Living Creatively in the Tension between Tradition and Context – Keynote CSNSW Student Safety Forum on Consent and Respectful Relationships – 17 March 2025
Some thirty years ago, I was introduced to the work of the American philosopher of religion, David Tracy. At the time his writing was quite prolific, though he retired early due to poor health and has only recently returned to writing. Notwithstanding, he has been one of the formative influences in the development of my own thinking. Tracy took the context of postmodernity seriously. He understood it, recognising both its possibility and its limitations. And wondering how one might speak the life-giving word of the Gospel in its midst, he proposed conversation as the theological method best suited to the times. In a postmodern environment, conversation is our only hope, he declared, recognising, however, that Truth manifests itself in conversation – should the conversation be engaged in the fullest way possible.[1] The alternative to conversation was the loss of public theology, and the retreat into what he called, private reservations of the Spirit – in other words, ghettoes and the privatisation of the Gospel.[2] But ghettoes do not bring forth life; people do not grow, they only survive.
So, for Tracy, something different was needed – and what was most critical for him, was the willingness to risk the adventure of conversation, a to and fro between interlocuters – the parties being what he called, the ‘Christian fact’ (which is the term he used to bring together the entire Christian experience) and the context in which we live, which for him, at the time, was the postmodern milieu.[3] And in this, he came to the rather provocative recognition that not everything that is true is Christian, and that not everything that is Christian is true. By this, he meant that, in line with the Church’s own tradition, truth greets us from many different sources, and that not everything that simply claims to be Christian is true. It is why we must be constantly on the pathway of interpretation, asking what is coming from where and why. Hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, is critically important.
Well, out of this framework he proposed as the outcome of such conversation, a correlational theological method, awake to what he terms, the critical mutual correlations.[4] When the Christian ‘fact’ enters into conversation with that which is ‘other’ than ourselves, what are the resonances and where are the dissonances? These are the ‘moments’ for which we are vigilant. And these become the ‘stepping stones’ as it were into the future. And most importantly, these become the doorways, so to speak, for the project of evangelisation, lest we be giving answers to questions no one is asking.
More recently, this perspective of Tracy’s has been taken up in the approach of the Czech theologian, Tomas Halik, and I refer to his recent 2024 publication, The Afternoon of Christianity: The courage to change. I have only grown more convinced of the timeliness of their approach as we seek to bridge the beauty of the Tradition of which we are heirs and a social climate which in different ways is alien in its premises and ideology.
However, let us not think that we are unique in our time or in our experience. For at the very outset of the Christian fact, St Paul was faced with a similar situation, and indeed, he himself adopted a similar strategy. We read in Acts: While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there.” (Acts 17: 16) Paul was not mildly concerned with what he witnessed. He was distressed, physically revolted by what he saw. Yet, he does not hide into a corner to whistle in the dark. He stays present. And something happens in the midst of this engagement, as the text goes on to illustrate. Paul’s distress is changed. It changes to recognition and opportunity. And so later in the chapter, we come to this most extraordinary conversion: “Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said, ‘People of Athens! I see that you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with the inscription: to an unknown God. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship – and this what I am going to proclaim to you.’” (Acts 17:22-23)
Paul’s conversion needs be ours too, especially in a post-Christian context. It was well expressed in a Vatican document, now 22 years old, called “Jesus Christ: the Bearer of the Water of Life – A Christian Reflection on the New Age.” In that essay, we read this important injunction, “If the Church is not to be accused of being deaf to people’s longlining, her members need to do two things: to root themselves ever more firmly in the fundamentals of their faith, and to understand the often silent cry in people’s hearts which leads them elsewhere if they are not satisfied by the Church.” (1.5).
This is why Tracy’s framework is critically important for with this we are holding together the questions of the times and the deepest impulses of our religious tradition. And this ‘holding’ is undertaken in such a way that the deepest movements of our tradition do not simply provide the answers to contemporary questions, but in a manner that respects the Spirit in the correlation, in the meetings, the mutual touching points between human experience, on the one hand, and the religious tradition, on the other. Using the imagery form the ancient Greek legends in which the hero had to steer a midway course between to seductive but alternative alternatives, such a possibility negotiates the steady course between the Scylla of some kind of new age solipsism in which the self remains locked within itself, and the Charybdis of an isolated traditionalism.
As I shared at the CSNSW Forum on the RE Curriculum, two years ago, in March 2023, this demands new pedagogy. It means a pedagogy on religious and moral issues that presents the current milieu as plainly and as objectively as it can, with as detailed an analysis of its premises as it can provide, and at the same time capable of presenting the Catholic worldview in as faithful and yet as creative way possible. Not to allude to the dominant cultural and social mores in which young people live and breathe is to risk, from their perspective, relegating the religious Tradition to disconnected fantasy. Not to open the Catholic worldview in as invitational way as possible is to abdicate our moral responsibility to share with others their truth.
Well, all this is important when it comes to the issue of respectful relationships. We are talking here of the promotion of human flourishing about which our Christian Tradition has a great deal to share. And yet our commitment to enable this is in an environment in which the experience of relationship is under great stress. As the late Australian writer and cartoonist, Michael Leunig observed some years ago, we live in a time where there is a “surge of a compulsive new bitterness and hostility, an antisocial infection . . . it is the driver behind you, angrily blasting their horn because your acceleration at the green light is not fast enough. It is the righteous ugly clash of a televised political debate, the spiteful intensity and punishing fury of a gender equality discussion . . .” [5] As Leunig concluded, the thought of focusing on the effects of all this on our collective mental health is “too hard to deal with and there is no Minister for Mental Health to take the initiative. After all, isn’t madness so common that is has become banal? . . . Madness is not the elephant in the lounge room, it is actually the lounge room. This is the normal lounge room where citizens may sit and digest the stupefying corrosive lunacy of television.” Today, of course, television is substituted by social media, which young people today, without hesitation, identify as the single greatest threat to their mental well-being. We live with the confusion between the breadth of connection with depth of communication. “People of all generations hunger for friendship and genuine human encounter because we are made for community. Our digital world enables us to be more connected than ever before, but sadly it can also be a place of manipulation, exploitation and violence.”[6] The remarkable paradox of our current age: never before have we been so connected; never before have we experienced such isolation.
It is this isolation that surely must be at the root of the dramatic increase in adolescent anxiety. All of us are aware now of Jonathan Haidt’s landmark study from March 2024, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. It outlines the decline of play-based childhood, which began in the 1980s and accelerated in the ‘90s and the rise of the phone-based childhood, which began in the late 2000s and accelerated in the early 2010s. The confluence of these two stories in the years between 2010 and 2015 is what Haidt call the “Great Rewiring of Childhood.” As he suggests, we ended up overprotecting children in the real world while under protecting them in the virtual world.
The outcome is the question of belonging for young people. “Do I belong?” “Where do I belong.” “How can I belong” – often enough with the conclusion, “I don’t belong” or “I could never belong” – with all the devastating personal consequences that flow from this. The result is the evaporation of community – a way of being in relationship that social networking capabilities cannot adequately address. If there be a crisis in meaning today, if there is a breakdown in faith, or indeed, any crisis of morality, it is primarily because there is a breakdown in genuine, transforming community. Meaning emerges innately in the experience of relationship, of human bonding, of community, ‑ all of which become the fulcrum of human conscience. Take away relationship, we take away meaning, we take away morality.
In a time when our young people can so easily experience a great sense of isolation, the experience of community especially emerges as important and part of what is essential for us. Michael Leunig once commented to me that we are in need of a new legislative framework that can deal with what he termed, crimes against community. Perhaps he was being somewhat idealistic, but certainly what is required, are ever fresh initiatives in which we draw people – particularly our young people – into experiences of community in which the genuinely human bonds of relationship can be experienced, engaged, and entertained. Knowing we are part of a community, belonging to a community, participating in a community and constructing a community can be one of the most powerful anti-dotes to the experience of isolation. This is why it is important to value and to give thanks for the community of which we are part. Such a community can remind us in often hidden ways the most important truth we will ever learn – one at the heart of the 2007 Sean Penn film, Into the Wild – that happiness is always shared, and that we are never more alive when we find ourselves in relationship with others. We are reminded that we come to the truth of who we are never alone but always in companionship with others.
The Catholic school runs on the very premise of a story of community. At the heart of its life, runs the story of God as Triune, the radical Christian imagination of God disclosed to us through the story of Jesus. As disciples of Jesus, we worship a God who is Community. This is a mystery of communion, a circle of life, of understanding and of love. It is a mystery of mutuality, reciprocity and dialogue: a community of persons in which each is defined in, through, with, by, and from ‘the other.’ To believe in this mystery is to affirm that at the heart of all creation beats the impulse and the drive towards relationship. To be made in the image of this God means that we ourselves are made for relationship, that we exist in relationship or not at all.
How do we maintain such a vision at the heart of our community’s life? how do we enable it to have animating effect on the culture of the school community and not just on the culture of the school but especially on the lives of our students who are drawn from a society increasingly marked by isolation?. As the then Vatican’s Congregation for Education, Educating Together in Catholic Schools put it in 2007 – curiously the same year of the Sean Penn film:
Not only does [the Catholic school] cultivate in the students the cultural values that derive from the Christian vision of reality, but it also involves each of them in the life of the community, where values are mediated by authentic interpersonal relationships among the various members that from it, and by the individual and community acceptance of them. In this way, the life of communion of the educational community assumes the value of an educational principle, of a paradigm that directs its formational action as a service for the achievement of a culture of communion. Education in the Catholic school, therefore, through the tools of teaching and learning, “is not given for the purposes of gaining power but as an aid towards a fuller understanding of, and communion with [others], events and things.” This principle affects every scholastic activity, the teaching and even all the after-school activities such as sport, theatre and commitment in social work, which promote the creative contribution of the students and their socialization.[7]
Community, Belonging, Relationship, Communion – these are not uniquely Christian categories. Yet, in our engagement of them as primary questions of our time, especially for young people, we recognise their profound correlation with what is central to our Christian experience and insight. We do not need to search the cupboards of our Tradition high and low to find the resonances. And if this be so, then, returning to where we started, these become the very considerations we most need to bring forward. “In the extraordinary beauty of creation, each unique human person . . . is to be received and appreciated, protected and cherished. . . No person is to be diminished or devalued, and all have an indispensable part to play in the human community regardless of differences.”[8]
We have been focussing on those moments of correlation between context and Tradition. However, in the engaged conversation into which we are impelled, there will be moments not of resonance but of dissonance. And these are not without import. For when Jesus, himself preaches the inauguration of a civilisation, he presents a model fundamentally at odds with the premises upon which Roman and first century Judaic law was constructed. In response, his methodology was both to name the prevailing expectation and to invite his hearers to something new, something different. “You have heard that it was said . . . But I tell you” is the refrain introducing his teaching (see Matt 5: 38-48). So, we too, are to accompany our students: “You know it is said . . . But here is another way of looking at it.” Such a pedagogy demands a trust in the truth, beauty, and goodness of what we wish to share – and the recognition that truth, beauty, and goodness are irresistible components in the adventure of evangelisation. Which way will our students decide? The forces of the ideological colonisation in which they are enmeshed may be too great. Research shows that the overwhelming number of students in our Catholic schools have made the decision against being Catholic by the age of fourteen. They enter our secondary schools Catholic and leave us pagan – a very sobering fact. But maybe the perspective we have shared with courage, conviction, creativity and compassion, sensitive to the hungers of the hearts of young people, might linger in their memory as a smouldering coal to be fanned into flame when they, too, like the people of ancient Athens, recognise the presence in their own search that there is an altar to an unknown god, a god who can, at last, be given a name: Jesus Christ.
[1] See David Tracy, Dialogue with the Other: The inter-religious dialogue, (Louvain: Eedmans/Peeters Press, 1990), 5. See also David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope, (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 28.
[2] See David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism, Crossroad: New York, 1989).
[3] See David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The new pluralism in theology, (New York, Seabury Press, 1975).
[5] Michael Leunig, “In the Midst of Madness,” Spectrum, The Sydney Morning Herald, 30-31 July 2016, 8-9.
[6] Bishop Terry Brady, “Foreword” in Australian Catholic Bishops Conference Social Justice Statement 2019, Making it Real: Genuine Human Encounter in our Digital World.
[7] Congregation for Catholic Education, Educating Together in Catholic Schools: A shared mission between consecrated persons and the lay faithful, (8 September 2007), (Strathfield, NSW: St. Pauls Publications, 2008), n. 39.
[8] Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, Created and Loved: A guide for Catholic schools on identity and gender (2022), 2.
