Where God Meets Man
The Church, the Incarnation, & the “Catholic Synthesis”
by Folke T. Olofsson
Christian belief is not a conceptual religious machine, conceived, projected, and constructed in order to meet certain human needs or fulfill various human aspirations. Nor is it an intellectual structure erected in accordance with a set of criteria endorsed by a certain age or a particular group of people. Christian belief is not a construction that may be deconstructed and reconstructed, but rather a discovery of something already given. As life is something given, which precedes any human action and exists as the prerequisite condition for any human activity, Christian belief is a discovery of the works and words of the Holy Trinity. And as life is known by being lived, so Christian belief is known by living in this discovery. Christian belief is based on facts of Life. The Christian Church is one of these facts.
The Church always finds herself in the danger area between a barren traditionalism and a flimsy trendiness. The Church has a tradition, something that has been handed over to her once and for all, and that has to be handed over uncorrupted to each new generation. Tradition literally means that which has been handed over. But tradition is not a deep-frozen merchandise to be handled in an unbroken chain of freezers. Tradition is something living to be given afresh to each new generation, and once taken over, it is formed and colored by the people of that time, their concepts, questions, problems, and needs.
Traditionalism stands for permanence and unchangeability. The traditional is semper idem, always the same. In an ever-changing world there is at least one archimedic point: tradition. Of old it has been like this, and so it shall be forever. Gimme that ole time religion—it’s good enough for me. Here is security, but it may be bought at the cost of irrelevance: an incomprehensible religious idiom, a liturgy that no one any longer understands, symbols that do not speak to anyone anymore. So much is invested in the past that the present never gets a chance. The Christian faith becomes a fossil and a relic. There is traditionalism in a bad sense, one that is near to death, characterized by rigidity and petrifaction.
Trendiness arises when sensitivity to all the contemporary whispers and calls is cultivated to the extent that the signals from “the faith which has been once and for all entrusted to the saints” is no longer heard or is consistently misinterpreted. The ambition to be relevant and in tune with the times is purchased at the price of becoming deaf to tradition: the substance dissolves and identity fades away. What remains is surfing on the waves of contemporary fads and trends, all the bad copies and the ever-prevailing opportunism. What the world outside the Church has long since left behind for new waves and winds, the straggling Church takes up with drums beating and trumpets sounding. So the Church becomes the sum and substance of self-conceited officiousness. Everyone who has seen the cartoon showing a knock-kneed cleric as an ice hockey goalkeeper with the balloon: “Dear lads, who is serving?”, is once and for all cured from all ingratiating trend surfing. He who marries the Zeitgeist will before long become a widower.
The Human Tradition
The history of the Church is a continuum, a flow through history. In every instant there is confrontation between the past and the future in the present. The tension between tradition and renewal, rigid perseverance resulting in irrelevance, indiscriminate listening ending in loss of identity, has followed the Church through the centuries. And, yet, the Church still lives. Why?
Tradition has no doubt always been questioned. Objections have always been abundant: tradition is obsolete, outworn, useless. Who needs a quill pen when there is the computer? Why should we take over an antiquated understanding of the world or an outmoded view of life? We know more about human existence than any generation before us. Look at technology! Look at transistors and transplants! Look at videos and virtual reality! We now live in a new world with new values and new views. Old answers simply do not apply. Convincing as this may seem, it is not true because human life remains essentially the same throughout history. Therefore it is not appropriate to compare quill pens to a computer and apply this comparison to the warp of life. There is a humanum that for all and forever remains the same: a birth-giving womb and an open grave define the room in which all theological statements take place. There is a common human experience of birth and death, joy and suffering, meetings and farewells, toothache and orgasm: all this which has been the same within and between people through the ages; all that can be told, transmitted, communicated in talks, speeches, novels, poetry, drama, tales, sagas, myths, pictures, music, and dance.
There is something given that can be handed over both when it pertains to the existential, common experience of the humanum, and to Christian belief. There is a substance that does not change. There is an identity that remains the same. But at the same time, there is a growth in mankind: new experiences, new questions, new answers color and form the traditum, that which is transmitted. Here lies the difficulty: the meeting between that which is old, given, and that which is new, reflecting its age. The ideal is and remains a continuity that preserves the tradition uncorrupted, but makes it flow on enriched— non nova, sed nove—not new things but in a new way. In this sense, good traditionalism certainly exists.
The Gift from Outside
Folke T. Olofsson is docent of theological and ideological studies at Uppsala University, and is rector of Rasbo parish in the (Lutheran) Church of Sweden. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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