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validity only within the traditionalist paradigm, which is the very thing that they are
questioning. The very logical distinctions which we have always thought intrinsic to
the universe, or at least to the human mind, are dismissed as arbitrary social constructs.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down; and in this case, it is
definitely not elves, exactly.
Well, then, we must strike deeper. But how? Perhaps in the first place by asking
whether even questioning itself--of anything, including Tradition--has any meaning in a
paradigm from which all answers are rigorously excluded. The Traditionalist does not
mind being questioned; self criticism is demanded by his Tradition. Before he builds a
wall he wants to know what he is walling in or walling out, and to whom he is like to
give offense. He wants to go behind his fathers' sayings (though, if he is a Christian, he
is willing to stop at his Father's). But having done so, he still finds himself helping his
neighbor repair the fence, for he knows that one thing is not another, that A is not non-
A, that some things are really right and others wrong, and that therefore some
boundaries are necessary. He does not hold with a kind of questioning in which all
answers, all legitimate boundaries, are excluded from the outset, all fences by definition
arbitrary exercises of power. He see no point in that kind of outdoor game.
Perhaps a second way of striking deeper is to ask insistently what it is that we
really value. Which is really our gold: Goodness, Truth, and Beauty (for Christians, as
the manifestations of God's character, His Word, and His glory), or "the endless free
play of the mind in the text"? That, indeed, is the question. Paths sunder, paradigms
are committed to, and interpretive communities are formed at precisely this point. We
cannot have it both ways. Either Truth exists and can be known or it does not. Either
words have a meaning that can be discerned in context or they do not. Good and Evil
are either objective realities accessible to the human mind or they can be no more than
subjective preferences. These disjunctions entail one another. Everything follows from
that.
With these matters the Church must be fundamentally concerned, especially as
she manifests herself in those Reformed traditions that have always prided themselves
often encountered from the post-modernist Left in an American context.