Totally understandable. I think it is the weakest, too. It is a fundamental part of orthodox christianity, but I personally see it placing obstacles to understanding the faith.
Well, thatās the big (but almost ignored) difference between Christianity and Islam ā the Christian faith is not entirely based on what is in its scripture. The Catholic (and Iām guessing Orthodox) faith states it implicitly: doctrine is based on the sacred Bible AND sacred tradition.
Tradition is a very important aspect of Islam as well. Believe it or not, it is one of the reason that attracted me to Orthodox Christianity, and one of the reasons I would prefer it over Jehovah Witness even though they donāt believe Jesus is God. And tradition is a very important aspect of Orthodox Christianity as well.
Tradition is important, but tradition can be wrong. In Sunni Islam, we have different schools of thought in law and doctrine. These schools of thoughts try to balance scripture and tradition to arrive at the correct rulings and doctrine.
While there is a validity to the Orthodox/Catholic Churches at the same time, I believed they erred. I see it in Islam as well. Both have a strong tie to tradition, following councils (which to me is the same thing as ijma :consensus: in Islam), and its continuous chain back to the founder, be he Prophet Muhammad or Jesus. They can err in the analyzes of tradition and scripture, even in light of the Holy Spirit, or what we might term Ilham or Kashf (inspiration from God).
I said all that to say, I am not ignorant of tradition and its place or importance or value in our religions, be it Islam or Christianity. I mean, look at Priest not being allowed to marry in the Catholic church, this wasnāt a practice of the early Church. I mentioned that to indicate that things change with time, and thus tradition can change, and thus have the susceptibility of error.
In Islam, we speak of hadith, however in early Islam, tradition had more weight then hadiths. Because of the possibility of tradition changing, later scholars preferred to rely mainly on hadith, because hadiths were more verifiable. And easier to find additions. For example, a person in 632 AD said the Prophet said this. However in 646, the same person said something slightly different, we know something was added in between. The early schools of thoughts were based on the traditions of a particular region, the tradition of Syria, the tradition of Iraq, the tradition of Yemen, the tradition of Medinah, the tradition of Mecca etc etc. It was more difficult to verify tradition, because of the nature in how it is transmitted.
The tradition of Medinah is the only school that survived the test of time, and exist as the Maliki school of thought in this day and time. Although those other schools of thoughts died out, their rulings based on tradition are still taken into consideration, because of its closeness to the early Muslims. The Hanafi school of thought was the first hadith based school. And the Hanbali and Shafi schools students of two other school of thought, althought mainly hadith based schools of thought, do not completely write off tradition, but it plays a large part in how their edicts made.
I said all this to say, there are pros and cons to tradition. So, I understand the place of tradition.
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