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Good morning. In Woody Allen’s stand-up routine he would say, ‘When I was a child my mother gave me a bullet. I placed that bullet in my breast pocket. One day I was walking down Seventh Avenue, when a berserk evangelist hurled a Gideon Bible. It struck me right over my heart. And if it hadn’t been for that bullet, that Bible would have killed me.’ I told that story one night to an American federal judge, whereupon he flicked his wrist, reached into his breast pocket, and drew out, from over his heart, an immaculate, gold-embossed copy of the United States Constitution. After that unforgettable moment, I started to perceive two strands in American thought: those who regard the Bible as their constitution, and those who regard the constitution as their Bible. My judicial companion was firmly in the second camp. The appointment of a new judge to the US Supreme Court is invariably a moment for passionate debate and the surfacing of profound convictions and fears surrounding single-issue politics – especially when the court seems poised on a knife-edge between conservative and progressive justices. But deeper than the political hurly-burly is the question of what kind of a document the American constitution truly is. On the one hand are so-called originalists, who believe the Supreme Court exists to preserve the meaning of the constitution as the Founding Fathers intended it in 1781. On the other hand are those who say, ‘We can’t always know what the Founding Fathers intended; and it’s hardly appropriate to assume what worked in 1781 is necessarily wise today.’ They see the constitution as a living document. They believe the role of the Supreme Court is to understand the soul of the nation, and in that strength to navigate the murky waters of the permissible and the prudent. You get the same dynamic in almost any tradition that takes authority seriously. For example you could call some Christians originalists, because they speak about the Bible as the unchangeable and definitive account of how God intends things to be – the tangible record of who Jesus is. Other Christians believe the Holy Spirit leads the church into deeper understandings that ring true with the Bible’s original content, but don’t unquestioningly replicate it. These are the two kinds of authority: that grounded in history and tradition; and that based on contemporary relevance and applicability. This battle over authority is perhaps the greatest ideological contest of our day. Maybe the mistake of the last few months is to think such a debate can be resolved by settling on one out of just two options. Tradition – or relevance? The answer can surely only be: both.