Tradition or Conviction?

The sphere of the church on the earth, nominally speaking, is comprised of peo­ple who live either “by tradition” or “out of conviction.” Christian living, as we view it with our humanly fallible and very limited vision, sees many of us do­ing pretty much the same thing but the different reasons and motivations that lie behind every action remain hidden. We maintain, to be sure, a real distinc­tion between ourselves and the world at large; we engage in our ecclesiastical af­fairs quite...