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The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
In this carefully reasoned book, noted historian and theologian Jaroslav Pelikan offers a moving and spirited defense of the importance of tradition.
“Magisterial…. Ought not to be missed.”―M.D. Aeschliman, National Review
“A soul-stirring self-analysis, no less than a distillation of the life-work of the living historian best qualified to provide solutions to those ‘Tradition versus Bible-Only’ controversies that have plagued Christianity since the Reformation.”―L.K. Shook, Canadian Catholic Review
“Admirably concise and penetrating.”―Merle Rubin, The Christian Science Monitor
“It takes a scholar thoroughly steeped in a subject to be able to write with lucidity and charm about its traditions. When the scholar is Dr. Pelikan, the result is a kind of classic, something sure to become a standard text for an interested public.”―Northrop Frye
“Wit, grace, style, and wisdom vie with knowledge. A rare combination, delightful to mind and memory. Recommended broadly for scholarly and general use on many levels, and especially among theology students, undergraduate and graduate.”― Choice
“Pelikan’s customary erudition, wit, and gracious style are evident throughout this stimulating volume.”―Harold E. Remus, Religious Studies Review
“The book clearly constitutes a unified plea that modern society finds ways and means to recapture the resources of the past and to overcome its fear of the tyranny of the dead.”―Heiko A. Oberman, Times Literary Supplement
Jaroslav Pelikan is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. Among his many books are Jesus Through the Centuries and the multivolume work The Christian Tradition.
“Magisterial…. Ought not to be missed.”―M.D. Aeschliman, National Review
“A soul-stirring self-analysis, no less than a distillation of the life-work of the living historian best qualified to provide solutions to those ‘Tradition versus Bible-Only’ controversies that have plagued Christianity since the Reformation.”―L.K. Shook, Canadian Catholic Review
“Admirably concise and penetrating.”―Merle Rubin, The Christian Science Monitor
“It takes a scholar thoroughly steeped in a subject to be able to write with lucidity and charm about its traditions. When the scholar is Dr. Pelikan, the result is a kind of classic, something sure to become a standard text for an interested public.”―Northrop Frye
“Wit, grace, style, and wisdom vie with knowledge. A rare combination, delightful to mind and memory. Recommended broadly for scholarly and general use on many levels, and especially among theology students, undergraduate and graduate.”― Choice
“Pelikan’s customary erudition, wit, and gracious style are evident throughout this stimulating volume.”―Harold E. Remus, Religious Studies Review
“The book clearly constitutes a unified plea that modern society finds ways and means to recapture the resources of the past and to overcome its fear of the tyranny of the dead.”―Heiko A. Oberman, Times Literary Supplement
Jaroslav Pelikan is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. Among his many books are Jesus Through the Centuries and the multivolume work The Christian Tradition.
104 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1984
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About the author
Jaroslav Pelikan
176 books132 followersJaroslav Jan Pelikan was born in Akron, Ohio, to a Slovak father and mother, Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Sr. and Anna Buzekova Pelikan. His father was pastor of Trinity Slovak Lutheran Church in Chicago, Illinois, and his paternal grandfather a bishop of the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches then known as the Slovak Lutheran Church in America.
According to family members, Pelikan's mother taught him how to use a typewriter when he was three years old, as he could not yet hold a pen properly but wanted to write. A polyglot, Pelikan's facility with languages may be traced to his multilingual childhood and early training. That linguistic facility was to serve him in the career he ultimately chose (after contemplating becoming a concert pianist)--as a historian of Christian doctrine. He did not confine his studies to Roman Catholic and Protestant theological history, but also embraced that of the Christian East.
In 1946 when he was 22, he earned both a seminary degree from Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis, Missouri and a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.
Pelikan wrote more than 30 books, including the five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (1971–1989). Some of his later works attained crossover appeal, reaching beyond the scholarly sphere into the general reading public (notably, Mary Through the Centuries, Jesus Through the Centuries and Whose Bible Is It?).
His 1984 book The Vindication of Tradition gave rise to an often quoted one liner. In an interview in U.S. News & World Report (June 26, 1989), he said: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide.
"Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition."
According to family members, Pelikan's mother taught him how to use a typewriter when he was three years old, as he could not yet hold a pen properly but wanted to write. A polyglot, Pelikan's facility with languages may be traced to his multilingual childhood and early training. That linguistic facility was to serve him in the career he ultimately chose (after contemplating becoming a concert pianist)--as a historian of Christian doctrine. He did not confine his studies to Roman Catholic and Protestant theological history, but also embraced that of the Christian East.
In 1946 when he was 22, he earned both a seminary degree from Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis, Missouri and a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.
Pelikan wrote more than 30 books, including the five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (1971–1989). Some of his later works attained crossover appeal, reaching beyond the scholarly sphere into the general reading public (notably, Mary Through the Centuries, Jesus Through the Centuries and Whose Bible Is It?).
His 1984 book The Vindication of Tradition gave rise to an often quoted one liner. In an interview in U.S. News & World Report (June 26, 1989), he said: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide.
"Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition."
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
August 2, 2016
After reading most of The World Beyond Your Head by Matthew Crawford, which argues for the loss of tradition in our culture, I was interested in reading this book. I have always really viewed Pelikan as one of those rare, master-readers who seems to have been able to read everything. This book is a collection of four lectures. Perhaps a quote from the last lecture (which is also in the introduction to his 5 part set on History of Church Doctrine) says what he is trying to examine:
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition a bad name." (65)
At the end of the first lecture he quotes the poet Czeslaw Milosz:
"Certainly, the illiterate of past centuries, then an enormous majority of mankind, knew little of the history of their respective countries and of their civilization" ... Pelikan continues "yet their lives were decisively shaped by that history. In fact, so long as the tradition is not understood, some parts of it, however transmuted they may be, can continue to be dominant..." (19-20)
From there he makes a bold, but important statement - "Knowledge of the traditions that have shaped us, for good or ill or some of both, is not a sufficient preparation for the kind of future that will face our children and grandchildren in the twenty-first century--not sufficient preparation, but a necessary preparation." (20)
I agree and he makes this case only stronger in later lectures. As a conclusion he gives a definition of tradition from Edmund Burke:
Tradition is "a partnership in all science, all art, every virture ... between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." I like this picture of tradition.
The second lecture takes Newman as a case study. Newman, famously, converted to Catholicism writing late in his life "to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant." (40) I think its obvious why Newman would write this ... often Protestants talk of church history in three figures - Paul - Augustine - Luther/Calvin. Of course, that is ridiculous, but the reason is given earlier in the lectures. Pelikan writes about the "sharp distinction between gospel and tradition" as a "major plank in the platform of the Protestant Reformation". This anti-traditionalism in the Protestant Christianity has, itself, become a tradition.
But, what drew me to this book and what I was really interested in exploring is tradition in general terms. Pelikan opens lecture three with a quote from Daniel Boorstin's book on the lost world of Jefferson:
"The Jeffersonian was not confined by any particular tradition: he had sought to reform the Christian tradition, he had disavowed the humanist tradition, and he had set himself outside the English tradition. The past, through which other men had discovered human possibilities, was for him corrupt and dead." (43)
From there he explains in brief how the 16th century Reformation which critiqued "the papacy and the sacraments and the legends of the saints" leads to the Enlightenment of the 18th century which continued critiquing ... but even those which Protestants had "declared out of bounds. ... Once it had been set free to do its work, the method of historical-critical study could not accept the notion of any privileged sanctuary ... " (44-45)
And Pelikan writes about the riches and vast scholarly work that comes out of this historical-criticism and higher criticism. Their efforts to read all the various versions, to read all the contemporary writings to give context, etc. will likely never be repeated. And we cannot go back ... the "garrison mentality" will not work.
However, their interpretations are not pure either. We must have turn on these late traditions the same critical eye and when we do we see: "that for many of them the rejection of the authority of tradition came first, and only then the discovery that tradition was historically relative (which was then used to justify the rejection). ... [and] there was a highly selective process of identifying those chapters from the total history of tradition that would strikingly document the way the historical environment has molded the development of tradition and the way this development has therefore manifested constant change" (47-48)
Pelikan says the "evidences for historical continuity ... have tended to receive far less attention in the scholarly literature." (48) giving communion as an example: "the changes in theory were attempts to make sense of the continuing practice." (49)
Here is a key point and something missing both from the non-religionless anti-tradition views so foundational to this country and I think typical of silicon valley, etc & protestant anti-tradition.
"we do not have a choice between being shaped by our intellectual and spiritual DNA and not being shaped by it, as though we had sprung into being by some kind of cultural spontaneous generation." (53) The question is "whether to be conscious participants or unconscious victims." (53)
He says we have two grandmothers - Jerusalem and Athens. From there he briefly explains the 8th century debates on the use of images, distinguishing idols, tokens and icons. He does this so he can explain that when "Tradition becomes an idol, accordingly, when it makes the preservation and the repetition of the past an end in itself; it claims to have the transcendent reality and truth captive and encapsulated in the past, and it requires an idolatrous submission to the authority of tradition, since truth would not dare to appear outside it." (55)
But he says that when Jefferson and the Enlightenment rejected this idolatry, they saw it all as a token ... Athens and Jerusalem were arbitrary and once we pry out the universal truths and values we don't need any of their particulars. "That view of tradition seems to assume, however, that the tradition will not be replaced by something far worse, and that the universal truths and values, once attained, no longer need the tradition to sustain them--an assumption for which the history of the past two centuries does not provide any great measure of reassurance. For, as Clifford Geertz has pointed out, 'It is, in fact, precisely at the point at which a political system begins to free itself from the immediate governance of received traditions ... that formal ideologies tend first to emerge and take hold.'" (56)
OK. So what about icon as a way to view tradition. Tradition is not "coextensive with the truth it teaches, but does present itself as the way that we who are its heirs must follow if we are to go beyond it--through it, but beyond it--to a universal truth that is available only in a particular embodiment ... it refuses to choose between the false alternatives of universal and particular, knowing that an authentic icon, a living tradition, must be both." (56-57)
This is big and interesting that earlier he argues it is tradition that allows us to have a both/and rather than an either/or perspective. He says a living tradition should have "capacity to develop while still maintaining its identity and continuity." This allows us to see the development of doctrine as a sign of vitality (rather than simply an example of its relativity). It also allows us a different frame for which to approach the development of doctrine.
The "development is real but it goes on within the limits of identity, which the tradition defines and continues to redefine. Like any growth, development may be healthy or it may be malignant; discerning the difference between these two kinds of growth requires constant research into the pathology of traditions. But it is healthy development that keeps a tradition both out of the cancer ward and out of the fossil museum." (60)
Ultimately ... "tradition will be vindicated for us, for each of us as an individual and for us as a community, by how it manages to accord with our own deepest intuitions and highest aspirations ... these intuitions and aspirations tell us that there must be a way of holding together what the vicissitudes of our experience have driven apart--our realism about the fallen world and our hope for what the world may still become, our private integrity and our public duty, our hunger for community and our yearning for personal fulfillment ..." (60)
He completes the lectures with a quote from Goethe's Faust:
What you have as heritage,
Take now as task;
For thus you will make it your own!
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition a bad name." (65)
At the end of the first lecture he quotes the poet Czeslaw Milosz:
"Certainly, the illiterate of past centuries, then an enormous majority of mankind, knew little of the history of their respective countries and of their civilization" ... Pelikan continues "yet their lives were decisively shaped by that history. In fact, so long as the tradition is not understood, some parts of it, however transmuted they may be, can continue to be dominant..." (19-20)
From there he makes a bold, but important statement - "Knowledge of the traditions that have shaped us, for good or ill or some of both, is not a sufficient preparation for the kind of future that will face our children and grandchildren in the twenty-first century--not sufficient preparation, but a necessary preparation." (20)
I agree and he makes this case only stronger in later lectures. As a conclusion he gives a definition of tradition from Edmund Burke:
Tradition is "a partnership in all science, all art, every virture ... between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born." I like this picture of tradition.
The second lecture takes Newman as a case study. Newman, famously, converted to Catholicism writing late in his life "to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant." (40) I think its obvious why Newman would write this ... often Protestants talk of church history in three figures - Paul - Augustine - Luther/Calvin. Of course, that is ridiculous, but the reason is given earlier in the lectures. Pelikan writes about the "sharp distinction between gospel and tradition" as a "major plank in the platform of the Protestant Reformation". This anti-traditionalism in the Protestant Christianity has, itself, become a tradition.
But, what drew me to this book and what I was really interested in exploring is tradition in general terms. Pelikan opens lecture three with a quote from Daniel Boorstin's book on the lost world of Jefferson:
"The Jeffersonian was not confined by any particular tradition: he had sought to reform the Christian tradition, he had disavowed the humanist tradition, and he had set himself outside the English tradition. The past, through which other men had discovered human possibilities, was for him corrupt and dead." (43)
From there he explains in brief how the 16th century Reformation which critiqued "the papacy and the sacraments and the legends of the saints" leads to the Enlightenment of the 18th century which continued critiquing ... but even those which Protestants had "declared out of bounds. ... Once it had been set free to do its work, the method of historical-critical study could not accept the notion of any privileged sanctuary ... " (44-45)
And Pelikan writes about the riches and vast scholarly work that comes out of this historical-criticism and higher criticism. Their efforts to read all the various versions, to read all the contemporary writings to give context, etc. will likely never be repeated. And we cannot go back ... the "garrison mentality" will not work.
However, their interpretations are not pure either. We must have turn on these late traditions the same critical eye and when we do we see: "that for many of them the rejection of the authority of tradition came first, and only then the discovery that tradition was historically relative (which was then used to justify the rejection). ... [and] there was a highly selective process of identifying those chapters from the total history of tradition that would strikingly document the way the historical environment has molded the development of tradition and the way this development has therefore manifested constant change" (47-48)
Pelikan says the "evidences for historical continuity ... have tended to receive far less attention in the scholarly literature." (48) giving communion as an example: "the changes in theory were attempts to make sense of the continuing practice." (49)
Here is a key point and something missing both from the non-religionless anti-tradition views so foundational to this country and I think typical of silicon valley, etc & protestant anti-tradition.
"we do not have a choice between being shaped by our intellectual and spiritual DNA and not being shaped by it, as though we had sprung into being by some kind of cultural spontaneous generation." (53) The question is "whether to be conscious participants or unconscious victims." (53)
He says we have two grandmothers - Jerusalem and Athens. From there he briefly explains the 8th century debates on the use of images, distinguishing idols, tokens and icons. He does this so he can explain that when "Tradition becomes an idol, accordingly, when it makes the preservation and the repetition of the past an end in itself; it claims to have the transcendent reality and truth captive and encapsulated in the past, and it requires an idolatrous submission to the authority of tradition, since truth would not dare to appear outside it." (55)
But he says that when Jefferson and the Enlightenment rejected this idolatry, they saw it all as a token ... Athens and Jerusalem were arbitrary and once we pry out the universal truths and values we don't need any of their particulars. "That view of tradition seems to assume, however, that the tradition will not be replaced by something far worse, and that the universal truths and values, once attained, no longer need the tradition to sustain them--an assumption for which the history of the past two centuries does not provide any great measure of reassurance. For, as Clifford Geertz has pointed out, 'It is, in fact, precisely at the point at which a political system begins to free itself from the immediate governance of received traditions ... that formal ideologies tend first to emerge and take hold.'" (56)
OK. So what about icon as a way to view tradition. Tradition is not "coextensive with the truth it teaches, but does present itself as the way that we who are its heirs must follow if we are to go beyond it--through it, but beyond it--to a universal truth that is available only in a particular embodiment ... it refuses to choose between the false alternatives of universal and particular, knowing that an authentic icon, a living tradition, must be both." (56-57)
This is big and interesting that earlier he argues it is tradition that allows us to have a both/and rather than an either/or perspective. He says a living tradition should have "capacity to develop while still maintaining its identity and continuity." This allows us to see the development of doctrine as a sign of vitality (rather than simply an example of its relativity). It also allows us a different frame for which to approach the development of doctrine.
The "development is real but it goes on within the limits of identity, which the tradition defines and continues to redefine. Like any growth, development may be healthy or it may be malignant; discerning the difference between these two kinds of growth requires constant research into the pathology of traditions. But it is healthy development that keeps a tradition both out of the cancer ward and out of the fossil museum." (60)
Ultimately ... "tradition will be vindicated for us, for each of us as an individual and for us as a community, by how it manages to accord with our own deepest intuitions and highest aspirations ... these intuitions and aspirations tell us that there must be a way of holding together what the vicissitudes of our experience have driven apart--our realism about the fallen world and our hope for what the world may still become, our private integrity and our public duty, our hunger for community and our yearning for personal fulfillment ..." (60)
He completes the lectures with a quote from Goethe's Faust:
What you have as heritage,
Take now as task;
For thus you will make it your own!
January 28, 2025
Read more Pelikan.
It’s one thing to hear a dynamic quote. It’s another to read it in its context. One of my favorite moments when reading books is when I finally read a quote in context. The following quote may be my favorite quote heard first out of context, and then read in context: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living” (65). What is Pelikan after?
Pelikan is after a critical engagement with what the past does with the past (12). He’s after the non-verbal and non-conceptual element of tradition as the “final object” of his investigation (16). He’s after rediscovery, not recovery which can possibly lead to rejection of certain rediscoveries (24).
He's not after a tape recorder of tradition (81) – that would be another example of the dead faith of the living. Worse yet, it’d be idolatry since traditionolatry occurs when tradition is an end. Pelikan writes that tradition is an idol when it makes the preservation and the repetition of the past an end in itself (55).
It’s one thing to hear a dynamic quote. It’s another to read it in its context. One of my favorite moments when reading books is when I finally read a quote in context. The following quote may be my favorite quote heard first out of context, and then read in context: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living” (65). What is Pelikan after?
Pelikan is after a critical engagement with what the past does with the past (12). He’s after the non-verbal and non-conceptual element of tradition as the “final object” of his investigation (16). He’s after rediscovery, not recovery which can possibly lead to rejection of certain rediscoveries (24).
He's not after a tape recorder of tradition (81) – that would be another example of the dead faith of the living. Worse yet, it’d be idolatry since traditionolatry occurs when tradition is an end. Pelikan writes that tradition is an idol when it makes the preservation and the repetition of the past an end in itself (55).
December 17, 2009
"Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." This quote was the most salient point for me in reading this short compilation of lectures. Pelikan makes use of a number of popular figures, from Thomas Jefferson to John Henry Newmann and Ralph Waldo Emerson in addressing the importance of tradition, innovation and creativity. An interesting book, somewhat dry at points, but interesting, especially for readers who are not prone to what C.S. Lewis termed "chronological snobbery." Pelikan's notion that new is not always better, particularly in the realm of Christianity, where tradition is alive and well informed.
July 8, 2017
Ah, it was nice to read intellectual discourse again (it had been a while, especially concerning nonfiction). I don't mind name dropping, but I have Robert Duncan Culver's copy (he parted with it willingly), replete with his own comments and asides, making it a nifty bonus-filled read for me (and whoever gets it after I shuffle off). As you likely know, Mr. Pelikan is pretty top notch about things, and his insights and enjoinments and adjurations make a good deal of sense throughout his four mostly connected lectures/essays. I wish it were longer, actually. He does a fine job contextualizing all sides of the Tradition issue, including the atheists who think it's all rubbish, even pointing out how those who continue to follow Emerson's call for rejecting tradition are guilty of following a tradition. It's full of spectacular lines, none of which will be quoted here because it's all the way upstairs and I'm down here. Track this down. It's really good. Of course, if you are one of those Emersonians, you'll probably not like it because it will point out how wrong you are, yet it will do so intelligently and respectfully - something you may not be used to from people who disagree with you and write things (post things) today.
August 14, 2018
Pelikan could hardly fail to present some little thought-gems worthy of admiration. I especially enjoyed the simple but necessary distinction between rediscovery of and recovery of tradition, and his definition that "tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." Truly, progressivism of one sort or another has always been the trend of humanity (though sometimes the current moves swiftly, sometimes hardly at all), and we are constantly in need of calls back to rediscover tradition and discern what is worth recovering.
Yet, these lectures were not as staggeringly excellent as I had hoped they might prove. In some ways, they are most interesting for seeing the seeds of Pelikan's eventual conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. His examples are decidedly tinged with an edge against Luther and toward Orthodox fathers, icons, etc.
More than that, the thoughts feel surprisingly time-bound. Somehow what should be a timeless topic shows its age of 35 years and has not aged as gracefully as one might have hoped.
Altogether, not a waste of time to read, but not something that will take an honored place on my bookshelves.
Yet, these lectures were not as staggeringly excellent as I had hoped they might prove. In some ways, they are most interesting for seeing the seeds of Pelikan's eventual conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. His examples are decidedly tinged with an edge against Luther and toward Orthodox fathers, icons, etc.
More than that, the thoughts feel surprisingly time-bound. Somehow what should be a timeless topic shows its age of 35 years and has not aged as gracefully as one might have hoped.
Altogether, not a waste of time to read, but not something that will take an honored place on my bookshelves.
November 9, 2021
Pelikan's lectures on Tradition were enlightening. Among the definitions was his famous line: "Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living and Tradition is the living faith of the dead." He also discusses the antitraditionalism tradition that is the hallmark Protestantism as well as how that has influenced people from Thomas Jefferson to Emerson.
He frames his lectures in four parts: rediscovery of tradition, recovery of tradition, tradition as history, and tradition as heritage. Each of these topics covering what I think is the overarching question - do we as a society blindly follow or reject tradition (Pelikan dismisses this as immature) or do we rediscover it and then proceed to reject it or accept it?
This book has given me new ways of thinking about tradition and its significance. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone searching for tradition's significance in our lives - whether relating to personal, civic, or religious life.
He frames his lectures in four parts: rediscovery of tradition, recovery of tradition, tradition as history, and tradition as heritage. Each of these topics covering what I think is the overarching question - do we as a society blindly follow or reject tradition (Pelikan dismisses this as immature) or do we rediscover it and then proceed to reject it or accept it?
This book has given me new ways of thinking about tradition and its significance. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone searching for tradition's significance in our lives - whether relating to personal, civic, or religious life.
December 31, 2020
Fantastic little book from Pelikan on the role of tradition. He examines the role that tradition should play in our lives, and he argues against the extremes of either denial/jettisoning and blind obedience. Tradition should give us a starting place to engage with the advantage of having been tried and tested by those who came before, and it should be a place of learning and engage us in the fundamental matters of the tradition. To deny tradition altogether is to invite something else to inevitably assume the vacuum. It's a quick read, but it's helpful to digest and absorb the arguments he makes.
November 28, 2018
Fair argument for the human need of tradition: Pelikan sees it as something we must proceed "beyond, but through" in order to reach new insight. His juxtaposition of tradition vs traditionalism is probably what these lectures are most famous for, as it offers a clear framework in which to differentiate between "the living faith of the dead" (tradition, something that is necessary for future insight) or the "dead faith of the living" (traditionalism, clutching forms without understanding).
February 17, 2022
I thoroughly enjoyed Pelikan’s first volume in his series “The Christian Tradition” and this little series of lectures likewise thrilled me from the beginning.
May 7, 2022
Not easy to read.
November 2, 2025
“that which your Fathers handed on to you,
earn it again,
so that you may possess it.”
earn it again,
so that you may possess it.”
July 31, 2015
Jaroslav Pelikan's The Vindication of Tradition is a dense, heady examination of the role of tradition in Western/Christian culture. The book's focus is primarily centered around the Christian tradition as informed and influenced by Greek thought, but the arguments it makes could, in their spirited defense of inherited tradition vs. a Bible-as-only-source approach to Christianity, just as easily be applied to, for example, the defense of oral Torah in Judaism, or the role of tradition in helping us interpret and understand the intentions of the crafters of the U.S. Constitution. Pelikan makes a strong case that maintaining a respect for and understanding of tradition is as much a necessity to fully understanding Western religious and cultural movements as are the Biblical texts which serve as the source of these movements. His defense is reasoned and tempered by a nuanced argument for tradition (“the living faith of the dead”) over traditionalism (a fetishization of tradition, or “the dead faith of the living”).
The Vindication of Tradition is a scholarly work, and one that assumes some knowledge of the intellectual history of Christianity (specifically as carried forward by Catholicism). Nevertheless, it remains accessible to a general audience, both Christian and non-Christian, religious and non-religious, though it will primarily be of interest to those who are interested in religious or constitutional debates between interpretations informed by tradition and those informed by a more strictly fundamentalist approach.
The Vindication of Tradition is a scholarly work, and one that assumes some knowledge of the intellectual history of Christianity (specifically as carried forward by Catholicism). Nevertheless, it remains accessible to a general audience, both Christian and non-Christian, religious and non-religious, though it will primarily be of interest to those who are interested in religious or constitutional debates between interpretations informed by tradition and those informed by a more strictly fundamentalist approach.
April 30, 2013
Jaroslav Pelikan was among the preeminent church historians of the 20th century. It's in this set of lectures given in 1983 as the National Endowment for the Humanities Thomas Jefferson Lectures that he laid out his understanding of tradition, why it might be rediscovered, recovered, understood. It is here that he makes his famous distinction between tradition (living faith of the dead) and traditionalism (dead faith of the living).
The reason we turn aside from tradition, he notes, is likely because of traditionalism -- that embrace of what is old for the sake of its being old, not because it has been critically examined and understood to be of importance.
Why examine tradition? Because all ideas and practices have a history! Even, I would say, postmodern ones!
The reason we turn aside from tradition, he notes, is likely because of traditionalism -- that embrace of what is old for the sake of its being old, not because it has been critically examined and understood to be of importance.
Why examine tradition? Because all ideas and practices have a history! Even, I would say, postmodern ones!
April 13, 2017
Because this book was originally delivered as a series of lectures it has a certain candidness that most scholarly books lack, yet it maintains the level of erudition one expects from a scholar of Pelikan's magnitude. I recommend this book to anyone studying church history and/or development of doctrine in an academic setting.
August 10, 2011
A little dry, but his main point is good. That we don't live in a spiritual vacuum, that we come from a rich tradition of Christian thinkers that need to be read.
January 11, 2013
Pelikan, premier church historian, offers up a truly challenging read that wrestles with tradition and its particular role in religious life.
September 21, 2015
Excellent!
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews