of rejecting anything even a few years old--other, more informed, Protestants have understood that a biblical faith does not entail automatic rejection of something just because it is old. A good example of this is John Milton, the British poet who swallowed whole the entire Western tradition as a Protestant and made great poetry out of it.

James Kurth, a political science professor and a Presbyterian Elder, shows how we can again go about this biblically shaped conservancy in his article "Western Tradition, Our Tradition". Tradition is not a dirty word.