30,000+ Church Traditions: Which One is the Right One?

As someone who is trying to make sense of why Orthodoxy is the true faith, I look to aspects in her which I find are in conflict with my own Protestant faith. And the one that stands out the most is that of tradition. In my personal experience as a Protestant, I was taught to see tradition as not necessarily bad, but not something that should be seen of equal importance to the Bible. Like many Protestant Christians, I equated traditions as 'man-made'; now, as someone who is exploring Orthodoxy, I start to see the irrevocable place that tradition has, especially in the context of faith. In this post, I will direct my point towards why we should consider church tradition when considering 'which is the true faith?'

When people look for a church in which to congregate with, they do it on the basis of 'what tradition does this church follow?' It's inevitable to do so, because in the context of faith, church tradition is what defines what one is to believe and how they are to practice their beliefs. If a tradition appeals to you, it's what you're going to want to adopt as your own. This is especially true for the Protestant Christian, despite the claim that many Protestant Christians and groups make that they don't follow any man-made traditions, just the Word-of-God.

For the Protestant, the only tradition that they subscribe to is 'Sola Scriptura'. Yet, here we must point out that in the Protestant Church, while many mainstream groups have similar core beliefs, we have 30,000+ denominations with their distinct traditions and names. Why, one may ask? All of these denominations (including the ones that claim to not be denominations) are subject to the interpretation and traditions of one man or woman, who started a movement; each with their own idea of tradition and interpretation of Scripture. Examples would include Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist, Lutheran, Seven Day Adventist, and the list goes on; and within those denominations we would find subset denominations with variances to what its founder(s) originally had in mind; tweaked with as to improve its theology, often times to better suit the understanding of the tradition being propagated. And a lot of times, these tweaks can be and are issues of conflict within congregations, sometimes resulting in even more splits. 

How is it that most claim 'Sola Scriptura' and yet arrive to different doctrinal differences? Many would contend that actually isn't the case, that the majority of those denominations coincide in the essential doctrines. However, aside from this notion of 'coinciding essential doctrines' (that in truth ignores the disagreements and divisions that arise from these essential doctrines) this in turn leads to the important question of whether the essential doctrine that these modern day Christian groups supposedly share are in essence the same essential doctrine that was taught in the early Church during its first centuries before becoming championed by the Emperor Constantine (a point in history to which many Protestant Christians attest that Christianity became infused with diabolical corruption at its union with the State at the hand of Constantine). A quick look at the history of the early Church, the writings of the early Church fathers, and the history of the Bible will lead us to the answer that such assumption that what Protestant Christian groups believe to be the same as the early Christians is actually a false one. And should push us to continue to investigate what the early Church actually believed.  

Of course, one must be aware that many, after taking a look at early Church history and what the early Church fathers wrote about, would contend, "The early Christians were right on some things, but they were also wrong. We may be wrong on some things, but what they had wrong, we know better now know because of logic." Personally, I find such a notion ludicrous. If that is their justification for continuing in what they consider to be the 'right tradition', I would consider it to be a poor one. 

To anyone who makes such a justification, I ask "What makes the founders and leaders of what we have as a 30,000+ denominational Protestant Church more special and more authoritative than the early Church leaders and disciples who, despite their imperfections, fought for unity in the traditions of the Church, and had received their teachings from the disciples of the Apostles, and the Apostles who in turn received their teachings from Jesus Christ himself?" If one considers the importance of the traditions in the Church, one can not ignore that while it's certainly true that the Orthodox Church underwent internal schisms, their traditions (including their theology) are unified. The same cannot be said about the Protestant Church.