The Intellectual Crisis of Today’s Church
This is the sort of reflection, which I’ve seen in many places and participated in myself, that made me present the idea for our group to Michael and Julianna in the first place. The logic of it, though, is much clearer than my own, scattershot pitch over lunch:
The church, unfortunately, more often than not, is in the obscuring business. No, not intentionally, but it is true. We protect ourselves and those we love from any “false doctrine” that leads away from Christ by hiding the issue or give a quick sound-bite apologetic which obscures and belittles the arguments of any opposition.
But here is the problem (and don’t miss this): one day the opponent will find an audience. Someway, somehow, whether it be in college or through a New York Times best seller, the opposition that we have dedicated ourselves so much to hide will be found. When this happens, a different tale is told, and this tale is much more convincing coming from an educated adherent than it was coming from us.
I think that honest engagement with these sorts of things in their own terms is always a superior alternative to straw-man apologetics. I also think that an openness to the possibility of being reminded should be part of our intellectual lives.
I say reminded because I think that people openly opposed to Christianity or at the very least modern iterations of Christianity can teach us something, but I’m not going to say that everything is a good lesson. When deliberating about the extent to which this or that idea is a good one for us, I tend to hold it up for examination’s sake next to the doctrines of Christianity. Sometimes they exist in simple opposition, and our job is to provide a compelling case for the truth of the gospel against the idea. But other times, an idea stings not because it’s false but because, if we were remembering our own traditions, we should have been saying it, in our language, but we had to be reminded.
Just to give an example of this, I think that Marx is right when he points out that monetary systems are something akin to fetishes in “primitive” societies–the metal discs and paper rectangles have no use-value in their own right, yet people will lie, steal, and kill to get their hands on more of them. But if I read carefully, I realize that such a teaching is, if anything, a modernization of Isaiah 41’s anti-idolatry polemics and echoes 1 Timothy’s assertion that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. It’s not simply redundant, however, as it frames those polemics in the terms of modern-era social theory, something that Christians probably should have done, but nonetheless we can thank Marx for doing for us.
That one is an easy one (I couldn’t muster anything more complex on a Saturday afternoon), but that’s the basic shape of how ideas not rooted in the gospel can still serve to educate Christians.
