How can Christians affirm anything regarding the nature of the witness of Christian tradition in light of the modernist assault on such a perspective?

DBH, in DBH style, does not really have an answer. But he certainly knows how to critique the attempted answers of others.

DBH begins by assessing Newman and Blondel's apologiae for Christian tradition. He concludes Newman ends up in a tautology which Blondel may have been able to escape but ultimately did not.

DBH then attempts to reframe the conversation about tradition to see it in a more apocalyptic way, as a living thing which has a telos but which is not yet revealed. He's willing to play "devil's advocate" about matters such as, say, Arius and his perspective, to be willing to make the argument how Arius was very much within a set of traditions about the understanding of the nature of God, and was far more "conservative" than one might have imagined, and in many respects the Niceno-Constantinopolitan conclusion was less so. That dispute and its conclusion, therefore, were not entirely foreordained, and who knows what later generations might think of them.

The author is Eastern Orthodox but is quite sanguine about the challenges and limitations regarding the appeal to tradition. He would have very little patience for my posture as a Restorationist, but I think he understands the impulse. The problem he would see is how restoration cannot ever be fully accomplished and would even question if that really should be or could be the goal, for how ideal was the beginning?

Such is the inherent tension and challenge when it comes to the Christian tradition. It is completely incoherent and internally self-contradicting. But it cannot, and should not, be entirely jettisoned. An apocalyptic perspective on the living nature of tradition and humility about how dogmatic we should be regarding our perspectives on such things are appreciated.

If one can tolerate the style of DBH, worthy of consideration.

**--galley received as part of early review program ( )