Mortal Remains
The Rules of Progress
by S. M. Hutchens
A New York Times article speaks of the blacklisting by Israel's Chief Rabbinate of an American Orthodox rabbi who advocates "a more open and inclusive Orthodoxy," and to that end favors abortion, ordains women, and supports gay marriage. He also claims he believes the Torah to be the Word of God and fully binding.
One knows the type. He is the person who claims to be a follower of a coherent tradition, but for reasons of his own reserves for himself the privilege of opposing it whenever it suits him. (Sworn, for example, to uphold the U.S. Constitution, he conveniently finds it, whenever necessary, to be a "living document.") Externally viewed, he looks less like a variation within the tradition than a transitional character who is by degrees moving into what opposes it, but will not forthrightly admit any transgression. He is "progressing," not abrogating.
The Lines of Defense
Within the abrogator's circles (and of course, we are not speaking now solely of rabbis) that movement is justified in predictable ways. The most common in our age is sanctified progressivism, the way of novelty as found in James Russell Lowell's, "Once to Every Man and Nation": New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth, / They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth. Another is to assert that the change is contained in the broader meaning of the tradition itself, so that the true follower of the tradition is one who understands that "from the beginning it was not so," and what his enemies claim is an abrogation is in fact an expression of the tradition itself, rightly understood. This is essentially the position of our undomesticated rabbi. It looks like that of Jesus with respect to the Mosaic Law, and, as his religious interlocutors understood, it elicited the question of the character of his authority. This set the stage for the crisis, a clear decision on whether or not Moses' Master stood before them.
All other reasoned justifications that claim allegiance to the tradition involve, I think, variations on one of these two themes: that of an external call by higher authority to actual transgressive boundary crossing, to change that voids the old tradition (we might by analogy call it the Darwinian approach—a new species is generated), or that of a unitary identity undergoing synthetic expansion of flexible integuments rather than the transgression of fixed ones (the Hegelian approach). Newman's argument for the development of doctrine, for example, is founded on the second line of reasoning—that the apparent innovation is a part of the true development of the Tradition itself.
Believers can—in fact, must—recognize their own faith in both lines of justification of the New. Their Lord says one must be born again (re-generated), and surely that involves the newness of a categorical change, a change in species in media temporis. Those in Christ are a new creation; old things have passed away. The language could hardly be clearer. But the same life is also a forward movement involving the incremental increase and decrease of what was before, from the inscrutable distance of a divine knowing and calling of the self before one was formed in the womb, through the hodos or itinerarium of sanctification or deification, the forgetting of those things that were behind and reaching forth to those things which are before, pressing toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Thus the two aspects of regeneration about which there has been so much foolish argument.
Matters of Judgment
Progressives seize upon both the evolutionary and dialectical aspects of novelty to justify abandonment of the Christian tradition. I believe E. Michael Jones was right in identifying the modernism that bedevils us on every side as the rationalization of sexual misbehavior—though I distinguish as a deeper and more universal phenomenon what William R. Hutchison identified as "the modernist impulse" in religion—which I regard as practically identical with original sin, for Eve was following that very same impulse when she abandoned the old and unexciting command for something new. But in so thinking we must also remember that the Lord was identified by his enemies, and not without reason, as an innovator, and that his ministry from beginning to end can be sensibly interpreted as an assault on the Law by someone who was making himself the equal of God.
Frequently, that a destructive assault on a tradition is being made is clear enough from a fair interpretation of the evidence, and the innovation can be disposed of therewith by balanced, informed, and reasonable minds. It is with such judgments that the "Orthodox" rabbi who favors abortion and ordains women is easily tipped into the progressivist stew. But even so, these are preliminary determinations that rest on faith, which is the necessary foundation of knowledge, not knowledge itself. There is always an arbitrary element in such determinations, and a perilous choice. We cannot know our own determinations as beyond dispute prior to God's final disposal in the Judgment, but pray that we have judged and acted rightly in accepting, rejecting, or, for insufficient evidence, declining to decide about innovation, for deciding wrongly is sin.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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