Been thinking about tradition again. Yves Congar says one must know the interior reason a decision was made in the past, and not just that a decision was made, nor just what the decision was.

This, it seems to me, complicates certain trends in theology that pose alternatives to tradition as various means of resolving errors or lapses in tradition. I at least am too conservative to want anything but that interior reason, and am frequently suspicious of “alternatives.”

But the phenomenon of tradition isn’t had unmediated (it is itself a mediation), and, as Newman warns us, the original impulse must change in order to stay the same. So any serious desire to preserve interior reasons for Christian deeds needs to be critical and methodical.

So any theology of tradition that rejects change out of hand is also inadequate in its desire to be traditional—that is, it ends up quite untraditional despite itself. I might be suspicious of alternatives, but I cannot unhand theology of all dialectical thinking.

“Development” really is the third way that avoids the twin disasters of alternatives and ossification, preserving the interior reason of tradition by mediating it through the present age. But that’s much harder than just choosing one of the easier options.

It seems to me that a lot of conservatives like myself balk at actually being consistent, and do not desire tradition so much as familiarity. This is a profound problem, and results in great injustices.

Conservatism is perhaps not so grand as truth.