Bare Necessities: Retrieval
In my last article on tradition (here) I appealed to the general need of faithful traditions as bulwarks to safeguard and mature our faith. I ended with an appeal that we walk into the future backwards, with our eyes to the past. This principle is true for the simplest task of walking across a field in a straight line. To maintain a straight line, our gaze must be fixed on a distant point as our singular focus. We don’t have the luxury of foresight. We do not know what the landmarks of the future will be, and thus if we only look ahead, we will be led by the tips of our toes as our furthest point of reference.
We maintain a steady course by receiving the faith. We chart the reception of that faith through the generations by looking backward. This is the heartbeat of the various high points in Church History. If we take the conflict regarding the divinity of Christ at the Council of Nicaea we can see this principle at work. The defenders of the faith were working within a delivered tradition. Scripture was certainly their highest authority, however there was a received interpretative tradition that lived within the life of the Church. Dionysus is recorded as leaning on such a tradition when he confronts a similar heretic to Arius in Paul of Samosata:
“And perchance what they say might be credible, were it not that the holy Scriptures contradict them; and then, also, there are works of certain brethren older than Victor’s (bishop of Rome that the heretics attempt to use as a witness), which they wrote in defense of the truth, and against the heresies then prevailing. I speak of Justus and Miltiades, and Tatian and Clement, and many others, in all which the divinity of Christ is asserted. For who knows not the works of Irenaeus and Melito, and the rest in which Christ is announced as God and man? Whatever psalms and hymns were written by brethren from the beginning, celebrate Christ the Word of God, by asserting his divinity. How then could it happen, that since the doctrine of the church has been proclaimed for so many years, that those until the times of Victor preached the gospel after this manner?” (Eusebius: Ecclesiastical History Book V Chapter 28)
The fathers of the Church had great confidence in asserting the language of the Creed because they were receiving the testimony from all places and all times regarding who Jesus is. This same pattern of retrieving older sources continued with the reforms of Gregory the Great in the 6th century and with the Rule of St. Benedict. Both these pillars of the faith looked back on the voices of the fathers, and the councils of the church, the liturgical life of the church, and harmonized with those landmarks. They did not invent new benchmarks, new modes of ministry, rather they refined the treasures already mined from the Apostolic Deposit of faith.
What’s more is that our fathers of the Reformation were practicing theological retrieval as well. Calvin, Luther, Melanchthon, Bucer, Hooker, Cranmer, etc. were by and large dedicated to recovering the patristic sources. The liturgical revisions in the Book of Common Prayer and the Lutheran Common Service, are the result of highly conservative reforms made by men that were not at all interested in departing from the great inheritance of the ancient Church. The articulations of criticism made against Medieval Rome were buttressed by testimony from the Church Fathers. The Reformers were not revolutionaries, they were stewarding the high watermarks of tradition. They were cleansing our eye line so we could more clearly see the reliable landmarks through the centuries and walk more confidently in the Spirit.
The Church in Maine is in desperate need of such retrieval. If we want fresh life of the Spirit, if we desire Church unity, if we desire deeper wells of joy, and a faith that renews our society, we need to heed the wisdom of the Church throughout the ages. We need to turn our heads to the past, as we walk forward. We need to not just recover the landmarks of the Reformation, but the landmarks of Bernard of Clairvaux, Gregory the Great, the Council of Nicaea, the apostolic Fathers, etc. We need to know how our faith has been delivered. We need to reform so that we are in conformity with the Communion of the Saints throughout the ages. The retrieval of the historic faith and practice of the Church, will breathe a spirit of unity, we will have unity in the truth but we must be willing to be changed by the truth first.