Good News or Old News?
The Via Negativa as Road to Renewal
Mark D. Filiatreau
The cross is "in" but Christianity is still "out." Much of the postmodern world sees Christianity as something old, archaic, and thus irrelevant—a source of dangling jewelry at best. For Christians to play into this stereotype is not only foolish, ultimately it is unfaithful. Yet Christian leaders—or at least the ones the media likes to quote—can often be heard waxing nostalgic about "traditional morals" and the "faith of the founding fathers." "[T]o get the country back on track, we have to … return to some basic values," Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition said last fall. Statements like these color the public face of American Christianity. What is important about this discourse is not so much the conservative politics associated with it as the fact that it appeals to an authority from age. It seeks validation from oldness. Rhetoric like this points to a mindset common among those of an orthodox persuasion, regardless of their political convictions: Christianity is old. Certainly authority based on tradition has its place in Christian thinking and public discourse, especially in theology. We necessarily rely on Scripture and the teachings of the early church to inform our understanding of God and the world. When significant doctrines are introduced as both new and Christian it is usually a sign that something is rotten in the state of New Jerusalem, that we have another of the twentieth-century heresies that have sprouted like mushrooms after a monsoon. God is not old
But the rhetoric of tradition can disguise the fact that the power and truthfulness of the Christian faith are not supposed to be derived from their antiquity. Christianity is true and powerful because it is eternal. Christ, as G. K. Chesterton expressed it, ...
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