“What we then find at the heart of our tradition is not some proposition, scriptural or promulgated or otherwise, which we hold to be authoritative and therefore exempted from the relativity of hermeneutical debate by virtue of its inspiredness. What we find at the origin is already a process of reaching back again to the origins, to the earliest memories of the event itself, confident that that testimony, however intimately integrated with the belief of the witnesses, is not a wax nose, and will serve to illuminate and sometimes adjudicate our present path.”
–John Howard Yoder, “The Authority of Tradition”, in The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (Notre Dame: UNDP, 1984), 70.
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