Category Archives: Culture

Baptism and Identity

Culture, Spirituality, Theology, ,

These days, it seems, we wear our identities on the outside, writ large. We proclaim and display them, manipulate and manage them. It’s become very important to carve out a space for ourselves, to be the somebody we are in such a way that, for others, there’s no mistaking it.

Is this so very different from the way things have always been? Maybe, maybe not. Who we are, as well as our sense of who we are, have always been important. Especially when we’re young and ‘becoming,’ or, ‘discovering,’ who we are.

In the present cultural moment, these things have become more prominent, and curious. On the one hand, a person’s identity in modernity has become a project of the autonomous self, and the technological and cultural milieu encourage the development and display of one’s unique identity. On the other, we’ve seen in the last several decades, a resurgence of ‘group identity’ where belonging to – identifying with – one’s tribe has become increasingly foundational, and thereby a cornerstone in one’s personal uniqueness.

But this, too, is probably the way it has always been: identity as an interplay of the intersecting aspects of one’s life, personal attributes and experience, community, and so on. Perhaps one factor in the present moment is the degree of independence one has in choosing their tribe and identity. Again, this is a luxury not everyone has equally.

Does becoming a Christian complicate or simplify one’s identity? I suspect that this is not an easy question to answer. For some people it will be the former, for others the latter. For many, perhaps, first complication before things becoming simpler. But it could go the other way as well, with the nature of a person’s Christian experience resembling a lifelong wrestle.

Nevertheless, it does appear that Christian identity is ‘a thing’: that, ideally, some features of Christian identity are discernible across time and tradition. To speak like this is to speak normatively rather than with reference to the diversity of Christian experience. It is to suggest that there is, in fact, a Christian ideal to aspire to, in spite of the great and often legitimate diversity of Christian experience and expression that has existed and continues to exist.

More precisely, we can speak of Jesus Christ as he is set forth in the Scriptures of the Old and the New Testaments as the archetype and exemplar of Christian identity. He is the pattern, the standard, and the goal. A Christian is one called to follow Jesus, to be conformed to Christ. It is evident that this will involve a hermeneutical exercise—who is this Jesus to whom I am called to conform?—and therefore inevitable variety and diversity in Christian experience and identity formation.

Yet such variety will occur within a somewhat bounded field: while many forms of life and identity may find their place within the field—from ancient Christian asceticism to modern evangelical Christianity to forms of Christian mysticism—not everything will. The New Testament writers clearly saw some forms of life and identity as contrary to life in Christ. It is also the case that we cannot always discern where the boundaries lie, or to shift the metaphor, what distinguishes the wheat and the weeds. Careful theological reflection and pastoral discretion are required, along with humility and generous hospitality as the posture we adopt when considering these matters and engaging in dialogue.

These days, it seems, we wear our identities on the outside, writ large. Hopefully this is the case with Christian identity, that we might truly be the Christian we are in such a way that, for others, there’s no mistaking it.

I have reflected on some of these issues in a new article recently published at Religions entitled “The Role of Baptism in Christian Identity Formation.” The abstract for the article is:

The construction of one’s identity in late modernity is sometimes viewed as a project of the autonomous self in which one’s identity may shift or change over the course of one’s existence and development. For the Christian, however, one’s identity is both a divine gift, and a task of ecclesial formation, and for both the gift and the task, Christian baptism is fundamental. Baptism represents the death of the self and its rebirth in Christ, a decisive breach with the life that has gone before. Baptism establishes a new identity, a new affiliation, a new mode of living, and a new life orientation, direction, and purpose. This paper explores the role of baptism in the formation of Christian identity, finding that Christian identity is both extrinsic to the self and yet also an identity into which we are called and into which we may continually grow. The essay proceeds in three sections. It begins with a survey of recent philosophical reflection on the concept of identity, continues by reflecting on the nature of Christian baptism in dialogue with this reflection, and concludes by considering in practical terms how baptism functions in the process of conversion–initiation toward the formation of mature Christian identity.

Douthat: The Americanization of Religion

Culture, Spirituality,

Picture Credit: daria-rom-fT4BRGAK5aQ-unsplash

I came across this article in the New York Times by Ross Douthat, author of The Decadent Society (2020) and Bad Religion (2013). He is reflecting on the latter book given its ten-year anniversary, and what has changed in American religious life since 2013.

Today, though, my sense is that Jesus himself is less culturally central, less necessary to religious entrepreneurs — as though where Americans are going now in their post-Christian explorations, they don’t want or need his blessing.

That shift in priorities doesn’t tell us exactly where they’re going. But it’s enough for now to say that the “post-Christian” label fits the overall trend in American spirituality more than it did a decade ago.

 He notes also a Pew Research Centre Report that gives four possible scenarios for American Christianity over the next few decades, three predicting precipitous decline and none of them anticipating growth. But Douthat is not entirely without hope that Christianity might experience some kind of rebirth:

I wouldn’t expect a social scientist to anticipate that kind of reversal. But Advent and Christmas aren’t about trends extending as before; they’re about rupture, renewal, rebirth. That’s what American Christianity needs now — now as ever, now as in those first days when its whole future was contained in the mystery and vulnerability of a mother and a child.

This link should lead to the article at NYT.

For a different kind of overview, see this article in the Huffington Post.

Times Have Changed

Culture

This is from the opening paragraph in the General Introduction of The Library of Living Theology. The first volume of the series appeared in 1952, and thus the General Introduction probably also appeared then:

As we enter the second half of the twentieth century, religion and theology are less likely to be neglected by thinking men. Whatever may be the causes of the present-day return to religion, the fact remains that religious thinking has again become intellectually respectable. As against the climate of a generation and more ago–when the notion of a ‘Christian intellectual’ was almost a contradiction in terms–we now see religiously minded men–motivated in their thinking by basic religious and theological assumptions–taking a more and more prominent and commanding place in the world of thought (Charles W. Kegley (ed.), The Theology of Emil Brunner, vii).

It seems to me that the confidence expressed in this announcement changed, and rather quickly. I imagine that by the end of the sixties the tide was already in ebb. Perhaps not universally since serious theological conversation did continue in institutions of higher learning and amongst their participants. But this is more an intra-mural than public conversation. Change in both church and culture shifted the focus of ‘thinking men’–of thoughtful people–with the result that religion and theology were not merely neglected but often rejected.

No doubt many factors were at play in both church and culture that led to this unanticipated neglect. No doubt some factors at work in the religion and theology of the period also contributed.

My point here is not an attempt to delineate these factors. Rather, I am simply musing on the confidence of the series editors in mid-century USA who did not anticipate the seismic shifts about to rock their world.

And I am wondering whether and how theologians might again find the means of commending the gospel in the cultural context in which now live. This is necessary, not as an adjunct to the gospel but, if we would learn from the ancient apologists, the Church Fathers, the great preaching bishops, medieval monks, and reformers, etc., as a part of what faithful and fruitful gospel proclamation means and requires.

Vale, Charlie

Culture

The first Rolling Stones song I ever heard was on a record my older brother bought home when I was eight years old – “Top of the Pops 1969”. The album had great classics like I Heard it through the Grapevine (Marvin Gaye), Something in the Air (Thunderclap Newman), Bad Moon Rising (CCR), Where Do You Go To? (Peter Sarstedt), and Honky Tonk Women (The Stones). It also had the Beatles (Ob-La-Di), Elvis (In the Ghetto), Bobby Gentry (I’ll Never Fall in Love Again), Zager and Evans (In the Year 2525) and fillers like Sugar, Sugar (the Archies). I was way too young to understand what the song was about, but what caught my attention was Charlie’s cowbell and drum roll intro. I still think Honky Tonk Women has one of the best guitar-driven rhythms and licks in the rock and roll era. And now I get the lyrics.

The first album I ever bought was on my fifteenth birthday (1976) – Get Yer Ya-Yas Out – The Stones live from Madison Square Gardens at the end of their 1969 US tour, and just before the infamous and tragic Altamont festival. There was Charlie on the front cover with an ‘interesting’ T-Shirt. It was years before I ‘got’ the shirt and the title, even though I was a teenage boy. Slow, I guess. During the concert Charlie was doing a few drum rolls at the end of a song and Mick said, “Charlie’s good tonight, innt ‘e?” before launching into their brand new single – Honky Tonk Women.

I was a Stones fanatic when I was young, and still enjoy their music. Charlie was eclipsed, of course, by Mick and Keith, but interestingly, at their concerts it seems he gets the biggest cheer of all when the band is introduced. The quiet type.

The Stones are touring the US again in the Fall and Charlie was already going to miss it, recovering from surgery. He’s still going to miss it. I guess the tour will likely go ahead, but with a memorial to Charlie included. The Stones website, though, doesn’t yet have an update. They won’t be the same without Charlie.

I am saddened, which is interesting to me. I never met him or knew him and yet somehow, he has been a part of my life’s story. Goodbye Charlie, and thanks.

“Positive Christianity”

Culture, ,

On February 24, 1920, at a public meeting in Munich the German Workers’ Party proclaimed a 25-point programme, drawn up originally by Gottfried Feder (1882-1941),[1] with a variety of social, economic, and political aspirations appealing to everyone except the Jews and the communists. It was intended as an instrument to draw popular support, especially amongst the lower middle classes threatened both by big business and by leftist elements such as the labour movement. It sought also to appeal to Christians—the twenty-fourth article concerned the church:

We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations in the state so long as they do not endanger it and do not oppose the moral feelings of the German race. The Party as such stands for positive Christianity, without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish materialistic spirit within and around us, and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the principle: The general interest before self-interest (Stackelberg & Winkle, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook, 65).

Like the rest of the Party’s platform, this article is carefully worded to appeal to as broad a constituency as possible, here amongst the religious population. The Party ‘demands’—will allow—religious freedom without favouritism for each of the Christian denominations in Germany: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, and United, covering most of the population across all geographical regions in the country. It will not bind itself to one or another of the Confessions, nor play them off against one another. Each will be free to maintain their own tradition and practice. The party stands for positive Christianity, speaking against ‘the materialistic spirit within and around us,’ and standing for an ‘inner’—spiritual—renewal of the nation, the common interest rather than ‘self-interest.’ Christianity will have a legitimate and respected place within the society.

Yet it is also the case that positive Christianity is a circumscribed entity, and that the promised freedom is freedom only within strictly defined limits. First, it is clear that freedom of religion does not include freedom for the Jewish faith—the anti-Semitism of the document as a whole is explicit even in this clause as it contrasts the inner spiritual dynamic of the Christian religions against the supposedly materialistic and self-interested character of the Jews.

More significantly, positive Christianity is a Christianity assimilated to the aims of the state and culture, ‘the moral feelings of the German race.’ It is a racialised and nationalist form of Christianity, legitimate ‘so long as’ they do not endanger the state or oppose these aims and feelings. The German Workers’ Party clearly intends to co-opt the church to serve its nationalist, racist, and political vision; anything that does not conform to Nazi ideology will be deemed ‘negative’ (Stroud, Preaching in Hitler’s Shadow, 7). The tragedy is that much of the Protestant church, especially, was complicit with this agenda.

The problem here is not primarily political but theological. The challenge is not so much that the church was being manipulated to serve a racist and nationalist agenda—which is bad enough, and a betrayal of its calling. Rather, the political problem and its devastating consequences were a symptom of a deeper and more subtle malaise. It was the church being placed within an overarching narrative alien to its true identity and being: the idea that the church’s primary service is to the state and culture rather than to the kingdom of God. It was the idea that the priorities of the kingdom of God could be identified with those of the culture. It was the idea that the church’s freedom derived from the permission of the state and that it was, therefore, a functionary or organ of the state and that, therefore, the state was its lord.

As it happened, freedom so long as, was not freedom at all, but servitude and betrayal. Hitler’s ‘so long as’ introduced an alien principle which determined the being and practice of the church. The church, accepting this circumscribed freedom, lost its true liberty in Christ. Where it gladly accepted the prohibition to oppose the ‘moral feelings of the German race’ it was unable to discern or affirm its distinctive calling as the people of God. Positive Christianity was, in fact, a misnomer: it was not Christianity at all, but an aberration. “It was, one might deduce, Christianity with no God, no Christ, and no content. It was the ‘politically correct’ version of an empty gospel” (Stroud, Preaching, 8). It was salt that had lost its flavour, fit only to be thrown out and trodden underfoot. 

To its great credit the Synod of the Confessing Church that met in Barmen in 1934 recognised this truth with great clarity:

Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in holy scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death.

We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God’s revelation.     
(Barmen Declaration, Thesis 1).

[1] Roderick Stackelberg and Sally A. Winkle, ed., The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts (London: Routledge, 2002), 63. Note, however, Mary Solberg’s contention that Hitler wrote the programme in Mary M. Solberg, ed., A Church Undone: Documents from the German Christian Faith Movement 1932-1940 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015). Hitler certainly approved the programme and refused to change it.

The Splintering of the Evangelical Soul

Culture

An interesting article in Christianity Today by Timothy Dalrymple, president and CEO of the organisation. The article, “The Splintering of the Evangelical Soul,” is a diagnostic-explanatory account of why,

Couples, families, friends, and congregations once united in their commitment to Christ are now dividing over seemingly irreconcilable views of the world. In fact, they are not merely dividing but becoming incomprehensible to one another.

Although we inhabit the same reality, Dalrymple says, we inhabit different ‘worlds.’ The article explores sociological reasons for the splintering of the evangelical worldview that gave the movement a sense of cohesion in a former generation. It explores what he calls the ‘informational world’ shaping the belief structures of people in our culture, the interplay of information sources and a person’s plausibility frameworks that filter information sources and content. Three informational sources are critical and evangelicals are in the midst of crisis with respect to each of them. The sources are media, authorities, and community.

Michael O. Emerson, a sociologist and scholar of American religion at the University of Illinois at Chicago, recently said he has studied religious congregations for 30 years but has “never seen” such an extraordinary level of conflict. “What is different now?” he asked. “The conflict is over entire worldviews—politics, race, how we are to be in the world, and even what religion and faith are for.” What I have offered above is a model for understanding how we have come to such a pass, and a mere suggestion of how we might begin the generational project before us.

We are not without hope. Lies ring hollow at the end of the day. Hatred is a poor imitation of purpose, celebrity a poor replacement for wisdom, and political tribes a poor comparison to authentic Christian community. We are a people defined by the resurrection of the Son of God. We are called to be redeemers and reconcilers.

The article is worth reading, especially for those interested in the future of evangelicalism.

Image: that used in the article;  Illustration by Mallory Rentsch / Source Images: Kimson Doan / Unsplash / imtmphoto / Getty Images

Evangelicals and Nationalism

Culture, ,

Much has been written about Evangelical support for Donald Trump over the last few years. Was this support an aberration? How could so-called Bible-believing Christians have supported so unlikely a candidate? Why did they resonate with his rhetoric and policy positions? In a recent interview on Politico Elizabeth Neumann, herself an Evangelical and so a sympathetic observer, identified several reasons why some American evangelicals fell for this temptation.

Religious nationalism is nothing new, of course, and nor is it restricted to North American Evangelicals or Christians generally. Many Christian groups over the centuries have fallen in line with the nationalist aspirations of their political masters. Where the head of the church or religion is also the head of state, the problem is compounded. But the head of state need not be the head of the church for religious nationalism to take hold of a population or certain segments of it. When a nation views itself and its destiny in terms of empire, and where a cultural synthesis occurs between church and state so that the aims of the church become aligned with those of the state, the conditions are ripe for the emergence of religious nationalism.

Part of the problem here, as Neumann contends, concerns the authoritarian streak that runs through some streams of Evangelicalism. But part of it might also be traced to a theological malaise in which the Christian imagination has been subverted and co-opted to the vision of the secular order. In a brief discussion of the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany James Hawes argues:

It is worth hammering this point home: if you’re trying to forecast whether a random German voter from 1928 will switch to Hitler, asking whether they are rich or poor, town or country, educated or not, man or woman and so on will scarcely help at all. The only question really worth asking is whether they are Catholic or Protestant (The Shortest History of Germany, 164).

He cites Jurgen W. Falter: “Hitler’s strongholds were clearly in the Lutheran countryside.” Further, only 17% of Nazi voters came from the predominantly Catholic regions (Der Spiegel, 29 January, 2008, in Hawes, 164).

Why and how did this religious support for Hitler surge between 1928 and 1933. No doubt part of the answer to the story is the ongoing suffering and shame of the German people which Hitler manipulated to his own purposes. But the Protestants were vulnerable to this manipulation also for theological reasons. Over the preceding centuries, and arguably back to Luther’s appeal to the German princes to support the Reformation, German Protestantism had actively looked to political authorities for support and in return also supported the political authorities.

Karl Barth also recognised the theological roots of Protestant support for Hitler’s regime in the preface to the first part-volume of his Church Dogmatics, published in 1932, the year before Hitler came to power in Germany.

Or shall I rather bemoan the constantly increasing confusion, tedium and irrelevance of modern Protestantism, which, probably along with the Trinity and the Virgin Birth, has lost an entire third dimension—the dimension of what for once, though not confusing it with religious and moral earnestness, we may describe as mystery—with the result that it has been punished with all kinds of worthless substitutes, that it has fallen the more readily victim to such uneasy cliques and sects as High Church, German Church, Christian Community and religious Socialism, and that many of its preachers and adherents have finally learned to discover deep religious significance in the intoxication of Nordic blood and their political Führer? (CD I/1: xiv).

I believe that I understand the present-day authorities of the Church better than they understand themselves when I ignore their well-known resentment against what should have been their most important task, appealing from authorities badly informed to authorities which are better informed. I am firmly convinced that, especially in the broad field of politics, we cannot reach the clarifications which are necessary today, and on which theology might have a word to say, as indeed it ought to have, without first reaching the comprehensive clarifications in and about theology which are our present concern (CD I/1: xvi).

A great danger for the church is that it loses its theological moorings and so substitutes other commitments and convictions in place of Jesus Christ—‘the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death’ (Barmen Declaration, Thesis 1, 1934). Barth, too, understood ‘there is within the Church an Evangelical theology which is to be affirmed and a heretical non-theology which is to be resolutely denied’ (CD I/1: xv). It is evident that the non-theology to be denied was the theological assimilation to National Socialism that occurred in the so-called German Christians.

Some—certainly not all—North American evangelicals fell into the same danger in their naïve support for the Trump agenda. This is not to say, of course, that everything Trump did was evil. But by accepting the Trump package, these evangelicals lost their ability ‘to discern what is excellent’ (Philippians 1:10) and in the end accepted and even celebrated a leader who exemplified a form of life alien to that of Jesus and his kingdom.

Bob Dylan – “I Contain Multitudes”

Culture

Bob Dylan has dropped two surprise songs in recent weeks. The first was the 17-minute ‘Murder Most Foul’ which has received mixed reviews. Sometimes a Dylan song grows on you, or on me at least, though I am not sure this one will. It is not amongst his best work. But I did enjoy this second song ‘I Contain Multitudes’ which has something profound and original in its idea that who we are includes the compilation of all the various influences that have shaped our life, attitudes, vision and behaviour.  This is true, including as well, those not-so-good influences which are nevertheless real and really part of who I am and have become.

I have also included a clip of one of his early, amazing folk-protest songs which some of you might enjoy. If you like Dylan, the Guardian also recently published someone’s list of Dylan’s best songs. It will give you something to argue with!

 

A Christianity that “Deserves to Perish”

Culture, , , , ,

On June 3, 1959 Karl Barth was a guest at the Basel chapter of the Swiss Student Association Zofingia, a fraternity established 200 years ago in 1819, and of which Barth himself had been a member in his student days. The photo shows him at a function in about 1906 (seated RHS). Now a famous theologian, Barth had been invited by the association to address the question: What are the role and duties of the Christian as a political citizen? Does Christianity commit the citizen to a certain political stance?

Barth responded by writing ten brief theses on the topic, delivering his short address and then took questions. It is clear that the primary issue concerning his audience was communism, especially Russian communism. One interlocutor insisted it was a Christian duty to resist it. Barth responded:

Reaction against Communism [is] only necessary when the Russians are at Lake Constance. We have not yet passed the test [that would then have to be passed]. What we have done up to now is stupid chatter and has not freed anyone from Russian subjugation. To join in, sounding the same note and writing condemning articles, is not necessary since virtually everyone is agreed about Communism. It was different at the time of National Socialism. An acute danger was manifest. Whether out of fascination or fear of attack, numerous people all over Europe began to yield and proposed accommodations. 

To this, one Dr Gerwig answered: “Communism is a great danger for Christianity. We must fight before it reaches Lake Constance.” And then came Barth’s marvellous riposte:

A Christianity that is in danger of Communism deserves to perish. The best and surest weapon against Communism is that one become a good Christian.

Barth was often criticised because he did not condemn Communism in the 1950s the way he had condemned the National Socialists in the 1930s. He argued that they were two completely different systems and so not comparable. This does not mean he supported Communism; he did not. But I love his comment. It is rhetorical, to be sure, but he is speaking of a form of Christianity rather than the lives of individuals confronting a brutal empire. Nonetheless, a “good Christian” is one who understands and lives in accordance with reality of the world-reconciliation accomplished in Jesus Christ, and so is bound to him as the “one Word of God which we have to hear  and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death” (Barmen Declaration, thesis 1). Bound to Jesus Christ, the Christian is liberated from every lesser allegiance and claim, and find their life and hope solely in him and the promise given to humanity in him.

Further, Jesus Christ is God’s mighty claim upon the Christian’s life, and thus “through him befalls us a joyful deliverance from the godless fetters of this world for a free, grateful service to his creatures” (Barmen Declaration, thesis 2). The church is “solely his property, and it lives and wants to live solely from his comfort and from his direction in the expectation of his appearance” (Barmen Declaration, thesis 3).

This kind of Christianity has a role to play within the culture but is neither over-awed nor overwhelmed by it. In word and deed it bears witness to the coming kingdom, even if the result of this witness is suffering and shame. It holds fast to its confession in the midst of a sinful world “with its faith as with its obedience” (thesis 3).

This is a Christianity that knows whose it is, a Christianity for whom Mark’s gospel and the letter to the Hebrews (not to say, the Book of Revelation) are not alien, but well-known, lived. They know First Peter and walk in the path of its author, as he walked in the path of the Master.

My guess is that Barth would say the same today to those Christians concerned at the increasing secularity of Western culture: “A Christianity that is threatened by secularism deserves to perish.”

“Critiquiness”

Culture,

Volf & Croasmun have a bit of fun critiquing critique, and introduce a new term coined by Christopher Castiglia to describe the “unmistakable blend of suspicion, self-confidence, and indignation” sometimes found in those who love to critique others, especially traditional biblical interpretations and theological formulations.

Conservatives like jeremiads; progressives relish critique. They interrogate and unmask; they trouble and problematize; they expose and subvert; they demystify and destabilize. For theologians no less than for nontheologians who practice it, critique is often infinite; it applies to everything—to biblical texts and biblical figures, to the church today and throughout its history, to God and to all aspects of modern societies—and it never stops.

Some of the progressive critical impetus comes from the Christian tradition itself, not just from the prophetic castigation of misuse of political power or religious rituals, but from the conviction that sin is most powerful when it appears as goodness, and therefore it conspires to present itself as godliness. And yet there is a fundamental difference. Today’s critique, as a rule, offers no positive alternative; its normativity is antinormative. Unlike the prophets of old, many theologians today engage not just in criticism but in what some critics of critique have called “critiquiness.” They shy away from offering a positive vision in whose service they undertake their critique; for then this vision, too, would recursively become a target of the critique. In the absence of a positive vision, critiques easily devolve to mere griping, knocking things down. Unmasking gives the impression of intellectual profundity, and griping offers the cheap thrill of understated self-righteousness. Both get old quickly and accomplish little; in fact, as the biblical admonition regarding exorcism suggests, they often make things worse (Volf & Croasmun, For the Life of the World, 54-55).

I remember my first theology teacher (John Yates) telling me many years ago that I needed to develop skills of critical thinking. He was right, for such skills are crucial intellectual tools in any field of study. But any good thing taken too far becomes a fault. Critical thinking that devolves into “critiquiness”—an intellectual habit of endless deconstruction and criticism sometimes undertaken simply for the fun of undermining the position of another—is a sign of intellectual laziness and a sense of personal superiority. It becomes a means of closing down rather than opening dialogue and discovery on the quest for truth. It may give the impression of intellectual profundity, but it is merely that: an impression, a mask better discarded altogether, not least in theological studies where the truthfulness of the Christian claim is the object and criterion of our study.