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Aaron Hann's avatar

Thanks for this, Ben. The ideal is relatively easy to state, immensely more difficult to practice and pursue. I’m working on a series on Calvin that is inherently critical, because I’m responding to criticisms of the “myth” that Calvin was a tyrant. I’m palpably aware of the impulse to focus on all the bad (esp b/c it seems so imbalanced in reformed studies of Calvin) and ignore all the good. My main idea is that it’s all really complex, and so we should avoid oversimplifying. If that’s true of an individual, it’s exponentially more true of a tradition.

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Matthew Stanley's avatar

I think it's important to understand a tradition as a problem-space where there people are working on theoretical and practical problems, with various people proposing and disagreeing about how to solve those problems, and doing so all from a sense of love and gratitude about the resources which the tradition has supplied. Love involves criticism, but starts with a graceful acceptance. I think this approach of tradition as a problem-space, conversation, and set of resources shifts things away from adherence to formulas and mitigates against a mindset of preserving some fossilized and unitary understanding of the tradition. Every tradition is inherently multiple and full of tensions, and we can creatively play with these in a spirit of both criticism and fidelity.

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