Why I am … Traditional

A few years ago I was talking to a colleague about the value of pleasure. He was a proud hedonist, believing pleasure to be the ultimate good, while I — while certainly valuing pleasure — was more skeptical of it. To support my position, I brought in not only contemporary insights from psychology (hedonic adaptation and such), but also the fact that in the entire history of Western philosophy, no one has ever considered hedonism (at least as it is understood today) as a viable position. (Aristippus of Cyrene did, but no one took him seriously. Epicureans were also technically hedonists, but not in a way people today would recognize.) My friend balked at this, saying he wasn’t going to let dead people tell him how to live and that the whole point of being alive is to make life for ourselves. I came back saying that if we don’t do this in any other area of life — we don’t insist on inventing pottery or computers, or domesticating wolves or grains for ourselves — why would we with our beliefs? And so we reached a conversational impasse.

I’ve started this post with this story because to me it’s become a great touchstone about why I see value in being ‘traditional.’ As I’ve previously written in my series ‘Tradition(ed)’:

Technologies may have changed and the world may be simultaneously much bigger and smaller than it once was, but the human heart is as it always has been. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel in every generation. To try to do so would be inefficient — wasting energy trying to solve problems that have already been worked out — and make cultural development impossible. And so there’s a sense in which this conservative principle within tradition — preserving what has worked well in the past — is actually forward-looking, allowing us to build on what we have received.

This doesn’t mean we need to parrot what we received, but that being traditional gives us a starting place from which to work. It gives us a map of the land we inhabit. The map isn’t the land itself, and we may very well find new things to add to it, or places where the map-makers didn’t quite get it right, but having a map is still preferable to not. And to me this is the first reason why I identify as traditional.

The second value I see in identifying with a tradition is precisely what detractors would call its irrelevance. The fact that the ancients weren’t driven by the same problems and questions we are — or come at shared problems from very different places — is helpful. To quote (yet again) my favourite C.S. Lewis insight:

People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. (”On The Reading of Old Books,” Introduction to On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius)

In the same way, our spiritual forebears’ different assumptions and ideas can be a wonderful source of theological creativity, breaking us out of our contemporary loggerheads and dead ends. I can honestly say that I’ve found far more common ground with today’s spiritual seekers from within the Eastern Christian tradition’s Logos theology than I have from any new-fangled idea or approach. Likewise, many years ago when I was wrestling with how to reconcile the theory of evolution with my faith, it was a huge blessing to discover that some of the same theologians who crafted our ancient Christian creeds understood that the seven-day schema of creation in Genesis was ‘obviously’ a literary device with little to do with what ‘actually happened.’

Third, and related to this, being traditional reveals just how big and broad and deep our Christian tradition is. My mind and heart have been expanded by exposure to tradition far more than it’s been limited by it. And at a time when I was frustrated by the shallowness of what I was seeing in contemporary Christianity, it was going deeper into the Tradition that helped me find the deeper wells that had the living water to slake my spiritual thirst: Eastern Orthodoxy revealed to me a theological vision that united theology and spirituality and worship, and a thorough-goingly Christian approach to meditation and mysticism; and the Ignatian tradition within Roman Catholicism gave me practices to help me bring all of myself to the altar. As grateful as I am for my early grounding in the evangelical basics and the expectation and passion of the charismatic movement, it was going deeper and broader into tradition that saved my faith and transformed my life in meaningful, needful ways.

Finally, the fourth reason why I am traditional is that it’s impossible not to be. Tradition is inevitable, whether we want it to be or not. To go back to the introductory post of my Tradition(ed) series:

The moment you have learned something from someone, you have to some extent engaged with tradition. This can be implicit, like how your family celebrates Christmas, or explicit, as with Sunday School lessons or being taught by your grandma how to bake cookies. A consequence of this is that even those who intentionally reject the authority of tradition end up creating traditions of their own. The churches of the Reformation, for example, all rejected Church tradition in favour of the Bible as the ‘sole’ source of authority, but all ended up creating interpretive and ecclesiastical (i.e., church institutional) traditions of their own. Reformed Christians may say they don’t accept tradition, but are quick to point out when you stray from their received traditions of Bible interpretation. In a similar way, Pentecostals may not have standard interpretations of the Bible, favouring a kind of sanctified ‘reader response’ form of Scripture reading, but this shared belief that the individual is led to the correct reading of the Bible for them by the Holy Spirit, is itself a tradition passed on in those communities. And so, to reiterate the first point: tradition is an inherent part of community life and as such, it is inescapable. Tradition is inevitable.

Because we cannot get away from tradition, we would do well to be intentional about it. If we deny that we have been ‘traditioned’, this doesn’t make us any less so. It simply pushes the ways we have been influenced by tradition into shadow, where we can’t see them, and where they might cause problems for us later on.

I could go on, but I think all this suffices for the purposes of this project. (If you’re at all interested in how to wrestle with tradition, please do check out the full series ‘Tradition(ed)’.) So, why am I traditional? I am traditional because it means not having to reinvent the wheel, because it challenges my assumptions, because it deepens my understanding and experience of God, and because it allows me to be honest about my influences.

But here I have to reiterate that being traditional is not ‘vain repetition’ of what’s happened in the past. Tradition lives in the active reception of wisdom, and then handing down it to others. Tradition is therefore inevitable, but also ever-changing. Tradition is living and active, the wisdom of the past applied for the sake of the future. And it’s to this last piece that I’ll turn next time.