“Making the Familiar Strange”
In preparation for a class I’m teaching this fall, I am reading an excellent book titled New Testament Christianity in the Roman World.[1] In his introduction, the first subsection is titled, “Making the Familiar Strange.” Maier explains at the end of this subsection (p. 4), “In short, this book aims to make the familiar strange by locating the New Testament and its audiences in a variety of overlapping but distinct ancient contexts. In doing so, it seeks to describe the dynamic and complex social contexts in which earliest Christianity developed and was practiced.”
Making the familiar strange! Why on earth would you want to do such a thing as an author, or subject yourself to such a thing as a reader? I like familiar. I like to drink out of the same coffee cup and sit in the same place at church. Probably, we all have these nice, cozy, familiar habits. We have habits of thought, just as we have habits in our actions. And we don’t like those habits to be disturbed.
Now, of course the familiar can be a good thing. There is no automatic virtue in novelty. The reason things sometimes become habits is because they are right and healthy.
On the other hand, not all familiar habits and ways of thinking are healthy. For every one healthy physical habit I have, I can think of two or more that are not healthy. What makes me think that my mind is exempt from such an unhealthy two-to-one ratio?
There is an old saying that you may have used yourself: “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Familiarity breeds lots of other unsavory things as well. Familiarity often breeds the illusion that we understand things that we really do not. I frequently find that my familiar, comfortable understandings are, in fact, misunderstandings.
Perhaps we all need to defamiliarize ourselves with what
we think is familiar. Perhaps even the
most familiar things and people harbor more mystery than we could ever
imagine. Perhaps learning, whether it is
formal or informal, is another name for making the familiar strange. Perhaps the familiar was strange all along.
[1] Harry O. Maier, New Testament Christianity in the Roman World, Essentials of Biblical Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
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