Tradition and Development

Tradition as source of religious knowledge had been obscured since the Reformation by the Protestant claim that the Bible, and only the Bible, was the source of Christian knowledge. The use and abuse of Tradition in religious controversy had led Protestants to distrust it. The end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries brought a rediscovery of the concept and an enhanced value to Tradition in the social and religious spheres. The Oxford Movement was to conceive Tradition not as static but as subject to change in continuity. The consequent conception of doctrinal development would prove to be one of the Movement’s most enduring contributions.