1Cor1v17-18 - unwise signal
Texting One Corinthians
“..For Christ did not send me to baptise but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”..” 1Cor1v17-18
“..I will destroy the wisdom of the wise..”
🧠🤯 Regardless of caveats and contextualisation, regardless the relative meaning and interpretative lens, regardless that Paul elsewhere champions the same wisdom (Eph1v8, Eph1v17, Col1v9, Col3v16 etc. Gk σοφίᾳ sophia) - the church is nevertheless characterised - in soundbite and deed - by a contempt for thinking. Bloated and brainless and unwise and anti-wise, with no proper appetite for learning, the church at large ventures merely lazy, timid dabbling in what could be the radical intellectual counter culture the gospel would offer. It suits our base narcotising to cynically call all sophistication sophistry, all excellence divisive, all ambition conceited, all criticism violence.
⛪🙋♂ I find church boring, everywhere. And I am it - chivvying no sense of urgency, forming no meaningful forum for meaning making, holding no sense of responsibility for rigour, declaring no imperative that we must solve for the problem of language in order to properly reason-together. My church is not a city on a hill - it is a rambling homily preached to a sleeping choir. My church is not a plausibility structure for a revolutionary worldview, it is a handmaiden to consumerism and an appeaser of nihilism. I walk amongst a church whose genders are virtue signals, whose charity is pity, whose consensus is less than the sum of its parts, and whose concern for the nations is mere hobbyism.
🐍🔀🕊 There is a people-pleasing, middle-class, live-and-let-live lackadaisicality that upside-downs Paul’s critique of “wisdom” and applies it as a blank cheque to deprecate discernment and elevate lazy thinking, sentimentality and superstitious theology. The church which upside-downs these verses by default is dull, galling and appallingly dull - a lumbering cozy congregation that believes its own hype, licks its own wounds and nurtures the myth of scarcity amongst a self-involved remnant. We amble hapless, gullible and non-weight-bearing as doves and as such must sustain ourselves up by a business proposition that is sly, venomous and deadly as serpents.
“..the cross is folly..”
✝ When the perishing peer into our church do they see the cross-as-cross in its crass ruination of propriety? Do they see the stark, offensive, ugly, radical bastion of super-sonic downward mobility? Do they see a category-defying, hygiene-transgressing, class-dismantling, empire-unsettling, order-disordering, power-redistributing, privilege-discombobulating Holy Fool addling the market norms of a slick London and sticking it to the prissy forms of a stiff Britishness and shaking the many multi and culturally relative ways we celebrate mediocrity? Do they see a body broken in shrieking incarnational extremism? Are onlooking Jews disturbed, are inquiring Greeks appalled? Does the church-as-cross-declaring have that properly grotesque cross as its foundation stone and capstone in its ministry of folly?
🃏 Or are a million other lacklustre indiscretions and inanities, bland follies and the clutter of kitsch, pointless power-play, spiritual immaturity, unreconstructed conservativism, untranslated Christianese, the prevenient obsession with comfortable mild-mannered individualism all contributing to the impression that the church believes it’s own cross-less folly is the cross.