The alternatives either a word with sharply fixed semantic boundaries, spoken long ago and once for all, or a word which says no more than we ourselves bring with us to the text are unattractive. Again, recognition of this fact need not entail capitulation to utter relativism and its consequences. The same studies have insisted that the neat distinction between reason and tradition is no longer sustainable. Reason in the sense articulated above is always related directly to some tradition of intellectual and practical endeavour. Tradition is not something over against which it stands in a relationship of potential contradiction, but furnishes the conditions within which alone reason may operate.
Tradition furnishes the standpoint, the place from which intelligent reflection is prosecuted.
Theological appeals to tradition as part of the threefold cord are as imprecise as concomitant appeals to reason . It would seem to be sensible to opt for a wide definition of the term, and allow it to embrace not only conciliar creeds and confessions, but the wider patterns of Christian existence including liturgy, hymnody, preaching, acts of service, anything , indeed, which might properly be said to constitute a form of faithful interpretation , performance, or actualization of the Gospel message within the church in the midst of the world. For all this bears signficantly upon the way in which Scripture functions authoritatively within the church, as well as being the product of that functioning. But the very breadth of the definition raises sharply the question of where the relevant thresholds of identity lie, and what sorts and levels of diversity may be permitted before they must be held to have been crossed. Traditions, in order to be identifiable as traditions at all, must have characteristic features and boundaries.