NOTES for Ti2 3:14-15
At all times, in the Church there were discussions about what is Tradition. For some the notion of Tradition is connected to the hoary Antiquity, with something whose roots lie in the depths of history. Young churches and communities as a rule are refused of tradition: because here it is not usually a question of several centuries of history. However Paul's words addressed to Timothy, say that the problem of Tradition is not at all the problem of the antiquity of these elements, of which it is composed.
Indeed, Paul calls precisely Timothy in particular to keep the Traditions, despite the fact that the history of the Church had only a few decades. What thus forms its basis? And which are its distinctive characteristics? First of all, on the base of the tradition lies faithfulness, faithfulness in "what is learned". Without such faithfulness, it is clear that it can’t be about any Tradition: because the bearer of any tradition is such only as long as it remains for him a natural and organic form of personal existence, as spiritual, quite as existentialist.
The man, whose tradition declared by him remains something external, is not a bearer of it, even if he knows it well enough, quite as is not the bearer of the language the one who studied it as a foreign language, even if the student speaks the foreign language freely. But when it comes to language, the problem is simply solved: it is about the language studied at childhood, as everyone studies his native language. There are of course also traditions studied in childhood, base in tribal or national myth received at that moment, in childhood.
Such language and such myth in fact form what we usually call tribal or national sense of self. But indeed, it is impossible to learn Tradition from childhood: we are not born Christian, but we become it. Here on the basis of everything lays the personal spiritual experience, reinforced by the experience of the Holy Scriptures. Why then it is precisely the Holy Scriptures that plays here a so important role? Of course it is not because the Bible contains answers to all questions.
It is about another thing: it reflects the communion with God typical, character for every time. Of course, if it is not all, then a lot of what are described in the biblical books are described by those or according to the words of those, with whom what is described occurred for the first time in the history of the humanity. But "for the first time" doesn’t mean "never again": what is described by the pioneers of the spirit becomes after a part of the experience of many (although we cannot speak about the massive character here: "the small herd" remains small).
And these many can always turn to the experience of the predecessors to compare their experience with theirs. So is born the real Tradition: not of the antiquity, but the essential, the spiritual unity binding all those who go on the way of righteousness and seek the Kingdom. Indeed, and God, and the way of righteousness, and the Kingdom are identical at all times. Unlike the variable human fashion, they do not change with years. And the Kingdom unites all those who became its resident. Independently of era, of language and of religion.