rain and the rhinoceros

The Incarnation is God’s refusal to avoid speaking, and so the Incarnation functions as a paradigm for the operation of theological language which both “does justice” to God’s transcendence and infinity, but at the same time makes it possible to “speak.” In other words, it is the Incarnation that provides an account which affirms both transcendence and immanent appearance - both alterity and identity - without reducing the one to the other. . .Not only is the Incarnation the condition of possibility for speech about God (pace Barth); it is the condition of possibility for speaking - or at least the condition of possibility for a proper understanding of language. If we affirm that “we love, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19), we can also affirm that we speak, because he has first spoken.

James K. A. Smith, Speech and Theology: Language and the Logic of Incarnation (New York: Routledge, 2002) 154-155.

I just came across an old review of Greg Boyd’s The Myth of a Christian Nation by James K.A. Smith that I wanted to share. As Smith rightly points out, although Boyd’s book is peppered with citations from Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder his approach to politics is a lot more Lutheran than Anabaptist. For instance, his stark dichotomy between the “kingdom of the sword” and the “kingdom of the cross” “lacks insight” and indicates both an “indequate theology of creation and an under-developed imagination.” Although Boyd rightly challenges the Constantinian underpinnings of the Christian Right, his alternative is a resurrection of “pietist withdrawal.” Check out the review here.