What has probably propelled me most in my own theological development over the years isn’t exactly Christian Dogmatics or Systematic Theology; not even Biblical Theology. Instead, at a foundational level, in a sort of ground-clearing and laying way it has been getting a grasp on the history of ideas and intellectual heritage of the church. In this process it has helped me to find critical space wherein seeing myself as a Christian in an unChristian world makes more sense; indeed it helps me to identify the Christian origins of the secular and even atheist mind among us. This seems like it is a potentially apologetical foundation upon which I understand myself in the world of ideas; but I don’t see it that way. I see it as the baby steps I took, and continue to take, as my way into an intellectual and spiritual world that opens up, ontologically, to the living God in Christ; since the world is finally and fully contingent upon the living Word of God. I am simply acknowledging that I do not inhabit a docetic world wherein the divine swallows up the particularlity of the contingent world, but instead he so grounds it that any intellectual accumulation that might happen therein always already ends and begins in him, in Christ; whether we are conscious of that or not (and I simply mean because he continues to uphold all things by the word of his power; I don’t mean he is the source or cause of all ideas). In Christ the scope of world history, and the intellectual history therein, takes on new and fresh cantor; world history, and the intellects of all therein become relativized by the cruciform shape that reality is suffused with; suffused with the very logoi of the Logos of God. In other words, even as I have engaged in the study of the history of ideas, and continue to, even as that provides me with a type of critical valence I wouldn’t have outwith, in Christ it all is sublimated to the point that its development, whether towards Christ or away from him, makes no critically realistic sense. In other words, even if the atheist or agnostic thinks the foundations upon which they build their philosophies of life are abstract from the reality of God, even as we can survey the ways ideas have developed this way or that way, the unalterable reality always remains, it always comes back to the fact that we live in a contingent world. For the Christian, this is not an abstract idea, but one that fully recognizes that our God in Christ fully assumed the contingency of the world in the vicarious humanity of Christ, which then allows all of this study, all of these ideational developments to finally find their refraction in the light of his life; even if they can’t finally bring themselves to repent.

I have no idea what this post is about exactly. I was going to write a post about Descartes and intellectual history of ideas, with a quote from Gerald Cragg, but the above popped out instead. Ah, such is blogging.