#391 Three Assumptions

A couple posts ago, I illustrated the absurdity of the claim that we make when we say that Jesus is Lord.  This is perhaps why I have such a disdain for traditional apologetics.  Its whole pursuit so often seems to pull a Schleiermacher in seeking to make a deeply scandalous religion acceptable to its cultured despisers rather than leaving it at Christ crucified, the original heart of the Acts gospel message.  In The Logic of Evangelism, William J. Abraham identifies three basic assumptions that we do in fact make when we make the astonishing claim that the reign of the God of the universe in history has been begun in the person of a particular first century Jewish male, Jesus of Nazareth:

"First, we assume that God is a transcendent agent who has created the world for certain intentions and purposes.  Without this assumption it will make no sense whatsoever to speak of God making promises and then fulfilling them, of God entertaining certain plans for creation, and of God acting both in history and at the end of all history to bring those plans into being.  In fact, to speak of the rule of God or the reign of God or the kingdom of God is fundamentally to speak of the action of God in history - and it is difficult to begin to get purchase on this discourse without trading on the idea of God as an agent analogous to the personal agents we know in experience and through which we learn the logic of language about agency.

Second, we assume that God has acted in the life of the people of Israel, making himself known through events in history and through his word to the prophets.  This is not a formal claim about the concept of God assumed in talk about the reign of God but a material claim about what God has in fact done to pave the way for the coming of the kingdom in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  In this case talk about the rule of God makes little or no sense outside the traditions of Israel that, taken as a whole, provide the particular conceptual cradle and the more precise content of the specific claims about God's action that are at the heart of the Christian gospel.

Third, we assume that eschatological claims about the kingdom of God involve irreducibly a futuristic dimension that defies adequate depiction.  Expressed negatively, the coming of the kingdom of God and all the activity of God associated with this cannot be exhausted by a description of events that are on the plane of history either in the present or in the future.  Expressed positively, the coming of the rule of God is consummated by the end of history as we know it; it incorporates a mysterious taking up of the earth and of history into a radically transformed plane of existence that is presently beyond our capacity to imagine or describe satisfactorily."

#390 Abelard Against Apologetics

Modern apologetics has as its aim the answering of questions rather than the questing for answers.  It is in this sense of apologetics that I add Abelard to my list of theologians against apologetics:

"Assiduous and frequent questioning is indeed the first key to wisdom. Aristotle, that most perspicacious of all philosophers, exhorted the studious to practice it eagerly, saying, 'Perhaps it is difficult to express oneself with confidence on such matters if they have not been much discussed. To entertain doubts on particular points will not be unprofitable.' For by doubting we come to inquiry; through inquiring we perceive the truth, according to the Truth Himself. 'Seek and you shall find,' He says, 'Knock and it shall be opened to you.' In order to teach us by His example He chose to be found when He was about twelve years old sitting in the midst of the doctors and questioning them, presenting the appearance of a disciple by questioning rather than of a master by teaching, although there was in Him the complete and perfect wisdom of God."

-- Peter Abelard, Sic et Non

I can't help but read over and over again the phrase, "through inquiring we perceive the truth, according to the Truth Himself."  Put another way, start with a question and you lay yourself open to the answer.  Start with an answer, and you close yourself off to He who is the Answer.

#389 Confessionalization

Certain Christians take pride in their denominational confession of faith.  But according to Diarmaid MacCulloch, the 16th century practice of creating them sealed the defeat of the Reformation as a reformation:

"This post-1570 era also witnessed a process to which historians have given the unlovely but perhaps necessary jargon label 'confessionalization': the creation of fixed identities and systems of beliefs for separate churches which had previously been more fluid in their self-understanding, and which had not begun by seeking separate identities for themselves - they had wanted to be truly Catholic and reformed.  Confessionalization represents the defeat of attempts to rebuild the unified Latin and Catholic Church.  In 1618 the outbreak of the most widespread warfare so far in the Reformation, the Thirty Years War, sealed that defeat."