This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Traditionalists and Modernists II: The Language(s) of Zion

I think Tripp, and perhaps some others, are beginning to see the gulf that separates us. He and I, as he often puts it, so frequently "talk past one another." Laura has a blog where she thinks she finally understands where Jeff and others are coming from.

This gets at what I've been trying to say for some time. Those who orient their life and faith by the modernist worldview assume that traditionalists just need to "get with it" or need to "be relevant" to twenty-first century needs and mores. And it seems to me that until recently Tripp, Laura, et al have been perplexed as to why folks like myself seem so locked into ways that modernists just don't understand. Why would we want to relegate ourselves to irrelevancy? Why would we want to just spend our time "talking to ourselves"? Aren't we interested in getting people to listen to the Gospel?

But that's just the question. Which Gospel? Because we don't read the same texts the same way. Indeed, it's not even so mundane as that. We read the texts in radically opposing ways, and thus unsurprisingly come to contradictory conclusions. Same sex unions? Modernists just don't get the traditional opposition to them. Traditionalists can't believe that anyone can claim fidelity to the Scripture and Tradition and yet contradict them so clearly. Traditional household relations? Forget it, say the modernists; feminism has shown us the sin of Paul's patriarchalism. But traditionalists look at the ever-skyrocketing divorce rate, the spread of STDs, rising abuse rates among unmarried domestic partners, gay on gay violence increasing, and wonder, why would we ever abandon God's clear revelation? Modernists assume the true meaning of Scripture is embedded and must be cut out of the sociocultural bonds in which it is imprisoned. Traditionalists assume that Scripture's message is timeless and has been preserved through endless changing centuries by the Church.

I don't assume that either side is going to compromise their deeply held convictions. But one may hope that while there may never be union in this sort of thing, at least there will be more understanding and less caricaturing of positions.