To some Tradition can have every appearance of being the dead weight of the Church's past determining the present and because of its formative and stifling power preventing any future advance. In other words, it can be seen as a suffocating and life-draining force which must
be rejected if men are to respond authentically to the demands of the present. On the other hand no person, no organization is without a past, and it is being unrealistic to act as though it did not exist. Tradition is the past of the Church - what is handed down - and, it is also the primary channel or source through which we are introduced into the mystery of Christ, and as such it contains all the various elements that have grown up in the history of the Church, above all Scripture and those elements outside Scripture that help us to understand more clearly the basic message of the Gospel. Yet there has never been any easy and generally accepted method of deciding which particular emphasis of Scripture, which strand of tradition is to be normative for Christian belief. There are and always have been many interpretations of Scripture and many separate, even conflicting, traditions. This book attempts to trace in very broad outline some of the situations in which the Church has met and tried to solve the problem of how to decide where true tradition lies; that is, where, among the choices offered, the truth about Christ and his message is to be found. No solution has been either universally accepted or completely successful. But in that lies a large part of the interest of the problem.