ABSTRACT
Tradition transcends the scope of immediate individual knowledge and experience, and provides the framework within which one's own thought develops and becomes critically sharpened. Communities are thought to hand down opinions, beliefs, myths, or codes of conduct, but only the individual, it seems, can grasp and test knowledge. Creeds, sacred texts and sacraments, for example, constitute mechanisms for the transmission of corporate memory and communal truth. In the context of religious or specifically Christian belief, the reiteration of shared knowledge on the basis of corporate memory finds expression in creeds, sacraments, sermons and the reading of narratives of the foundation-events out of which the community was born. In science, corporate memory provides a frame of reference in the light of which the scientist assesses or interprets knowledge and determines procedure. There is force and truth in the well-known dictum of Calvinist theology that the church that has been reformed always stands in the need of reformation: ecclesia reformata semper reformanda.
