This really gels nicely with what I was trying to say in the main post. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews described Jesus as a priest of a tradition that preceded that of Aaron, and as the consecrator of a "cosmic" temple greater than the one of wood and stone in Jerusalem. Using your terminology, I see this as a way of saying that Jesus, as an upholder of the perennial Tradition, found it necessary to come up against the upholders of tradition. Jesus was not well-behaved; and he came up against a tradition which, if it was ever truly inspired of Spirit in the beginning had become worldly.
The difficulty is that someone who crosses tradition in the spirit of Tradition looks to people of the time like a rebel. This is where the litmus test of "good vs. bad fruit" can be applied. Women who fought for suffrage bore good fruit, vs. the bad fruit of disenfranchisement. Pain, suffering, oppression are bad fruit. Those who opposed women's suffrage could have quoted scripture and tradition in their favor, but this doesn't change the fact that they were wrong, and we know it because their teachings bore the bad fruit of continued oppression of women.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-05-04 07:58 pm (UTC)The difficulty is that someone who crosses tradition in the spirit of Tradition looks to people of the time like a rebel. This is where the litmus test of "good vs. bad fruit" can be applied. Women who fought for suffrage bore good fruit, vs. the bad fruit of disenfranchisement. Pain, suffering, oppression are bad fruit. Those who opposed women's suffrage could have quoted scripture and tradition in their favor, but this doesn't change the fact that they were wrong, and we know it because their teachings bore the bad fruit of continued oppression of women.