Chesterton says respecting tradition means giving the departed a vote.

But this would make us all Hindu right? Or Buddhist. I mean the population of India is overwhelming now and I assume it that has been the case for centuries.

Surely the dead pagans outnumber the dead in Christ, right?

So it is not the dead who get the franchise but only an elite portion of the dead.

But what happens if Protestantism outstrips Catholicism for a few generations? Say a Roman Catholic Chestertonian invented a time machine and went a millennia into the future (the farthest reach of his machine). Say he found a planet of thirty billion that was mostly Christian and Protestant, and that had been that way for quite some time. He comes back and does the demographic research and realizes that he now has knowledge that the Protestants of the first three millennia of human history now make up a majority.

So would he give up his distinctive Roman Catholic belief? I doubt it. I think he would simply insist that eventually the numbers would return to a shape that gives the RCs a majority in the wider scope of world history.

More likely he would deny it mattered. It doesn’t matter who is more numerous now, the seven voter booths have closed and there are no further elections to be held. It is not simply that the dead get a vote, they form a dictatorship.

But whoever, Romand Catholic, or Protestant, would actually allow their beliefs to be dictated by any majority? We don’t give a vote to truth claims ever. In the West a great many have decided that Christianity is not true, yet those of us who remain loyal to the Apostalic Faith of the Creeds don’t care. The Apostles Creed is true no matter how many people now or ever despise it.

The reason we ask people to “listen to the dead” is because we think they are caught up in popular fads where they are, unknowingly and irrationally, allowing their beliefs to be dictated by sheer numbers. Pointing out that there are numbers of people who thought otherwise isn’t done to have our beliefs ruled by a real majority, but to cease subjecting our principles to the democratic process altogether. Our convictions come to us by divine-right monarchy or else as pretenders. Voting is stupid.

If I showed you the number of geocentrist Christians outnumbered the heliocentrists, would that prove what model you should adopt?

What are traditions? Sometimes they are actual stories about things that allegedly happened. Traditionally, we say, Revelation has been dated from the time of Domitian. What do we mean? We mean there is actual testimony of testimony about when John wrote Revelation. In order to re-date Revelations’ copyright date one must show the testimony is unreliable or find overwhelming counter-evidence. In the case of revelation there is reason to believe that the early testimony was misunderstood. The early tradition is fine but the tradition about the early tradition is a misunderstanding.

Another tradition is that Mary and Joseoph never consummated their marriage. I think what is interesting about this tradition is that it contains no genealogy. Paul can say he passes on a tradition and launch into the story of the founding of the tradition (1 Cor 11; 1 Cor 15). But here all we know is that in the Church everyone who taught about the virgin Mary and said anything about it also taught that she remained a virgin.

Did Mary tell someone? Did Joseph? Is this even really a tradition at all? I guess it is, but it involves no actual information about its own information.

And what about Chesterton’s democracy of the dead? How many Christians in the first four to six centuries of the Church actually exercised their franchise? Are there any records of people asking how this conviction was arrived at or where it came from? As far as I can tell the idea simply seemed plausible and was carried on from wherever it came from. No one voted. It is perfectly possible that the a later generation of Early Christians massively outnumbered the generation before. If they had decided to make up their minds about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, they would have had to be agnostic about the issue. They had no testimony.

But wait, what about the testimony of the earlier Church? There is no testimony. No one claims that so-and-so received instruction from Mary or Joseph or Jesus about the issue. There is nothing but an opinion suspended “in the air.”

So the democracy of the dead turns into the dictatorship of the most ancient recorded. We are supposed to submit to a tiny fraction of the total number of Christians. We are to deny ourselves the franchise altogether. Neither we nor anyone in the hundred generations preceding us gets to vote on anything.

Is that really comparable to traditions about Scripture or about, say, the doctrines of the Nicene Creed? When I look at the books of the NT and compare them to the close contenders (Letter of “Barnabbas,” Shepherd of Herma) they don’t even look anything like the canonical books. If it wasn’t for the early Church I wouldn’t know whether the Gospel of Thomas is authentic? Really?

The testimony of the Early Church about the canon is never simply nothing more than a demographic survey from the earliest records. We not only have an idea of the consensus they came to, but we can see why they did so simply by looking at the documents and comparing them. The tradition is hugely important but it is not alone bearing the weight of our definition of the canon.

And this is even more true of the basic Chritian doctrines of the Trinity and the incarnation. Yes the Church has a tradition, but it is a tradition of argumentation. The arguments still work. It is not and never has been purely a matter of counting opinions. We don’t simply allow a majority or some elite generation with a franchise to vote on what is true.

Come to think of it, the most reviled stereotype of a North American Fundamentalist is far more orthodox (according to definitions shared by RC and Orthodox) than many thousands (or more) of Athanasius’ contemporaries. What is the early church consensus about God? The early church consensus was to to find it plausible, agains the testimony of Scripture, to deny that deity would taint itself by joining with creation. The early church consensus is a view of deity and spirituality that demands separation from the world. By God’s grace, the Scriptures were heard on these points, but it wasn’t easy. And there is no reason to believe that this widespread mindset (remember it was Athanasius contra mundum) didn’t result in many other errors that would require later reform according to the orthodox Christological confession that the church barely managed to make.

I think there is definitely good reason to respect teachers of an earlier age. I’m not sure democratic voting is a good model for the form that respect should take.