Tradition ~ It Must Live & Breathe

This is the kind of thing I love about the Anglican way:

After all, the great Confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were hardly the product of leisured academics, saying their prayers and thinking through issues in an abstract way, without a care in the world. Those were turbulent, dangerous and violent times, and the Westminster Confession on the one hand, the Thirty-Nine Articles of my own church on the other, and many more besides, emerged from the titanic struggle to preach the gospel, to order the church, and to let both have their proper impact on the political and social world of the day, while avoiding the all too obvious mistakes of large parts of medieval Catholicism (equally obvious, it should be said, to many Roman Catholics then and now). When people in that situation are eager to make their point, they are likely to overstate it, just as we are today. Wise later readers will honor them, but not canonize them, by thinking through their statements afresh in the light of Scripture itself.

– N.T. Wright, Justification: God’s Plan & Paul’s Vision

An excellent description of the way that tradition works in the three-legged stool of Scripture, Reason & Tradition.