New Ideas are Overemphasized

I recently ran across the following quote in one of the books I am reading for school. It definitely made me reevaluate some of my thoughts, especially those concerning the concept of the kingdom of God, something I have been doing lately anyway. This comes from Clifford Geertz's The Intepretation of Cultures.

In her book, Philosophy in a New Key, Susanne Langer remarks that certain ideas burst upon the intellectual landscape with a tremendous force. They resolve so many fundamental problems at once that they seem also to promise that they will resolve all fundamental problems, clarify all obscure issues. Everyone snaps them up as the open sesame of some new positive science, the conceptual center-point around with a comprehensive system of analysis can be built. The sudden vogue of such a grande idee, crowding out almost everything else for a while, is due, she says, "to the fact that all sensitive and active minds turn at once to exploiting it. We try it in every connection, for every purpose, experiment with possible stretches of its strict meaning, with generalizations and derivatives."

After we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it has become part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expectations are brought more into balance with its actual uses, and its excessive popularity is ended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-universe view of it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to the problems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it and extend it where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and they desist where it does not apply or cannot be extended. It becomes, if it was, in truth, a seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring part of our intellectual armory. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had. The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selection, or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the means of production does not explain everything, not even everything human, but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolating just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise.

I think there is a lot of wisdom in that quote to ponder on when we start running with a new idea. It is fresh and exciting because it provides answers to problems that we have been contemplating, but it will definitely not be the answer to every problem we have been facing. I still love all of the changes that "kingdom of God" thinking has done for my Christian walk, but it does not answer everything. I propose that no theological, ecclesiological, or christological concept ever will.