Tradition

This essay is part one of a series on Tradition, with new installments posted each week.

There is a sweet sense of reunion that attends me when I look at the first, blank page of a new piece of writing. There, I am confronted with the fact that I never immediately know what I should write. It is a lonely feeling that, I think, ought always to attend the attempt to do something novel, and particularly by myself in an empty room. And yet, that lonely space has become the occasion for remembrance, in this moment a kind of invitation of past voices to speak again and come to my aid. If it’s a lesson-plan I am writing, certain master teachers come to mind. If it’s a sermon, then there are certain pastors. If—heaven help us—I am attempting a poem, then the much annotated stars of my Norton anthology start to emerge. Sometimes, it is a friend; sometimes, it is an ancient author I have never met but through their words. I try to ask as politely as possible: will you help me find my words with some of your own? 

If anyone had in front of them my intellectual or spiritual family tree, they would start to recognize how strongly the influences of mentors have directed my own production. It would be as illuminating as seeing a family photo album and realizing I have my mom’s eyes or my dad’s ears. I am not original, but I am also none of those influences, in particular. I am bound in a real way to and by those who have formed me, but I am not the sum total of the things I have learned from them. They have traditioned me, but their traditions now meet the world in the unique circumstances of my life. This is but one of the ways tradition meets experience to reveal what we will call a living tradition, and it is to a meditation on that kind of tradition that we may now proceed (with thanks to Thornton, Eliot, Peister, Scarlett, and Bourdain for their help getting us started). 

What is tradition? Put most broadly, tradition means “to give over.” In practice, tradition is the acquired pre-understanding that we bring to any experience, and both in ways that are alike and different from those from whom we acquired it. Take reading, for example. We read like those who taught us to read, both in the illuminating and constraining ways they taught us. As an English teacher, I read Shakespeare as my first-grade teacher Ms. Smith taught me to read sentences, enhanced by the reading habits of Drs. Kleist and Silver. And they also had teachers who informed their thoughts, and who I suppose are my grand-teachers. As an English teacher, I taught Shakespeare to many students, and presentations of Shakespeare to students were always somehow related to theirs, even to the point that I’d find a phrase coming out of my mouth that was just the way one of them would say it. That is not just professional admiration—that is the linguistic tic of an extended family. Each of those teachers have grand-students walking around; a heritage has been established.

In the Church, discussions of tradition refer to how the practice of the Faith gets passed down from generation to generation. Practically, this means an ongoing examination of what is fixed and what is temporary in that transmission of the Faith. Usually, and especially in the West between Protestants and Roman Catholics, conversations about tradition concern the relationship between the text of Sacred Scripture and the developed traditions around how it is read (interpretation), how doctrines are discerned (theology), how worship is practiced (liturgics), and how all of this is put into practice (ascetics). Broadly, there is a spectrum of opinions about the relative authority of Scripture with the discernment and teaching of the Church. It is possible to have a high view of Scripture and a low view of the Church’s authority (as seen in many nondenominational settings) or a low view of the Scriptures and a high view of the Church’s teaching authority (as in liberal mainlines for whom the Bible is little more than an artifact to inspire progressive social theories). 

Prof. Anthony Lane, of the London School of Theology, helpfully summarizes the other viewpoints throughout that spectrum. First, the coincidence view holds that there is indeed a written canon of Scripture as well as an oral tradition of preaching that rightly interprets the Scriptures. This “Rule of Faith” later developed into the Apostles’ Creed to guide the reading of Scripture in the right sense, but adds nothing that is not strongly established by the Scriptures themselves. Second, the supplementary view, by contrast, suggests that Scripture is not complete of itself but admits of necessary additions. In the moderate sense of this view, this usually applies to liturgical traditions, ways of putting into practice the formative principles of Scripture in community. In a more extreme sense of this view, it suggests something like an open canon–or great latitude with doctrinal development–without an unambiguous mechanism for what not to include. It was certain applications of this flexible view of the Church’s relationship with Scripture that occasioned the disputes of the Protestant Reformation, which contributed to the development of the next two views.

In the ancillary view, one can observe a reaction to what was seen as interpretive abuse of the Scriptures in certain theological arguments. In the Reformation, what was at stake was not the question of whether tradition was necessary–the reformers roundly approved of tradition–but about the methods by which it was applied. In its best light, the Reformation argued for the ancillary view of tradition, or the view that tradition must be continually led by the Scriptures as a handmaid, close and obedient. One could see that as a gesture toward the coincidence view that characterized the early Church’s teaching, but it was also profoundly affected by a general skeptical crisis in philosophical discussions of the time. The ancillary view left the door open for a gradual dismissal of tradition in what we call the solitary view. This began with the good intent of establishing as a cultural norm among Christians that Scripture was exalted in its authority, but that good intention eventually succumbed to a rising attitude among the radical reformers that the plain sense of Scripture alone was to be trusted, acting as Lane puts it, “as though nothing since the New Testament had happened.” What resulted from this were ahistorical and anti-ecclesial readings of Scripture depending on a kind of gnostic reading that hoped for a lightning bolt of understanding, or else invested linguistic and historical criticism to an absurd degree with the power to illuminate the text free of any ideas but what the Bible itself contained. It is worth nothing that the ancillary view and the solitary view broadly characterize American Christianity.

As Anglicans, I would characterize us in general as holding to a coincidence view of tradition that nods toward the ancillary view’s main ideas. The core of our identity is a book of prayer that offers the Church’s ancient pattern of prayer to all Christians who would aspire to practice it. Anglicans know we need tradition, and we are generally respectful of it. But we are also wary of the ways any particular age will try to say more than it knows, and are comfortable with the humble agnosticism that surrounds matters about which Scripture is silent. It is perhaps why we generally lack a gargantuan tome of doctrinal definitions. The experience of God in prayer has historically held priority for us over dogmatic distinctives. And while that order of priorities has sometimes created problems for us, we have also remained a living tradition in the sense that the encounter with God through common prayer may be the only thing that unites us.

As Anglican-Catholics, further, our commitment to the ecumenical councils and a serious consideration of the church fathers moves us more concretely back to a coincidence view of tradition; we earnestly expect the Spirit to lead the Church into truth through its sacramental ministry ordained by Christ. Finally, I might add that our attentiveness to the ascetical and liturgical traditions of the Church, and in particular through the Benedictine tradition, has given us an aptitude for seeing how the forms of worship crafted over centuries have been, in themselves, a way of expressing doctrinal traditions. As the proverb states: the law of prayer is the law of belief. How and what we have prayed for centuries, the shape of our encounter with God the Trinity, have bestowed that pre-understanding for our approach to the Scriptures.

Another helpful way to understand our view of tradition is by what is called the Vincentian Canon. This rule, attributed to St. Vincent of Lerins, states that the rule of essential Christian tradition is “that which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.” Helpfully, this moves us to consider tradition primarily through the eyes of the ages before our time. And when we do, we discover that tradition is something Christians in every period have taken very seriously. That should caution us in our historical moment of flippancy and dismissiveness about tradition, though we should also be wary of calcifying and weaponizing tradition as did some of our brethren in the past. The Vincentian rule suggests to us that it is a good thing to keep the family (in its multiple generations) together, and to prioritize this in every way possible over the pressing demands of one age or another. In general, the crises of our times can be as much distractions and temptations as calls to genuine reform. It seems to me that we are in a moment of cultural addiction to revolution and innovation, and as such we might exercise a particular caution around compulsive novelty.

It is good for us to remember, too, that the Lord has promised that the gates of hell will never prevail against His Church, and that He is with us unto the end of the age. Our exploration of tradition should be a challenge to us in our time not to forget what should be remembered, but also not to use the past to avoid an active trust in God’s Providence to ensure that the life of the Church will pass from generation to generation. Our attention to what may be held in common with our ancestors in the Faith constructively disposes us toward trust that even though certain seasons of the past have known darkness, there has always been a holy light preserved through those night seasons. As such, the light with which we have been entrusted is not of our making, but a light to tend in our time before passing it along to those who come after us. In the meditations that follow, we will look at how a renewed vision for tradition might make us better Christians, and restore to us a sense of how we are privileged to be participants in the work of God through the missions of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. 

I end in a similar place to where I began, wondering how to close this piece. Again, I invite the perspective of those who have so graciously shared their way of seeing and expressing what they have seen. And so I can do little better than follow in the tradition of one of my beloved mentors and thank you for reading, and invite you to join me in praying: “Glory to God for all things.”