Had a good chat with Sivin and Kia Meng yesterday in, of all places, the KL Sentral LRT station. A few things I wanna jot down (really, for my own memory's sake, before it slips me).

Sivin and Kia Meng highlighted the ahistorical nature of much apologetics discourse. We tend to talk to people like they/we just popped into being or took a time-travelling capsule from ancient Greece (or, in many cases, the Englihtenment years). What about the ideas, theoretical models, language(s), struggles, daily newspaper issues which confront a particular community (and are often unique to it)? What about personal stories? These should temper our use of labels and categories - something I gotta bear in mind as I'm very fond of thinking like this (I confess I'm a multi-view freak, I like to immediately split an issue/idea into its various "hot-cold" parties).

Kia Meng reminded me that the term 'religion' is really an Enlightenment-construct. Ancient people rarely compartmentalised religion from other 'parts' of life. I can't think of a good (modern) analogy but maybe it's like someone asking you to look at the 'friendship' and 'romance' aspect of your relationship with your spouse/boy-girl-friend as separate entities. "This is me and Chrissy as friends, that is us as a couple, this activity reflects agape love, that reflects eros!"

I think it was N.T. Wright who said, in relation to Jesus' actions in Jerusalem, that to be non-political in ancient Judaism was to be irrelevant. The Jews then didn't separate politics from religion (it's unlikely they would've understood the distinction!).

Sivin also shared his conviction that he has no wish to 'sell Jesus'. People need to find the Lord in their own ways, come to Him with their own hang-ups, their own categories of thinking/doubt, their personally nuanced questions. I recall with regret my response a colleague some years back. She told me she found that church services were kinda boring. I was thinking in my heart that if she tried to live the principles taught she wouldn't find it boring i.e. either she didn't understand or she didn't try. This was my problem (and still is): I focused entirely on what she hadn't been doing right.

I didn't ask her what her spiritual-emotional needs were, what she expected from church, how she felt church could be improved to present Jesus in a more accessible manner, what she was in fact 'looking for' in life, and so on. I just fired my guns, mentally (and triumphantly) categorised her as a hedonistic anti-religious dud and. Of course I didn't say all this to her. I ended up telling her, well why don't you just switch church? What more lazy answer could I have given, huh?