Contextual theology as creatively existing in two spaces of tradition

Fri, Aug 23, 2024
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I love playing with tradition – respecting the past, but giving it a twist to make something fun and new. At my wedding, my groomsmen and I wore kilts, with my family’s tartan – but we also entered the church to the theme of The Riders of Rohan. I also find creatively playing with tradition to be a helpful way of thinking about contextual theology. We can think of the interaction, the dialogue, the dance of living within modern society and within Christianity as living creatively, even as living artistically.

Call them traditions, or social structures, or norms, or constructions. These are ways of thinking about the communally-made practcies, beliefs and worldviews that are taken for granted within a social grouping. They tend to be so deeply and implicitly learned that they go without saying; from the inside, they simply describe the way the world is, and they can be indistinguishable from the concrete physical realities around us.

A longstanding question in sociology is how do we reconcile individual freedom and choice, on the one hand, and the quasi-determinism that social norms can impose, on the other. Michel de Certeau famously used the metaphor of walking in a city to describe this interplay. The physically constructed world of the city: its skyscrapers, roads, alleys and sidewalks, provide a selection of choices for where and how to walk. We have a near infinite number of possible combinations of decisions: what direction, which destination, which mode of transport, what style, all while respecting the built system of the city. We can also add the possibility of bending the norms, for example by cutting across a parking lot or a lawn, and breaking them, by walking through a fountain in the town square or cutting through the front and back doors to a neighbour’s house. These breaches, small or large, increase our possibilities, while also increasing the likelihood of offending the social norms of those around us. ¹

While not physical, social norms have much the same structuring effect on our lives. The reactions Jesus evoked by questioning the traditions of his society – and especially the traditions of powerful members of his society – illustrate this well. Jesus countervened bad traditions, but traditions are not innately bad. Is it wrong to tithe cumin and dill? No, not as long as it doesn’t lead to disregarding the moral law. Over its 2000 years of history, the Church has created many traditions – some faithful and helpful, others much less so. Taken as a whole, we often refer to this history as The Great Tradition, that has included innumerably diverse social forms – created traditions – that we can claim as our heritage. While Christianity is certainly more than a tradition, it is most definitely not less than a tradition.

Thinking of two of the contexts in which we live – our faith and our culture – in terms of traditions can give us a fruitful metaphor for thinking about life and faith contextually. If we think of them both as sets of rules and structures in which we can creatively live, a selection of ways of living – old, new, and mixes of both – opens up to us. As we deepen our understandings of the sources and hidden structures, the rules that go without saying, our creative options multiply.

One of Western society’s strongest and least questioned norms is authenticity, an idea with a paradox of meanings. On the one hand, it means being true to one’s unique self², and on the other, being true to an ideal, often reflecting an imagined perfect past, or an imagined perfect future. Both of ways of thinking about authenticity are easy to identify in the Christian tradition: the Lutheran concept of vocation can describe an individual, particular way of being human; the doctrine of the imago dei speaks of an ideal of being human. The repeated movements of Reform that punctuate our history often look to reclaim an original form of community, or to build one in the image of the future, eschatological Kingdom.³

Another norm of today’s society, or perhaps more precisely a value, is living a holistic life. This is closely related to authenticity, but even more than authenticity, its roots go deep in The Great Tradition. From the life of the people of Israel, to the renewed law of the Sermon on the Mount, through Acts chapter 2, the desert hermits, monasticisms, pietisms and personal holiness movements, the thread of the wholeness and integrity of faith for all of life runs strong.

This is a place where Christian tradition and contemporary western tradition overlap, and provide a compelling mode of witness. A faithful, holistic, Christian lifestyle can, at the same time, both respect and subvert the cultural tradition. We can take a cultural form without taking a cultural value. If the cultural traditional form of holistic lifestyle can be Christian indeed, the cultural traditional values of primacy and power of the self are not. Adopting the former while resisting the latter can be beautiful – even artistic.

We need to be careful here. We don’t break norms just because we can, but so that we, the Christian community, can become a sign of the Kingdom: our way of being in the world, our lifestyle, foreshadows the reconciliation of all things in Christ.

If living in two cultural spaces is a creative, artistic life, then rather than opposing faith and culture, let’s make them sing, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in counterpoint, sometimes in dissonance – but always in ways that reflect the beauty of the Kingdom of God.