Tradition is Apocalyptic

In his On the Proof and the Spirit of Power (1777), the German philosopher and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, uncovered what he described as an “ugly broad ditch” separating the contingent facts of history from the necessary truths of reason. Ever since, the problem of tradition has continued to haunt the discourses of Christian theology. After all, Christianity is nothing if not an audacious insistence upon the absolutely revelatory character of local history, an affirmation of God’s self-disclosure in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. To suggest that no bridge can be erected across the gulf separating the contingencies of historical particularity and the exigencies of reason seems to raise a challenge to the very substance of Christianity, to say nothing of the problems it poses for any claims to a perennial deposit of faith delivered in unbroken continuity across generations. And yet, for all this, many theologians (and theologically inclined readers) often prefer to invoke “tradition” as a resolution to the aporias and contradictions of historical-critical research and the critiques of revelation proffered by modern (and post-modern) philosophers, rather than raising tradition itself as an immanently questionable and urgent problem.

Indeed, the invitation to recollect a kind of perennial “grammar” of Christian faith for the sake of confronting the supposed challenges of secularization, the dangers of philosophical modernity, and the abyss of liberal relativism, is a familiar trope in many currents of recent theology, and not simply among crude traditionalists. Even in some of the more impressive theological contributions of the last several decades, the task of theology is frequently undertaken as an appeal to a self-grounding creedal orthodoxy juxtaposed with a declension narrative that traces the uncertainties of modern life as a regression from Christian innocence to one form or other of ancient heresy. While it is undeniable that this approach possesses an evocative power that may even compel the occasional graduate student to believe that the Nicene Creed alone can serve as the antidote to every philosophical or political ill since (roughly) the seventeenth century, the question of the coherence and authority of tradition is nonetheless bound to resurface with an irrepressible vengeance. If we are to suppose that the Nicene Creed, to use one example, expresses a perennial and necessary truth, we cannot simply ignore the fact that the Creed itself was an unprecedented response to a series of historically contingent events. We are compelled to ask how tradition is at all legible and authoritative given that it begins from and remains conditioned by the vagaries of history that it claims somehow to transcend.  

David Bentley Hart probes these daunting questions of theology, history, tradition and authority in his latest book, Tradition & Apocalypse. With typical boldness, Hart offers both a scathing polemic and a constructive proposal for a revised theological understanding of tradition. Hart’s thesis is straightforward enough. Negatively, Hart argues that the intentionality of Christian faith can neither be reduced to a mnemonic recollection of historical revelation nor to a pious acquiescence before contemporary constellations of dogmatic authority. Positively, Hart claims that Christian faith—and the tradition which it sustains—is fundamentally proleptic, determined relative to an apocalyptic horizon that is presently hoped for but still yet unseen. Said otherwise, the coherence and unity of the Christian tradition is derived from the antecedent finality of its futural fulfilment and cannot be secured by appealing to a procrustean deposit of faith that perdures throughout history.

Hart advances his argument across seven chapters, the first three of which are devoted almost entirely to an extended critique of John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and Maurice Blondel’s Histoire et Dogme. That Hart would situate his own proposal in conversation with these texts is not surprising insofar as the contributions of Newman and Blondel have (at least in large part) served as the primary models for subsequent theological reflections on the question of tradition. Hart’s treatment of Newman and Blondel is even-handed and conciliatory. On the one hand, Hart credits Newman and Blondel for courageously interrogating the problem of tradition and for attempting to demonstrate its coherence without succumbing to either historical skepticism or ahistorical dogmatism. On the other hand, Hart observes how despite their laudable ambitions, the arguments of Newman and Blondel ultimately dissolve into empty tautologies, terminating in a “fatigued appeal to an authority that somehow already exists outside of historical causality.” According to Hart, Newman’s account of doctrinal development succeeds only in retroactively imposing contemporary magisterial assertions on the very origins of Christian self-understanding, regarding every “legitimate” doctrine as an inevitable clarification of a fixed, and pre-possessed content of belief. Likewise, though with perhaps a greater degree of philosophical subtlety, Hart considers Blondel’s attempted reconciliation of history and dogma as but a restatement of Newman’s errors. Newman and Blondel fail, in Hart’s view, because they each aim to “justify the past by the past,” demonstrating by sleight of hand that “what happened was correct because it happened.”

David Bentley Hart

The concluding four chapters of Tradition & Apocalypse explicate Hart’s proposal for an apocalyptic theology of tradition. In chapter fours and five, Hart illustrates how an apocalyptic perspective would allow for a revised account of tradition’s relationship to history and dogmatic authority. Hart rejects any hermeneutic of continuity that interprets the history of Christian dogma as a process of progressive clarification and unbroken development. As Hart points out, the historical record itself attests to the fact that Christian tradition is shaped as much by discontinuity and contradiction as by continuity and coherence. Such an admission, however, needn’t amount to a denial of a unified tradition but must instead serve to reorient us toward the absolute future that sustains tradition as an ongoing project. Hart writes, “the refuge of tradition must be understood not as the melancholy memory of a promise that was not fulfilled, but rather as the constant creative recollection of a promise whose fulfilment and ultimate meaning are yet to be unveiled.” The apocalyptic horizon of Christian faith is thus at once the immanent logic that regulates the manifold currents of tradition, and ceaselessly invites new possibilities for interpretation and reconstruction.

Only in chapters six and seven does Hart offer something like a positive definition of the apocalypse that underpins his preceding argument. Of course, the category of “apocalypse” derives much of its rhetorical force from its function as a limit-concept that subverts and interrupts our capacity to appropriate. What limited sketches Hart offers are therefore fittingly paradoxical, emphasizing apocalypse as the sudden rupture of an “arriving Kingdom of God, and new age of creation” as well as the “intrinsic finality,” or “perfect realization” of the possibilities of history. However, it is amid this tension between interruption and entelechy that Hart’s apocalyptic invocations begin to raise more questions than they answer.  

First, is it really the case that we have surpassed the tautologies of Blondel and Newman by deferring the reconciliation of historical contingency and necessary truth to an unknown future?  Is this not simply another exercise in proving faith by faith, only now with eyes turned toward the future rather than the past? In turn, if apocalypse is to become the final index of tradition, what corresponding index is available for measuring what we mean by apocalypse? In other words, why should we presume that a coming apocalypse would fulfill the intentionality of Christian tradition rather than contradict or dissolve it? To insist, as Hart does, that apocalypse is both the “final cause of Christian tradition” and a more comprehensive vista that exceeds and interrupts “the local horizon of Christianity’s religious history” alternately suggests either an elision of the determinate character of Christian apocalypticism or a confession of faith in an ahistorical, perennial idea of apocalypse without religious specificity. Why should we suppose that an apocalypse would meet Christianity’s expectations for, say, a final resurrection if the present constellation of Christian tradition is but a “premonition” or another “veil to be parted”?

That Tradition & Apocalypse invites such questions is a testament to its significance and its unyielding rigor. Hart has written what may prove to be the most important contribution toward a theology of tradition since Blondel. That Hart has achieved this with such clarity of purpose and style only reinforces his stature as a preeminent voice in the contemporary theological landscape. Tradition & Apocalypse is an essential book and will unquestionably serve as a point of departure for further reflection on the problematic relationship between history and doctrine. 

Jack Louis Pappas is a PhD candidate at Fordham University in systematic theology with primary research interests at the intersection of fundamental theology, continental philosophy of religion, and theological metaphysics. His dissertation focuses on the theological reception of Martin Heidegger in the thought of Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, and the ongoing significance of this reception for the so-called “theological turn” in contemporary French phenomenology.