Diversity of belief was the common state of things, so long as theology had not been made subject to dogma. 119

David Hart Tradition and Apocalypse 2022

Any true and living tradition must be at once both the subject and the object of a constant and pious hermeneutical retrieval that, guided by an awareness of the history and logic of what has gone before, seeks to discover the tradition’s dialectical unity and rationality ever anew. 128

David Hart Tradition and Apocalypse 2022

Living as they [traditionalists] do like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, with their faces turned toward the past and backs toward the future, carried onward by historical forces whose ends they cannot see and therefore cannot understand or interpret, they resent the living tradition’s often chaotic and disruptive vitality. 131

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Once upon a time, Christianity grew and endured and even flourished over the course of many generations in total and blissful ignorance of any officially defined dogma, any single recognized canon of scripture, anything remotely like the systematic or dogmatic theologies of the coming ages of Christendom and after. 133

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... Christianity entered human history not as a new creed or sapiential path or system of religious observance, but as apocalypse: the sudden unveiling of a mystery hidden in God before the foundation of the world in a historical event without any possible precedent or any conceivable sequel .... 135

David Hart Tradition and Apocalypse 2022

... the Kingdom was preached, but it was the church, with its often almost comically corrupt and divisive institutional form, that arrived. 138

David Hart Tradition and Apocalypse 2022

And so - just as the reiterations and returns of ritual and liturgy displace the empty flow of ordinary time with ... the living eternity of penitential and joyous repetition - a living tradition ... displaces the rule of bare history with the adventure of a coherent journey ... from a remote beginning to a remote end. 144

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[attitude toward tradition] would be not a simple clinging to what has been received, but also a relinquishing, even at times of things that had once seemed most precious... 145

David Hart Tradition and Apocalypse 2022

A true fidelity to the tradition must be one that leaves open the possibility that the orthodoxies of the present ... may yet be surpassed by a fuller revelation of the truth, one that will be wholly given only at the end of tradition’s long historical course. 152

David Hart Tradition and Apocalypse 2022