England

An Ode to Fishness

O fishy smell, you are so strong!
How long, how long, how long?

12 February 2009

Andrew Shields

Tradition

The fol­low­ing is a copy of my pa­per for the Study of The­ol­ogy su­per­vi­sion I had last week. My su­per­vi­sor is Ja­son Fout, a very kind fi­nal year PhD stu­dent, who, like my fa­ther, has tran­si­tioned from a Bap­tist back­ground to the Epis­co­pal church. The pa­per is nei­ther gram­mat­i­cally per­fect, nor does it have the pol­ish I would like for my fi­nal thoughts on this pro­ject. It is, how­ever, in­dica­tive of the kind of work I do for this su­per­vi­sion. Which is usu­ally then put through the fire by my su­per­vi­sor. So if you would like to do the same, I would of course be most obliged to you.

Et­y­mo­log­i­cally the word tra­di­tion comes from the Latin tra­di­tio mean­ing the act of hand­ing over. Tra­di­tion is some­thing given, a grace ex­tended to Chris­tians and by Chris­tians as mem­bers of the Church. The em­pha­sis on tra­di­tion that the va­ri­eties of ex­pres­sion of the Chris­t­ian faith take part in, to a greater or lesser ex­tent, is, at least in part, in­her­ited from Chris­tian­ity’s Ju­daic roots. The Mish­nah is a record of the rab­binic tra­di­tions in Ju­daism which were recorded in the be­gin­ning of the third cen­tury, but clearly date from ear­lier oral tra­di­tions. From the in­struc­tion to Adam, to eat bread as a sign of the la­bor which he must suf­fer un­der his sep­a­ra­tion from God, Ju­daism and Chris­tian­ity have steeped in tra­di­tion, both tra­di­tions in­sti­tuted by man and by God. But tra­di­tion is not sim­ply a se­ries of ac­tions or a set of com­monly held truths. Tra­di­tion can en­com­pass all the means by which we en­counter the world and when we claim that the Church is the Church of God, of Je­sus of Naz­ereth, we claim a kin­ship with twenty‐one cen­turies of be­lief and prac­tice. The tra­di­tional prac­tice of the faith in­cor­po­rates not only litur­gi­cal wor­ship, ethics, church pol­i­tics, and de­vo­tional pat­terns, but also the ap­pro­pri­ate means for the in­ter­pre­ta­tion of Scrip­ture and the use of rea­son. By all of these tra­di­tions the Church de­fines it­self as the same Church. “True tra­di­tion is al­ways a liv­ing tra­di­tion. It changes while re­main­ing al­ways the same. It changes be­cause it faces dif­fer­ent sit­u­a­tions, not be­cause its es­sen­tial con­tent is mod­i­fied” (Meyen­dorff). Dif­fer­ent faces be­come nec­es­sary be­cause tra­di­tion must re­main con­so­nant with the faith­ful­ness of a church whose con­stituents are a liv­ing pop­u­lous whose lives ex­press the tra­di­tion as both the way in which they take part in what was and build what is to come. Tra­di­tion con­tains within it­self the work of dis­cern­ing its own el­e­ments and source of au­thor­ity; fur­ther­more, the cre­ative work of in­cor­po­rat­ing new doc­trine or new ex­pres­sions of doc­trine is mod­eled within the his­tory of tra­di­tion it­self.

The prob­lem of tra­di­tion, as was pointed out by the Re­for­ma­tion in the 16th Cen­tury, is that it’s vi­tal­ism can be for­got­ten. Tra­di­tions be­come le­gal­is­tic rules for ac­tion and un­der­stand­ing, wooden doc­trines left to moul­der into tra­di­tion­al­ism poorly un­der­stood and aided by co­er­cion. Tra­di­tion ceases to serve the church as an or­ganic com­mu­nity and be­gins to serve an elite class ben­e­fit­ted by the preser­va­tion of the sta­tus quo. Out­dated lan­guage and empty rit­ual re­place the spir­i­tu­ally ful­fill­ing com­mu­nion with the saints pro­vided by mean­ing­ful par­tic­i­pa­tion in the signs and state­ments of church faith­ful­ness. How­ever, the re­jec­tion of tra­di­tion by Luther and Calvin was not com­plete, they rec­og­nized that the rot­ten­ness which they must cut out of Chris­tian­ity in the form of Ro­man Catholi­cism was a sign of a once liv­ing faith. While un­der the ban­ner of sola scrip­tura, the Re­form­ers es­tab­lished new tra­di­tions which orig­i­nated in the idea of a sin­gu­lar source of Chris­t­ian the­ol­ogy. Scrip­ture was thought to be the sole form of rev­e­la­tion and tra­di­tion emerged as those ideas which were ap­par­ent to any reader of the Gospel story, al­low­ing the preser­va­tion of the Nicene creed and the con­tri­bu­tions of many of the early church Fa­thers. As the Re­for­ma­tion churches de­vel­oped they formed many new tra­di­tions of church rule and scrip­tural in­ter­pre­ta­tion. Even those churches which re­fused all creeds held on to the doc­trine which held that the scrip­tures were open to any Chris­t­ian who was open to the teach­ing of the Spirit and that no au­thor­i­ta­tive in­ter­pre­ta­tion was nec­es­sary. The seed of the Re­for­ma­tion re­mained pre­sent in the re­liance upon the pri­macy of Scrip­ture as a mea­sure for any tra­di­tion and the abil­ity of any mem­ber of the church to chal­lenge any tra­di­tion which con­tra­dicted the Scrip­tures.

In re­sponse to the Re­for­ma­tion, the Catholic church is­sued the Coun­cil of Trent, whose de­ci­sion on the sources of the­ol­ogy re­main rel­a­tively un­changed in the fur­ther coun­cils Vat­i­can I and II. This re­sponse es­tab­lished the of­fi­cial po­si­tion of the Ro­man Catholic church as fol­lows: There is one Word of God which is com­posed both of the sa­cred Scrip­tures, the writ­ten Word in the canon, and the sa­cred tra­di­tion, the oral tra­di­tions handed down from the Apos­tles. The au­then­tic in­ter­pre­ta­tion of both of these el­e­ments of the Word of God be­longs ex­clu­sively to the Church, as a liv­ing en­tity whose re­spon­si­bil­ity it is to teach the Word. Fur­ther­more, Ro­man Catholi­cism de­vel­oped the doc­trine of pa­pal in­fal­li­bil­ity. Thus, it is their be­lief that any in­ter­pre­ta­tion given to Scrip­ture or tra­di­tion by the pope speak­ing ex cathe­dra is the ob­jec­tive truth as given to the peo­ple of God by the Holy Spirit. While some­what cir­cu­lar this doc­trine, de­cided in the coun­cil of bish­ops de­ter­mined a sin­gu­lar au­thor­ity by which all tra­di­tions could be mea­sured, which was it­self a norm tem­po­rally de­ter­mined by the coun­cil.

Nei­ther of these Tra­di­tions was suf­fi­ciently pre­pared to cope with the chal­lenge is­sued by moder­nity for ra­tio­nal grounds. The Re­for­ma­tion val­ues were more eas­ily de­feated as the prin­ci­pal of sola scrip­tura was shown to dis­in­te­grate as the for­ma­tion of the canon was put to his­tor­i­cal scrutiny re­veal­ing the rea­son­able doubt that many of the au­thors of New Tes­ta­ment gospels and let­ters were not only not among the Twelve, but pos­si­bly en­ter­ing the canon pseu­do­ny­mously, throw­ing doubt on the mo­ti­va­tion of such an au­thor. The in­spired and in­fal­li­ble word was shown to have been cul­tur­ally and the­o­log­i­cally bi­ased, dis­cour­ag­ing those who held with ver­bal in­spi­ra­tion, and demon­strat­ing the need for au­thor­i­ta­tive in­ter­pre­tive meth­ods. Still fear­ing the cor­rup­tion of tra­di­tion which claimed to be uni­ver­sally ap­plic­a­ble, many of the heirs the Re­for­ma­tion turned to ex­pe­ri­ence of the Spirit as the source of au­thor­ity by which to ne­go­ti­ate the best means of in­ter­pre­ta­tion. Thus pri­vate judge­ment be­came the source of au­thor­ity in the­o­log­i­cal rea­son­ing, bondage to the sin­ful na­ture of man be­ing pre­ferred to the bondage pst au­thor­ity whose ba­sis was in the use of power. Sim­i­larly the au­thor­ity of ex­tra scrip­tural tra­di­tion came un­der at­tack. En­light­en­ment crit­i­cism pointed to the va­ri­ety of con­tra­dic­tory opin­ions held by the pa­tris­tic tra­di­tion al­ready dis­cov­ered dur­ing the Scholas­tic pe­riod. Even at­tempts by doc­tors of the church like St. Thomas Aquinas to rec­on­cile the tra­di­tion to it­self ac­knowl­edged the use of pa­tris­tic quo­ta­tions in both the state­ments of and the ob­jec­tions to the­o­log­i­cal doc­trines. Some­times these quo­ta­tions were from one and the same Apos­tolic fa­ther, the nor­ma­tive sta­tus of such an au­thor­ity then be­comes need­less, since the in­ter­preter of the au­thor­ity must also be ra­tio­nally jus­ti­fied. Con­sen­sus was not pre­sent in the work or about the in­ter­pre­ta­tion in the time of Aquinas, so the el­e­va­tion of Aquinas to the source of or­tho­doxy seemed with­out ra­tio­nal grounds. There­fore it was as­sumed church lead­ers el­e­vated those who stood in the best po­si­tion to ben­e­fit them­selves or their cul­tural and philo­soph­i­cal bi­ases. While the doc­trine of pa­pal in­fal­li­bil­ity re­solved the dis­pute over the source of au­thor­ity for Ro­man Catholi­cism, it is not it­self grounded in an unim­peach­able ra­tio­nal ar­gu­ment. In­stead, the doc­trine re­lies upon the ax­iom from faith of the pres­ence of the Holy Spirit in the one who car­ries on the tra­di­tion of Pe­ter.

Sim­i­larly the need for the apos­tolic wit­ness of sa­cred tra­di­tion was ques­tioned by En­light­en­ment thinkers who ul­ti­mately sought the free­dom of the hu­man rea­son. What could his­tor­i­cal fig­ures tell us which we as hu­man be­ings were in­ca­pable of dis­cov­er­ing our­selves by the ap­pli­ca­tion of hu­man rea­son? The au­thor­ity of ‘priest­craft’ as it was sneered at, lay in the power of co­er­cion and con­sisted in empty for­mu­las. The church was just one more po­lit­i­cal body vy­ing for power over the masses who could be cowed by the fear of death and hell. Even to those who took the de­sire of church­men to have a pos­i­tive in­tent found them­selves ques­tion­ing what kind of spir­i­tual com­pre­hen­sion came from sim­ple near­ness to the his­tor­i­cal event of Je­sus. If the Spirit was at work in the pre­sent, what need was there for de­pen­dance upon the his­tor­i­cal wit­ness of the apos­tles and the Fa­thers? Why should the early church be con­sid­ered a golden age, when they fought against here­sies and squab­bled amongst them­selves as much or more than mod­ern the­olo­gians. Fur­ther­more, in the Church of rea­son, the need for litur­gi­cal dif­fer­ences fell away. If God could be met through rea­son, then surely God could be met sim­i­larly by all. The his­tor­i­cal mes­sage, the kerygma, was ul­ti­mately un­nec­es­sary be­cause of God’s pres­ence in the world. A re­li­gion based in rea­son alone would stand on more cer­tain prin­ci­ples than the his­tor­i­cal event of God’s in­car­na­tion and res­ur­rec­tion. Such mir­a­cles were ir­ra­tional su­per­sti­tions, and were bet­ter left as sym­bols of the duty and sac­ri­fice re­quired of man for the com­mon good. Where be­fore the con­sen­sus of the Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity as rep­re­sented of by the meet­ing of bish­ops was taken as an in­di­ca­tion of the uni­ver­sal ap­peal of truth, Mod­ern crit­ics ar­gue that con­sen­sus in­di­cates only a con­for­mity with the philoso­phies and cul­tural bi­ases which the com­mu­nity had de­ter­mined to stand with or against by the dic­tates of fash­ion and Im­pe­r­ial pol­i­tics.

To­day, in many places the chal­lenges of the En­light­en­ment are still felt: “The ac­knowl­edged nor­ma­tive power of a past prac­tice, arrange­ment, or be­lief has be­come very faint, in­deed, it is al­most ex­tin­guished as an in­tel­lec­tual ar­gu­ment.” (Shils) Thus faced with es­tab­lish­ing the ra­tio­nal grounds for the truth claims of tra­di­tion, the­olo­gians could ac­cept the chal­lenge of moder­nity or ig­nore it. Schleier­ma­cher chose to ac­cept what he saw as the valid cri­tique of his time, that ec­u­meni­cal coun­cils like that of Chal­cedon, had be­come or had re­mained ob­scure since the time of their con­cep­tion, and that the tra­di­tional un­der­stand­ing of Christ was a dry rep­e­ti­tion of for­mu­laic sal­va­tion. He found the grounds of the­ol­ogy in piety it­self, in the ex­pe­ri­ence of ab­solute de­pen­dance upon God, and dis­pensed with the mythol­o­goumena of the his­tor­i­cal Je­sus. The sav­ing power is found in the abil­ity of Christ’s God‐consciousness act­ing as a means be­tween the in­con­stant hu­man God‐consciousness and God. In many ways, Christ be­comes merely per­fectly hu­man and ab­solves God from the fore­or­di­na­tion of suf­fer­ing or the hu­man con­stric­tions of ra­tio­nal need. Thus rid­ding the Chris­t­ian of the need for mir­a­cles or propo­si­tions about God in which God suf­fers or is bound by lim­i­ta­tions.

While moder­nity’s crit­i­cism ap­pro­pri­ately re­sponded to the hor­rors of re­li­gious wars and op­pres­sion by the rad­i­cal ques­tion­ing of tra­di­tions which could sup­port such vi­o­lence and men­tal slav­ery, the quest for the ra­tio­nal re­li­gion must ul­ti­mately fail. The in­abil­ity of the Mod­erns to agree on one for­mu­la­tion of the a pri­ori, the ob­jec­tive foun­da­tions from which to build or judge, may point to the ab­sence of ay such ob­jec­tive view­point ac­ces­si­ble from within the hu­man per­son. We are trapped not only by our time and place, but by the seem­ingly end­less lay­ers of self from which the ra­tio­nal con­science emerges as only one judge of the de­ter­min­ing grounds of moral ac­tion. Thus rea­son, like ex­pe­ri­ence, is ul­ti­mately in­con­clu­sive on the ob­jec­tive re­al­ity of re­li­gious doc­trines and moral­ity be­cause it op­er­ates en­tirely within the in­di­vid­ual, un­able to es­cape from the self’s prior de­ter­mi­na­tion of the world to the un­con­di­tioned re­al­i­ties on which the de­ter­mi­na­tions rest.

Is it true, then, that: “Any ap­peal to tra­di­tion founders on the prob­lem of de­ter­min­ing which el­e­ments of tra­di­tions are the­o­log­i­cally p? I dis­agree. This ques­tion is fun­da­men­tally flawed in that it looks down on Tra­di­tions from a pre­sumed point of ob­jec­tiv­ity, weigh­ing the mer­its of each Tra­di­tion from out­side. It as­sumes that Tra­di­tions are built like haystacks and that by ex­am­in­ing the strength of the sheaf of wheat on the bot­tom of the stack one can de­ter­mine the strength of the Tra­di­tion as a whole. But ul­ti­mately we can­not es­cape weigh­ing tra­di­tions by the needs and pre­sup­po­si­tions of our own time, by the re­liance upon lan­guage to au­then­ti­cally ar­tic­u­late tra­di­tion we are al­ready dis­tanc­ing our­selves from the faith of the past which de­ter­mined the world dif­fer­ently than we do in thought and in speech. If we are to judge ac­cord­ing to cul­tural and so­cial bi­ases, it is bet­ter that we should try first to un­der­stand how the au­thors of the tra­di­tions we cri­tique fit in their own time. In tak­ing up the quest for sources in the­ol­ogy, “we might best be­gin by re‐appropriating our own in­di­vid­ual tra­di­tions… Calvin­ists could look to the writ­ings of Au­gus­tine and Calvin and Ed­wards, Methodists could look to the work of Wes­ley and Wri­m­inius, and so on. This would im­me­di­ately serve to move us out of the stuffy con­fines of our own time, to es­tab­lish links to cat­e­gories of thought that are not in cap­tiv­ity to moder­nity,…” (Lints). Hav­ing com­pleted this sur­vey, sev­eral cri­te­ria might pre­sent them­selves for the de­ter­mi­na­tion of au­thor­ity: 1) Is the tra­di­tion co­her­ent and self‐consistent? 2) Can the tra­di­tion speak about its own for­ma­tion, the rea­son for its ex­is­tence and the hu­man need for such a tra­di­tion? 3) Can the tra­di­tion ex­plain from its own world­view the cause of the other tra­di­tions in the world which op­pose it? 4) Fi­nally, does this syn­the­size more of the world into a uni­fied cos­mos than any other? (Mac­In­tyre) These ques­tions, ig­nor­ing the mod­ernist pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with an ob­jec­tive third view with which to ex­am­ine var­i­ous tra­di­tions, which ul­ti­mately does not ex­ist, give us a means of com­par­ing two tra­di­tions ei­ther within a sin­gle strand of Chris­tian­ity or form­ing two com­plete Tra­di­tions. Whether for in­di­vid­u­als or com­mu­ni­ties: “The loyal and un­crit­i­cal rep­e­ti­tion of for­mu­lae is seen to be in­ad­e­quate as a means of se­cur­ing con­ti­nu­ity at any­thing more than a for­mal level; Scrip­ture and tra­di­tion re­quire to be read in a way that brings out their strange­ness, their non‐obvious and non‐contemporary qual­i­ties, in or­der that they may be read both freshly and truth­fully from one gen­er­a­tion to an­other” (Williams) This di­a­logue with the past brings scrip­ture, tra­di­tion about scrip­ture, and extra‐scriptural tra­di­tions into ac­tion and re‐invigorates the faith of the dead so that we in­ter­act not with dead mouth­pieces, but the liv­ing faith of saints who have passed from this world into the next. The faith of the past was not stag­nate dur­ing the lives of its the­olo­gians and be­liev­ers, but be­ing thought about and worked on in faith. If then we sim­ply re­peat it with­out find­ing ei­ther iden­tity or con­flict with it, it be­comes stul­ti­fied it into an un­rec­og­niz­able fos­sil of propo­si­tions, un­true to its ori­gins.

au­thor­i­ta­tive

From this point, we might also con­sider what el­e­ments of a tra­di­tion we can ex­pect to change through di­a­logue with con­tem­po­rary be­liev­ers and de­velop over time with­out in­val­i­dat­ing the tra­di­tion that pre‐existed or mak­ing the Tra­di­tion in­ter­nally con­tra­dic­tory. Ev­i­dence of the need for this kind of de­vel­op­ment is ev­i­dent in its oc­cur­rence af­ter the time of Je­sus, in the time of the Fa­thers. While the truth re­mains the same, i.e. the eter­nal ex­is­tence of the re­la­tion­ships of the trin­ity, the doc­trine, i.e. the doc­trine of the Trin­ity, must be enun­ci­ated in time as it be­comes ev­i­dent to the body of Christ. As God con­tin­ues to re­veal God’s be­ing as the act of be­ing God’s self, hu­man be­ings will con­tinue to ex­pe­ri­ence and share ex­pres­sions of re­la­tion­ship with God. The need for tra­di­tion to ac­tively re­flect the con­tin­u­ing act of God in our own time, and the chang­ing shape of hu­man un­der­stand­ing give rise to he de­vel­op­ment of new doc­trines and new for­mu­la­tions ex­press­ing the same con­tent for a new time. How­ever, “causes which stim­u­late the growth of ideas may also dis­turb and de­form them” (New­man) caus­ing the orig­i­nal faith to be lost among a cor­rupt tra­di­tion and the echo of the ac­cu­sa­tion of the Protes­tant Re­form­ers. Grant­ing the ex­is­tence of such de­vel­op­ment and cor­rup­tion: How do we de­ter­mine when the claim to de­vel­op­ment is spu­ri­ous and the sub­stance of faith has been lost. In the fifth cen­tury, St. Vin­cent of Lerins wrote that the stan­dard by which we might ad­mit of de­vel­op­ment, but not of sub­stan­tial change, was that we must keep what has been be­lieved in the Church every­where, al­ways, and by all. But our abil­ity to de­ter­mine whether or not a doc­trine would meet such a stan­dard seems im­prob­a­ble. John Henry New­man sug­gests sev­eral tests, “There is no cor­rup­tion if it re­tains one and the same type, the same prin­ci­ples, the same or­ga­ni­za­tion; if its be­gin­nings an­tic­i­pate its sub­se­quent phases, and its later phe­nom­ena pro­tect and sub­serve its ear­lier; if it has a power of as­sim­i­la­tion and re­vival, and a vig­or­ous ac­tion from first to last.” By these test New­man sug­gests we can rec­og­nize the true faith, much the same way that a per­son rec­og­nizes in the adult face the face of a child they knew. The growth of tra­di­tion seems to be a spon­ta­neous thing like the growth of any nat­ural body: it is hard to con­ceive of which di­rec­tion tra­di­tion might con­tinue to grow with­out chang­ing the na­ture of the ex­ist­ing struc­ture.

What then is the norma nor­mans, the rule that rules it­self, the ground of au­thor­ity? While no sin­gle rule for the reg­u­la­tion of the au­thor­ity of tra­di­tion ex­ists, ei­ther within Scrip­ture or within hu­man his­tory, which sat­is­fies Chris­tians every­where, al­ways, and at all times, the on­go­ing di­a­logue of the pre­sent and the past does not pre­vent our faith from up­hold­ing our church as the Church of Christ eter­nal, but strength­ens our re­solve. The faith of liv­ing be­liev­ers in the com­mu­nity of saints in which they par­take en­livens their un­der­stand­ing of doc­tri­nal tra­di­tions by means of com­mon wor­ship. Be­cause the logic of tra­di­tion is never alone, the en­act­ment of tra­di­tion which in­volves the whole per­son, mind, body, and soul in re­la­tion­ship with God, con­tin­ues to nour­ish the liv­ing or­gan­ism which is the Church. Al­though can­cer­ous tra­di­tions ex­ist within the Church, like Christ it may be bet­ter to leave the tares mixed in with the wheat un­til the har­vest, when the so­cial, po­lit­i­cal, and philo­soph­i­cal world­view has changed and we are bet­ter able to iden­tify where the truth has blos­somed into the full­ness of un­der­stand­ing. That is not to say that we should cease to cre­ate the­olo­gies and to seek to un­der­stand and cri­tique the ones that ex­ist, but that it is more im­por­tant that we find our­selves able to pray what claim to be­lieve. Au­gus­tine claims that un­der­stand­ing is born out of faith, and not a faith which is sim­ply ver­bal as­sent, but as­sent of the whole be­ing to the ob­scure mys­ter­ies of Chris­tian­ity. This un­der­stand­ing will never be com­plete un­til His King­dom comes.

• Lints, Richard. The Fab­ric of The­ol­ogy. Eerd­mans Pub­lish­ing: 1993.
• Meyen­dorff, John. Liv­ing Tra­di­tion: Or­tho­dox Wit­ness in the Con­tem­po­rary World. St Vladimir’s Sem­i­nary Press: 1978.
• New­man, John Henry. “An es­say on the De­vel­op­ment of Chris­t­ian Doc­trine”. 1978.
• Shils, Ed­ward. Tra­di­tion. Uni­ver­sity of Chicago Press: 2006.
• Willams, Rowan. ‘Post­script — the­o­log­i­cal.’ Ar­ius: Heresy and Tra­di­tion. SCM: 2001.

23 November 2008

Jon Kara Shields