I’ve recently been involved in some discussions where the sensibility of traditional Christian doctrines and practices were in question. (The doctrines and practices in question were substitionary atonement and inviting on the baptized to receive the Eucharist.) Questioning the tradition is not only permissible in my mind, it’s necessary if we’re going to be faithful to our calling to continually be open to God’s reforming work through Word and Spirit. But the way we question the tradition is significant if we’re to be guided by the Spirit and not the Zeitgeist. The wisdom of T.S. Eliot is especially applicable here:
We must remember also that the choice between Christianity and secularism is not simply presented to the innocent mind, anima semplicetta, as to an impartial judge capable of choosing the best when the causes have bothe been fully pleaded. The whole tendency of education (in the widest sense-the influences playing on the common mind in the forms of ‘enlightenment’) has been for a very long time to form minds more and more adapted to secularism, less and less equipped to apprehend the doctrine of revelation and its consequences. Even in works of Christian apologetic, the assumption is sometimes that of the secular mind. Any apologetic which presents the Christian faith as a preferable alternative to secular philosophy, which fights secularism on its own ground, is making a concession which is a preparation for defeat. Apologetic which proceeds from part to part of the body of Christian belief, testing each by itself according to secular standards of credibility, and which attempts to constitute Christian belief as a body of acceptable parts, so as to end by placing the least possible burden upon faith, seems to me to be a reversal of the proper method. Should we not first try to apprehend the meaning of Christianity as a whole, leading the mind to contemplate first the great gulf between the Christian mind and the secular habits of thought and feeling into which, so far as we fail to watch and pray, we all tend to fall? When we have appreciated the awfulness of this difference, we are in a better position to examine the body of our belief analytically, and consider what is permanent truth, and what is transient or mistaken. As even the disciples, during the life of our Lord and immediately after His death and resurrection, suffered from occasional lapses of faith, what are we to expect of a world in which the will has been powerfully and increasingly misdirected for a long time past? What a discursive reading of the literature of secularism, over a number of years, leads me to believe, however, is that the religious sentiment-which can only be completely satisfied by the complete message of revelation-is simply suffering from a condition of repression painful for those in whom it is repressed, who yearn for the fulfillment of belief, although too ashamed of that yearning to allow it to come to consciousness.