Hand to Hand

This is part three of a series on tradition. Part one is here and part two is here.

Thus far, we have defined tradition by its literal sense of ‘giving over’ and spoken of the ways that tradition is practiced in both sacred and secular senses. We also spoke of the specter of traditionalism and the way it parasitically feeds on sacred tradition to ensnare those who are seeking a reintegration with the Church before and after, the Church above and among. Traditionalism is a counterfeit of tradition that aims at secular power, using the gifts of the past as artifactual weapons; they are like the antagonists in Raiders of the Lost Ark attempting to use the Ark of the Covenant as a doomsday device against their enemies. And as with the ending of that film, traditionalism and its adherents are doomed to dissolution by the very realities they attempt to control. Tradition, in the end, cannot be divorced from the living entity of the Church and its life of prayer in union with God the Trinity. To the extent that tradition is conceived of as existing of itself, that is where the error of traditionalism thrives.

A return to a healthy relationship between a Christian and tradition involves a renewed imagination for the life of the Church and the place of tradition in the Church. To this end, the insights of the Anglican theologian John Macquarrie prove very helpful. In his Principles of Christian Theology, he sets the role of tradition within a taxonomy of sources by which the science of theology is practiced–by which the content of the Faith is discerned so that it may be applied. Prior to tradition, Macquarrie observes the necessary place of experience, revelation, and Scripture. We discussed the sometimes tense, adjacent relationship between Scripture and tradition in part one of this series, but it is helpful now to take a further step backward to see how these have a context within a communal life.

Macquarrie asserts that “theology implies participation in a religious faith, so that some experience of the life of faith precedes theology and may indeed be said to motivate it” (Principles, 5). Further, he notes that “[our] experience of the life of faith comes, in turn, from participation in a community of faith” in which “there is met what seems to be a quest inherent in the very constitution of our human existence. The quest is met by the opening up of the dimension of the holy, which is experienced as addressing, judging, assisting, renewing, and so on (5). For Macquarrie, experience entails attentiveness to life known in relationships. There is within us that which seeks a quest into the dimension of the holy, a basic human religiousness that must be unfolded if our humanity is to be full. Theology that suppresses this necessary participation, which obliges a personal stake in assaying that dimension of the holy, becomes abstracted and lifeless. Downstream, it will produce traditionalism.

After experience, however, Macquarrie notes the place of revelation, “the primary source of the theology.” He continues: “we may notice that essential to the idea of revelation is that what we come to know through revelation has a gift-like character. If, in general terms, we say that what is disclosed in revelation is the dimension of the holy, then, in religious experience, it is as if the holy ‘breaks in’ and the movement is from beyond man toward man” (6). Revelation is that which is given from the dimension of the holy to aid the quest inherent to our human condition. Revelation presupposes that there is an Other who is not us, but who is the end of our intrinsic desire for the holy. In St. Augustine’s terms, it is the One for whom our hearts are restless until they find our rest in Him. Revelation tempers the tendency of experience to turn inward on itself, and experience keeps us attentive to the fact that each of us must seek and find what is revealed. Together, these make sense of Scripture and tradition, which follow in Macquarrie’s order. As strange as it sounds to say, if we begin with Scripture and then tradition, we will end up missing them. Scripture is the inspired record of revelation and tradition is the evidence of the Spirit’s inspiration of the Church to whom the Scriptures are given. They are the authoritative records of how God has revealed Himself in an encounter with the people He made for Himself. Thus, we cannot know tradition apart from a faith community and its heritage anymore than we can know Scripture apart from the Church for whom it was inspired.

It is for these reasons that liturgy looms so large in any substantial conversation about tradition. Liturgy is the work of the people with God and for God. Liturgy is not a question of the aesthetics of a worship service, although visual symbolism is an important part of the conversation. Rather, liturgy must be seen as the meeting place of experience, revelation, Scripture, and tradition. It is the appointed time at which the faith community gathers to experience God infused by the hope that God will meet us in an encounter. Scripture grounds us in the primary experience of those who first walked with the Lord, and tradition unfolds how their experience has been known in all the subsequent generations. liturgy is how we enter participation in the faith community. It is worth noting that by ‘liturgy,’ I am not referring to any specific liturgical tradition right away. The way that every Christian congregation practices that encounter with God through the shape of its prayer is, definitionally, liturgical. Put another way, there is no such thing as a non-liturgical church. Liturgies become traditional the moment they are repeated more than once. Liturgies can be ancient or novel, thoughtful or compulsive, coherent or chaotic. And Liturgies tradition us in understanding and practicing what we receive by revelation and through Scripture.

Liturgy, in its turn, arises around the sacraments, the outward and visible signs of an inward, invisible grace. Sacraments are the objective places where the ongoing presence and graces of God can be confidently sought and found. As the Prayer Book says of them, they are ‘pledges of [God’s] love” the place where our Lord has promised to be present with us. As Anglicans, we are recipients of the seven sacraments of the Church: Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Confession, Matrimony, Holy Orders, and Unction. Our tradition observes the distinction of Baptism and Eucharist being what are called the ‘dominical’ sacraments, meaning simply that they are the two sacraments for which a form (the way it is observed) was directly commanded by the Lord. They anchor what we know it means to be regenerated and incorporated into the Body of Christ, and then to participate in that Body through Holy Communion with Christ and our brethren. Yet the other five sacraments follow from the example and teaching of the Apostles, through whom the Spirit continued to reveal the shape of God’s grace after our Lord’s Ascension. That they could pray for the Spirit to descend, that they could loose and bind sins, that they knew marriage to be a sacred sign of Christ and Church, that they could bestow Christ’s authority to others, and that those elders they appointed could touch and heal the sick is amply evident. The liturgical patterns of any church will arise from their relationship to the sacraments given by Jesus to and through His Apostles, and the manner in which Christians are traditioned into the Faith will be ongoingly shaped by participation in those liturgical patterns.

Here I would like to observe a common trait among the sacraments that suggests their place in the passing down of the Faith from generation to generation, of being the location of the Church’s traditioning practice. Before we spoke about tradition as ‘giving over,’ but the sacraments all take that abstracted definition and place them, literally, into hands. A robust, sacramental sense of tradition is not just ‘given,’ but ‘handed.’ As elementary as it must sound, all of the sacraments require a ‘handing over.’ In Baptism, sponsors or parents hand over a person to the priest at the font to go under the water. At Confirmation, a priest presents candidates to the Bishop, who lays his hands on each (followed by a pastoral slap!). In the Eucharist, the sacrament of sacraments, our Lord puts Himself into the hands of the priest who then gives it to all who receive. In Confession, with the words “and by His authority committed to me, I absolve you” the priest makes the sign of the cross over the penitent. In Orthodox churches, moreover, there is an additional practice of the priest placing part of his stole over the shoulder or head of the penitent while they confess. In Matrimony, the couple’s hands are joined in the exchange of vows, and it is a very ancient practice for the minister to ‘handfast’ the couple as they declare the indissolubility of the marriage. In Unction, the minister takes the oil blessed by the Bishop and anoints the head of the sick. For the dying, he also anoints the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, and feet. And in Holy Orders, the Bishop lays His hands on the ordinand that they might receive the Holy Spirit for the work of his office, as had been done for him and those before him all the way back to the Apostles who received that Spirit from the Lord Jesus. In all of these sacramental rites, the hands become the place where that which was received becomes that which is bestowed, where the means of grace that uphold our practice of the Faith are handed down.

Consider how a life shaped by these fixed points alters our experience. What if, instead of regarding our life as a march from a birth-date to a death-date, from DOB to TOD, we saw life more meaningfully as beginning in our baptism into Christ, who leads us ever on in the weekly remembrance of His Resurrection to receive Him again and again—Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity. How would this not convert and then transform us? What if, instead of envisioning ourselves as solitary Christians bound by our own age, we instead were brought under the care of a ministry received by and from a successor of the Apostles, whose ministry was bestowed hand-to-hand from the hands of Jesus? Would this not break the confines of secular time in a reunion with our Christian family across the ages? And what if, when we had succumbed to sin or sickness, we were not left with a mental struggle to assimilate propositions but a voice in our ears and a hand on our head to assure us of the mercy of Christ? Would this not give us confidence that we were not alone even in the midst of our shame or in the hour we confronted death? How would this shape of life not then alter how we see everything else: the Scriptures, our fellow parishioners, the sick, the imprisoned, the needy, the lost, our families and co-workers, our ancestors and our descendants?

Our sense of tradition cannot escape the reality of giving and receiving hand to hand. We cannot evade the embodied, communal, and historical dimensions of the Faith and our need to receive it as it has been received. That this is necessary may require a change in how we view our liturgies and the cultures of our congregations that emerge from them. It may mean that churches need to stay small so that a stable communal life and its rhythms can be observed. It likely means attention to how the generations interact with each other. It may mean a re-evaluation of what we think is traditional but actually is just local use. Regardless of whatever else it means, though, it means that we cannot abstract our sense of Church to obscure the living, Persons of the Holy Trinity, by whom and for whom and with whom the living persons of the Church–both in the world and with Christ–are and have been made alive. Tradition serves the life of this people, one people in many times and many places, who share the life of one God in three Persons. To experience this life is to experience the living tradition so perfectly summarized in the words of St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: “For I have received of the Lord that which also I gave unto you.”