Question: What Is the Beating Heart of Tradition? Answer: Not What You Think.

When teaching a class on church history, or the history of Christian spirituality, Vincent of Lérins and his reflections on the beating heart of the Gospel truth will inevitably come up. This 5^th-century thinker pondered the essential question about authenticity: “Since the canon of Scripture is complete, and sufficient of itself for everything, and more than sufficient, what need is there to join with it the authority of the Church’s interpretation? For this reason — because, owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another.” How is it that we all have the same Bible but interpret it so wildly differently? How can we know which version, which interpretation, which tradition is the Tradition?

Vincent’s rule of discernment is this: The Great Tradition—the thread of truth that can be found from the Gospels forward—is that which has been believed everywhere, by everyone, at all times. Or, otherwise said, the rule of universality, consent, and antiquity. That, he argued, can help us navigate the flotsam and jetsam of historical movements that breed endless false iterations of the Gospel. But obviously if his rule actually worked, would we have so many disparate interpretations of the Gospel?

It is this topic of the Great Tradition that chafes David Bentley Hart. He wastes no time pointing out that history as such cannot support the idea. To argue that any doctrine as articulated by Christians today is in fact a true and Spirit-inspired iteration of the Gospel wrought throughout time and theological reflection is, he says, to argue that “what happened was correct because it happened, because what happened must be correct in order to have happened, because what is correct must have happened.” Or, in other words, we speak Gospel truth today because everything that has happened in the past has conspired to corroborate our version because it’s the version that has come to pass and is therefore destined to be. This is a dog chasing its tail. History is, after all, written by the winners, and therefore nothing in history can prove or disprove the legitimacy of any theological or dogmatic development.

Hart also dismisses the possibilities of extrinsic certainty, that is, the affirmation that what we describe as the Gospel today is obviously the Gospel because the Church says it’s the Gospel, and the Church has received the Gospel through divine revelation and therefore nothing in history can disrupt that revelation. This isn’t a dog chasing its tail; it’s a dog waiting for a treat.

Hart examines these two possibilities of guaranteeing the Great Tradition through the work of two powerful thinkers of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, John Henry Newman and Maurice Blondel, each of whom made brilliant, scholarly, and (according to Hart) ultimately futile attempts to understand the development and discussion of Christian doctrine through time. Newman tried to reconcile the fluctuations of history with the necessities of dogma by weaving a story about the development of doctrine as organic growth. Blondel tried to synthesize the extrinsicism of divine sovereignty imposed on dogmatic development and the historicism of the Christian adventure by letting the two forces impinge on one another and thus reveal the beating heart of the Tradition in each stage of development. According to Hart, however, there is simply no evidence of a “living, continuous, and internally coherent phenomenon that corresponds to” THE tradition of the Church.

His major rebuttal lies in the direction these thinkers are facing: the past. We cannot, Hart says, look to the past as any kind of foundation for our theological purity today. He embraces fully the historicity of the Incarnation-Passion-Resurrection event, and yet Hart insists that we cannot see history (not the councils or the creedal developments, not the development of papal infallibility or the revolution of the Reformation, not the rise of historical or textual criticism) or any outside magisterium (whether Catholic, Orthodox, or any Protestant version) sufficiently sustaining the power of that event. “What is required is a concept of tradition that can simultaneously assure us of an essential immutability in Christian confession while also offering us a credible apologia for all the transformation through which that confession has manifestly gone over the centuries.”

For this, Hart says, we must look not backward but forward, finding the true impetus of Tradition in its apocalyptic vision of salvation at the end of time. 

Salvation, as Hart describes it, is the heartbeat of the Tradition moving forward, and any doctrinal ebb and flow moves in sync with the vision afforded by the Jesus event—a vision of salvation that Hart defines as deification. Hart’s description of the development of dogma takes the Arian crisis as a prime example of this internal rationale. The Cappadocian language and thought around the Trinity became increasingly necessary as the only good way to talk about a salvation that involved God becoming human so that humans can become gods, apokatastasis, the redemption of all things. The development of Trinitarian doctrine was a necessary episode in the Church’s growing understanding of just exactly who Jesus was and what he came to do. This, according to Hart, is the seed, the “guiding rationale,” for all that followed. This vision of the end is the “spiritual imperative” that holds the disparities together, that explains the forward movement.

Hart’s closing arguments then begin to eddy around his more controversial passions, particularly universalism and the possibilities of external traditions speaking into Christian thought (Vedantic metaphysics or monism). He speaks of trajectories and vital forces and disruption and dissolution, all in the name of the fuller understanding of the essential revelation of the mission of Christ.

None of what I have written even comes close to the experience of reading Hart’s book, which is a roller coaster of language, argument, history, imagination, and beauty. It is harsh and critical and exacting and unforgiving in its eviscerating condemnation of traditionalists of all sorts (Orthodox, Catholic integralism, Calvinists). It is in turn evocative and disturbing, exhilarating and a bit depressing, curious and humiliating. He bludgeons with erudition and extreme finesse, and who am I to quibble with his genius? Still, it did cross my mind …

Yes, yes, we can only truly believe in the right direction, and the truth of what God is doing in and through Jesus is grander, more majestic, and more wonderful than any of us can begin to imagine. Yes, as Julian of Norwich intimated in her Revelations of Divine Love, the “final narrative” holds answers we cannot even begin to anticipate. Yes, that hope moves us forward.

But it is not only hope, and maybe even not primarily hope of the telos that holds us together, that binds Christians over the ages despite our differences. “Final causality” may have explosive energy but is it indeed the final qualification of every authentic development of Christian thought and practice? I might suggest that Hart is overlooking what seems to me to be the even stronger seed or rationale for Church.

What enabled the early Church to survive its disappointment in the delayed Parousia? What empowered Athanasius’ chutzpah in resisting the Arian tidal wave? What compelled the writings and prayers and longings and ponderings, the selfless service and the constancy under persecution and the ministry to the sick and abandoned? What links together such wildly dissimilar Christians as John Cassian, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Pascal, Sojourner Truth, Thérèse of Lisieux, George MacDonald, Watchman Nee, Corrie ten Boom, Dorothy Day, or Lamin Sanneh? What really is the heartbeat of Christian tradition? I contend is the love and adoration of Jesus, the experience of his indwelling presence through his Spirit. Jesus is not just the seed event, but the ongoing life that takes us to the end.

Kathleen Mulhern
Interim Director, Spiritual Formation
Denver Seminary
August 2024