Adherents of groups who identify as faithful to the Christian Tradition (as each group defines it) usually maintain that God has made clear the divine will through revelation, and provided both the necessary doctrines about this will and the requirements and regulations for following it through their respective traditions (most of which, of course, exclude the others as contrary to God’s will). Joseph Bracken—himself a Roman Catholic priest and therefore no stranger to “traditional” Christianity—provides a helpful corrective to this view by reorienting our understanding from God’s “will” to God’s “desires.”
Influenced by Alfred North Whitehead (as well as Martin Buber’s writing on the I-Thou relationship), Bracken emphasizes that God’s desires are persuasive rather than coercive. He writes,
‘Obeying God’s will’ suggests to me the worldview of classical metaphysics in which God is the Ultimate First Cause and the Ultimate Final Cause of all else that exists…‘Fulfilling God’s desires,’ on the contrary, suggests to me the intersubjective world view sketched above in which the three divine Persons and all their creatures make up a cosmic community of dynamically interrelated subjects of experience who are cocreating a common world, in biblical language the kingdom of God.
Largely following Whitehead’s system, Bracken proposes that God empowers creatures to make decisions, orders these decisions into a coherent whole and provides the initial aim for each subsequent moment in individual and corporate history; creatures make most of the decisions about what will happen in each moment. What makes Bracken’s position intrinsically Christian is his conclusion on how this influences the life of the believer:
The real import of my article is to raise the question of which model of the God-human relationship better serves our spiritual needs from day to day. On the one hand, a person who is serenely confident that he or she is executing the will of God for him- or herself at any given moment has a decided psychological advantage over another person who is struggling with a decision, while praying for divine guidance, trying to read ‘the signs of the times,’ and conferring with other people about what to do. On the other hand, if the first individual’s self-assurance turns out to be a big mistake, then the consequences for both the individual and other people could be quite painful, even disastrous. Clearly either alternative carries risk, but which one carries the greater risk?
The question about risk easily carries over to the subject of traditions. What happens to groups and individuals maintaining rigid traditions of doctrine and practice when the bases for the traditions develop cracks? We see the signs all around us. Such groups tend to tighten their boundary maintenance, acting against outsiders viewed as threats (e.g., racial and sex/gender minorities, schools and libraries, etc.) and rigidly policing the thoughts and actions of members. Members of these groups will either support these actions and therefore perpetuate the oppressive systems or, overwhelmed by the ever-increasing viciousness of these systems, can suffer faith and/or psychological crises.
In contrast, groups and individuals who experience God acting persuasively through their traditions can experience far more harmonious relationships. The continuous response to the creative God develops the humility and flexibility enabling a tradition to creatively advance in beauty and truth. As John Thiel proclaims,
The faith that makes tradition is properly humble and as open to the new as it is loyal to the old. Faithfulness is exciting because through it traditions are continuously made. Tradition is a function of faithfulness. The act of faith both affirms what a tradition has been and imagines what a tradition might be in order to fulfill what it already is.
