Ancestors, Tradition & the Body

Our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians recently dropped its latest episode.

In that episode, we looked at the theme of tradition. We thought we would begin by acknowledging the massive elephant in the room, which is the knee-jerk equation of tradition with liturgy.

The hope of the episode was to go beyond this reductionistic tendency, as a way of giving greater weight to tradition in terms of dogmatic scope and purpose, which as I hinted, implicates nothing short of our salvation. The question that became one of how our salvation gets caught up in tradition, and it was in this context that the discussion turned to two resources.

The first was Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on divine revelation. We looked at this as a way of anticipating some pushback from our (mostly protestant) listeners that our salvation is bound up with the divine revelation (which in turn is bound up with the Word of God), rather than tradition. In doing so, we made the point that these were not separate sources of revelation, but constituted a single composite reality.

The second resource was Anne Carpenter’s article in Church Life Journal concerning Maurice Blondel’s responses to the fight over Catholic Tradition. We spoke of this because of her incredibly helpful use of the analogy of the body to think about tradition as a living thing, rather than something that is static. Whilst bodies will grow and change, they nevertheless express the same person as it passes from one age to another.

You can listen to the episode in full on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.