At our staff meeting yesterday we began a 6 week study and discussion based on the recently released Reason for God DVD by Tim Keller. The format is a discussion group of 5 non-Christians who have a series of conversations (6) with Tim Keller revolving around a particular theme. Each segment lasts about 20 minutes. They are very good. Following the DVD discussion we engaged the material as a staff for another 30 minutes or so – very refreshing. One staff member forwarded me this article in light of our discussion yesterday morning. The article is by Scott Cairns (whom I first heard of via Mars Hill Review some time ago) and it addresses the current cultural value of recapturing lost Christian language. It, too, was a good article. Following is a clip:
Among a good many advantages our predecessors in the early Church could claim was a more nearly adequate vocabulary. For instance, they were in possession of a number of words that indicated a number of amazing truths. Nous, kardiá, népsis and théosis were among those words that helped to keep the young Body focused on the task at hand, the task of healing our shared array of rifts — rifts within ourselves, between ourselves and others, and, most keenly, between a Holy God and a race of creatures that had broken off communion.
Three of those words – nous, népsis and théosis — have been all but lost to our contemporary conversation, and the deep significance of another, kardiá, which is to say “heart,” has been sorely diminished. With these onetime commonplace words enhancing their spiritual conversations, our predecessors were better able to give their attentions to the profound complexity and the vertiginous promise of the human person, another treasure neglected over the centuries.
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Good article, although I wish the author could have defined the “lost words” early in the article so we could compare them to their now weaker translations…still, what he says has a lot of merit. Worth reading.
Excellent article, Steve! The motto on my family crest is “Follow the anthropological and epistemological terms and how they change,” so articles like this make me very happy. I agree with Kelly that it would have been nice for him to flesh out the meanings of the words. I hope he develops this some more and turns this into a book.
I’m with him on the words that he lists, but I still think that we need to pay more attention to the phrēn family, particularly when we’re talking about healing and becoming like Christ. However, that’s way more than he could have reasonably gone into given the constraints of a short article. Nous does appear more frequently, but I think the phrēn family opens some key aspects of knowing/growing that we lost in the modern era.
I’m excited to see him engaging a general audience on the importance of paying attention to the anthropological and epistemological concepts in the scriptures and early church. Steven D. Smith talks a lot about the implicit ontologies that underlay our use of language. Part of the reason we are so messed up as Christians in how we understand growth and healing is because we are messed up with how we understand knowing. The words that we use to name our experience as persons in everyday evoke different ontologies of the human (especially in the ontology of the knower) than premodern ontologies. Christians in this country usually read the scriptures through the lense of a completley different story about what human flourishing and knowing looks like than the pictures available in the early Christian era. This hinders our maturity and our witness.
Two of the major tasks the church is called to address today are to articulate a faithful theological anthropology and epistemology, and to make this teaching part of how we educate lay people. I think this is starting to catch on, with Tim Keller leading the pack in making it accessible to those within and outside of the church. I hope that Scott Cairns continues with this project.
YES – why didn’t Cairns define theosis, nepsis, nous and kardia for us. I’ll have to research them myself, I guess.