This is a series of posts seeking to follow the prompt set forth by David Bentley Hart in his recent lecture posted to his Substack, Leaves in the Wind. I have not linked every single scriptural text for the sake of length.
The scientific, political, economic, academic, and social revolutions that we usually identify as the dawn of the “modern” period are to some degree byproducts of Christendom and the cultivation of Christian humanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. As Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry persuasively argue, the Christendom of Medieval Europe was, for all of its internal ambiguities and contradictions, also a profoundly fertile society in terms of its intellectual and artistic output. Shaped by a papally headed Catholic Christianity, by the new Western lingua franca of Latin in both high, educated style and its Vulgar, vernacular legacy, especially in the emergent Romance tongues of Italian (in its local dialectical varieties, including the tongues of Friulian, Sicilian, and Sardinian now distinguished from the Tuscan, Florentine Italian that became gradually standardized after the unification of the peninsula), French, and Castilian Spanish (active from the ninth century onward, but centralized in 13th century Toledo), by the ongoing presence and contributions of a strong (but persecuted) Jewish minority in the Christian kingdoms of Europe and continual contact, ranging from exchange to outright conflict, with the civilized world of the umma, European Christendom joined Western, Central, South and East Asia as the site of profound human cultural development. These contributions were in turn the context for the European Renaissance: through the elite academic culture of the comune of Florence, to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the flood of Greek scholars (and the knowledge of Greek) to the West, to the rise of the Venetian Empire, humanistic paideia in poetry, grammar, history, moral philosophy, and rhetoric, the ideal (however unattainable) of the uomo universale, the democratization of knowledge and aesthetic beauty through public libraries and art, innovations in science and mathematics, the rebirth of anatomy and the first serious developments in medicine since the standardization of Galen in late antiquity, increased travel, trade, and globalization with the rest of the world, the early development of biblical studies and the rebirth of classics as disciplines at last brought Western Europe to a level of cultural sophistication comparable to that of the East, different parts of which were also experiencing their own profound cultural effusions in and around the same periods. And these, in turn, were the intellectual foundations that contributed to the birth of what is often identified in Western historiography as “modernity”: the “early modernity” of the 16th to the 18th centuries, the “proper” modernity of the 19th and 20h centuries, and inclusive, somewhat confusingly, of both “late modernity” and “postmodernity,” which is less a historical period and more a literary, artistic, and philosophical mindset still seeking its footing in the early 21st century. The historiographical concept of modernity is subject to real critiques, but as an academic idea that has had demonstrable influence on the world, and that characterizes the mindset of contemporary Western people, we can identify a “modern mind” that is also “postmodern”: politically, socially, philosophically, scientifically, artistically, even religiously, the Western world and the world as shaped by Western culture really is a different place now than it was prior to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the literary movement we typically call the European Enlightenment. On the one hand, this modern psychology constructs a distinctively different, and in its most profound iterations, anti-Christian and post-Christian vision of the interrelations of God, world, and self, far different from those of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic premodernity; on the other hand, this vision is largely derived, as I argued in the last entry, from an intensive focus on the dignity of the human being, particularly as derived from its classical, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic construction. This is in fact clearest in those writers, thinkers, political projects, and movements of the modern period that have weaponized Western humanism against the very religious and philosophical cultures that birthed it. It is also evident in that other cultural humanisms, while periodically responsible for religious atheism, agnosticism, or other trends analogous to Western secularism in non-Western societies, have never really produced the form of post-traditional society that Western modernism has. There are various legitimate reads on why this might be the case, but a compelling answer remains the idea that modernity is a krisis internal to Christianity as an interpretation of the Way, on at least three fronts.
Modernity apocalyptically confronts Christianity with the compromise of its gospel of the Kingdom in favor of worldly power. The modern world order can be traced to a variety of intellectual and practical points of origin, but in its relationship to the Christendom that preceded it, it is primarily an order based on protest against the failure of Christianity as an interpretation of the Way of Jesus to bring the Kingdom of God, its justice, and its peace which Jesus preached. The intellectual tradition grounding our modern political discourse about human rights, the ideal state, classical liberalism, and the social fabric it has created is in its essence a rejection of Christendom’s theocratic submission of state power to religious interest and political compromise of the gospel’s ethics in favor of the interests of power, one influenced in part by the gospel’s own logic of the human being’s infinite moral value as well as the revitalized classical tradition’s concept of human potential. To be clear, modern liberalism has taken immense time to articulate that dignity in a genuinely universal manner, and no modern liberal state has yet successfully implemented those ideals in a way that has ensured the rights and needs of every person within its regime. As several competent historiographers of proper and late modernity have pointed out, the limits and failures of classical liberalism to ensure that dignity are in turn the launch points for a variety of historical phenomena of the last two centuries: the rise of republics, the varieties of socialist economic philosophy and experimentation, the rise of autocracies in Europe and Asia, Leninist-style communism in Russia, China, and Southeast Asia, the American Civil Rights Movement, the New Left, new spiritual and religious movements, the formation of late 20th century conservatism, libertarianism, and democratic socialism—each of these owes something to the limitations of modernism as perceived rightly or wrongly by different actors and can, on some level, be described as ongoing digressions within the wider Western and Christian conversations about the meaning, obligations, and potentials of human life. These are, in other words, aspects of a utopian sort of discourse, about ideal society and human flourishing, that have precedents and influences in the Jewish and Christian apocalypticism within which the original preaching of Jesus and the apostles is situated, and which exists in large part because of that specific precedent and its lineage. The force of that modern protest against Christendom’s false Kingdom of God is equal to the force with which the apocalypticism of the gospel inspired, however incoherently, the empire-building project of the Christianized Roman Empire; but it has also, now, exercised profound influence on the world beyond the historic borders of that empire and its successors, including on the Christian civilizations that were not bound to its destiny. That is to say, Nestorian Christians of the Church of the East and Jacobite Christians of the Non-Chalcedonian Orthodox Churches may not have subscribed to the imperial project of Christendom, but they are no less implicated by the modernist challenge to Christianity than are Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, or the varieties of Protestantism. Modernity posits the collective contention to Christianity that if its interpretation of the Way of Jesus is accurate, then Christendom ought to have been the peaceable Kingdom hoped for by the prophets, preached by Jesus and the apostles, and also longed for by Jews and Muslims, bringing the new heaven and new earth in which justice dwells (2 Pet 3:13); because it did not, the politeia of Christendom stands judged as a false realization of Jesus’s gospel, and therefore the very meaning of Christianity is in question, particularly as the dismantling of Christendom catalyzes liberation for humans.
Modernity apocalyptically confronts Christianity with the compromise of its ethics of the Kingdom in favor of the ethics of hierarchy. To be clear, the collectivist or communistic ethics of the historical Jesus and the earliest communities of his followers were already in the process of compromise by the ethics of domination in the Roman Empire within the first century: as Bart Ehrman has recently argued, the Book of Revelation, for example, already reflects a reappropriation of the Jesus Movement’s apocalypticism to fantasize about the transfer of the Roman Empire’s wealth and power to the communities known to John of Patmos instead of Jesus’s vision of the downfall of hierarchicalist power in favor of a Jubilee-based communal sharing of goods. In the second and third centuries, every iteration of Christianismos was, at its heart, an attempt to make the Jesus Movement intelligible and ethically credible to the Hellenistic world of the Roman Empire and therefore resilient beyond the original cultural context of first-century Judaism within which it was birthed. And so the compromise of the gospel’s ethics by the Christianized Roman Empire did not come from nowhere; nor did the protest against it, first from within (by a litany of Christian reformers in the middle ages, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and over the centuries of the modern period), and then from without the boundaries of Christianity (beginning already in late antiquity with Jewish dissent from Christian claims and Islamic qualification of them). The ethical question at the heart of Christianity has always been over whether Christians will obey Jesus’s radical demands concerning wealth and power or whether they will compromise these in favor of worldly domination. In fairness to the majority of lay Christians who historically have not followed Jesus’s teachings in toto, the ethics of Jesus’s gospel are clearly predicated, given his historical context, on the belief in the imminence of the Kingdom’s arrival and God’s intervention to save Israel, reckon with, and reconcile the nations, the failure of which to materialize has left those otherwise inspired and compelled by Christ with the ongoing option of life in the world in addition to the option of answering the call in renunciation. Modernity’s multiplicitous push for the insurance of justice and prosperity for all people is to that degree a protest against the failure of Christendom to bring a genuine end to the world’s hierarchical system of power based on dominance, even if one inspired, however unknowingly or unwillingly, by Christ’s own prophetic preaching of justice and mercy for the poor and the oppressed. Just as the politics of resurrection have inevitably encompassed the question of the state, then, so also they inevitably encompass the question of society’s ideal configuration for the greatest possible inclusion, prosperity, and flourishing of all. Behind the varieties of modern socialism—utopian, Christian, orthodox Marxist, Leninist, and democratic—is both the implicit and explicit dream of the New Jerusalem, a vision which can be appropriated by hierarchicalist aspirations as well as by collectivist ones. Modernity confronts Christianity with its failure to realize this aspect of Jesus’s preaching and to preserve its radical import.
Modernity apocalyptically confronts Christianity with its sublimation of the charismatic, prophetic authority of Jesus, the apostles, and the Christian mystical tradition to the authority of institutionalized religion. It is popular but wrong to think that Jesus of Nazareth was anti-religion. Jesus and his followers were Jews; they believed and practiced their ancestral traditions as Jews zealously and they held to pious hopes drawn from Judaism’s scriptures and popular aspirations. But even if Jesus did not oppose the legitimacy of the Temple or the synagogue qua Temple or synagogue, Jesus did operate in a way that intentionally reached beyond their boundaries and to some extent sought to supplement their systems, both with the purifying power of Jesus’s attributed miracles and with the expanded meanings of the Jewish ritual practices that Jesus made normative within his Movement (one of them, baptism, shared with his predecessor John the Baptist). Jesus’ disciples and their earliest communities were itinerant charismatics, and even in the settled communities of Galilee and the Diaspora, Jesus’s followers coded into a wider cultural web of thaumaturges, healers, holy men, and the like among Jews and non-Jews. When Christianismos prevailed as an interpretation of the Way among the second-century descendants of those communities, a tradition of charismatic authority emerged that was frequently contested, challenged, and adumbrated in the developing Christian communities of the various cities of the Roman Empire: itinerant prophets, gnostics of orthodox and heterodox variety, bishops, monastics, hermits, Manichaeans, visionaries, reformers, and rank-and-file institutionalists have all by turns laid claim to the charismatic authority of the historical and kerygmatic Jesus, sometimes in protest against, sometimes in service of, sometimes for the reformation of the institutionalized church. Charismatic authority in Judaism has stood, particularly in settings where Christians lacked hegemony, as a parallel balancing act between divine freedom and the necessities of stable continuity, while Islam may be understood from the Christian angle as the power of charismatic authority to variously relativize, assimilate, and annihilate the Christian project itself. Modernity is not the first, then, to challenge the sublimation of religious freedom, which is merely the human element of divine freedom, to the needs of a dogmatically ordered, canonically constructed, imperially enfranchised ekklesia of Jesus’s followers; but its challenge has achieved the most stark and successful such audience with Christian power in the Western world. Within Christianity, the Protestant Reformation, the birth of critical biblical studies, critical theologies (often labeled as “modernist” or “liberal” by fundamentalists and the neo-orthodox), and the rise of new Christian communities, however tangentially related to the historic mainstream of Christian belief and practice (i.e., the various descendants of the Millerites, Mormonism, Christian Science, and so forth), are all symptoms of this apocalyptic challenge to Christendom. But beyond Christianity’s bounds, the whole range of new options opened by the world that followed the European Enlightenment, from Deism, to atheism, to agnosticism, to religious non-affiliation, to new spiritual and religious movements, both esoteric and exoteric, “low-brow” and “high-brow,” the revival of paganism, the popularity of South and East Asian traditions (however diluted) in the Western mainstream, each express the same challenge to Christianity’s claim to divine, prophetic authority and power to liberate the world and the self from their malign conditions. I would consider the dispute about “disenchantment” and “enchantment” raised by modernity—which in its early intellectual framework certainly sought to exorcise the universe of its divine influences, a mission at which it was never totally successful and which more recent cosmological models do not entirely support—to be a subordinate element of this challenge. The scientific revolution was not, as the conflict thesis erroneously suggests, a revolution of science against religion per se; it was instead a revolution of cosmological models that saw an ancient and traditional view of the world patronized by the Church and useful to its claims dismantled in favor of a worldview that was less obviously helpful to the sources of institutionalized divine authority claimed by Christians, thereby triggering hierarchical opposition in certain cases that easily lent itself to misrepresentation as religion’s intolerance for science to later generations (e.g., the Galileo affair). Today, when public-facing scientists and scientific popularizers continue to weaponize our developments in cosmology, physics, chemistry, biology, botany, zoology, anthropology, archaeology, history, and the like over against religious communities and claims, it is primarily by way of response to reactionary fundamentalism’s tendency to play the part prescribed for it by the conflict thesis rather than by way of response to traditional religious claims in themselves. When, in turn, neo-orthodox thinkers attempt to assert the perennially obvious congruity of faith with the sciences and to spin the Church as the persistent champion of the sciences, it is a fable intended to mask the real intellectual challenges of the modern cosmos to Christian authorities. Those challenges are that the real questions have not to do with how best to interpret something like creation in relationship to evolution or humanity in the image of God in relationship to the biological tree of life of which we are a part; instead, they have to do with questions that touch on the philosophy that was previously embodied in the old cosmology and whether it can be logically translated into the new cosmology. The Ptolemaic cosmos was a living entity, a rational animal and an ensouled god, in which dwelt innumerable gods, spirits, demons, and monsters together with humans, animals, plants, minerals, and the fundamental elements; the early framers of the new cosmos gradually sought a mechanist picture that elided this living, thinking universe in favor of one that was totally subject to the logic of abstract laws and utterly devoid of any genuine analogue to the human soul in the natural world, before that, too, came into question for modern thinkers. But if modernity’s cosmology and modernity’s anthropology seem at odds with one another, this is to some degree a reflection, in however shattered a mirror, of Christianity’s own inconsistency in its parsing of human dignity in the context of the cosmos, and its failure, outside the minds and writers of a particular lineage of enlightened sages, to articulate human significance in a way that was continuous with that of the non-human creation rather than constructed at its expense. That is why modernity is the mother both of the environmental crisis caused by the industrial revolution and rapid destruction of the planet’s ecosystems as well as alternative, ecologically based spiritualities that are often parsed as alternatives to Christianity or fully anti-Christian in spirit, at least popularly. The dissonance of enchantment—the endurance of premodern beliefs in an enchanted world under the regime of an intellectual, political, social, and economic model that was designed, at least, to disenchant that world, and which minimally succeeds in reducing it to a bank of resources to be harvested and exploited in the interest of the rich and the powerful—is a modern inheritance from Christendom, a way that modernity caricatures but also reflects Christianity’s own history of imperialism and ecological abuse. Similarly, the resurgence of those gods and spirits formerly led in procession by the church as conquered, vanquished foes, at best recycled into the archetypal icons of Christ, Mary, and the Saints of the Church’s cult, in the worship and admiration of late modern Westerners is, for that very reason, modernity’s reappropriation of Christianity’s own logic of paradoxical triumph, in which the triumphus is unexpectedly achieved precisely in the act of uttermost humiliation which the world associates with crucifixion (2 Cor 2:14; Col 2:15), against Christendom’s self-satisfaction. Christians frequently lament the spiritual marketplace of Western modernity, but their own history’s internal contradictions is almost exclusively responsible for it, and so the Christian task of finding a new vocation within that refreshed agora is also the task of making sense of the modern apocalypse for Christianity as an interpretation of the Way.
Fundamentalism and neo-orthodoxy, in all their forms, are simply Christian attempts to sidestep the challenge of modernity. The two earliest and most persistent responses to that apocalypse have been the two most resistant to its revelatory significance. Fundamentalism as a method of appealing to supposedly infallible foundations in the hermeneutical engagement with anything is a possibility in any religious, philosophical, or other disciplinary enterprise, but in Western Christianity it is a uniquely modern phenomenon, born from the confessional in-fighting of the Protestant and Counter-Reformations and exacerbated by the challenges of the scientific revolution and the earliest iterations of the academic study of the Bible in a critical manner. And while Protestant in origin with respect to its current iteration, it has at this point spread, infection-like, to Catholicism and Orthodoxy as well, such that fundamentalist impulses to insist on the inerrant vision of either the deposit of faith and/or its traditional interpreters can be found in any and every Christian community today, even those that otherwise, superficially, deny this as a belief that they hold. Conversely, the neo-orthodox position, which begins from a receptive standpoint to modern critique but then attempts to subvert that critique by either attempting to argue that the Church has already absorbed its shock in what it has “always” taught or done or by attempting to argue that the requisite assimilation of the critique’s content will not come at the expense of any serious, substantive change to the Church’s life and thinking is simply fundamentalism but with more steps. It is not that every modern critique of or challenge to Christianity is correct, or that because a criticism is leveled against Christianity on the grounds of modern principles that it is incumbent on all Christians to change in response; nor is that the reason that fundamentalism and neo-orthodoxy compromise Christianity’s overall intellectual credibility. It is instead that ample evidence exists in support of the major modern critiques to traditional Christian claims on a variety of fronts, and the fundamentalist/neo-orthodox assertions that these critiques are simply not potent is wishful thinking laced with desperation. This is probably nowhere more apparent than in the theological debates that have erupted within the global Catholic Church since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) over whether the council ought to be read through the so-called “hermeneutic of rupture” or “hermeneutic of continuity.” That postconciliar Catholicism definitively parts ways with preconciliar Catholicism on a host of issues—from the status of non-Catholic Christians, to the status of non-Christians (particularly Jews and Muslims), to the legitimacy of engagement across these divides, to the validity and importance of modern critical study and the sciences to the theological process—is undeniable. And yet, an impressive fleet of neo-orthodox Catholic writers and thinkers has been laboring for nearly sixty years to deny that very thing, emboldened under the pontificates of Pope John Paul II (1978-2005) and Benedict XVI (2005-2013) to embrace a “hermeneutic of continuity” which effectively softens the council’s radical nature by either suggesting that it had nothing new to say (objectively false) or by suggesting that its novelties constitute a calm, orderly, and obvious unfolding of Catholic doctrinal and moral principles that was always there in potency and inevitable in actuality. And yet, this is the dominant interpretation of the council’s significance in the discourse of most Catholic hierarchs and priests today—the council, recall, that was the largest Christian communion in the world’s formal aggiornamento, engagement and reconciliation with modernity. The captivity of academic theology from the mid-century to the present to neo-orthodox sentiments and the resurgent popularity of fundamentalist sentiments in parochial settings of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant communities in the West as strategies of evading a modernity perceived to be pernicious and antichristic. But while one of these may well claim to be a serious engagement with the modern world, it begins from the same hermeneutical starting place as fundamentalism, which is the concept of an inerrant, infallible authority that must be defended at the cost of reason or conscience at worst or, at best, employed paternalistically to pander to modern concerns without listening deeply and authentically to the apocalyptic summons modernity offers to Christianity and its sister faiths.
Christianity does not face the challenges of modernity alone. Secular modernity of the Western variety is to a very large degree the product of internal Christian logical and ethical fallacies, and it has largely spread to the remainder of the world from the former holdings of Western Christendom. But secularism is not exclusively a challenge to Christianity: it is a multifaceted, diverse challenge to all premodern religious cultures that have survived to the present. That challenge is not new, per se, in that several of these cultures have either survived or been catalyzed by similar cultural shifts in perspective, worldview, and values, but the magnitude and the intensity of the challenge is somewhat novel in that never before in human history has the death and rebirth of a culture involved not just a metamorphosis of religion but the possibility of the abandonment of religion entirely. Where in the premodern spiritual marketplace Christianity could contend with Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the like with the assumption that religious belonging, behavior, and belief was a fundamental human virtue in the pursuit of which different systems were merely competing cultic technologies (in the sense of skillsets) of transcendence, Christians now stand on one side with all other traditions in distinction from a growing percentage of the population that does not find value in religion generally. The point should not be skewed: plenty of the “nones” have spiritual beliefs, interests, or practices, and the temporary growth of a religiously unaffiliated portion of the population may well simply be the preface to the rise of new, different, or alternative religious identities as the human need for the sacred and desire for stability reassert themselves in new social configurations. The very militantly atheistic are ultimately a tiny portion of society, with limited political clout; the true contemporary danger to premodern religions rests not in the possibility that defectors are plotting some sort of persecution (which is a popular but pernicious myth among especially American Christians), but in the distinct possibility that the religious future will be one where the growing irrelevance of traditional identities results in their final eclipse by some new revelatory community, for better or for worse. Western Christians, for the first time in their history, face the real possibility that that which they have long celebrated having done to the traditional religions of Greece, Rome, Southwest Asia, and Western Europe is now happening to them; and where Christianity is growing, it is beyond the sphere of Western control, which is tenuous at best in those places where ancient centers of Christianity continue to exercise some influence on vibrant churches in the Global South. But again, these are not just Christian challenges: secularism also provides attractive alternatives to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, even of fairly liberal varieties, at least if the numbers are to be trusted. These communities also face the temptations to fundamentalist and neo-orthodox reactions, and they, too, face the same hemorrhaging of membership that correlates with these responses to modernity, at least when the instruments of social control and definitions of human freedom remain beyond the command of the fideists.
Christianity, as the traditional vessel of the Way of Jesus, cannot retreat from modernity but must progress through it in order to achieve meaningful synthesis for present and future. Fundamentalism and neo-orthodoxy provide no real way forward; they trend inexorably in the direction of the ghetto, of the enclave from the world that, however well-intentioned, faces the same breakdown that all utopian experiments face, as isolation from the world empowers the toxicity and cognitive dissonance of the architects of such communities in disastrous ways. There is a reason that social experiments like the Catholic milieu or its various afterlives, including the “Benedict Option,” are not permanently solvent, and often create more distress than they resolve for the pioneers involved. To a very large degree this is because the logic behind the commune is simply the logic of Christendom reduced to a smaller venue, in which the tension between the politics of resurrection and the politics of death which weaponize domination against the weak is clarified in ever more intimate and devastating ways. Nor will an elite, academic neo-orthodoxy intent on engaging with modernity exclusively on the Church’s terms a long-term strategy for future vitality: the Church no longer speaks to the world from a platform that the world has to acknowledge or respect, and no longer has any claim to moral or intellectual credibility that can be taken for granted, if Christianity ever enjoyed such benefit of the doubt to begin with. It is already the case that the neo-orthodox response to modernity is being cultivated in an ever-shrinking circle of inward-looking hierarchs, clerics, and committed laity, ignoring the proverbial writing on the wall and smiling blithely as water fills the barque. The revelatory rivers of Christianity have now flown, as it were, from the new Foundation Stone of Golgotha into the Great Sea through the narrow ravines of modernity’s advent, and there their waters mix inevitably with those of many other streams. That the rafts, boars, ships which have sailed those waters should make it to some farther shore instead of ship wrecking somewhere in the Aegean archipelago of misfired reconciliations with modernity requires that they travel through the Gates of Herakles, finding that current that runs through modernity to the future Christ proclaimed, which we hope is the true horizon even on these rough seas.