1. We treat scripture as a conversation instead of ideology
2. We realize tradition as creative instead of nostalgic
3. We hold reason as balance instead of inevitability
4. We pursue evangelism using desire instead of shame
5. We realize transcendence through affection instead of fear
2. We realize tradition as creative instead of nostalgic
Tradition enables every people with whom God has spoken to, to share a conversation running longer than a human speaker can recall, and richer than human speakers can know in their own time. Tradition links humans through many ages, honoring our forebears’ labors and sacrifices, and forwarding their hopes into a world they scarcely foresaw. Modern historians keep steady focus on the gulf separating us from the ancients and their world. We cannot enter their world any more than they can enter ours. But listening as they talk of their own present and their vision of their own past, we can build a bridge: not only through shared experience, but of shared reflection on human challenges, tragedies, and victories. Our values may change, but across that bridge we can glimpse those goals while keeping ours present.
Among Christian goals of every era, Progress reigns supreme. In the fourth century, Gregory of Nyssa wrote that progress in becoming God’s friend is the perfection of life [The Life of Moses, ad fin.]. Churches must likewise progress in showing Christ’s pattern to the world. Like St Paul we build on a foundation of earlier achievements, while ready to leave those behind and stretch forward toward the “prize”, as he and other earlier Christians did. [Philippians 3:14] Hence faithfulness to our tradition requires creativity and openness for not only new sources, but also combinations, and ideas.
Tradition’s nemesis is not creative innovation, but nostalgia. Nostalgia means longing for a past that is not one’s true past. For example, American Civil War battle re-enactments, perhaps a harmless entertainment, have mushroomed without evoking the proportional cost in dead and wounded—higher than in almost any other war—and ironically today’s newest growing participants are Asian tourists. By contrast with nostalgic fantasy, tradition connects real lives, and realizing tradition takes frank and sometimes uncomfortable dialog. We sift through past Christians’ writings and deeds, hoping to choose as well as they chose or better, in circumstances they knew well and in others they never thought of.
Restoring some pure unanimity or continuity in belief and order is a nostalgic project, and has led to tragic conflict. In fact the more we study Christianity’s beginnings, the more diversity we find on points that even historic councils struggled to define. Today every historical action, argument and change wants fresh understanding and eventual revision: as Luther wrote, ecclesia semper reformanda, the Church at all times demands reform. For example, starting with a Hellenistic pagan approach rather than Jewish ritual for Passover seder and chaburah fellowship meals and eucharist alike, Jews and Christians have incorporated symbols, music, and cult elements from local ethnic cultures, and spread these combinations around the world. For another example, both Christian and Jewish synagogue worship adopted imperial ceremonies from the very Roman state that had destroyed temple cults and persecuted churches decades earlier. Today such processes speed up as world technology advances, and evangelism requires openness to the pluralist reality of modern life.
Christian tradition’s creative achievements in teaching, worship, music and working structure have typically met resistance from voices who pleaded to preserve past ways unchanged. But we cannot keep or restore the past any more than we can enter it; only a creative response after our forebears’ example can realize tradition the way tradition has always lived.
This is part 2 of 5 in Rick Fabian's Core Values Series describing the theology behind All Saints Company, the founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church.
