This is really impressive. I have tended to see the strange resilience of the Church through history as secularly inexplicable, embarrassing to intellectual unbelievers, and evidence for the faith by its sheer weirdness. It struck me as a difficult problem to account for Christian resilience in terms that avoided a framing that is too explicitly apologetic to fit into mainstream public discourse.
But I think you've done it. And it doesn't deny or neutralize the apologetic value of Christian resilience. Why has the Christian philosophical tradition been successful enough to keep satisfying many leading intellects and holding its own in public debates down the generations? Why has the church been able to sustain its independence of the state, in ever evolving forms, while refusing to capture it? Why has Christianity been so persistent and genuine (with lapses but also recoveries) in love? Your explanation doesn't remove the mystery, but it does provide a solid core that secular people can digest, understand, and tentatively accept as far as it goes, without locking them into a path towards a belief that they'll resist.
And my first impression is that this does capture the heart of it. Obviously there's more to be said, but I wouldn't have expected it that it was possible to summarize the reasons of Christian resilience like this. Bravo!
Thank you. So much appreciated! I'm really excited to hear your thoughts as we move past the introductory stage-setting and into more complex topics! (And thanks very much for sharing it too. Would certainly be fun to get more interlocutors here!)
This is really impressive. I have tended to see the strange resilience of the Church through history as secularly inexplicable, embarrassing to intellectual unbelievers, and evidence for the faith by its sheer weirdness. It struck me as a difficult problem to account for Christian resilience in terms that avoided a framing that is too explicitly apologetic to fit into mainstream public discourse.
But I think you've done it. And it doesn't deny or neutralize the apologetic value of Christian resilience. Why has the Christian philosophical tradition been successful enough to keep satisfying many leading intellects and holding its own in public debates down the generations? Why has the church been able to sustain its independence of the state, in ever evolving forms, while refusing to capture it? Why has Christianity been so persistent and genuine (with lapses but also recoveries) in love? Your explanation doesn't remove the mystery, but it does provide a solid core that secular people can digest, understand, and tentatively accept as far as it goes, without locking them into a path towards a belief that they'll resist.
And my first impression is that this does capture the heart of it. Obviously there's more to be said, but I wouldn't have expected it that it was possible to summarize the reasons of Christian resilience like this. Bravo!
I love where this is going!
Thank you. So much appreciated! I'm really excited to hear your thoughts as we move past the introductory stage-setting and into more complex topics! (And thanks very much for sharing it too. Would certainly be fun to get more interlocutors here!)