ABSTRACT
In Ruether’s work, tradition functions primarily as something to be overcome or used for some present purpose by free agents who stand outside of historical traditions. Notice her description of method in Gaia and God: ‘I also sift through the legacy of the Christian and Western cultural heritage to find usable ideas that might nourish a healed relationship to each other and to the earth.’ The same expression was used ten years earlier to define her position in respect of the past in her Disputed Questions: On Being a Christian, where she stated that ‘in light of new cultural demands, one might have to look again at some apparently closed questions from one’s past to see what is usable.’ This ability to sift through a historical past to discover ideas on the basis of their present usefulness assumes that the agent herself is somehow separate from that historical past and can pick and choose concepts from tradition based on the criterion of usefulness. It assumes that the historical past is somehow ‘closed’ like sealed documents in the dusty recesses of a library. Thus tradition functions as an inert storehouse of ideas activated through human will.
