Christian Nonduality

What might one mean by The Great Tradition?

Some conceptions of the Great Tradition are too broad in some ways and too narrow in others. My categories work like this: Theological = Cosmological + Axiological, where the cosmological includes our descriptive science & normative philosophy and the axiological includes our evaluative cultural milieu & interpretive religious stance. This roughly maps over a perspectivalism such that the evidential = science, rational = philosophy, existential = cultural & presuppositional = interpretive. The only reason that our descriptive & interpretive realms do not wholly conflate is b/c we are radically finite & fallible.

My Peircean rubric says that the normative mediates between the descriptive and the interpretive to effect the evaluative, or, alternatively, that the philosophic (rational) mediates between the scientific (evidential) and the religious (presuppositional) to effect the cultural (existential). Some Religious Epistemologies often seem to be saying that the Biblical mediates between the scientific and religious to effect our existential longings (ultimate concerns).

What happens, then, is that some folk seem to think that the Great Tradition has something to say about the cosmological, about science and philosophy, for example about anthropology. In my view, this too broadly conceives the Great Tradition, which has only to do with our axiological concerns. The Great Tradition shapes and influences the answers to our questions: What's it to me? (evaluatively & existentially) and How's all of this tie back together? or re-ligate (interpretively & presuppositionally)? It does not attempt to answer the questions: What is that? or Is that a fact? (descriptively & evidentially) or How can I best avoid or acquire that? (normatively or philosophically or ethically or morally). Special revelation is not required for a human to live the good and moral life. (I'm not denying that it might not otherwise allow us to run the good race more swiftly and with less hindrance as it transvalues all of our value pursuits.)

More concretely, then, the Great Tradition has nothing to reveal to us about anthropology such as regarding the nature of the soul or the history of the species. It does not rely on one metaphysic or ontology vs another and does not help us adjudicate such questions. For example, it does not tell us which theory of atonement is better, the classical theory of an ontological rupture located in the past or the Scotistic view of a teleological striving oriented toward the future. Presently, the evidence seems to support Scotus (the Franciscans) and Teilhard?

Axiologically, however, the Great Tradition is often being conceived much too narrowly. Mere Christianity is WAY more than creedal formulations. Creeds, in my view, are secondary propositional articulations that grew out of our primary participatory celebrations (cf Jamie Smith). There is more to be had from the retrieval of songs, hymns, stories, letters, rituals and such and a more robust semiotic grasp of what they conveyed in the way of truth articulated, beauty celebrated, goodness preserved and unity enjoyed vis a vis the primary encounter of a People Gathered and properly understood. The participatory understanding narratively precedes the propositional formulation.

As it is, these propositional formulations in creeds are too heavily encrusted in cosmological speculations and there is a danger in overemphasizing them because there is a tendency to take some of these cosmological accretions and to consider them essentials when they are not even accidentals but, instead, somewhat irrelevant, even.