“Since your canon (the Bible), your creeds and your core Christian beliefs are so ancient, doesn’t that also make them instruments or expressions of violence? After all, don’t they come out of eras and settings of religious chauvinism, imperial politics, and scientific ignorance, from times of witch-burnings, trial by ordeal and belief in a flat earth?”
If I had to rely on ancient sources for knowledge about the life cycle of eels, I would believe that they came from horse hairs that fell into running water. Until only 150 years ago, I would also have believed that flues, colds and malaria were transmitted by vapors or “humors” in the air. The age of a belief then is no guarantee of its validity.
Nor is its newness.
The origins of eels and sickness, however, are not things I am asked to believe either by the Bible or church creeds and confessions. They deal more with matters like, Is there meaning to life? What does it mean to be human? Are we alone in the universe? And How should we live? Much has happened over the past 300 years that tells me that we are making progress in understanding things like eels and sickness. But nothing has happened over the same period to convince me that we are significantly further along toward answering questions of meaning, value, or right and wrong than were the ancients, at least not without the help of revelation. Nor have our ancestors anything on us modern and postmodern people when it comes to cruelty, duplicity, egocentricity or ethnocentricity. Our only progress in such matters is the technology and scope with which we act them out. If anything, modern and post-modern people have made much more of a fetish of despair and of questioning even the worth and the answerability of such questions. Let us not then confuse scientific and technological progress with moral and spiritual progress, nor assume that the first guarantees the latter.
Our historic, spiritual and philosophical ancestors were not perfect plaster saints. For example, I find great depth and meaning in the writings of Bernard of Clairvaux (12th C. Belgium) about the ways in which Christ still comes courting the human soul. But Bernard was also a shill for the Crusades (“Say it ain’t so, Bernie!”). But I doubt that we today are any less cracked and spotted. Should we then totally disregard or disparage what he said about the one because of the other? If so, then I must totally disregard and disparage anything and everything I have ever said, including this essay, and so should you, dear reader, because of times and ways in which I have found that I was mistaken, misled, and potentially misled others. I can think of a few. But that is finally a logically and philosophically impossible position to take.
There was a time when we in the church argued the merits of an idea based largely on logic, the Bible and experience. I miss those days. Now we are at least as likely to discuss and dismiss beliefs and ideas because of who said them, when and where someone said them, and who the contemporaries were of the person who said them. Julian of Norwich had a brilliant mind and a deeply devotional heart. But she wrote at a time of witch-burnings. To say that we can therefore safely ignore or even dismiss her and her works, and those of her contemporaries, would be a philosophical version of guilt-by-association. That is not admissible in a court of law; it should be handled just as carefully in theology, philosophy and ethics.
We should not be so quick, either, to assume that, if our ancestors were ignorant in one sphere (like where eels and colds come from), and if some were guilty of certain things, like witch burnings, then they were all equally ignorant and guilty of everything. Besides, our blanket assumptions about their ignorance and guilt may be overblown. Not everyone before Columbus believed that the earth was flat. We moderns have commendably outlawed slavery and burning witches or heretics at the stake (at least in Western democracies). But these tragedies were not universally practiced nor applauded in ancient times, either. Modern and post-Enlightenment people did not suddenly wake up to the ignorance and evil of such things; they inherited a long history of debate and discernment about them. The church’s debate and discernment on slavery long predates the American Abolitionist Movement and the Civil War, with many who took the allegedly modern Abolitionist position 1900 years ago. To what forms of evil and ignorance have we yet to wake up to today?
Knowing something about the times and contemporaries of a writer or a document are more than helpful for understanding their context, purpose and viewpoint. Of course we stand to benefit from greater input on significant questions from a wider range of people, places, perspectives and times. But on their own, the time, the place and the identity of a writer or a speaker do not validate nor invalidate what he or she said.
So, whenever I hear someone complain that their generation was not consulted when the Confession, or the creed or the canon were drawn up, I want to know what happened that made any generation, en toto, so much wiser and more virtuous than previous ones. Discovering vaccines or anesthesia, as wonderful as those are, do not apply. A generation did not do that; scientists building on the work of scientists in previous generations did.
I am not arguing for mere traditionalism. As the theologian, Jaroslav Pelikan, said, “Tradition is the living voice of the dead, while traditionalism is the dead voice of the living.” The traditionalist and the progressive alike enact their own mirror-image versions of each other’s errors. The one says “It was better when….” while the other is dead certain that, “It will be better when….” History and experience tell me that we always have been and will be equally flawed, and equally gifted, equally fallen, and equally blessed, sometimes just in different ways. Both positions display more faith in time than they do in the timeless Lord of the church. Let, then, the errors and blind spots of our ancestors, their eras and their associates, educate us to the potential of similar pitfalls in ourselves and our times. But don’t let them and their age blind us to all that our ancestors have yet to teach us.