In my last post I focused on a problem I see currently in evangelicalism. Individuals are writing, speaking, teaching, reading, and often practicing as if they were the first people to think about such things. In this context, gurus abound, offering a path of life unmoored from any specific Christian tradition.
Here I want to focus on a simple question.
What does it look like to moor ourselves to a tradition?
Let me start, however, with the opposing questions: What doesn’t it look like to moor ourselves to a tradition? The fear, I think, is that folks feel like embracing a tradition shuts down questions, honest inquiry, and difficulty with teaching that feels outmoded or alien. But none of this needs to be true.
I understand this worry though. The way we often teach theology lends itself to a kind of all-or-nothing approach to the Christian tradition broadly, and the Protestant traditions more narrowly (as if there are only one possible view of all things). It is easy to start thinking that being Reformed, for instance, is a single thing. Instead, when you start reading in these traditions, you discover a profound breadth to them.
There is a tendency on a more fundamentalist impulse to reject this. There is a tendency to assert that there is only one way to talk about justification by faith alone, the atonement, or the church. But doing so reveals an ignorance of the actual traditions they propose to be advancing.
Instead, to moor ourselves to a tradition requires that we learn it from the inside with a kind of empathy, openness, and critical eye to how our own age might blind us to the truth rather than illumine it. We can simultaneously keep a critical eye on the tradition as well, since, as Protestants, we expect the various traditions to be misguided in ways. We should always remain avid espousers of sola scriptura.
Nonetheless, mooring ourselves to a tradition requires a submission to its logic, insights, and emphases so that we can embrace what values and virtues have been weighed by the tradition itself. We might never fully embrace all aspects of the tradition we belong to, but to submit ourselves to it, is to learn to reason along the contours of what has been handed down.
Broadly, this is what we always have to do as Christians. We receive scripture, above all else, as it has been handed down to us, as the rule that governs our life, beliefs, and faith. But we also embrace creedal realities, like the Apostles’ and The Nicene Creed, as affirmations we declare and as guiding frameworks for thinking Christianly. These things, together, teach us to look along the light of what we have received, not only to affirm generically, but to see the world a certain way.
Within this broader tradition, we need to learn to live and reason within a people.
Doing so requires humility. Doing so requires faith. Doing so requires that we consider our own calling, time, and capacity. Some of you are called to do this deeply. Many of you are not. There is nothing wrong with that. But we all, in one way or another, are called to grow in a kind of traditioned literacy.
Let me suggest to you and this won’t shut down creativity, individual freedom of thought, or depth in your thinking, but it will awaken those things. Traditioned reason opens us up to the blindness we cannot see in ourselves and in our age.
If you are thinking: Fine, but where do I start. Let me suggest that the devotional, Be Thou My Vision, by Jonathan Gibson is a great place to start. Not only is it a beautiful book, but it offers a kind of liturgical cadence through scripture and through protestant catechesis that is devotionally rich and prayerful.