Remember the former things of old;
for I am God, and there is no other;
I am God, and there is no one like me,
declaring the end from the beginning
and from ancient times things not yet done.

It is in fact more important for us to know what God did to Israel, to his Son Jesus Christ, than to seek what God intends for us today. … I find no salvation in my life history but only in the history of Jesus Christ.

The nations of the world make history and think what they do matters. But [biblical] Israel knows that it is God who makes history, and it is the reality formed in response to God's will which is history.

The real business of tradition is not the securing of the past, but the ensuring of a future. Only when we know how the story has run to this point can we responsibly decide how the plot might now unfold.

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

Every tradition is a collective memory.

Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.

Breaking with the past is part of our past. Leaving tradition behind runs all the way through our [American] tradition. But how is such a separate self to be shaped and grounded?. … In the absence of any objectifiable criteria of right and wrong, good or evil, the self and its feelings become our only moral guide. … "Being good" becomes "feeling good."

In the present [20th] century, there have been many prominent intellectual figures who have thought that what we have inherited is as bad as can be but that a society without blemishes is at hand for the making. … Change has become coterminous with progress; innovation ...