Christianity is an apprenticeship. All professions – law, medicine, football – require apprenticeships, which involve their own craft skills and vocabulary. The logic of the practices peculiar to each of these cannot be seen immediately seen by the public. Nevertheless we do not demand that each specialism speaks only some neutral language in which all their judgments are completely accessible in the public domain. But it is part of our modern narrative that we should speak only neutral language and that we need no apprenticeship: we can know, everything, immediately, without effort.
Christians say that the Christian life is learned and lived like any other vocation or career, with the same element of adventure, which means that its path is not entirely clear from the outset. In fact they say this is how any life, not just the Christian life, is – everything requires training which means that nothing is immediate or effort-free. This means that the Christian hermeneutic is more sophisticated than the modern hermeneutic of immediacy, which wants us to believe that nothing has to be learned and that life doesn’t require any particular skills.
The package of Christian doctrine, which constitutes the Christian apprenticeship, has been taken apart in modern period and some of its components have been re-connected to re-create old Hellenic arrangement of two worlds, in which the world of the individual is prior to the public and political world. This arrangement does not concede that the individual gives or receives anything in his encounter with others, so we appear to have no real stake in other people. We are reluctant to concede that we are beings in time, or that we are really committed to the toil and change that comes with life with other people.
Here Christian theology, particularly in its patristic and Eastern Orthodox expression, can contribute decisively. It can show that Christians have an alternative way of regarding the world, a sophisticated ontology which factors in hope. They say that God is making the world more real, and that the ordinary environment of people and things is in process of becoming more vivid, more solid, engaged and interactive. This is what I have learned represented by Orthodox theology. Since catholicity alone says that we cannot leave out the insight of half the Church, though the Eastern tradition may not be better, its difference from our own helps us to see how we may better hold together what we have inherited from Augustine, and prevent it from being purloined by the champions of autonomy who want us to believe that life requires no skills and that we should therefore do without this, or any, apprenticeship.
