The conclusion proposes alternative ways to think about Christian normativity, drawing on the concepts of polydoxy and religious autonomy from Alvin Reines, with additional support from Catherine Keller and Laurel Schneider, and the concept of theological disobedience, derived from Louis Michael Seidman’s notion of constitutional disobedience.

This chapter examines the liberal approaches to Christian prescriptivism, which have typically fallen under the label of the “essence of Christianity.” The quest for the essence has its origins in the Reformation but becomes a widespread theological concern in the Enlightenment. This first chapter examines liberal, historicist, dialectical, and liberationist versions of this quest. Using Schleiermacher’s rubric, I organize different versions of the essence along the lines of reason (doctrine), experience (culture), and morality (politics).

Tradition stands as an unexplored and misunderstood segment of humanity’s memory, a moment of déjà vu for the collective unconscious that the twenty-first century strains to escape or resolve. The modern world knows neither whether tradition is necessary for thought to exist, nor whether it is a barrier to true rationalism. Further, struggling over tradition and whether it has a place in our collective consciousness has frequently divided modern Western culture into warring camps. In an attempt to make a contribution to the present situation, the present study examines John Calvin’s engagement with tradition. His day, not unlike ours, was turbulently violent, and the epistemic foundations of truth claims were one of the regularly visited battlegrounds. Calvin lived in a time when the medieval foundations of claims to religious truth were being questioned openly. I argue that this makes him the perfect study to provide a mirror to the present age. For Calvin struggled with tradition – arguing that he did not use it, while turning to it frequently. In so doing, he created a religious tradition in which many modern Christians still stand, that does not know what to do with the orthodox tradition.