I remember reading once (maybe someone can tell me where as I seemed to have forgotten. Maybe Zizioulas?) that Christianity was unique in its approach to truth. To the Greek mind, it was claimed, truth was something disconnected from our day-to-day reality and was wholly transcendent. To the Jewish mind, truth was historical (as evidenced by the Jewish focus on events like the Exodus, which, during the Passover seder, each Jew was to celebrate as if he had been there and was personally delivered by God). In contrast to both, John’s Gospel tells us that “in the beginning was the Word” (the Greek word for “Word,” logos, was used by Heraclitus to mean the principle of all order or knowledge), and that this Word became flesh and dwelt among us. In other words, John tells us that the Truth, which is transcendent above all things, chose to enter into humanity at a certain point in history.
This transcendent truth as rooted in history is reflected in the Apostles’ Creed (probably in written form by the second half of the second century). I love how this creed doesn’t just say vague stuff like, “I believe in heaven” or “I believe in being good to people,” but “I believe in Jesus Christ [who was] born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate…” To its originators, it didn’t carry the weak force of a faith in an arbitrary principle or a simple moralism, but of historical certainty grounded in reality. The creed’s message is very different than nebulous new age creeds like “you are God,” or “God is in everything,” and far more like the confidence with which one might assert “I was there when your mom brought you home from the hospital,” or “I saw Jim punch Robert at the 7/11 last night in front of everybody!”
That’s one reason why Christianity is so cool to me.