On tradition in the history of Christianity one cannot do better
than to consult Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A
History of the Development of Doctrine, 4 vols. (Chicago,
1971–1989). Yves M.-J. Congar, Tradition and Traditions:
An Historical and a Theological Essay (New York, 1967), is
a another masterful treatment by one of the intellectual lead-
ers of the Second Vatican Council. One should also consult
the classic that inspired both Pelikan and Congar, John
Henry Newman’s An Essay on the Development of Christian
Doctrine (New York, 1845). For Orthodox Christian ap-
proaches see John Meyendorff, Living Tradition: Orthodox
Witness in the Contemporary World (Crestwood, N.Y., 1978);
Constantine Scouteris, “Paradosis: The Orthodox Under-
standing of Tradition,” Sobornost 4, no. 1 (1982): 30–37;
and Michael Plekon, ed., Tradition Alive: On the Church and
the Christian Life in Our Time: Readings from the Eastern
Church (Lanham, Md., 2003). See also the critical assess-
ment by Paul Valliere, Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev,
Soloviev, Bulgakov: Orthodox Theology in a New Key (Edin-
burgh, U.K., and Grand Rapids, Mich., 2000), chap. 15,
“Conclusion: The Limits of Tradition.”
A probing discussion of tradition in Islam is in Fazlur Rahman’s
Islam, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1979), chaps. 3, “Origins and Devel-
opment of the Tradition,” and 4, “The Structure of the
Law.” Rahman’s critique of the analysis of Islamic tradition
by Western scholars illuminates the problem of continuity
in religion in general. Similarly Robert Lingat’s study of tra-
dition (smr:ti) in Hinduism, The Classical Law of India, trans-
lated with additions by J. Duncan M. Derrett (Berkeley,
Calif., 1973), provides insights into the workings of any sys-
tem of norms based on tradition. See also Louis Renou,
Études védiques et pa ̄n:inéennes, vol. 6 (Paris, 1960).
On tradition in early Chinese civilization, see K. C. Chang, Art,
Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient
China (Cambridge, U.K., and London, 1983); Cho-Yun
Hsu and Katheryn M. Linduff, Western Chou Civilization
(New Haven, Conn., and London, 1988); and Aihe Wang,
Cosmology and Political Culture in Early China (Cambridge,
U.K., 2000). The complex interaction between religious tra-
dition and social systems in Buddhism is explored by S. J.
Tambiah, Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-East Thai-
land (Cambridge, U.K., 1970); Melford E. Spiro, Buddhism
and Society: A Great Tradition and Its Burmese Vicissitudes, 2d
ed. (Berkeley, Calif., 1982); and Todd T. Lewis, Popular
Buddhist Texts from Nepal: Narratives and Rituals of Newar
Buddhism (Albany, N.Y., 2000).
On tradition and change in modern times, see Robert N. Bellah,
“Epilogue: Religion and Progress in Modern Asia,” in Reli-
gion and Progress in Modern Asia, edited by Robert N. Bellah
(New York, 1965), pp. 168—229; and Eric J. Hobsbawn
and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cam-
bridge, U.K., 1983). Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber
Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development
in India (Chicago, 1967), is a classic study of the role of tra-
dition in modern politics. Milton Singer, When a Great Tra-
dition Modernizes: An Anthropological Approach to Indian
Civilization, with a foreword by M. N. Srinivas (New York,
1972), is another fine work on tradition and modernity in
South Asia. The tenacious reader will be rewarded by work-
ing through Joseph Richmond Levenson’s Confucian China
and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy, 3 vols. (Berkeley, Calif.,
1958–1968). Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradition and Modern-
ization in Japanese Culture (Princeton, N.J., 1971), is a good
collection of essays on tradition and change in early modern
Japan. Paul Heelas, ed., with the assistance of David Martin
and Paul Morris, Religion, Modernity, and Postmodernity
(Oxford, U.K., and Malden, Mass., 1998), provides a sam-
pling of postmodernist perspectives on issues of tradition and
modernity.
From the growing literature on the cultural and religious impact
of globalization, see Arjun Appadurai, ed., Globalization
(Durham, N.C., and London, 2001); Peter L. Berger and
Samuel P. Huntington, eds., Many Globalizations: Cultural
Diversity in the Contemporary World (Oxford, U.K., 2002);
and Mark Juergensmeyer, ed., Global Religions: An Introduc-
tion (New York, 2003), which includes a helpful bibliogra-
phy. In the same connection, William Ernest Hocking’s sug-
gestive typology of the interaction between religious
traditions in Living Religions and a World Faith (New York,
1940) is receiving fresh attention, as is Wilfred Cantwell
Smith’s Towards a World Theology: Faith and the Compara-
tive History of Religion (Philadelphia, 1981).
PAUL VALLIERE (1987 AND 2005)TRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE. Ac-
cording to Webster’s New International Dictionary of the En-
glish Language, second edition, unabridged, to transcend is
to “ascend beyond, excel.” The term is used of the “relation
of God to the universe of physical things and finite spirits,
as being... in essential nature, prior to it, exalted above
it, and having real being apart from it.” Immanence, defined
as “presence in the world... in pantheism is thought of
as uniform, God... equally present in the personal and the
impersonal, in the evil and the good. According to theism,
immanence occurs in various degrees, more in the personal
than the impersonal, in the good than in the evil.”
It is clear that transcendence is a value term expressing
the unique excellence of God, because of which worship—
utmost devotion or love—is the appropriate attitude toward
the being so described. It is less obvious that immanence is
a value term, but ubiquity, “being everywhere,” comes closer
to expressing a unique property. If God is everywhere in the
world and also in some sense beyond the world, then God
certainly surpasses all ordinary objects of respect or love.
“Prior to the universe” seems to suggest a time when
God was alone, with no cosmos of creatures to relate to—
first a creator not actually creating, then one creating. But
it also might mean that there was a different universe before
our own. Origen thought God had created an infinity of uni-
verses in succession and never lacked relation to some actual
creatures. We see a partial return to that position in Alfred
North Whitehead’s hypothesis of “cosmic epochs,” each
with its own natural laws. Whitehead held that having a uni-
verse, some universe or other, is, in principle, inherent in
God’s nature and not subject to divine choice. What may be
subject to such choice are the particular laws that will governTRANSCENDENCE AND IMMANENCE 9281