Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life (Stob Lectures 2006)

by Alan Jacobs

What is needed, for the health of the church on every level - denominational, congregational, individual - is a stronger, deeper consciousness of the many life genres of the Christian faith, of the ways in which a life develops according to the generic patterns, and of the ways in which individual Christians appropriate those genres for themselves and thereby achieve meaningful and satisfying self-interpretation.

St. Paul came to understand that the Greek quest for wisdom leads in the end to a distinctive kind of foolishness and the Pharisaic quest for righteousness before God ends by turning on itself and becoming a self-righteousness that utterly alienates one from God. The one who sees these truths doesn't know whether to laugh or cry, and this is the true mark of the deepest irony; this is also why Czeslaw Milosz called irony "the glory of slaves." To note the irony of a condition we can do nothing to change is sometimes the only freedom we have.