Attending to tradition

...Equally willing to urge the other side to get "out of the abortion business," his desire is a simple one: "to get beyond labels, and down to something reasonable...

...it also does not involve an invocation of the authority of office...

...Paul confronted Peter and called him wrong, and there were many disagreements between saints...

...But the fact is that it is only during the last couple of centuries that it has been questioned by Christians or Jews, and it should bother us more than it does that we assume our ancestors to be wrong, and the thinkers of-the Enlightenment correct...

...Christian truth is harmonious, and may become clear only over the long haul...

...But this was seen as providential, an expansion of what was revealed at the Epiphany: now God's Kingdom was to include the Gentiles, who themselves had something to contribute...

...it doesn't take enough account of the mystery of the Incarnation...

...JOHN GARVEY 31 January 1986:39...

...That this will lead to new appreciations and emphases is inevitable and good...

...ATTENDING TO TRADITION IS EVERYTHING MERELY ACCIDENTAL...

...R ELIGIOUS TRADITION is controversial these days...

...not an orthodoxy which relies upon official pronouncements, which at best are reinforcements of something generally understood and should never be considered the source of truth...

...But the historical time of Jesus' coming, the nature of the Judaism that was his preparation and his personal formation, the fortunate confluence of Jewish and Greek thought during the formative years of Christianity -these things cannot be taken as simple accidents...

...It is not as if this idea has been scientifically disproved, but a fear of triumphalism, cultural colonialism, and sexism has led to another approach, which at its extreme regards the Judaism of Jesus, his maleness, the time during which he entered the world, the formation of the creeds, and the dogmatic contribution of patristic thought, as more or less accidental...

...The idea that tradition involves something harmonious and complex, something which demands a special attention more than a reaction, is not a recent part of our ordinary way of reading Christian history...

...Among the controversies is one which has yet to surface as clearly as it must, but which permeates the debate: it is the question of what we mean by religious tradition in the first place...

...But it seems to me essential...

...The greater danger is that this line of thinking could make an abstraction of Christianity -- that is, we are presumed to have the ability to see what really matters in the message of Jesus, and we are able then to extract it from its limited cultural and historical context...

...On the other side of the line are "progressive" religious people -- that is to say, churchpeople who take a view of the world which looks very much like the one held by the editorialists who draw the line...

...It could reveal what is wrong both with fundamentalism and a certain sort of liberal Christianity...

...In their reply to the attacks, the Maryland legislators warned: "If you attempt to limit the anti-abortion movement to those who also oppose contraception, then you will only be bringing serious Ill I I Of several minds: John Garvey II I harm to the pro-life cause...

...The orthodoxy I have in mind is one which has everything to do with attention to tradition as a living language informed by prayer...

...It is "what is handed on to us," as Paul said in telling his listeners about the Eucharist, and our faith is that the Holy Spirit is part of the process, even part of what happens during the disagreements between Augustine and Pelagius in the West, and the disagreements between those Orthodox monks who believed that monasteries should not own great estates and that heretics should not be persecuted, and those monks who opposed them...

...Knowing the mind of the church does not involve a poll of the majority, including the majority of theologians...

...What worries me is the self-conscious contemporary thinker who is embarrassed by the awkwardness of a tradition which includes currently unfashionable things, and who, in the name of bringing things up to date, refuses to entertain ideas which were powerful to our ancestors.There are forms of intellectual lock-step which make this look less problematic than it should...

...But one of the most important functions of tradition is to keep us from being trapped in the limited understanding of the present age...

...There is something healthy about this reaction to the self-satisfied Christianity of the imperial church, but there is also a real danger...

...Not only does this presumed ability fail to take into account the limitations of our own vision...

...the conservative temptation is to reject any twentieth-century thinker as obviously less impressive than the thinkers of the past...

...For some pro-life groups, support for any form of contraception is anathema, while some of the pro-choice groups are equally adamant about anyone who is against abortion...

...It might begin to refresh our appreciation of orthodoxy...

...It pays attention to the fact that the Jews were tribal, but not to their chosenness...

...In saying that we need special attention rather than reaction, I do not mean that we should ignore the abuses which have been done in the name of tradition...

...They should be remembered, in the name of tradition, and any honest tradition ineludes them...

...Instead, we should pay as much attention as we can to what the whole of the tradition tells us, to all of the voices that have formed it...

...pope...

...Durbin makes a similar argument...

...progressive" debate has come down to a quarrel between those who are in favor of a strong hierarchical structure and those who are not, who favor instead a diversity of opinion and a more democratic church structure...

...I don't mean to say that the questions should not be asked at all, only that they should not be answered so easily against a traditional view and in favor of a more modern one...

...for example, the working out of the doctrine of the Trinity and the three persons of God, "one in essence and undivided," involved Greek rather than Jewish concepts of essence and person...

...If the Holy Spirit is alive in the church and has guided the development of doctrine, the lives of saints, and the sacramental participation of Christians in the life of Christ, our attention to tradition can never be detached or merely critical...

...To presume that we can, in our present condition, judge the whole of our tradition without having allowed it to inform us to the depths is profoundly arrogant...

...Which, at least in part, may be another way of saying, "common ground...

...nor should we presume an inferior one, as conservatives tend to...

...Tradition has been abused and is still frequently invoked as a way of ending all thought and discussion...

...Those Christians who went before us didn't, and we should not presume a superior vision, as liberals are sometimes wont to do...

...It is very easy to see what was wrong with their view of the world and how limited their intellectual horizons were, but not so easy to see how our own understanding is limited...

...The principles of Jesus, the meaning of his life and teaching, matter more than the development of doctrine or the particular cultural and historical circumstances in which they occurred...

...It sees only the limits of the past and the confining nature of culture (excepting the culture of the person who is doing the abstracting), and none of the depths...

...The ways in which the church of the first centuries expressed the faith were influenced by Greek thinking...

...And there is a danger in easy discarding...

...For two of the Maryland legislature's "most fervent opponents of abortion," support of family planning resulted in attacks from the Family Protection Lobby, which accused them of the "wholesale sellout of our families and children...

...People use words like "'fundamentalist" and "orthodox" interchangeably, though they are far from equivalent, and there is a vague formula in some liberal minds which places on one side of a line (one drawn by editorialists who know almost nothing about religion of any sort) Jerry Falwell, Hindu traditionalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Orthodox Judaism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Anglo-Catholicism, and the...

...Granted, the chosenness of the Jews is controversial, among Jews as well as Christians...

...This battle, between the "possessors" and the "non-possessors," ended in a short-term .victory for those who favored what most of us would regard as the wrong side, and as a result the church suffered in the next century...

...For Durbin, his efforts have meant being vilified as a baby killer, being made an enemy "pin-up" in a right-to-life newsletter, and having a right-to-life opponent in the fall...

...NANCY AMIDEI (Nancy Amidei frequently reports on human-services issues from Washington...

...It's time they asked themselves, he says, to assess their impact on the abortion issue since Roe v. Wade became the law, given the fact that a generation has now grown up with abortion legal...

...He thinks demands for opposition to family planning may defeat the purposes of those who oppose abortion...

...In the ages when officially sanctioned views of Christianity were the only kind allowed, Jews and heretics (who had often become heretical because of the self-satisfaction I I A lot of the recent "traditionalist" vs...

...The history of religion provides progressive churchpeople with an embarrassing number of reasons to distrust traditional Christianity...

...There is a real difficulty involved in distinguishing between tradition and traditions, between those things which are essential to Christian belief and those which can and should be discarded as irrelevant or even harmful...

...Traditionally, Christians believed that Jews were the chosen people, that Jesus was born "in the fullness of time," and that the period of the patriarchs and prophets pointed towards his coming...

...Our work is not to try to restore the church to what it was in the past or to restore a triumphalist Christian vision...

...but it is also not to judge the church as if the twentieth (rather than the fourth or thirteenth) were the greatest and wisest of centuries...

...Take, for example, a current fashionable approach to the historicity of Christianity...

...Chalk one up for the long haul.., but not before noting some of the important issues raised in the debate, such as the ability of monasteries which Commonweal: 38owned estates to care for the poor and orphaned who would otherwise have been neglected, and the fact that the leading figures on both sides of the debate were canonized...

...Politically, he says, "we've failed...

...It looks strange and awkward to us, with all its odd costumes, old pictures, and a language which bears the marks of 2,000 years of shared experience...

...Part of the danger lies in our own cultural limitations: we are inclined to think that we possess a clarity which our ancestors lacked...

...What I think has to be avoided, though, is the treatment of the church as if it were only a sociological and cultural phenomenon, and not the Body of Christ, where the Holy Spirit lives...

...No one can deny that many foolish arguments have surrounded the maleness of Jesus, or that the chosenness of the Jews has been perversely used as an excuse for anti-Semitism, or that there were limitations to the vision of the Fathers of the church...

...and corruption of those who were officially Christian) were persecuted in the name of Christ...

...The liberal temptation is to think that no fourth-century thinker could possibly be as clear about Christianity as we are today...

...With regard to this debate (in general it doesn't interest me much) I can say only that the purpose of any hierarchy is to represent the mind of the church, and that cannot be equated with the hierarchy talking to itself...