Tradition and Apocalypse by David Bentley Hart

Author:David Bentley Hart [Hart, David Bentley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Theology/History, REL067080, REL067000, REL015000
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

II

If one is to make sense of the theological concept of tradition without being impaled on one or another of the horns of any of these dilemmas, it seems to me, one must begin from an altogether different premise. And that premise must be sustained at first by a very different kind of venture of faith: not one that expects to find itself confirmed or its expenditure of energy rewarded either by historical data or by dogmatic authority alone, or even by both in combination. Rather, faith must look first to the very failure of a perfect resolution between the history and the dogma of the church as itself indicative of the true nature of a living tradition; it must begin from the supposition that the inadequacy of even the most necessary and inevitable formulations of doctrine is proof of the reality of the “essential” truth to which the tradition bears witness; and it must regard the persistence of the tradition’s inner search for fuller understanding as evidence of that “antecedent finality” that makes even these imperfect resolutions at once possible and recognizable in their imperfection. Admittedly, all of this involves a kind of fidelity that bears more than a passing resemblance to the philosophical pragmatist’s “will to believe,” but only in the correct sense of that phrase: a willingness to commit oneself to a path of discovery on the strength of one’s sure sense of having received a compelling vocation, a rational summons to an end one can dimly conceive but not as yet properly name. It is not an empty will to believe despite the evidence (no Pragmatist philosopher, as it happens, ever advocated such a thing); rather, it is obedience to the evidence of a real future object of intention as revealed in the rational longing it elicits within human beings, and in the partial expression of that object in the shared experience of tradition.

I am not attempting to be evasive here. It is merely the case that I am pointing toward a rationale internal to tradition whose existence to a great extent can be revealed, if at all, only by the very act of pointing at it. This may sound coy or vague, but I would contend that it is a manifest truth about Christian tradition, if it is to be understood as a concrete historical phenomenon that is also an intrinsic unity. It seems clear to me that whatever it is that is most vital to tradition in the theological sense—whatever force or substance sustains it as a continuity amid incessant change—must also be that which is most inconspicuous, even invisible, within it. This as yet impenetrable invisibility is in fact tradition’s very life. If the essence of a tradition’s continuity were not in a very real way something hidden from direct view, it could never pass through, provoke, or survive so many successive conceptual and practical configurations; if it were not something that silently abides amid change, the as yet still inexpressible within each

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