It occurs to me now that there are two ways we could approach the fact that there are both dumb and smart Christians.
We might argue that there is an essence to Christianity. That is, a group or an individual must have some essential quality which determines whether it or he is a true Christian. And not only is there an essence, but it is knowable to us. If this were true, we could judge whether people were true Christians or not. And we could judge whether we felt that essential quality was a good quality or not.
I suspect it's better, though, to argue that there is no essential defining quality of Christianity. There are many Christianities. And these are related to each other by family resemblance, in Wittgenstein's sense of the term. This makes it more difficult for us, because if we want to understand and evaluate each Christianity we have to know what it individually entails. So if the local churchgoers are horrible, that doesn't allow us to pass judgement on different thinkers, despite their sharing the label "Christian."
We might argue that there is an essence to Christianity. That is, a group or an individual must have some essential quality which determines whether it or he is a true Christian. And not only is there an essence, but it is knowable to us. If this were true, we could judge whether people were true Christians or not. And we could judge whether we felt that essential quality was a good quality or not.
I suspect it's better, though, to argue that there is no essential defining quality of Christianity. There are many Christianities. And these are related to each other by family resemblance, in Wittgenstein's sense of the term. This makes it more difficult for us, because if we want to understand and evaluate each Christianity we have to know what it individually entails. So if the local churchgoers are horrible, that doesn't allow us to pass judgement on different thinkers, despite their sharing the label "Christian."
