When I lived in Boston I noticed a lot of energy in the classical music community around early music. They even had what was practically a fad about reproducing the music of those times as faithfully as possible, right down to using antique instruments. Presumably they also implemented well-researched tempi, tunings, ensemble sizes, and venues. They sought to present early music “authentically,” so that the listener would hear in 1984 exactly what one would have heard in 1684.
But then one critic made what I thought was a dazzling and cogent observation about this, noting that in reality this whole movement did not actually reproduce the music of earlier centuries so much as present us with a different kind of contemporary music. This was not really a look “back” at all; it was a statement about, and a response to, our situation at the end of the 20th century. A lot of what we heard was good, beautiful, and interesting music… but in the end it was a genre of new music.
That comment was a revelation to me. First of all, it exemplified a critical post-modern sensibility, that recognized the socially and historically conditioned nature of everything. There is no uninterpreted experience. We simply do not have direct access to the past; everything is filtered through our present consciousness and situation. Secondly, it compelled me to rethink a lot of what was going on in my own field, that of Christian faith.
The Reformation of the 16th century thought of itself as a recovery of the faith of the early church. It was all about getting back to the Church of the Apostles. In reality it was an adaptation of Christianity suited to the needs and desires of some people of that time. People found what they needed and wanted to find, using criteria designed for the task. A “traditional” Protestant worship service reproduces the forms of the 16th century, not of the 1st.
The Church has gone through many versions of this. In the last few decades we had the drive to recover the “Celtic Christianity” of the 5th-12th centuries, which has excited me. And there are the “quests for the historical Jesus,” which have erupted periodically in the last few centuries.
All these movements say they want to recover and restore something beautiful and good that has been lost; but all of them are responses to contemporary conditions. They produce not some connective passage to the past, but new forms of Christianity designed to meet the needs/desires of people today. They are no more “authentic” than Colonial Williamsburg is an actual reproduction of 18th century Virginia. At best such efforts are sincere and educational. At worst, they are about selling books and merchandise, adaptations designed to appeal to the 21st century market.
For there is no going back. There is no recovery or restoration of something that is past. And we now know that to make such a claim is a lie. I’m not saying don’t listen to voices from other eras, far from it. We need to be informed by a deep historical sensibility. Let’s just be honest that all recoveries, reforms, and restorations are actually adaptations. In short, we don't have the past event; all we have is tradition, which is the ongoing history of adaptation.
Those adaptations can be very valuable, faithful, and powerful! They can provide a lot of useful and beautiful practices to the Church today. The study of Celtic Christianity, for example, has produced amazing resources in terms of books and music, prayers, liturgies, and missional strategies. It has opened us to nearly forgotten theologians like Pelagius and Eriugena, and drawn connections with more recent figures like George MacDonald and Teilhard de Chardin. It has shown us different ways of doing theology and organizing the Church. For me, it even gives a certain legitimacy to new practices if it can be shown they were used effectively by saints in the past.
Which leads me to the opposite observation that some adaptations can be destructive and actually undermine authentic Christianity. This is where I place the various quests for the “historical Jesus.” It is one thing to be informed by movements and theologies of the early Church. It is another to eviscerate the heart of the New Testament itself and gouge out of the text words Jesus, according to someone’s arbitrary criteria, “did not really say.”
How do we make this determination, that some expressions are in tune with the gospel of Jesus, and some are contradictions of that gospel? It is not, as Modernity wanted to say, by using historical science to identify what is “oldest.” That would be to begin with the assumption that faith is about the past. “God is not the God of the dead but of the living, for all live to God” (Luke 20:38), says Jesus.
(Neither is it the uncritical reception and adoption of whatever is handed to us by the previous generation. This conservative approach assumes an unadulterated process of transmission over the centuries. But we know that contexts are always changing, and tradition is about continuity realized in adaptivity and adaptation.)
The answer here is Presence. Authenticity does not mean faithfulness to the past no matter how we represent it or claim access to it; it means faithfulness to God’s living Presence here and now.
In his ministry, the Lord Jesus Christ does not seek to recover and restore the Israelite faith of the past; he comes to fulfill it. He realizes it in himself and becomes the Way for us to experience and know the ever-present, living Spirit that animates the tradition of his own people, and indeed all of human spirituality. Authenticity has to do with the Spirit. The Spirit is always present. The Spirit is always all-inclusive and non-dual. The Spirit is always revealing fulfilled time, thus giving meaning and direction to our journey through time.
The question of authenticity then is not about what is older. It is about what is real. Thus it always brings us up to “Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture,” who “is the One Word of God which we have to hear and which we are to trust and obey in life and in death.” Authenticity has to do with what is in accordance with Christ, as discerned by the gospel community that lives in trust and obedience of him.
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