In his commentary on Hebrews, F.F. Bruce warns against a mistaken loyalty to nostalgia:
The faith once for all delivered to the saints is not something which can be caught and tamed; it continually leads the saints forth to new ventures in the cause of Christ, as God calls afresh….To stay at the point to which some revered teacher of the past has brought us, out of a mistaken sense of loyalty to him; to continue to follow a certain pattern of religious activity or attitude just because it was good enough for our fathers and grandfathers – – these and the like are temptations which make the message of Hebrews a necessary and salutary one for us to listen to. Every fresh movement of the Spirit of God tends to become stereotyped in the next generation, and what we have heard with our ears, what our fathers have told us becomes a tenacious tradition encroaching on the allegiance which ought to be accorded only to the living and active word of God. As Christians survey the world today, they see very much land waiting to be possessed in the name of Christ; but to take possession of it calls for a generous measure of that forward looking faith which is so earnestly urged upon the readers of this epistle. Those first readers were living at a time when the old, cherished order was breaking up. Attachment to venerable traditions could avail them nothing in this situation; only attachment to the unchanging and onward moving Christ could carry them forward and enable them to face a new order with confidence and power. So, in a day when everything that can be shaken is being shaken before our eyes and even beneath our feet, let us in turn give thanks for the unshakable kingdom which we have inherited, which endures forever when everything else to which men and women may pin their hopes disappears and leaves not a wrack behind (Bruce, Commentary on Hebrews, 392).
