IRISC

International Research Institute into Spirituality and Change

(published in Milton Keynes & Malvern Papers on Contemporary Society July 2000)

This is a further contribution to the ongoing conversation initiated by the members of I.R.I.S.C. and a sort of response to Malcolm Brown's response, offered in the sense of responsibility - i.e. the feeling that we are called upon to respond to the other person - that I encounter in the work of Derrida and Levinas (1). So I will take just one point from Malcolm's article and see where it may take us. About halfway through he says that he is reluctant to make the issue one that is primarily about foundations and that he agrees with me that a sharp dichotomy between foundationalism and anti-foundationalism is not helpful. Then: "For me, the implication of this is that foundations themselves are not the issue, rather it is about the way foundational positions are used" (2). I want to pursue this thought taking as a key the suggestion of Giddens quoted in the title that what is now required is anon-traditional defence of tradition. In a moment I will offer a number of theses and some explanations, but to bring this discussion down to earth some clues as to how this impinges on 'normal life' and practice.

Those of us who are operatives within the particular tradition of Christianity and the idiosyncratic branch office of English Anglicanism face questions of how to handle the tradition of which we are guardians probably almost daily. An aspect of our work that many of us comment upon as having changed dramatically in recent years is the increasing customisation and personalisation of the occasional offices. So Baptisms, Weddings and Funerals can no longer simply be offered in the form of a standard package because people want to put their own stamp upon the service and relate very clearly to their own self-understanding and personal circumstances. This has now gone way beyond the straightforward inclusion of a small talk about the deceased at a funeral, for instance. Because other material is now so readily available, including that from other faiths, one has no idea in advance of what a particular family are going to want at 'their service'. I personally see this as potentially creative and exciting because it does often mean that people are putting real thought into what the piece of liturgy means. However, in this 'democratisation' of liturgy, the professional guardian of the tradition is often faced with the question of what is appropriate for a Christian service and what is not. How is such a decision to be made, let alone to be communicated to the family for whom Christian doctrine, let alone practice, is probably a closed book? Unless such services become a complete free-for-all, we will presumably have in our minds some criteria for making these judgements, but I suspect that they may be somewhat vague and inevitably pragmatic. Is this a problem? A traditional defence of tradition might find it so, but what would it look like for a non-traditional defence of tradition? So what do I mean by a non-traditional defence? I will now offer the theses, building upon some of the ideas referred to in my original article in this series. (3)

1. We now acknowledge that all traditions are human constructs and thus that we have to take responsibility for them.

2. The human imagination that creates these constructs is a necessary and a creative part of our humanity. Without imagination we would have no world to inhabit: it is the human way of ordering, shaping and living within our environment. Imagination is not about dreaming of things that do not exist, it is about imaging and giving shape to our world. Hence I find Castoriadis's work on the social and the individual imaginary formative for this understanding of how we are. (4) The imaginary is not to be compared with 'the way things really are', because the way things really are is as we 'imagine' them to be. So to say that traditions are human constructs is not in any way to diminish or demean them, but to take responsibility for our own creating and imagining.

3. The clear implication of this is that we do not have to be stuck with any traditions, but must decide - if that is the correct way of describing it - which traditions, or which part of those traditions we are going to consider valid and worth retaining. This is a non-traditional defence of tradition in the sense that one no longer sees a tradition as being 'passed down from on high' and requiring our automatic and unquestioning assent. It does not mean that traditions are no longer seen as important and can just be abandoned as relics of an earlier stage of human evolution. It is a recognition of how and where they play a crucial role for the human psyche and society and again requires of us greater attention and responsibility not less. When, in an earlier work, I used the phrase 'Major Narrative' to refer to Christianity and other traditions, accepting that Grand or Meta-Narratives are no longer appropriate terms, this is at least part of what I meant (5). It also links to Malcolm's comment about the issue being how foundational positions are used. For Christianity it requires a mind-shift of significant proportions for the simple reason that the accepted wisdom about the nature of this tradition has become that it is an agreed body of doctrinal propositions that contain a core of beliefs that must be accepted as a package. Being a Christian means believing and assenting to propositions a,b,c,d, etc. Remove any one of those key beliefs from the agreed corpus, for instance the doctrine of the Incarnation, and what remains is no longer Christianity. Now of course this ignores the fact that there has never been a clear consensus on what the core beliefs are, but people still act as if such an approach is reasonable and such a consensus achievable. What it really means is that I can only be comfortable if you agree with me on what Christianity is. It also ignores the fact that, for many, Christianity has been a matter of practice rather than belief and is susceptible to a feminist critique that doctrinal purity is essentially a male obsession and means of control. (6). However, I am not convinced that even those critics of the doctrinal proposition format of Christianity have necessarily taken on board the full implications of this mind-shift. It does not mean the end of tradition, or the end of discussions about the content of belief. It does mean that one no longer has to defend or interpret for contemporary human beings a complete body of Christian doctrine in the form of a Systematic Theology as per Tillich, Barth or anybody else. Many have struggled towards this realisation but few seem to have got there. In a similar way the phrases Post-Metaphysical and Post-Foundational do not mean that both Metaphysics and Foundations can now be consigned to the dustbin of history and no longer have an impact upon the way we are. They mean that the traditions represented by those terms have reached the limit of their intellectual resources, but that we are still living with them and within them in the knowledge that we have yet to move decisively beyond them. We cannot do with them any longer in one way, but we cannot do without them either. We are both inside them and struggling to move outside them, but they are not, as yet, a thing of the past (7). Content does still matter, but we relate to it in a provisional and contingent manner.

4. This leaves us with the question of how we make decisions about what of our traditions we retain and what we discard and indeed the uncertainty about what we discarded yesterday proving to be what we need to retain today. What criteria do we have or develop for making such decisions? Part of me wants to say that such criteria will be essentially pragmatic and that this is acceptable and appropriate. We are moving into uncharted territory here and a degree of flexibility and a willingness to experiment and accept that we will get it wrong seems reasonable in those circumstances. The issues over constructing liturgy are surely a case in point. The key thing is that we continue to review and think critically about what we are doing and why. All one-off events must be subject to such critical review. I also want to say that a key criterion is the extent to which what we do contributes to our own self-understanding and development. Have we learnt something important and useful about ourselves through what we have done etc? Yet I am not entirely happy that this is enough. I think we do require other criteria for deciding whether or not what we are doing is acceptable to ourselves as Christians, in this case. Perhaps the content of these is of secondary importance. The point is that it gives us - those who have a commitment to and a stake in this tradition - a way of conducting a public discussion about what we are doing. In order to take responsibility we require a way of exercising that and that must surely entail open and honest debate about what we are up to. Without that all practice will become localised, idiosyncratic and individualised. We have already gone a long way down that path and my reason for wanting to set limits to that is not because I want to see some centralised control re-imposed, but because I see value in sharing these discussions with others. It could only be an appropriate aspect of democratisation. I would refer to my previous attempt to establish some criteria for religious belief and practice as an attempt in this direction and I don't want to repeat the details here (8).

5. It may be that the burden of proof in this process of a non-traditional defence of tradition should be upon those who want to ague to retain a particular part of the tradition, particularly if this is in the light of significant challenges from outside. I can see that a more conservative approach would argue the other way round and perhaps it is a good thing that this particular debate continues to happen with both sides having to argue their case on a regular basis.

6. I see this as a part of a wider process of reflexivity, i.e. the conscious and deliberate effort to constantly review and critically evaluate what we as humans are doing and the directions in which we might go. The non-traditional defence of tradition could be described as the development of reflexive traditions. However, there is a danger that this language is too closely identified with a cognitive, exclusively intellectual and rationalistic (not the same as 'rational') procedure. I want to maintain that reflexivity is also about the affective, the emotional, the aesthetic, the pre-rational and transrational dimensions of being human. The language of decision and criteria suggest a far greater conscious control over the process than I think is the case. It also begs the question of the extent to which religion, or Christianity in particular, can be appropriately located within a purely intellectual framework. This is a larger debate and one that I am pursuing elsewhere. I would just want to say here that I believe that there must be elements of both the intellectual and the affective in our self-understanding and that, as stated before, we cannot do exclusively with either of them but we cannot do without them either. The tensions between the two have to be maintained because both are part of our imagining of ourselves.

I want finally to refer to a description of different approaches to tradition that I feel is helpful to this debate (9). Simon Critchley offers three senses in which we use the term tradition. First there is Sedimented Tradition. .. "where tradition is inherited as forgetfulness of origins, as pre-critical inheritance or pre-philosophical doxa, as the moral world-view that is inculcated into us by family, schooling etc". Then there is Reactivated Tradition, the philosophical engagement with the first sense of tradition, the way in which Enlightenment or Modern humanity has become aware of the history of its traditions and now sees them as human constructs. Third, there is Deconstructed Tradition, and here I will only offer the rather enigmatic quotation: "where the unity, univocity and linearity of the reactivated traditions would be critically questioned, and where the founding presuppositions of such traditions would be shown to be premised upon certain exclusions that are non-excludable, leaving us in the double bind of closure, and encouraging us to face up to the doubleness (or more than doubleness) or hybridity of tradition, culture and identity. This would be the contrapuntal or double consciousness of tradition as changing same". In other words, every tradition already contains a defining and subversive other, that which it has pushed below the surface in order to establish its own identity, but which cannot finally be either suppressed or assimilated and continues to challenge and disturb from both without and within. Awareness of this constitutes the next stage of reflexivity or consciousness of tradition, just as it does our own individual self-awareness. The responsibility - the unending and unsatisfiable call to respond to the other, both internal and external - is the horizon for our non-traditional defence of tradition.

1. Jacques Derrida, Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford University Press, Standford California, 1999.

2. Malcolm Brown, Fallible Foundations: The Theology ofthe Interim, Milton Keynes and Malvern Papers, Spring 2000

3. John Reader, Democratising Religion: AnAgendafor IRISC, Mitton Keynes and Malvern Papers, Autumn 1999

4. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Constitution of Society, Polity Press 1987

5. John Reader, Beyond All Reason: The Limits of Post-Modern Theology, Aureus, Cardiff 1997, pp74-78

6. Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy ofReligion, Manchester University Press 1998

7. Simon Critchtey, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Edinburgh University Press 1999, p89

8. John Reader 1997, ibid p150-3

9. Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, Verso 1999, p136

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