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| Version 1 | Version 2 |
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| Silence: A Christian History by Diarmaid MacCulloch – review | Silence: A Christian History by Diarmaid MacCulloch – review |
| (2 months later) | |
| That silence should be essential to Christian traditions is actually rather a surprise, considering the noisy world from which it springs. In Judaism, disputatious, full of sound and fury, there is nevertheless a minority witness in the prophecy of Isaiah, which speaks of the arrival of a suffering servant, silent in the face of injustice. For Christians, this figure points irresistibly to Jesus Christ, dumbly facing down his accusers, and all but confirms him as the Messiah, the chosen one of God. Early Christianity can be interpreted as the meeting of noisy Jewish monotheism and mute Greek thought, and the silence in Christian tradition seems of a very Platonic sort, wordless before the ineffable, inscrutable, inexpressible mystery of the divine. This has tended to be more at home at the Catholic end of the Christian spectrum in our own time and contributes, MacCulloch suggests, to another profoundly regrettable form of silence: the church's self-imposed omerta when scandal threatens to break. Perhaps, in light of that, we might impose on ourselves another kind of silence, and listen, in humility and with penitence, to God speaking in God's endlessly surprising and confounding ways. | That silence should be essential to Christian traditions is actually rather a surprise, considering the noisy world from which it springs. In Judaism, disputatious, full of sound and fury, there is nevertheless a minority witness in the prophecy of Isaiah, which speaks of the arrival of a suffering servant, silent in the face of injustice. For Christians, this figure points irresistibly to Jesus Christ, dumbly facing down his accusers, and all but confirms him as the Messiah, the chosen one of God. Early Christianity can be interpreted as the meeting of noisy Jewish monotheism and mute Greek thought, and the silence in Christian tradition seems of a very Platonic sort, wordless before the ineffable, inscrutable, inexpressible mystery of the divine. This has tended to be more at home at the Catholic end of the Christian spectrum in our own time and contributes, MacCulloch suggests, to another profoundly regrettable form of silence: the church's self-imposed omerta when scandal threatens to break. Perhaps, in light of that, we might impose on ourselves another kind of silence, and listen, in humility and with penitence, to God speaking in God's endlessly surprising and confounding ways. |
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