COMMENTARY: The only true metric for the authentic exercise of ecclesial authority is Christological — grounded in the cross and the Crucifixion.

In a previous article, I wrote about the need for the Catholic Church to foster in the faithful a proper sense of ecclesial tradition. In that first essay, I argued against a false dialectic between a runaway progressivism that treats tradition like a Rorschach inkblot onto which one can project any interpretation one desires, and a moribund traditionalism that rejects most modern magisterial developments of doctrine on controverted matters as “modernist novelties.” I stand by that claim and hold strongly to the view that this dialectic is deeply harmful to the Church’s efforts at genuine reform and renewal.

The Limits of a ‘Reasonable Middle’

Unfortunately, the theological response to this seemingly intransigent and intractable dialectic cannot be a simplistic reconciling of the two extremes by taking a little bit from “progressive column A” and mixing it with an equal measure of data points from “traditionalist column B.” And this is so because the problem isn’t a simple matter of both sides engaging in opposite-end exaggerations of what are essentially sound beginning principles. The basic theological principles that act as the respective starting points for each view are flawed from the get-go. 

Ersatz hybridization of the two views will fail. 

This is the mistake made by so-called “conservative Catholicism” that exists as a kind of halfway house between the two extremes, siding with neither, while borrowing from both to create a bland, milquetoast “status quo” Catholicism of endless compromises with the dominant culture, while keeping up a veneer of traditional forms of expression. 

The Progressive Error That Undermines Tradition

But what are the theological flaws in the two extremes with regard to tradition? Progressives begin with a fundamental rejection of the very notion of a binding and normative tradition in the first place. They assert that tradition is important as an identity marker and as a placeholder for where we have been. In this view, the ecclesial tradition is similar to how an individual cannot escape the formative elements of his or her own past and the life narrative that has emerged from it. Individuals are grounded in time, space and place, and so too is the Catholic Church. 

However, just as individuals are free to break free from their past, which after therapy and counseling they now view as “toxic and oppressive,” so too is the Church hierarchy now warranted to engage in a “hermeneutic of suspicion” with regard to its tradition and to reject huge swaths of it as distorted by sins such as misogynistic patriarchy, “homophobia,” and a generalized Manichean hatred of sex. 

Therefore, for progressives, tradition is important, but only as an identity marker, and more often than not, it is simply wrong on all manner of topics. 

When the Zeitgeist Becomes Normative

It is indeed telling that for progressive Catholics, whenever there is cognitive dissonance between the tradition and modernity, it is the tradition that must change. And this is telling because it demonstrates that for progressives, what is “binding” are the values of the zeitgeist and not tradition, a fact that requires the development of novel theologies of how the Holy Spirit apparently speaks more clearly and with more binding force through the ethos of “the world” than it does in the Church’s tradition itself. That the “unthematized” experience of the “Spirit” among modern secular people is truer than the “thematized” doctrines of the Church’s magisterial tradition.

The Holy Spirit, in this view, rather strangely, seems to hate “religion” as something inherently conducive to bigotry and oppression. Thus is the “historical Jesus” reconfigured as a first-century advocate for an antinomian, nonjudgmental, subjectivist morality and as a guru of free-love expressiveness. And just as Jesus fought against “religion” in his day, so the genuinely Jesus-like thing to do today is to fight against the accepted structures of the Catholic tradition as just so much pharisaical hypocrisy.

Seen in this light, the progressive approach to tradition is the establishment of a counterfeit counter tradition by way of appeal to the entire arc of history as articulated by modern liberalism — an arc that requires an account of history as a chain of development from infancy to adulthood, with infancy marked by myth and religion, and adulthood marked by scientific secularity. 

In the end, Christ is eclipsed and replaced with sociology, psychology and vague notions of “dialogue.” And this Christological amnesia is important since it shows us that progressives do not view tradition as the unfolding in time and space of God’s revelation in Christ via sacrament and doctrine, but rather as little more than a purely natural sociological construct of deeply fallible men.

The Traditionalist Temptation Toward Positivism

Traditionalists err, as one might expect, in the opposite direction, viewing the tradition in an overly literalistic and wooden manner. They are superior to the progressives insofar as they do believe in a binding and normative tradition. But they, too, divorce Christ from the ongoing tradition by subtly ignoring how the latter is grounded in the former. 

There is a marked tendency toward an ecclesiastical positivism that begins with Christ’s breathing of the Holy Spirit onto the apostles — a breathing that gives them real magisterial authority to teach in Christ’s name — but then proceeds in a too forensic and juridical direction that treats all later ecclesial teaching as “true” simply in virtue of the fact that it is ecclesial teaching. 

It is to be remembered that shortly after the affirmation of faith that elicited from Christ Simon’s new name of “Peter,” Peter begins lecturing Christ about the impropriety of a crucified Messiah. Peter, flush with new “authority,” immediately ignores Christ and replaces the message of Our Lord with his own worldly wisdom. Whereupon Christ refers to Peter as “Satan.” 

In other words, the only true metric for the authentic exercise of ecclesial authority is a Christological one, grounded in the cross and crucifixion. 

Traditionalists will grant that there are various levels of authority and truth in later teachings, and that not all teachings are infallible. But there is still in their analysis a deficit of Christology insofar as the various doctrinal traditions in the Church are not submitted to a Christological analysis grounded in the Paschal Mystery. The reasoning remains too flat and linear and intra-worldly in its understanding of authority. Christ had authority, and he gave that authority to his apostles. Case closed. Now their teachings are simply to be regarded as “true” in very literal ways. 

To be sure, they must remain faithful to Revelation and not “invent” novelties, but there is no sense in which the kenotic Christological elements of the cross, of the washing of the feet, or of the whole movement of salvation beginning with the humility of Mary’s quiet “Yes” and ending with Christ’s “It is finished” are taken into account as hermeneutical principles of the highest order.

Vatican II and the Christological Reordering of Doctrine

This is why traditionalists now struggle with what they view as the “modernist” innovations of the Second Vatican Council and the entire post-Vatican II magisterium. There are indeed elements of the modern tradition that seek to reposition the hierarchy of the Church’s doctrinal truths within a more explicitly Christological and salvation-historical metric. At Vatican II and in its aftermath, despite some bizarre theological and liturgical constructions that marred its reception, the Church was engaged in a “rereading” of its tradition from within a renewed Christological lens.

And this rereading of the tradition, and the resultant reordering of doctrinal truths, did involve some correctives of past teachings precisely in order to remain faithful to deeper Christological teachings. 

Traditionalists seem to have issues with this Christological reorientation. And their resistance to it exaggerates the unchangeable nature of previous teachings, even on the level of a simple nuancing and contextualizing of those teachings in order to get at their deeper meaning. 

If a 15th-century pope taught that one must be connected by water baptism to the Catholic Church in order to be saved, then that is that. And if that means embracing the idea that the vast majority of human beings are in hell or headed to hell, then so be it. And any statement from the contemporary magisterium that seeks to place that previous teaching under a Christological microscope and to thereby nuance it is probably just a modernist deception. 

But if the figure and form of Christ is not allowed to guide the Church in recalibrating her own tradition in ever deeper ways, grounded in the descent of God into the fullness of the human condition, into death and resurrection, then we are left with the eclipse of Christ here as well. We are left with an ecclesiastical positivism that borders on a form of ecclesiolatry. 

Christ Is the Measure of All Development

St. John Henry Newman, now a Doctor of the Church, has famously given us some very important principles for guiding our understanding of tradition and its development. But I do think it is time to tease out of his principles the unspoken Christological fire that breathes within them. 

It is Christ who breathes fire into the Church’s doctrinal equations. All else is straw and should be burned away as so much dross. 

The first principles of such purifications are Christological first and foremost. All else flows from that. And what is left after such burning will be the form of Christ as it shines forth in the tradition, shedding a light on that tradition, which allows us to differentiate the permanent structures from mere shadows.

This article was originally published by NCRegister.