Tradition grows, moves, and changes. It is also multifarious, complex, and the growing, moving, and changing site of ongoing arguments. That “Christianity”—a broad simplification of an immense tradition—includes bad things as well as good should not be surprising.
The real problem is that people imagine tradition as something that is only imposed upon them, as though they were merely inert receptacles, instead of something in which they participate with their own moral agency. Our tradition is like the village square of our culture: it is the place where we argue about what to do, not the instructions for how to do it.
We should own the numerous failures of our tradition, but we are fools if we imagine that we can immunize ourselves from future failures by simply rejecting or cutting off that tradition. It is there not just as a storehouse of inspiration, but as a storehouse of error. This is why, at the root of our tradition, in our scriptures, we keep both the proclamation of law from Sinai and the immediate turn to idolatry with the Golden Calf; and it is why we keep both the priestly instructions and stories of the institution of kingship and the extensive and rigorous critique of the priestly and monarchical power in the prophets. The trajectory is set right there: we are a people who have failed at least as often as we have succeeded.
We should continually critique our own past even as we remain engaged in the tradition that continues to grow from that past. That is not rationalization; it is reality. We should not succumb to the quintessentially modernist fallacy that we can somehow amputate our own history and pretend that our own character and morality has somehow sprung from some other ground.
Tradition grows, moves, and changes. It is also multifarious, complex, and the growing, moving, and changing site of ongoing arguments. That “Christianity”—a broad simplification of an immense tradition—includes bad things as well as good should not be surprising.
The real problem is that people imagine tradition as something that is only imposed upon them, as though they were merely inert receptacles, instead of something in which they participate with their own moral agency. Our tradition is like the village square of our culture: it is the place where we argue about what to do, not the instructions for how to do it.
We should own the numerous failures of our tradition, but we are fools if we imagine that we can immunize ourselves from future failures by simply rejecting or cutting off that tradition. It is there not just as a storehouse of inspiration, but as a storehouse of error. This is why, at the root of our tradition, in our scriptures, we keep both the proclamation of law from Sinai and the immediate turn to idolatry with the Golden Calf; and it is why we keep both the priestly instructions and stories of the institution of kingship and the extensive and rigorous critique of the priestly and monarchical power in the prophets. The trajectory is set right there: we are a people who have failed at least as often as we have succeeded.
We should continually critique our own past even as we remain engaged in the tradition that continues to grow from that past. That is not rationalization; it is reality. We should not succumb to the quintessentially modernist fallacy that we can somehow amputate our own history and pretend that our own character and morality has somehow sprung from some other ground.