ORTHOPRAXIS AND BEING FAITHFUL TO ONE’S TRADITION
Peter Jonkers (Tilburg University)
Through the title of my paper I want to query the common view on orthodoxy and adaptation to cultural changes. First of all, this approach runs the risk of interpreting orthodoxy and adaptation from a rather objectivistic perspective, thereby distorting what these notions are all about. In particular, it runs the risk of missing what is at stake for the members of religious communities, namely trying to be faithful to their tradition in times of cultural change. Even a brief look at the history of Christianity suffices to show its enormous capacity to adapt to various cultural circumstances without giving up crucial aspects of its orthodoxy. This capacity is all the more extraordinary because most of the cultures into which Christianity ‘inculturated’ itself originally did not at all take a positive stance towards its doctrines and practices, as Paul’s experience on the Areopage clearly shows.1 Moreover, Christianity did not only adapt to its surrounding cultures, but also succeeded in adapting those cultures to its own values and practices, as the example of the propagation of the Benedictine rule in Europe during the early Middle Ages illustrates. Allthough I will not elaborate on this point in this contribution, it is essential to keep in mind that the process of adaptation is a two-way process. Finally, by using the term orthodoxy, one creates the impression that this issue only concerns religions. Although the focus of this paper and the majority of the examples I give are taken from the religious sphere, a secular community is confronted with basically the same questions, as I will show by linking orthodoxy to the identity of a religious or secular community.
I will discuss the leading question of this volume, the relationship between orthodoxy and adaptation to cultural change, from a philosophical perspective. Hence, it is not my intent to discuss the orthodoxy of specific doctrines or practices, nor to analyse specific instances of their adaptation to cultural change, and even less to assess whether certain adaptations to contemporary culture have been successful or not. In this paper, I will focus on ‘orthopraxis’ instead of ‘orthodoxy’. In my opinion, the former is at least as essential for the identity of a (religious) community as the latter. Furthermore, I will argue that the basic concern of any (religious) community in all times is not so much about how to adapt to current culture, but
rather about how to remain faithful to its tradition. I will discuss these two issues in the two main sections of my paper. In the last section, I will apply these theoretical considerations to a specific case of orthodoxy and adaptation to cultural change, the Sunday’s rest, which is relevant for the identity of religious as well as secular communities. In sum, the question I want to address in this paper is: How are people able to remain faithful to the tradition they are existentially committed to and that constitutes their identity in changing cultural conditions?
1. Orthodoxy and Orthopraxis
As is commonly known, the origin of Christianity is situated in a Hellenistic culture with a longstanding philosophical tradition, keen on discussing all kinds of things on a theoretical, that is critical and rational level, thereby often demythologising traditional practices and beliefs. In order to make itself popular among the intellectual elite Christian theology used the philosophical vocabulary and way of argumentation developed by Greek thinking. More importantly, the fact that Christianity is essentially a religion of conversion considerably contributed to the importance it attached to demonstrate the truth of its dogmas on a philosophical level. Because such an approach was in principle understandable both to in- and outsiders, it could serve as a means in the conversion of the gentiles. These factors have determined the history of Christian doctrine to a large extent. In this sense, Christianity has always been more philosophical and less ‘traditional’, more concerned with the orthodoxy of its doctrine than other religious traditions. However, this genuine interest in a theoretical approach and a rational explanation of its doctrine was never detached from its existential embedding, that is, Christian faith as a personal conviction that one’s life is saved thanks to God’s grace. If only because the human intellect is created by God, a radical opposition between faith and reason is out of the question. On the contrary, the classical idea of the relationship between the two is that human reason, including its concrete philosophical shape, is subservient to revealed truth. Anselm’s idea of the fides quaerens intellectum is a clear example of this conviction; and although Thomas Aquinas attributes a more important role to philosophy as a preparation to faith, he admits that there are a lot of essential Christian truths, such as the trinity, that are only known to us by revelation and cannot be explained by human reason.
practice to discuss the truth of Christianity primarily from a philosophical perspective. The result of this was theism, which can be defined as a philosophical doctrine, supposed to be capable of rationally proving all the essential truths of Christian religion, such as the existence and essential attributes of God, and the immortality of the soul. Descartes and his followers were convinced that philosophy should be preferred to theology in demonstrating the truth of Christian religion, because it was able to offer a solid, rational foundation for all knowledge by using a method that had proven to be successful in astronomy and physics.2 This shows firstly that theism is not identical with rational religious thinking as such, but has its specific origin in modern philosophy.3 Secondly, the success of theism was due to the fact that it was able to keep up the meta-physical foundations of physical reality against the atheistic tendencies of secular philosophy and natural science. Therefore, it is no wonder that theism was considered as the best safeguard for Christian orthodoxy. In Catholic religion, the best-known recent example of this approach was neo-thomism, being a curious synthesis of medieval theology and modern, specifically Kantian, rationalism. The main reason for its popularity during the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century was that this was the heyday of positivism and scientism, propagating a militant atheism. In this threatening situation, Neo-Thomistic philosophy was welcomed by the Catholic Church as the most adequate preambula fidei. It was seen as the only type of thinking that could prove the truth of Christian religion in a hostile cultural climate. Again, this shows Christianity’s capacity of adapting itself to a given culture without giving up its loyalty to its basic doctrines.
In spite of its undeniable success theism had a problematic reverse side, which eventually lead to a decline of its plausibility in the second half of the twentieth century. Due to its rationalistic and foundational character, it lost sight of something essential. Pascal’s phrase: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob – Not of philosophers or the wise,”4 is the most famous expression of the awareness of this loss. To put it into philosophical terms, one can ask whether theism, because of its doctrinal approach, was able to think the truth of
2 In the dedication of his philosophical opus magnum, the Meditations on First Philosophy, to the professors of the theological faculty of the Parisian university Descartes affirms that he has “always been of the opinion that the two questions respecting God and the Soul were the chief of those that ought to be determined by help of Philosophy rather than of Theology.” Cf. R. Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia. In Oeuvres de
Descartes (11 vols.; ed. Ch. Adam & P. Tannery; Paris: Vrin, 1996), vol. 7, 1.
3 For an historical survey of the origin and the development of the term ‘Theism’ cf.: U. Dierse, “Theismus” in J. Ritter, K. Gründer (Hrsg.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie Band 10 (Basel: Schwabe, 1998), 1055.
religion as a concrete way of life, to which people commit themselves. Are the abstract, metaphysical concepts of theism really able to serve as a foundation for and minimal content of faith in the living God of Christian religion, to whom people devote their lives? Doesn’t their committed, existential relationship with God differ radically from the neutral, theoretical relation of the philosophical theist to the object of his research? Moreover, one can doubt whether theism’s specific interpretation of the relation between faith and reason is adequate: Hasn’t the result of theism’s success in fact been a take-over of faith by reason?5
All these factors made that theism has lost a good deal of its plausibility as an essential element of Christian orthodoxy since the second half of the twentieth century. From the perspective of philosophy of culture the most serious problems facing theism are themselves consequences of the growing uneasiness with the project of enlightened reason in general, especially its disenchanting effects upon our Lebenswelt, the dominance of instrumental reason, and its ‘representational’, objectivistic way of treating the mystery of faith. Hence, in spite of the hope modern culture had placed in them, positivism and scientism proved unable to respond to the main concerns of humankind. In sum, just as the rise of theism, and especially its stress on a rationalistic approach of all kinds of doctrinal aspects of Christian faith, was the effect of the emergence of modern, scientific reason, its decline also reflects the problems that this specific form of rationality ran into, since it proved to be unable to do justice to human existence in its concreteness.
This shows that a strictly doctrinal approach of religions is one-sided and should be balanced by a more existential one. In other words, orthodoxy should be complemented by orthopraxis. Hence, my suggestion is to treat religion not so much as a (philosophical or theological) theory about the existence of God, his essential attributes, the creation of the universe, the immortality of the soul etc., whose truth can be discussed objectively, but first of all as a whole of symbolic meanings and practices, to which people are committed existentially, because it enables them to give meaning to their existence and the world in which they live. Defining (Christian) religion in this way is a shortcut for saying that Christians orient their lives by placing themselves under the sign of the risen Christ. Through their lives they testify to the fundamental truth of their orientation to this tradition, expressing their commitment to it in a variety of concrete experiences, behaviours and ways of thinking. Traditions, religious as well as secular ones, are primarily symbolic systems, implying that their basic ideas, values, goals and practices have to be understood as elements of a complex
whole of culturally embedded meanings and distinctions.6 One can think of basic meanings like the origin and destiny of the world, the dignity of human beings, the relations between people, and of distinctions qualifying these meanings, such as between children and adults, male and female, pure and impure, good and bad, the living and the dead, God and the world, etc. Because of their symbolic character traditions enable people to detach themselves to some extent from the order of nature, in which all these meanings and distinctions don’t make any sense at all. To give only one example: by burying their dead, being one of the oldest and most widespread traditions, people give a symbolic meaning to a natural event. Through this tradition a human community expresses that there is an essential, symbolic distinction between the human and the non-human. In the Christian tradition this is actualised by the last rites and the funeral ritual. Only within this symbolic system it makes sense to discuss the orthodox meaning of the promise of the resurrection of the body at the end of times, and to determine which practices can be considered as an appropriate expression of it. By interpreting religion as a ‘traditional’ way of life, the whole idea of orthodoxy gets a broader meaning because it is complemented by orthopraxis, and hence also includes symbols, rituals, prayers, narratives, gestures, behaviours, works of art, etc.
The importance of the orthopraxis aspect of (religious) traditions is shown as well by the fact that all traditions attach a symbolic meaning to all kinds of material things, such as specific places, events, bodies, and objects; these things represent symbolic meanings in a sensuous way. Thus, special dates can get a symbolic meaning; in order to express them materially these days are usually holidays, thus distinguishing them from an ordinary working day. Statues are erected in order to express the symbolic meaning of certain persons or events. Certain people wear special vestments when exercising their office, which is again a materialisation of their symbolic distinction from the people not exercising that office. All these objects and dates are of crucial importance to the identity of the people belonging to this tradition, because, in order to become actual, symbolic identities need material expressions. Let me give an example of the subtle yet crucial distinction between ordinary material things and these same things as expressions of symbolic meanings. Even though vandalism as such is treated as a criminal offence, people desecrating tombs are liable to a much more severe punishment. That is because society considers this act to be a gross violation of this material
6 For a more extensive discussion on religion as a complex symbolic system see H. de Dijn, Religie in de
21ste eeuw: Kleine handleiding voor voor- en tegenstanders. (Kapellen/Kampen: Pelckmans/Klement, 2006),
expression of its symbolic attitude of respect for the dead. This example shows the importance of orthopraxis, that is, of taking an appropriate stance towards objects that are symbolically laden. It also shows that in some cases orthopraxis is even more important than orthodoxy: regardless of the debates between religious and secular people about the orthodox interpretation of the hereafter, they all agree on the importance of adopting a respectful attitude towards the dead, expressing itself in a specific kind of orthopraxis with regard to their tombs. Apparently, insignificant material objects can express important symbolic meanings, and reversely the widespread feelings of disrespect when these objects are violated show how crucial these material expressions are for the identity of a community. In fact, desecrating tombs is a materialisation of another symbolic meaning, viz. to cut off people from the link with their parents and other relatives, and thus from one of the most intimate aspects of their identity. This also shows that these material expressions are not something provisory, eventually to be superseded by a purely spiritual inwardness, but belong to the essence of what tradition and cultural identity is.
relate to their orthopraxis, e.g., the interdiction to eat pork, the wearing of a scarf by women, facilities for employees to pray during working hours, etc.
In the case of a religious tradition, the fact that orthopraxis is at least as important as doctrinal debates also explains why people can remain faithful to it in spite of their disagreement with some of its doctrines, in other words why there is not only a believing without belonging, but also a belonging without believing.7 The flip side of this is that as soon as a religious group does no longer comply with the orthopraxis of the larger community to which it originally belongs, they formally separate themselves from their fellow believers and establish themselves as a separate church. Originally, Christians considered themselves as belonging to Judaism, and this in spite of important doctrinal disagreements. Only when they no longer wanted to observe the Jewish law, that is, when they started to disagree about orthopraxis, they were thrown out of the synagogue, thus establishing their own church.8
Secondly, by stressing the praxis-oriented dimension of religious traditions they become less liable to an objectivistic approach. By addressing them primarily from the perspective of orthodoxy, as if they were only a set of philosophical or theological doctrines, the discussion about religious traditions can easily turn into a conceptual game, as the debates between theists and atheists (in the philosophical sense of the word) have shown.9 As already explained above, such an objectivistic approach disregards the fact that people are
existentially committed to their faith, and hence show their attachment to it primarily on a
practical level. Traditions help us to orientate ourselves in life and in our relations to others by organising and structuring all aspects of human life on the basis of symbolic distinctions between what is good and valuable in life and what is not. Although some traditions, especially religious ones, offer sophisticated systems of knowledge about the theoretical background of these meanings and distinctions, their core-business is existential; they mark and interpret the crucial moments of life by relating them to authoritative stories and ritual practices.10 That is why a disruption of them, that is a violation of the orthopraxis, affects people much more than doctrinal differences of opinion.
Finally, a praxis-oriented idea of orthodoxy links the sensitivity for safeguarding a (religious) tradition to the active life of a community as a whole. Precisely because traditions
7 T. Radcliffe, What is the Point of Being a Christian? (London: Continuum International Publishers, 2005), 201.
8 See the contribution of Adele Reinhartz in this volume.
9 In my view Herman Phillipse’s approach of philosophy of religion is a clear example of this objectivism. 10 See P. Jonkers, “Are There Good Reasons For Our Attachment to Religious Traditions?” n: The Catholic
are of vital importance for the identity of a community (of faith), their preservation and the way in which they are handed down to future generations is not only the concern of specialists, but of this community as a whole. Besides, especially in the case of a religious tradition, it extends the circle of people who can serve as its guardians: not only experts in (systematic) theology, but also people with spiritual authority, pastoral experience etc.
2. Adaptation of and Being Faithful to One’s Tradition
As indicated above, one of the main reasons for communities to be concerned with orthodoxy, considered as a combination of both orthodoxy and orthopraxis, concerns their identity. This concern has always been quite explicit in the case of religious communities, but secular ones have their own ways of safeguarding their identity. As the most explicit expression of a country’s identity on a legal level, the constitution is surrounded by special procedures in order to prevent it from being changed rashly, in other words to safeguard its basic orthodoxy. The question I want to discuss in this section is how a (religious) community can safeguard its identity through time. What does it mean to be faithful to your tradition, faced with rapid and profound cultural change?
This question has often been answered in the sense of being faithful to your inspiration, because traditionally, the spirit is considered as containing the substance of a tradition, while its material manifestation is something accidental, which can be adapted according to the needs of the cultural environment. In Christianity, the hierarchical opposition between the spirit and the letter has, among many other things, often been invoked to underpin this; the apostle Paul used it to criticise the attachment of some early Christian communities to some practices that followed from complying with the letter of the Jewish Torah, e.g. circumcision. Especially since the Enlightenment this opposition has lead to the conviction that the essence of all religions is situated in one’s inner disposition, and hence that all material expressions of God’s spirit, as long as they do not concern one’s moral behaviour, are only accidental. Kant’s idea of an invisible church, being “a pure idea of the union of all righteous people under a divine immediate, but moral world-government, [and which] serves as an exemplar for all [visible] churches, established by humans,” is a clear example of this conviction.11 However, as my discussion of the importance of orthopraxis for the identity of a (religious) community in the previous section has shown, things are more complex. The spiritual and the
material influence each other mutually, implying that even minor changes in the material expression of one’s faith can affect one’s inner disposition. Specific texts, words and gestures, music and vestments are closely connected to the spirit of a tradition, and thus have been handed down through the ages together with its doctrines. Even a change of seemingly contingent expressions and materialisations can have a disruptive effect on tradition. For example, in the Eucharist, one cannot replace the host and the wine by a bowl of potato chips and dip-sauce. Because of the importance religious communities attach to these doctrinal and practical elements of tradition, they appoint specific persons to preserve them. These persons are not only chosen to give authoritative interpretations of the doctrines, but also to perform the rituals appropriately. The fact that some traditional practices are incomprehensible or outdated in the eyes of outsiders does not at all prevent the insiders from being attached to them. This attitude should not be interpreted as an expression of some irrational conservatism. Rather, it expresses a concern to safeguard (religious) identity. This need for stability explains why a community, religious or secular, is always in one sense or another traditional, and develops formal and informal ways to preserve it from being changed radically and arbitrarily according to the vicissitudes of history. That’s why religious communities are so preoccupied with the ‘ortho’ of both orthodoxy and orthopraxis.
However, all this should not be taken to mean that traditions are opposed to any change. We should understand how orthodoxy and adaptation to cultural changes are related. It is obvious that (religious) traditions not only in principle can, but also in fact do change. Orthodoxy and orthopraxis are no time- and changeless realities.12 In some cases traditions even have to change in order not to lose their meaning and significance for the community belonging to that tradition. People who think they can best defend their tradition by clinging to the letter of its doctrines and to the form of its practices, in fact run the risk of fossilising it. But the reverse side is true as well: adapting orthodoxy and orthopraxis to the issues of the day can disrupt the substance of your (religious) identity. Apparently, the question whether orthodoxy and adaptation are conflicting realities cannot be answered with a simple yes or no. In order get a better idea of how orthodoxy and change are related I want to replace adaptation to cultural change with remaining faithful to one’s tradition in times of change. My reasons for making this suggestion are the following. First of all, adaptation to cultural change is a descriptive expression; it takes on an outsider’s perspective to show how (religious) traditions in fact adapt to a given culture and its changes in the course of time. Although such a descriptive approach is crucial in order to understand the history of societies as well as of
religions and their orthodoxies, it is unable to explain why the (religious) communities in question accept or refuse adaptation. As I showed above, this has to do with the essential role of traditions in safeguarding the identity of a community. The question of how to remain faithful to one’s tradition in times of cultural change addresses these reasons from an insider’s perspective. This perspective should be given priority over the descriptive category of adaptation. Furthermore, the term adaptation suggests a rather constructivist idea of traditions, and thus also of the identities of individual people and communities. It gives the impression that we actually possess traditions and that we can constantly re-construct them in order to restyle our identities according to our needs.13 However, we do not so much construe traditions as they construe us, in the sense that they enable us to situate ourselves in a cultural space and time, and hence to form our identity, as Odo Marquard has made clear.14 Again, the expression of being faithful to one’s tradition does more justice to this basic idea than the term adaptation. Finally, adaptation creates the impression that people are only attached to their traditions in an accidental way, which therefore can be adapted to cultural change without having a major impact upon their identity. But this ignores the fact that most of our attachments are substantial, and that constantly re-describing them would make us insane, because we would lose our identity, as Rorty has pointed out.15 For all these reasons I want to substitute adaptation to cultural change by remaining faithful to one’s tradition, as I already indicated in the title and the introduction of this paper. The latter notion is far better able to explain what is at stake for a (religious) community when confronted with cultural changes. Furthermore, it offers an answer to the question why some changes are accepted or even welcomed, while others are refused: the crucial question is whether a community is able to relate these changes in a positive way to already existing symbolic expressions of its identity and remain loyal to itself while changing.
Let me give an example of what I mean by the idea of being faithful to one’s tradition. This example is about a religious community that understood that its loyalty to its tradition required acceptance of change and a secular community that had equally good reasons of refusing to adapt to cultural change. The attitude of the Catholic Church, both in its doctrines and its practices, with regard to other Christian denominations and non-Christian religions has changed considerably since the second Vatican Council. Since then, the Church explicitly
13 R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73-4.
14 O. Marquard, “Apologie des Zufälligen. Philosophische Überlegungen zum Menschen,” in idem, Zukunft
braucht Herkunft: Philosophische Essays (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 154.
agreed to comply with some basic principles of modern societies, particularly the state-church separation and the freedom of religion. Although the decision to accept change was preceded by heated debates, it was eventually welcomed as legitimate. This happened in spite of the long-standing tradition of the Catholic Church to cling to the universal truth of its message of salvation. In this case, keeping its tradition alive required that the Church was willing to adapt to this specific element of cultural change. Concretely it recognised that religious freedom belongs to the very dignity of human beings, and declared it “to be greatly in accord with truth and justice. To this end, it searches into the sacred tradition and doctrine of the Church – the treasury out of which the Church continually brings forth new things that are in harmony with the things that are old.”16 In this way, the Church integrated these new ideas and practices into its tradition. Although this process of adaptation took time, it eventually proved to be an enrichment of the orthodoxy and orthopraxis of the Catholic Church. But there are numerous examples of the contrary as well. After the Second World War, there were a lot of people in the countries behind the iron curtain who refused to adapt their ideas and practices to the cultural change, implemented by the communist authorities. In fact, these people defended a secular tradition, which had its own orthodoxy and orthopraxis, the universal declaration of human rights, implying that the actions of the state should respect the basic rights to freedom. Their loyalty to this tradition required them to oppose the Communist idea of cultural change, sometimes at the cost of imprisonment or even worse. Now, so many years later, their refusal to adapt has proven to be legitimate, and the former Communist countries now struggle to come to terms with the fact that the majority of their populations adapted too easily to this problematic aspect of cultural change.17 So, in order to fully grasp whether or not orthodoxy and adaptation to cultural change are conflicting realities, it is necessary to understand what it means to be faithful to one’s tradition. In some cultural settings this loyalty requires a willingness to change, while in others this same loyalty demands for opposition to change. Hence, the external, factual question about adaptation can only be understood adequately by first answering the internal, principal one about what being faithful means in actual practice.
3. An Example of Remaining Faithful to One’s Tradition in Times of Cultural Change
16 Pope Paul VI, Dignitatis humanae, 1.
By way of a conclusion, I want to examine a case in which all my previous remarks come into play. “In the year 304 in North Africa, a number of Christians were arrested for gathering together to celebrate the Eucharist on Sunday. When the proconsul asked Emeritus, the owner of the house, why he had allowed these people into his house, he replied that these people were his brothers and sisters. When the proconsul still insisted that he should have forbidden them entry, Emeritus replied that he could not: “Quoniam sine dominico non possumus.” The then Cardinal Ratzinger translated this as: “Without the day of the Lord, we cannot live.” He commented, “For them it was not a question of a choice between one precept and another, but rather of a choice between all that gave meaning and consistency to life and a life devoid of meaning. So keeping the Lord’s Day should shed some light upon what difference our faith makes to our lives as Christians.”18
This example illustrates what being faithful to a tradition actually means. First of all, it shows that orthodoxy is not about abstract doctrines, but primarily about being faithful to a way of life, in which theoretical considerations and concrete practices are closely connected, such as the celebration of the Eucharist on Sunday in a community of faithful. Secondly, the saying “Quoniam sine domenico non possumus” clearly illustrates the substantial character of the attachment of Emeritus and his fellow-believers to their faith. In other words, the existential reason for them to remain faithful to their religious tradition is that their identity depends on it: if they would be deprived of the possibility to celebrate the Eucharist together on Sunday, they could not live. This shows, thirdly, that the identity of a person or community is not primarily a matter of an autonomous construction. If this were the case, Emeritus and his fellow Christians could as well have chosen another day of the week than the day of the Resurrection of Christ, or a form of celebration that would be less offensive to the Roman authorities. However, their attachment to the Sunday as the Lord’s Day shows that their religious identity is attributed to them, through their belonging to a tradition, instead of the other way round. Moreover, the fact that Emeritus wants to celebrate the Eucharist together with his brothers and sisters in faith illustrates that one’s loyalty to a tradition is not an individual thing, but has to be shared with others. Fourthly, apparently contingent, material things, such as a liturgy together with others on a specific day of the week, determine one’s identity much more than one would expect if one sees humans as spiritual beings, for whom the material expression of their faith would be accidental. Again this proves that the way in which we give meaning to the world is not only a matter of expressing our internal thoughts
and feelings, but also, reversely, that external things have major repercussions on our internal selves.
The question is what attitude Christians should take when they are confronted with cultural change regarding this specific element of their orthodoxy and orthopraxis. As is commonly known, there is a tendency in some European countries to liberalise the legislation on Sunday’s rest. First of all, I want to examine what the basic attitude of remaining faithful to their tradition requires Christians to do in this specific situation? Taking into account the remarks about the importance of the Sunday’s rest for their religious identity, they have good reasons to oppose such a liberalisation. Reducing this existential question to a an expression of every one’s private opinions or individual options, which can be adapted or given up at will according to the needs of the times, completely ignores what the idea of being faithful to a tradition actually means. Such a reduction ignores the substantial character of many of our attachments. It also ignores the fact that we can share them with others. Hence, the opposition of Christians to liberalisation of the Sunday’s rest should not be interpreted as something irrational, but as an expression of their loyalty to their religious tradition. Whether or not this opposition will be successful in a democratic, pluralistic society, in which Christians are in a minority-position, is of course another matter. It will eventually depend on how the secular majority answers the question whether or not the Sunday’s rest is important for their identity too. But the important thing to notice in this case is that orthodoxy, or more specifically orthopraxis, and adaptation to cultural change are not conflicting realities but rather that the reasons for being faithful to one’s tradition concern the identity of one’s community. As most Christians nowadays are committed to their tradition in a conscious way, they are well aware of the existential importance of symbolic meanings and distinctions, such as the Sunday’s rest, for their identity. Probably much more so than secular people, whose substantial commitments are often implicit and unconscious,. By focussing the discussion about orthodoxy and adaptation on the existential significance of traditions, it becomes clear to what extent the symbolic meaning of the Sunday’s rest is constitutive for the identity of the Christian community as well as the secular one.
Sabbath is there to stop you from being absorbed in the success story, to prevent you from being enslaved to productivity and profit. In a world in which people find the meaning of their lives in their work, then what one does when one is not working is not so important. One does not work so as to be able eventually to relax, but on the contrary, one has leisure so that one will be able to go back to work again. And what one does in one’s free time, one’s Sabbath, is not so important, so long as one is back at work, refreshed on Monday morning.19 This shows that the most important reason for the symbolic distinction of the Sunday from other days of the week – to prevent people from being enslaved to productivity and profit – does not only count for Christians, but for secular people as well. According to the ‘orthodoxy’ of the traditional Socialists, having one day off in the week was a basic right for all labourers. Of course, its symbolic meaning was not to celebrate the Resurrection of Christ, being an essential element of the Christian identity, yet it was crucial to them as well in order to celebrate their secular identity. That is way, traditionally, both Christians and Socialists defended the Sunday’s rest. The crucial point of this discussion is that it explicates the close connection between specific, symbolic meanings and practices and the identity of a community, both religious and secular. Although Christianity has a well-developed orthodoxy to make this point clear, secular communities have their own reasons to be attached to these meanings and practices.
But in contemporary society, which is often characterised as liquid modernity, work is acquiring a new meaning. It can no longer offer the secure axis around which to wrap and fix self-definitions, identities and life-projects. Neither can it be easily conceived of as the ethical foundation of society, or as the ethical axis of individual life. And this means that abstention from work and the celebration of the Sunday may also have a new meaning.20 The question then is again how to be faithful to this specific aspect of Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxis in a time of radical cultural change? Just as in an industrial society the abstention from work on Sunday’s puts a stop to the idolatry of work and places it in the right perspective, in our contemporary liquid and insecure society the celebration of what is most enduring for Christians, the marriage in Christ of God and humanity, serves as its counterpart as well. The obligation to participate in the Sunday Mass embodies their faith in this enduring relationship. For Christians, it speaks of their unchanging identity in Christ, in the midst of a liquid and mobile world. For them, it is not an external obligation, but an expression of who they are. In
19 T. Radcliffe, What is the Point of Being a Christian? 194. Radcliffe quotes from the book by H. McCabe,
Law, Love and Language (London: Sheed & Ward, 1968).
general, obligations express the ways in which we are rooted in abiding relationships with other people. They are signs of those enduring fidelities that give us strength and identity. “My life may be pointed in all sorts of directions, loved by different passions and interests, but the Sunday Eucharist brings to light the one recurrent orientation of my existence, my homecoming to God. The Sabbath recalls one to the point of everything, which is the point of being a Christian.”21 Again, the idea of celebrating enduring relationships in a liquid and insecure society means that the Sunday’s rest gets a new symbolic meaning, which is not only appealing to Christians, but to many secular people as well. For most of them, the Sunday is a day of spending time with one’s family, and visit relatives and friends. It is quite obvious that these symbolic meanings, be they Christian or secular, are vital for the identity of a community. Moreover, the celebration of enduring relationships only works if the overall majority of the population has the same day off from work or school, so that it is not an individual choice. That is why, according to a recent survey, even in a highly secularised and individualised country as the Netherlands so many people are attached to the Sunday’s rest.
This example elucidates several things. First of all, the question of how to be faithful to one’s tradition in times of cultural change does not only count for Christians, but also for the members of other religious communities, as well as for secular people. Secondly, in order to prevent oneself from interpreting this loyalty as something completely contingent or even irrational, one has to take an internal stance and keep an open eye for the reasons for the people involved to be substantially attached to their tradition. These reasons always concern the importance of symbolic meanings and distinctions for the identity of a community. Thirdly, this example shows how one can be faithful to one’s tradition in times of cultural change. As said above, we usually interpret loyalty to a tradition as a loyalty to its spirit, to its intention, while we are convinced that its concrete materialisation may vary according to different times and places. This approach to interpret the material as something external and to subordinate it to the spiritual or internal has not only been a constant factor in European culture from Plato to Hegel, but is also in line with a nowadays quite dominant ‘expressivist’ conception of our selves, according to which the individual self thinks to be able to freely express his ideas, feelings etc. in all kinds of practices, images, rituals, and symbols, while still being in control of them.22 Consequently, if the needs of the times require to change or replace these expressions by other ones, the self thinks it can do so at will. Above, I already hinted at the problematic aspects of this approach. Modern, post-Hegelian philosophy has
21 T. Radcliffe, What is the Point of Being a Christian? 201.
