Dialectical Traditionalism

Dialectical Traditionalism May 24, 2016

"Study of Hands," Albrecht Durer
“Study of Hands,” Albrecht Durer

We live in a modern word that bears very modern interests, and theology – well – isn’t. It isn’t. It is the clash between the two that I want to explore for a moment.

We are marked by a 21st century keenly aware of the hallowed identities of people, of their differences, of their uniquenesses. Theology, meanwhile, breathes with the ancient life of Jewish and Hellenistic lands; it bows with reverence for the one God and for the love of wisdom. These worlds are expected to clash, and it is often assumed that the ancient world and the modern one are in a perpetual struggle for dominance. Neither can really live while the other lives.

It’s true, isn’t it? Camus cannot tolerate Plato – may universals be damned to the indifference of existence – and Aristotle is the enemy of moral relativism. Or, to put it less technically, it seems that those who yearn for cherished old things are not at home in the present, and those who yearn for a better future are not at home in the past. Within Catholicism, there are many who lament as the Church abandons her traditions, and many who lament that she refuses to relinquish them.

The Church herself is stretched across the rack of time.

I am forever aware of this, perhaps because of where I work and what I do: reading ancient theologians with modern Californian students. I’m too stubborn to surrender the ancient, but not dumb enough to think that its importance is obvious or relevant. There must be a real sharing. In one way, I have to introduce my students to ancient questions and old worlds they’ve never known. In another, my students have to introduce me to theirs. Neither of us go on unchanged.

We begin to ask the questions of the past, and we begin to ask the past questions that it never had. In surprising ways, the past asks questions of us too. It speaks and it demands as much as we do. Let me see if I can explain.

Recently, my campus has endured considerable unrest among students and faculty over a number of issues, as the community struggles to understand and to respond to complex problems of ethnicity, race, gender, violence, etc. There have been several protests over these matters across the nation. I wrote a theological reflection for my college on the problem of diversity specifically.

I had a number of reasons for writing the essay, but it is the effort itself that’s important here, because it illustrates a vital principle for theology. In writing the essay, I experienced an example of dialectical traditionalism, a phrase that a colleague of mine has coined for a particular way of doing theology. In other words, on a campus perplexed over a modern concern, I was forced backward into my tradition to find resources to respond with and think through the (new) problem. I asked questions that the Catholic tradition has never quite asked itself – questions about diversity, which are recent – but that it has reflected upon in different forms and contexts.

Such a search is a difficult and delicate task that requires historical awareness but not historical fundamentalism. In other words, there has to be enough imagination about the past to be able to bend it in new ways to respond to the present. There also has to be enough fidelity to the past to preserve the “original impulse” (as Yves Congar puts it) that governed the historical decision. Dialectical traditionalism is a back-and-forth (a “dialectic”) between the Christian tradition and the present, a movement that defers to tradition while refusing to think that keeping it the same really keeps it the same.

So I had to ask questions the tradition hadn’t quite asked, and I had to know the tradition well enough to begin imagining the ways it had started to ask these questions. My questions reconfigured the resources of the past, constellated them in a new shape. At the same time, tradition pushed back: its resources reconfigured the present question, reshaped it along new lines. The problem was no longer the original question about diversity. It became a question about diversity governed by what it means to be Church, and by what it means to be Trinity.

Did I succeed? Perhaps in some ways. Others have done much better jobs in much more formal works. The essay is also, of course, so very theologian – but I am not the only form of theologian that exists. There would be many other ways to work through the problem.

Theology is a double-writing of sorts. It writes simultaneously with the past and the present – at least in this form – and neither are unaffected by the other. They press upon each other. It is an incomplete theology that refuses to look into the past for help; it is incomplete as well to think that old answers are enough for new questions. We only have this moment before God, which is double-written with the poverty of the past and of the present.

And blessed are the poor.


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