As modernism wanes, theologians have very often taken to quoting St. Anselm of Canterbury, who described the pursuit of a Christian intellectual life as fides quaren intellectum, roughly translated as "faith seeking understanding". This usually means that there are claims Christians make concerning what they believe; ours is a faith that cannot rest upon these claims without attempting to make sense of them. Karl Barth famously quipped that theology is nothing more than sermon preparation, which is kind of the same thing; in the Reformed tradition, the sermon sits at the center of the communal worship life, and is exposition of a Biblical text to the faithful.
Yet, at some point in these times when so much of the intellectual energy of the modernist project has exhausted itself, I believe the question needs to be asked: Is the intellectual content of the Christian faith both a necessary and sufficient condition for making this faith tenable? Indeed, considering the varieties of intellectual approaches to the Christian faith, to the variety of claims existing under the name "Christian", one need hardly imagine my own answer to this question is "No".
This is not to say the intellectual pursuit of understanding isn't an important part of our communal life. It has been from the beginning and will continue to be long after people have stopped reading David Hume carry on about miracles and Voltaire talk about strangling princes with the entrails of the last priests (or is it the other way around? I can never remember). It should also be remembered the assaults on the Christian faith currently in fashion - Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris being the most notorious - aren't exactly new.
The late second-early third century Christian Apologist, Tertullian wrote a long dialogue in which he addressed then-current slanders against Christianity, which included, among other things, the charge that worship services included cannibalism, sexual orgies, and the worship of a donkey. This last charge I find amusing precisely because it shows that common Roman sentiment on divinity was so limited they could not imagine human beings worshiping a god who was not represented by some image or other (their common slander against both Christians and Jews was they were "atheists" because they refused to create an image; popular imagination changed that in to Christians, at any rate, paying obeisance to an ass). Tertullian did not attempt to refute, point by point, this kind of thing. Instead, he did the equivalent of pointing and laughing at how stupid the accusations were (even though there were believers who paid through torture and even death for the accusations), and made a clear case for what it was Christians actually believed and practiced.
This trip back in time is necessary, first, to remind Christians that attempts to ridicule our faith are neither new nor, in the main, terribly original. At least the Romans managed to picture Christians being interesting in their worship practice, rather than either nonsensical or boring. Second, while Tertullian's defense of Christianity was superb (he was, perhaps, the brightest, and certainly the wittiest, Christian writer in the centuries before Augustine; few Christian writers in the centuries since have managed to be quite as funny as Tertullian was), it was also done with one eye on the fact that the defense of the faith was secondary to the proclamation of that faith. Getting the word out that Jesus of Nazareth had lived and died and risen again in order to bring about the reconciliation of fallen humanity with God was the point; fleshing out what that might mean, and what it most certainly did not mean, was important, but not necessary to making that faith real, a living thing among those who declare it.
Whether it's the best and brightest among the Roman Empire, European intellectuals of the 18th and 19th century deciding that "miracles" are the mark of Christian belief, or Sam Harris writing the only true Christian faith is fundamentalism, we have always faced those who decide, from outside, who we are and what we believe and why it's nonsense. While addressing these criticisms is important, it should always be done with one eye on the reality that making sense of the idea of Jesus as God incarnate isn't as important as declaring it.
Tertullian's lead in another area needs to be followed as well; Christian writers need to remember that a little scorn, the kind of writing that makes folks laugh is effective. Making fun of people who think they're really smart but are actually both ignorant and stupid gets the message out that they aren't quite as authoritative as they claim.
