(8:41 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

A Spurious Scar

In the hi-tech industrial estate when I first went to work there were still wide patches of grass between the plots on which companies had constructed call centres and warehouses. The rain was allowed to lie in long puddles in the grass and mud. Every so often the grass was mowed, but for the most part it was left unused. Once, gypsies came and spread their caravans on the grass. We heard about it on the tannoy. They were evicted and the council brought in diggers to cut channels along the fields so no caravan could be towed there. A channel four foot deep and then a wall of earth four feet high marked the perimeter of each lot. But the grass had been torn up and now there were great tracts of mud. When it rained, I thought to myself: these lakes are like great wounds and what they wound is time. The gypsies have left great scars of tme in the muddy fields.

Conversation with the antecedent theology of each encountered religious culture is intrinsic to the gospel's mission, and this conversation is never merely polemic. That the fathers were able to agree with "the Greeks"... was constitutive in the missionary history that leads to Western forms of Christianity, and contributes irreplaceably--at least for the West--to the church's knowledge of the gospel.

What must not continue is only the Enlightenment's elevation of the Greek element of our thinking to be unilateral judge of the whole..... Nor may we continue the mistake that suggested these moves: the qualification of truth taught by Plato or Aristotle as more "natural" or "rational" than truth taught by Isaiah or Paul.

There is a particular version of these errors that must be noted. We usually refer to the work of Greece's theologians with their own name for it, "philosophy." We have thereupon been led to think this must be a different kind of intellectual activity than theology, to which theology perhaps may appeal for foundational purposes or against which theology must perhaps defend itself. But this is historical illusion: Greek philosophy was simply the theology of the historically particular Olympian-Parmenidean religion, later shared with the wider Mediterranean cultic world.

The church fathers, in direct contact with "the Greeks," were usually clear about this.... Theologians of Western Christianity must indeed converse with the philosophers, but only because and insofar as both are engaged in the same sort of enterprise.

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