ABSTRACT
Religious traditions like Christianity are not timelessly immutable but constantly require translation, re-conceptualisation and re-interpretation in order to maintain their relevance and adequacy, as well as their intelligibility and credibility. Christian doctrine arises through the creative development by later theologians of what was often no more than ‘hints, marginal remarks and suggestions’ that the original biblical authors could not possibly have conceived of thus in their time and circumstances. Thus the innovative development that is characteristic of a religious tradition will always involve the introduction of new elements that were not there before. First of all, the definition permits terms like ‘Christian,’ ‘Christianity’ and so forth to be used intelligibly by both spectators of and participants in the Christian tradition. As such it merely lays down the minimum conditions of intelligibility required for the common use of such terms. In fact, ‘internal conflict between Christians with differing apprehensions of the gospel is not an anomalous or unusual phenomenon.
