I'm Not in a Declarative Mood

I had an epiphany this morning. It's part of my monthly subscription to www.epiphany.com. Their prices are quite reasonable, for those of you who enjoy the occasional burst of enlightenment. Foolishness aside, it did occur to me today that "post-everythings," as my pastors call contemporary persons, or "posters," as I prefer to name them, are rather shy of the verbal stance known as the declarative mood.

I stumbled on this odd revelation while discussing G.K. Chesterton with a co-worker. I lent this person Orthodoxy a while back, just as a non-threatening introduction to some key Christian concepts. The person volunteered today that some progress had been made in the book, so I inquired as to the person's impression. The reply was,"It's okay. Chesterton seems a little arrogant." It seemed strange to me that someone would think that; I purposely chose Chesterton because he's just so jovial. But then it occurred to me that universal assertoric statements of any kind, unless they are either trivialities or based on a canon of contemporaneity (e.g. world peace), probably are quite threatening to posters. Significant universal assertoric statements probably sound, to them, like the distant footfalls of the dreaded Totalizing Narrative.

Part of the professed purpose of this blog is translating pre-modern Presbyterianism into poster parlance (the other part of this blog's purpose being to provide Stephen N. Clark with a continuing source of entertainment). As I considered the fear and hysteria inspired by the approach of metanarrative, I wondered if part of the ineffectiveness of the orthodox church in our day is attributable to its insistence on continually speaking, on topics of universal significance, in the declarative mood. Could it be that we are taking an inappropriate "illocutionary stance," as it has been called by certain analytic philosophers? Can we find another, perhaps intermediate, illocutionary stance that will better serve the cause of truth in our day?

My suggestions are as follows: We should begin using the conditional mood (or the interrogative mood) more frequently, until we reach the point where the threatening nature of the declarative mood has been somewhat tamed. Posters generally consider the declarative mood simply an expression of personal opinion; perhaps we can soften some of that suspicion by couching our universal truth claims in the form of hypothetical syllogisms, since posters generally like hypothesizing (if there is water on Mars, does that mean that there is life in outer space?). We can at least learn to speak more frequently in the third person in order to give the posters some personal space--they do adore descriptions of the Other, as long as the Other stays far away. Or, if all the above seem cowardly, we can resort to speaking in the first person plural. Nothing scares the poster more than saying something so terrorizing as "I believe in God, the Father Almighty."

Please note that I am not suggesting that we abandon the declarative mood. That illocutionary stance is absolutely essential to the proclamation of our faith. I am just raising the possibility that we might be more effective if we made the scary doggy wear a cutesy sweater so that the poster-child isn't as scared of him.

Minimizing one's usage of the declarative mood does not necessitate the abandonment of meaningful content, even universally applicable meaningful content. Socrates famously used the interrogative mood almost to the exclusion of all others, and no-one has confused him with the Sophists. Maybe we need to learn Erasmus' famous prayer: "Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis."

Grammatical mood - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia