Brief Observations of a Smart Christianity

The community of language gives one access to significances at which he cannot otherwise arrive. To find a word is to find a meaning; to create a word is to find a single term for a meaning partially distributed in other words. Whoever may doubt that language has this power to evoke should try the experiment of thinking without words.  

Richard Weaver, Language is Sermonic

Christianity has historically taken to the task to bring imaginative detail to the lacuna and difficulties of the biblical text. This imagination finds full and wonderful expression in the church’s art, homiletic tradition, and symbol. Rather than invest in the continuation and growth of such expressions, the new fad of a thinking Christianity is one at least obliquely initiated in the pursuits of historical criticism, this fad now having wrought generations of Christians who mechanically agree to polite debate about religion on chiefly Enlightenment terms. Of these terms is firstly that the currency of information exchange is brute fact. Second is that religion's conclusions can be considered topically and without bearing much intrusion into one’s private assumptions about the world. And third that the Bible is a cold artifact of history which can be appreciated mutually as a catalog of human thought and moral development.

Built upon these terms, seminaries have authored programs to make Christian leaders privy to the standards of persuasive speech, the foremost of these programs being that of apologetics. Neither a summary of these programs nor a history of Christian apologetics is provided here. The exercise of apologetics, broadly speaking, found a ready audience in the internet age and became an industry without calibration from the church for the proper positioning of the new apologist to the Scriptures. Given some pause for reflection about this positioning, the apologist would do well to recover the circumstances of the gospel which seat the Christ event in a world-imminent apocalyptic worldview. Moreover, assuming the labor of apologetics is not without some analysis of the text, its methods are often freighted with modern attitudes about education which are foreign to the ancient Jewish worldview.

It must first be stated that no matter what arguments the church makes in her own defense, it is by providence that the plot of Christianity is carried. The contents of the New Testament kerygma presuppose a unique cosmology in which Christ ascended and assumed the powers of heaven, and that the world below now persists in a period of waiting. For some Christians this is enough to pursue the qualities of Christ’s personality and to structure their lives according to the New Testament expectation. There are, of course, others, who can be called apologists least by such interests, who make distinction between a Christian cosmology and a biblical cosmology, the latter presented as provisional until the mechanisms of God’s activity were made known. The mystery of God in this regard is but human failure to understand, and it is insisted that God is discoverable through syllogism or by means of the scientific process.

 This approach appeals to a natural theology in which God is discernible by observation within the forum of his activity. When posed as proof for God’s existence, natural theology presents a God who is practically true rather than necessarily true, the core proposition which gives meaning to everything else. God in the Scripture is a for-granted and tyrannizing reality whose instrument of power is language. Thus the Scriptures, through import of the late Hebrew memra and the Greek logos, attribute to language, as Richard Weaver wrote, "a sort of deliverance from the shifting world of appearances". A Christian who believes the subject of God can be broached with an objective vocabulary speaks out of character to a Word made flesh, and as it goes for anyone thinking upon the names of things that that there is no knowledge without language and no language without forces external to form.  

The church moved forward from Pentecost and injected into the public consciousness a unique lexicon and imagery. The task of the church is to keep its language, which is a responsibility often neglected for making easy digestion of a relatable or reasonable gospel. Admittedly the difficulty of a “pure” account of the gospel is that modern Christianity is limited to communicate ideas bound up with the original languages, and such limitations are easily given to hermeneutics of suspicion, sentimentality, and bias. Respect for the integrity of the text is not only to the circumstances of composition but also to its form. Words whose meaning are taken for granted by the author routinely become technical and repurposed beyond the perspectives of the original correspondence.

Now admittedly a critical discussion of form requires some background and methodology, but may it suffice here that each Gospel was written to command assent within a believing community. Apologetics insists the biblical record is accountable to the terms of persuasion, and that its claims can be appreciated without bearing much intrusion to one’s private assumptions. The heroes of the Books of Acts, however, who after some public spectacle would make an opportunity of their offense, spoke with bold confrontation not just to the enemies of the gospel, but also to those who thought it possible to live uninterrupted by the question of whether or not Jesus had resurrected and assumed the powers of heaven. The power of the gospel is its scandal that nothing is unaffected by its crucial question of whether or not Jesus was raised from the dead, and it cannot reason the veracity of this question without a valued orientation. 

Ultimately to speak of the activity of God in a manner value neutral is more convenient than tenable, making for an impressionable position in which the conclusions of popular science are unrolled and assimilated to an entrenched base proposition. A God who avails human quests for knowledge presents a barrier to understanding a God who in Scripture interfaces with human history at specific plot points and always to interrupt the natural process. He who, of course, upon seeing our cooperation to build a ziggurat with access to the divine realm, did ascribe to humans an unspecified sin and confused our speech. 

 So it is also in the New Testament that reasoning from these Scriptures endangered the lives of the apostles. That is because God and humanity are deeply pitted against one another where our language rebels against the telos of historical witness, to fail to claim unto God all things and to speak above our situations the redemption being brought about by a world-imminent new order. Such observations about a thinking Christianity and broadly about apologetics are presented here as preparation before bringing the pearl of the gospel into the stall of a debate culture which insists God must be spoken for without urgency and without the appearance of extreme piety. For speech that is not Christian is not free from Christianity's basic confession, which subjects even the inner things of human experience to suffer and to groan until redemption.