Guard the Good Deposit

20 • Guard the Good Deposit: The Great Tradition for the Whole Church

West, the division between Catholic and Protestant dates to the 1500’s. Without idealizing the ancient Church, we can say that it was essentially one body during the time of the Great Tradition. The Great Tradition, therefore, belongs to every branch of the Church as our common heritage. We do not need to give up the unique identity and history of our own traditions to retrieve the Great Tradition. “[The core tenets of the Great Tradition] represent the common roots of the Christian faith that, freshly understood and practiced, can bring renewal and revival to the fractured, splintered, and confused practice in many of our churches today.” 4 Is this stuffy high church? Aren’t you forcing your culture on everyone? Does retrieving the Great Tradition threaten our cultural identity? Retrieving the Great Tradition does not demand that we change our culture. We suffer from the confusion of the Great Tradition itself with the specific cultural ways that the Church has expressed the tradition throughout history. Tradition (or what is handed down) comes in three varieties. 5 First, we have the authoritative tradition of the Apostles and the Prophets, the Scriptures

4 Davis, Sacred Roots , p. 33

5 For more detail on this see Appendix 3, Traditions , on page 65.