Those of us living now in post-Christendom have something of a collective memory of the once violent conflict between Christians who placed priority on their sacred texts and those who placed priority on their sacred traditions. You know, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations.
I tend to be a bit Catholic on this one myself because it seems to me that all sacred texts are traditions. The Christian bible was written by a few dozen people over several centuries. (Although the New Testament itself was written within a fifty year time span.) The often taken-for-granted collection of these works is the product of tradition. Someone, some time, had to decide to lump these books together into a collection. And then someone else (several of them) at some other time (several of those too) had to decide to keep the collection together and hand it down.
Tradition is also responsible for the exclusion of a good many books. The Other Bible is a handy collection of just those books. Some, like the Gospel of Thomas, are quite excellent and present an alternative view of the Christian message that Constantinian Christianity chose to reject. Martin Luther was no fan of James–it argues that “faith without works is dead,” a troublesome verse for his doctrine of salvation via faith alone–and made noise about kicking it out of the canon. And many, many folks over the centuries have made a case for kicking Revelation out the canon.
Currently, there’s a movement to start using “faith tradition” in place of “religion.” Why? Many people know exactly what a religion is: it’s a collection of superstitions they don’t like. (That this view is just plain rude and a junior high level of faith development is the subject for another post.) If “faith” is understood to be a lifestyle orientation toward someone’s “ultimate concern,” then a “faith tradition” is the communities, cultures, and institutions that support the individual’s life of faith.
The two require each other–the faith tradition and the “faith-er.” The individual’s faith is a challenge to the tradition. The tradition must continue to provide fertile ground for its practitioners, generation after generation. If it does not, the tradition will be either abandoned or overhauled. Likewise, the tradition is a challenge to the faith of the individual. Any faith tradition that has stood the test of time contains enough breadth and diversity to support mystics, bureaucrats, crusaders, theologians, reformers, and social justice workers. In time, neglected portions of the faith tradition will undermine attempts to make any one role or theme the dominant one.
My fellow Unitarian Universalists often ignore the mutual relationship between individual faith and the faith tradition. My hunch is that this behavior stems from a rejection of self-stereotyped faith traditions that provided nothing for them as they reached higher developmental stages. The trick, though, is to not leap into a stereotype of the stereotype. No one likes the kid who left the clique to start his own clique that’s only purpose is to be the anti-clique. And it’s no less adolescent.
Yet the dependence of sacred texts upon faith traditions is not absolute. Recent theory goes to town on the notion of “text.” “Text” is now understood to be much more than just the black ink on the printed page. No text means anything without someone to read it. No text can exist without an author, even if the text can go on to have a life of its own well beyond the author’s intent. Most text are composed to one degree or another in conversation with other texts, whether intended or unintended, acknowledged or unacknowledged. And texts have a nasty habit of unravelling when you pull at their loose ends.
Which is only to say that texts require a tradition to begin and to survive. But once we know how dependent text is, can we really separate text from the readers and writers and other texts that it is dependent upon? If scratches on a page make no sense by themselves, don’t we need all of it–the readers, writers, etc.–for text to be text? It seems, then, that text is a tradition.
But the work of the genealogists—Nietzsche and Foucault in particular–shows us that any tradition can be read as a text. Traditions, too, have their allusions, contradictions, theses, grammars, subjects, and objects (direct and, especially, indirect). What’s not to read? Perhaps you know someone who can walk into a church on Sunday morning or a neighborhood watch meeting and after a few minutes tell you everything about that group–its history, it’s major players, its major conflicts, its growing edges. This is nothing less than reading a text.
So if sacred texts depend upon their faith traditions and faith traditions are readable texts, what ultimately is the use in distinguishing between them?
Exactly. Ultimately, the only useful thing is to trace their myriad interrelationships, how one leads to another and then to another again, how one serves to critique another, and how one comes to be dominant over another. Play one off against the other. Interpretive jazz, not interpretive chamber music. Everything else is just gravy.
