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issuesetc.org. Thanks for your support. If you were raised with the conventional wisdom in your church life, that tradition is generally or perhaps in most cases a bad thing, you are out of step with the vast majority of Christians who

have ever lived. Usually tradition in the history of the Christian church is considered to be a good

thing. Now, not an unqualified good thing, but something that always needs to be tested against

scripture. St. Paul even talks about those things that he received. He handed down to you.

And the word he uses there is essentially the word tradition. So how do we sort it out?

Welcome back to Issues, etc. I'm Todd Wilkin, joining us to discuss Lutheranism and tradition.

Pastor Hans Feeney. He's pastor of Prince of Peace, Lutheran Church in St. Louis,

creator of a series of comical videos called Lutheran satire. He's a contributor to the Federalist

and author of a recent column for the Lutheran Witness magazine titled Tradition, Blessing, Burden, or

both. Hans, welcome back. Good to be with you as always. How is this word tradition often used

against Lutherans? Yeah, so tradition is often used against Lutherans in a kind of viewing it as

an inherently empty thing or something that's inherently contrary to the scriptures or separated from

the scriptures. So a lot of times if Lutherans are talking

with their evangelical friends, and you talk about, say, an issue like infant baptism, the way the

evangelicals will dismiss it is they'll say, well, there's no verse in the Bible commanding you to

baptize babies. There's no first Hezekiah 3,6 that says, and you shall baptize all of the babies.

So they'll say this was just a tradition that came about later. So it's a tradition of men trying to kind of equate it to a Phariseical tradition that's sort of been imposed upon your view of the scriptures.

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