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.
Christianity’s way forward through modernity requires an honest reckoning with Christian Origins that is both historical and theological. For most of their history, Christians have had the freedom to re-tell the story of their origins however they saw fit. They both enjoyed the political power to do so with impunity and the canonical collection of the New Testament to draw on without serious competition to frame the life of Jesus, the deeds of the apostles, and the birth of the Christian Church. No living memory that we have evidence of concerning the commitments of Jesus, James, Peter, Paul, or other early leaders of the Movement to Judaism qua Judaism, and not simply as praeparatio evangelica, continued to exist beyond the eclipse of those dwindling Jewish-Christian communities from the fourth to the seventh centuries CE, when the last of them were swallowed up by the proto-Islamic community. Even when critical theories of the origins of Christianity did begin to emerge in the form of hermeneutical disagreements in textual or historical criticism of the New Testament, they were disagreements happening internally to the Christian community, by and large; the alternative counter-narratives of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection fostered in gnostic, Jewish, and Islamic circles did not for the most part register with Christians functioning in the Roman Empire or its various descendants as serious interpretations of Christ’s significance or as real challenges to the veracity of Christian dogma. That is not to say that they did not perceive such narratives as threatening to Christian hegemony: they clearly did, which is why Christians were so often comfortable throughout the history of Christendom with the destruction of pagan, Jewish, and Islamic literature and spaces. It is not incidental that King Louis IX of France, eponymous patron of St. Louis, Missouri, both burned Talmudim and went on crusade (poorly, though). But the modern world has access to a discourse of Christian origins that, though Christians participate in it and arguably still dominate the academy devoted to it, is not exclusively run by any Christian institution or community; and as there are fewer Christians in general, it will eventually be the case, provided the disciplines of critical religious studies and biblical studies in particular continue to exist, that these will not be totally Christian-dominated fields. In some places, it is already the case that they are not Christian-dominated fields, and in other places, it is already the case that the kinds of faith represented in scholarship are already critical, modern, and liberal forms of the traditional religions from which they are derived. Modern Christians have no choice but to face the critical study of Christian Origins straight on and to accept the evidence and the most convincing readings of the evidence with unbiased eyes, if not unbiased hearts. That is to say, Christians must be willing to embrace the historical Jesus as a core part of their Christology, the painful and destructive articulation of Christianismos as a separate phenomenon from Ioudaismos as a point of both success and shame in their story, the sins of Christendom as those of their own fathers and mothers for which they must make some repair to the Christian and non-Christian world even if they do not bear personal guilt for those actions. It is here that Christian psychology will fragment along the lines of other emotive groupings and allegiant identities, for the ability to separate one’s personal culpability from one’s responsibility for a situation is a perennial human moral obligation that is, for whatever reason, uniquely impossible for many contemporary Americans. Hence, the balking and the outrage that American Christians are prone to when told that they might have some work to do in order to cleanse their communities and traditions of antipathy for Christians of other persuasions than their own, for Jews, for Muslims, etc. But taking Christian Origins seriously as Christians requires exactly this kind of work of penitence. It also requires seriously facing, if not the fragility, then at least the mystery of the Christian claim. The fundamental Christian belief that Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish prophet of the Kingdom of God, was raised from the dead by God and appointed messiah, Son of God, and Lord of the nations is not judicable by historical-critical or literary-critical means. As multiple scholars have observed in numerous works, evidence exists to confirm or deny any preexisting belief or aptitude for belief concerning Jesus’s resurrection, which is ultimately a matter of philosophically necessary conditions and conscientious perception of reliability. Honest, and intellectually honest, people land on different sides of the Christian claim. If anything, Christians facing Christian Origins seriously should engage in the mental exercise of considering that from the perspective of the Judaism that preceded Jesus, the Judaism that outlived him, and the history of Christianity, the veracity of the Christian claim can appear seriously suspect. But even so, the Christian holds hope that there is a way to sail the revelatory waters with integrity even after one has admitted that the claim not merely for Jesus’s significance, nor even merely for his glorification, but of his summative importance for Jewish and even all of human history is not straightforwardly obvious given what we can really know about his life or what we can say with relative certainty about Christianity’s impact on the world, positive and negative. Facing up to modernity in a mature manner, however, will not permit Christians evasion of this most fundamental of its insights.
Christianity’s way forward through modernity requires an honest reckoning across ecumenical lines with the origins and ongoing causes of Christian division. As Christians revisit their origins, they also revisit the identity shift from the earliest Jesus Movement to Christianismos and its division before and after imperial sanction along lines of dogma and praxis. Where for most of Christian history the ability to claim an unbroken line of orthodoxia and authoritative hierarchia existed as an administrative weapon against perceived dissidence, novelty, and insurrection, and ecclesiastical power of local, regional, and patriarchal bishops coincided with imperial or state power and wealth, Christians today are heirs to divisions that they did not cause and that mean relatively little to the ordinary person beyond the parochial transmission of prejudice. Most Eastern Orthodox Christians think that Roman Catholics are heretics and can, perhaps, name why they think so, though of course the reasons that they employ are for the most part half-truths about the theological history of both Christian East and Christian West, are heavily oversimplified even in what they do get right, and, what’s more, are not convincing, compelling causes of disunity today anyway. So, too, for Catholic and Protestant knowledge of one another. Earnest Protestants today still inquire of me if Catholics worship Mary; many Catholics still perform the equivalent of calculus (at least in that its referent is not real) to demonstrate the absence of grace in Protestant churches and sacraments, no matter how catholic they prove (Anglicans are particularly short-changed by this Catholic weaponization priestcraft). Orthodox and Catholics still regularly trot out a list of heretics, the former in their liturgical calendar, and the heresies named for them, as though they were reciting an updated version of Epiphanius’s Panarion, from Simon Magus to Marcion to Valentinus to Basilides to Origen to Arius to Eunomius to Eutyches to Nestorius and onwards, without ever pausing to consider (at least in ecclesiastical spaces) that the reduction of these figures to the outline of ecclesiastical polemic against them violates ordinary modern criteria of logical coherence and, anyway, rarely fits the historical data considered precisely. And every tradition still basically holds to a sacred narrative that proposes to recount how, in the end of things, that communion is the real successor to the ancient church of Christ and the apostles, still teaching the selfsame gospel that they did. David Bentley Hart, whose lecture inspired this series, has also written a book on this topic, Tradition and Apocalypse, which captures the essential points I would echo here: first, that the logic of all such claims is hopelessly circular, even in its most intelligent and well-articulated iterations; and second, that every communion can make the argument of succession with some (albeit varying) degree of validity. Orthodox Christians, of Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian varieties, and the Church of the East, can certainly claim a kind of direct succession to the Jesus Movement through the apostolically founded communities who invented and adopted Christianismos as a refashioned identity; so can the Church of Rome, though the Roman Catholic narrative of succession depends on a concept of Petrine/Pauline primacy for the monepiskopos of that Church that is, at best, a kind of local hagiographic flavor of their martyrdom that has proved useful for Christian cohesion in some times and places (but not others) and, at worst, a weaponized myth of origins intended to assimilate or annihilate alternative Christianities and their power structures. In point of fact, every claim of direct apostolic succession to some specific individual who supposedly stands at the head of an episcopal lineage runs this risk. A critical account of Christian Origins tells us that we know next to nothing about the founders of Jesus’s community after him. Consider for a moment that beyond the life of Jesus, which is only communicated to us by second and third hand parties, we do not have direct accounts of most of the apostolic generation. Relatively little is said about Peter in the New Testament considering the outsized role that Peter plays in later Christianity. Neither of the epistles attributed to him were written by him and the earliest purported biography of his role in the Jesus Movement was written anywhere from twenty to sixty years after his death by the dominant scholarly dating paradigm (which Jonathan Bernier has challenged but endures until that new schema garners formal consensus). We have nothing from James himself—the letter attributed to him is a forgery—and he appears inconsistently in the Book of Acts. From Paul’s hand we have seven undisputed letters, three letters forged by someone living in the early years after his death, and three forged by someone living much later; the longer biography we get of his life and times is in Acts and is partially designed, it has seemed to most scholars, as damage control for the potentially controversial relationship Paul had to Peter and James. About most of the Twelve we know absolutely nothing: all of our traditions come from centuries later. We do not have reliable information connecting the Gospel of John or the Johannine literature to John bar Zebedee; possibly they are the product of “John the Elder,” but whether this person is credibly understood as also John of Patmos, the author of the Book of Revelation, faces intense scrutiny. It is unlikely that the Gospel of Matthew is related to the apostle Matthew in any but the most tangential way if at all; at any rate, our best reconstruction of the Gospel of Matthew’s social context and location does not mesh with the traditional account of his life and martyrdom, which locate the bulk of his activity in Ethiopia (where Christianity would not come in earnest for some time after his lifetime). What we have, in other words, from the earliest followers of Jesus are mainly the writings of those who by the New Testament’s own reckoning were peripheral representatives of Jesus and his immediate followers and yet whose collective understanding of Jesus’s significance provides the main skeleton for all subsequent Christianities. Christians should earnestly reckon with this when engaging in wars of attrition with one another over succession and legitimacy. Assuming the Twelve were real, historical persons, there’s a decent chance that they would regard all modern Christians as illegitimate successors to their preaching; there’s even a decent chance that Paul or John would, too. Modernity forces Christians to understand the contingency of their tradition or, better, its itineracy, and in fact to see themselves as nomads across history (and actual space) rather than as autochthonous descendants standing in a clear line of succession.
Christianity’s way forward through modernity requires an honest reckoning across ecumenic lines with Judaism, Islam, and the world’s other philosophies and religions. This ecumenical reckoning also brings Christians face to face with Jews and Muslims simultaneously as internally diverse neighbors, partners in dialogue, and covenantal siblings with whom we both have historically poor relations and also claim the overwhelming majority of the blame for those broken connections. That Christianity did not have to become an arch-heresy of Judaism through volitional destruction of Jewish lives, livelihoods, and cultures is one of the most profound sins of Christianity as a historical phenomenon—one great enough that it forecloses any but the most occasional, awkward, and uncomfortably intimate dialogue about the points over which they originally parted ways so many times in the early centuries of the Christian Church—is one thing. But that Christians now coexist with Jews in the modern world as mutual siblings of Abrahamic or Adonaistic faith, that Jews have for two millennia developed their own internal cultural and communal networks, real and conceptual, that did not exist in Jesus’s lifetime or in the centuries prior and that make Modern Judaism a distinct phenomenon from the Judaism of the first century to which Christianity is genetically connected, is another. Whatever their historical origins together, whatever their family connection, whatever their long history ranging from mutual contempt to mutual coexistence, Christians and Jews now live together for the most part in modern Western nations or in the Israeli State under (at least putatively) secular regimes and face both common challenges and common dreams even as they seek to address old and new wounds. Christians will have to maturely address their present with Jews as one of diverse experience, given that Christians are internally diverse and so too are Jews, such that every Jewish/Christian encounter is unique even as it is the same. Christians will also have to realize that their proclamations of reconciliation or realignment in the wake of the Shoah, however well-intentioned as part of the Christian effort to repudiate formal teachings of anti-Judaism and antisemitism, have been hasty from the mainstream Jewish perspective, failing to account for the ways that Christians still habitually, however unofficially, construct themselves in response to an othered Jewish community and an othered Judaism, both usually figments of the Christian imagination. These principles generally obtain, too, in the Christian responsibility of repair for relations with the Muslim world, though the situation is different here. Where the Christian-Jewish relationship historically is almost entirely one of domination and resistance, attempted assimilation or annihilation by the former and resilient continuity by the latter, Christianity has for much of its common history with Islam in places under Islamic rule experienced the selfsame supersessionistic impulse at Muslim hands. Muslims have, it can be argued in some times and places, ultimately been more tolerant and generous overlords of Christians and Jews alike than Christians have been of Jews or Muslims, and the historic Jewish preference for living under Muslim rule to Christian speaks to that; but Christians have also suffered analogous kinds of violence and efforts at assimilation to those that they have otherwise imposed on Jews at Muslim hands, and so in engaging the Muslim world today theirs is a more complex relationship, shaped by a mutual rather than a one-sided history of wrongs. Here, the humility that modernity demands of Christians is different. In the face of Judaism, Christians have to accept that their tradition is almost singlehandedly responsible for the negative aspects of the relationship, and that virtually all Jewish reappropriation of Jesus and reconciliation with Christians and Christianity is when seen against the backdrop of that history of persecution on every occasion a singular act of generosity and goodwill. But in the face of Islam, Christians have to look a brother in the eye where wrongs have been traded in both directions and elect to focus only on their own sins and those of their forbears, seeking forgiveness for them without predicating it on a reciprocal act of penitence. It is only through this kind of mature engagement that Christians can possibly hope to once more benefit from a living relationship to these traditions in ways that will be productive for flourishing in and beyond modernity: only a meaningful act of parlay and concession is enough on these waters to ensure another fleet of passing ships, even one that first set sail with us, that we are neither pirates nor an enemy navy (even if that is how we have appeared previously). For Christians at least, Jews and Muslims are the signature religious others in our history as, at least putatively (and not without issue), fellow children of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, and Esau (in the case of Judaism, our elder siblings). But Christians also have individual histories of sin to address with the grand collective of traditional cultures and religions that they have tended to stereotype as “pagan,” from the religions of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean that Christianity first sought parity with and then actively exterminated to those of Africa, Asia, and the Americas that they have by turns dialogued with and destroyed. The Church of the East shares in the sins of wider Christendom against Jews and Muslims, inherited antipathies that plenty of Syriac Christian literature demonstrates, but it alone is absolved of the narrow-minded dogmatism towards “paganism” or dissidence in its canonical territories, and its efforts at meaningful inculturation in Central, South, and East Asia are genuinely superior to those of more Western Christianities. But most modern Christians, even if, again, they bear no personal responsibility for this legacy (yet some of them do), must realize that Christianity in most of the world for most of its history has been a force of deep intolerance and destruction for traditional lifeways, sometimes in ways that have been liberating for those not well served by the dominant social hierarchies, their political enforcers, and their religious defenders, but often enough in ways that disregarded the consent of ordinary people and welcomed the support of the powerful and the wealthy provided their patronage ensured the forced Christianization of their lands. In other cases, as in the Americas, Christianity was the face of the apocalypse, bringing an end to life as millennia of people had known it and then repeating that cataclysm in the most intimately cruel ways in the lives of individual people and children. The Indian Schools erected and administered by mainly Western Christian bodies stand as a permanent reminder to First Nations peoples in the Americas—even Christian ones—that the pronouncements of Christian hierarchs today about the evil of the Doctrine of Discovery or the mistreatment of indigenous peoples today actually carry less formal weight than the justification for their enslavement and the theft of their land did when it was papally issued previously, and are in any event insufficient to heal the wound. Christians also bear a profound responsibility for the intellectual history of conquest that enabled rampant destruction of the natural world and that now threatens even more in the era of a new, corporate space race (to invoke the subtitle of Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s Astrotopia). Christians have to reckon with the rather horrifying idea that they may well be looking at a number of global apocalypses that their ancestors have inflicted on the world and its peoples that have no known cure. And so modern Christians have a duty of repair to these that require genuine service to the peoples of the world and to their freedom, even and especially their freedom to hate Christianity itself with the strongest passion. In many cases, such antipathy for formal Christianity is entirely separate, anyway, from the feelings of indigenous peoples, Jews and Muslims about Jesus himself, who can factor into a number of religious and philosophical systems in ways other than Christian but still positive and even, in many cases, uniquely powerful. Christians also face this ambiguity when they turn to consider the new religious movements whose origins are distinctively modern, whether early or late, but which nevertheless represent the hunger, especially in historically Christian spaces, for a vision of reality that Christendom and Christianity have not successfully provided to many in the modern world. This phenomenon also extends to new conversions or outreach from old religions in novel ways and spaces: Islam is not new, of course, but the phenomenon of Western converts to Islam is a distinctly 20th and 21st century one, whose basis has to be interrogated with critical sympathy by Christians if they want to understand and improve their own tradition in ways that might hemorrhage fewer people and attract more.
Christianity’s way forward through modernity requires an honest reckoning with the scientific changes of modernity. I wrote in the last post about fundamentalist and neo-orthodox responses to modernity and included among them the spectrum of responses that these orientations offer specifically to modern science. In particular, I tried to stress that even the reconciliation model between science and faith suffers from a question-begging assumption that nothing the sciences unveil could ever touch a Christian doctrinal construction, such that the Christian embrace of science under neo-orthodox terms ends up being an isolated rather than an engaged dialogue with the sciences. It is certainly true that there are some things science qua science cannot touch for Christians or for anyone else: the question of God or the transcendent; the primacy of consciousness or mind as non-material and pre-material awareness; the possibility of the miraculous or of Jesus’s resurrection; etc. It is also certainly true that the “conflict thesis” model of the relationship between science and faith is hogwash. And, in at least some instances, there are occasionally movements within the scientists, new discoveries, new fields of possibility that seem in certain ways to support the Neoplatonic, pantheological, and idealist panpsychist tendencies of traditional Christianity and other faiths. It is not ongoing Christian insistence on such things that I mean when I talk about neo-orthodox blunting of the force of the sciences on modern theology. It is instead those points where Christians either fail to acknowledge or refuse to concede that an outmoded aspect of premodern cosmology is continuing to dominate their theological thinking in the present that is vulnerable to scientific thinking in the present. Cosmologies come and go, so it is also not the case that the continued use of a premodern cosmology as a particular frame of mind or poetic construction of the universe is per se illegitimate; it is instead that the refusal to make the cosmological shift can end up alienating Christianity from its modern context rather than facilitating new synthesis. Take, for example, the fact of biological evolution as the modern sciences have theorized it. Darwin’s theory has found ample reception in the Christian world, the Scopes Monkey Trial notwithstanding; but both the fundamentalist alternatives (Young- and Old-Earth Creation, Intelligent Design, etc.) and the neo-orthodox reception have blunted the real import of evolution on the way we think about life and humanity themselves. Consider the papal encyclical Humani generis, released by Pope Pius XII in 1950 as a way of affirming monogenetic evolution as compatible with Catholic doctrine provided that one also affirmed direct divine intervention to create the immortal soul, and explicitly denying polygenism as, at least as it seemed to Pius, reconcilable with Catholic anthropology. On the one hand, this is an explicit affirmation of evolution by the Catholic magisterium. On the other hand, the encyclical’s explicit goal is to constrain the range of possible scientific interpretations of evolution for the Catholic world by submission to a non-scientific principle about human beings that is also, seemingly, required only by the specific theological chain of late modern Roman Catholicism and has little biblical grounding. This attempt to concede to modernity without conceding ends up accomplishing neither of the goals that it sets out to: science is not really grappled with by this approach, since the scientific method is one of inherently open, critical, experimental, and revisable interpretations of data, and Christian doctrine is not preserved either, since it is attached by this methodology to an easily falsified proposition whether we consider it in its theological mode (as a rather strange misunderstanding of what it means for God to create, what the soul is, and how the Bible envisions the human being’s relationship to the natural world) or in its scientific one (since the model of evolution most agreeable to Pius in 1950 is by now deeply outmoded in our current picture of human origins, which includes more than just our species). When I say that the Christian way forward through modernity means grappling seriously with science, I mean embracing the same methodological spirit even in the way that Christians do theology, by the similar embrace of an open, critical, experimental, and revisable account of Christian teaching that is flexible, adaptable, and capacious for the overall changing intellectual landscape of humanity. In this sense the path forward that modernity leaves open to Christians is one that requires us to recall our origins and to retrace our steps along the Way, but it is not one that allows us to attach ourselves thoroughly to some remembered or imagined foundation or moment of previous synthesis as an enduring model of permanent significance.
Christianity’s way forward through modernity requires an honest reckoning with the political, social, and moral changes of modernity. This is an important principle to consider too as we turn to think about Christianity’s place in an era after the political and social enforcement of historic Christian mores and in a rhetorical landscape that is conditioned both by the widespread intolerance of Christian disregard for consent to Christian morals as well as by fairly seismic revelations of Christian hypocrisy about those same standards in the leadership of major groups (in the Catholic Church’s scandals about sex and power, surely, but also in cascading revelations about other communities, too: no one is safe in an age of digital media and aggressive journalism from the consequences of their actions, and as Adam AJ Deville would have it, “Everything hidden shall be revealed”). All of the least favorite social trends of the resurgent right, fundamentalist and neo-orthodox and integralist alike, are in reality prophetic protests against this ecclesiastical, moralistic play-acting: the Sexual Revolution and its various phases, the waves of philosophical, political, and social feminism, the modern deconstruction of sex and gender norms by Millennials and Gen Z—each are, on the one hand, uniquely Western social phenomena but they are also, on the other, distinctively collective psychological reactions to the inconsistencies of Christendom’s social and moral vision, to the rank villainy of reifying ancient hierarchicalism in the name of Christ. The rise of left-leaning political and economic philosophies like, for example, Communism and democratic socialism are similar such reactions: against the capitalistic world created by late medieval, Renaissance, and early modern Christendom, the formation of a politics of solidarity that appropriates Christian values without Christian faith commitments (but sometimes inspired by them) is, in reality, a reaction against the failure of Christendom to bring about the eschatological reversal promised in the Kingdom of God. So too the various forms of counterculture across the 20th and 21st centuries: beatniks, hippies, revolutionaries, liberation theologians, workers’ advocates, and more reacted immediately against the limits and failures of a modern liberal order that was and still is marked by massive conflict and inequality, but through that foreground, also against the background of a Western Christendom that had paved the way for that nightmarish world. So too, as already mentioned, the rise of new religious movements and the new popularity of old ones in Western spaces. That is why Christ is so often reappropriated by such movements as their hero rather than the Church’s. Most Sufis, some Reform Jews, many modern Western extensions of Hinduism into Europe and the United States, indigenous practitioners, New Agers, psychonauts: many different kinds of people claim Jesus as a patron for their independent, alternative, non-conformist, or revolutionary religious and social visions, often over-against the Church’s gate-keeping of Jesus’s significance. Christians will have to face the truth that at least in some cases, these reappropriated uses are at least as authentic or even more authentic from some angles than those of their own tradition’s forbears. But they will also have to reckon more directly with the fact of modern society, its successes, failures, and futures, in a way that relatively few Christians have managed to consciously do (and the communions that have so managed are in current free fall, numerically). The world has been “modern,” whatever we want that word to mean, for a long time. The impulse either to reverse modernity, to go back to an earlier phase within modernity (which is usually the real content of aspirations to return to premodernity, which is often poorly understood by those who speak this way), to resist modernity, or to overcome modernity with a premodern postmodernity (these terms eventually stop sounding like they mean anything the more often they are used, I realize) are all symptoms of a basic delusion about just how modern the world really is now. It has been not decades but centuries since Christendom was an active force of political, social, and moral cohesion for mainstream Western society; its metamorphosis into the modern world order happened long ago now. It has been not decades but centuries since alternative philosophical and moral visions of the good life for human beings not explicitly based on Christian principles have been outlined by philosophers and popularized among ordinary people. In the United States, where many mainstream Christians continue to be prone to racism, misogyny, and homophobia, the reminders are somewhat more pressing: the Civil War ended in 1865, and the Civil Rights Movement was now sixty to seventy years ago; while its vision of a just social order has not yet come to pass here, whatever it might take to come about, a genuine pluralism will eventually win out in this country. Suffrage was extended to women in 1919, and the popular idea among conservatives (predominantly but not exclusively men) that women can honestly be forced or convinced to freely surrender freedoms they have progressively enjoyed for around a century now is both ludicrous and damnable. And the freedoms and identities empowered by the Sexual Revolution, at least in Western countries, are irreversible in the long-term, in part because they are not novelties of modernity but long facts of the diversity of the human race recently re-acknowledged by a society that used to have vocabulary to describe them. Whether Christians like these things or not—and statistically, to be clear, plenty do on the ground, as the majority of laypeople in Europe, Canada, the United States, but also Mexico, Central and South America, Australia, and in some parts of Asia tend to hold more progressive values about inclusion and equity, at least socially and politically if not ecclesiastically—the society of the modern world is not reducible back to an older hegemonic ghost of Christendom. Attempts to make it so by the seizure of power cannot long endure as political schemes and will backfire as evangelistic philosophies: Christians have to reckon with the fact that whatever their own practices and those of their communities, they now exist in a world of moral pluralism quite unlike that which they remember from their history, in which customary distinctions between, say, Christians, Jews, and Muslims or between Christians and Buddhists or even Christians and Greco-Roman pagans were in many cases more cosmetic than substantive. And the deep recollection modernity forces on Christianity of its origins and development might also spark here a moral renaissance, a reconsideration of which ethical principles espoused by Christianity historically are really essential unfolding of the logic of the gospel and which are contingent cultural inheritances now in the midst of change as all such social values are subject to. Again, Christians on the ground in many places are already doing that. Not everywhere, of course: Christians in Africa and some in parts of Asia join the resistant chorus of Christian conservatives in the United States to uphold “biblical morality,” especially around issues of sex, and hold that the export of the values of the Sexual Revolution to the Global South is just another wave of cultural imperialism. And, to be fair, it certainly is; I do not think that the values of the late modern West can be imposed from above on the rest of the world, nor that they should be infected elsewhere without consent, nor that they are necessarily ultimate. In fact the moral reckoning I envision is one that is predicated on the abandonment of the confusion between the eternal Good and the nomos or mos that only ever partially makes it tangible in the interrelated lives of human beings, which is at one and the same time the guarantor of some kind of cosmopolitan morality as well as the justification of moral diversity across spatial and temporal boundaries. In a nutshell, the primacy of a well-formed conscience, aporetically contemplating the Good, aware of customs, and devoted to the cultivation of virtue, ought to be vital, and such a conscience will always be aware of context and what is realistic within a context, as well as the ways that a theater of moral activity must be prophetically challenged for the sake of the Good. So, Globally Southern Christians are free, on the one hand, to set their own moral terms, and ought to be free from the imperialism of Western social movements; but on the other hand, the reckoning of modernity is coming for them as well, and is already here, forcing conversations in Churches in South America, Africa, and Asia, where Christianity is rapidly growing, about the roles of women, the dignity of LGBTQ people, and the real moral boundaries of sex, gender, marriage, and the like. What is often missing from the rhetoric emanating from these quarters around “biblical morality” is sufficient awareness that the currently dominant moral conservatism treated as “traditional” or “revealed” in the Bible is also a Western export, brought to the shores in question by European and American colonial powers and their churches such that, say, GAFCON’s moral outrage over LGBTQ affirmation is just reflective of Western values too, albeit earlier and more exclusivist ones. Again, my point is not that Christians everywhere have to adopt a common ethical package composed by recent generations of Europeans and Americans: it is that a reassessment of the moral standards of the gospel is going to be iconoclastic for many traditionalist positions on the human good when appropriate acts of contextual translation are made. For the first time in their history since its earliest days, Christians are again in a rhetorical position of having to reason through and argue their ethics rather than being able to just assume their universal assent. The reckoning modernity forces on Christianity is not so much that there are other moralities than those espoused by Ancient Jews and Christians but instead that the logic of the cross is in fact antithetical to the legislated moralism of Christendom and its afterlives. Given that what Christ reveals is that the Good is also Love, it is only Love, which the conscience alone and no system of virtue or law is qualified to discern, which can be a credible ground of Christian ethics in a modern world that is, understandably, disillusioned about Christian moral integrity.
Christianity’s way forward through modernity requires an honest reckoning with the writing on the wall for the present of Christianity, especially as it currently exists in Europe and North America. The previous five theses are, to some degree, statements of what Christians must do intellectually and ethically if they wish Christianity to thrive in modernity and beyond it. They are aspects of what the politics of resurrection look like today, specifically as predicated on the ethics of the cross: Christians must empty themselves of their presumptive, but no longer real, status, submit to the apocalyptic critique of modernity, and be willing to endure the crucifixion and death of Christianity as they have known it, all in imitation of Christ who emptied himself and submitted in humility to death (though in his case, Christians believe, the death of an unjust condemnation; Phil 2:6-11). Christians are called to do this with intention by the modern apocalypse, but whether they do it or not, it is their fate anyway. The writing is on the wall in Europe and the United States: Christianity is becoming smaller, less popular, and less credible to an increasingly non-Christian population. Some of the factors causing Christianity’s demographic decline along these lines are held in common with other traditional religions like Judaism and Islam; but some of them are unique to Christianity, whose decline in some instances benefits those sister faiths. True: Christianity is growing in the Global South, often in those communities most rhetorically resistant to modernization; but, crucially, the nations where they are growing are already modern too (however they feel about it), and so the same dilemmas and pitfalls that has faced Christianity in Europe and the Americas are going to prove relevant to Christians in Africa, Asia, and Oceania, too. Take, for example, the debates about women’s ordination that initially contributed to the formation of GAFCON, which is now internally split over exactly the question of whether women can hold major orders; consider struggles in Australian Catholicism and Anglicanism over acceptance and welcome of LGBTQ members; consider the ecumenical necessity of engaging in dialogue with other surrounding traditions even by Christians in other parts of the world who feel beleaguered with persecution (sometimes because they really are) and who rhetorically value the language of spiritual agonism against darkness (and for whom the demonic and the spiritual are real experiences); the list goes on. History is not teleological, so it is not my intention to suggest that it is absolutely inevitable that these same issues are going to force themselves on the consciousness of Christians in other parts of the world. But it is contingently inevitable: modernity is already in the Global South, modernization is rampant there, the same krisis is only temporarily delayed. Christianity’s outward form is in the midst of a death whether Christians consent to it or not; embracing that death with intention can also infuse it with meaning and martyric value.
Christianity’s way forward through modernity requires an honest reckoning with the failure of Christianity as an interpretation of the Way of Jesus. Coming to terms with the previous six theses can be summarized briefly in the following observation: on its voyage across the great sea of modernity Christianity has reached a craggy island on which it has undergone shipwreck (Lat: naufragium). The major elements of Christianity as a reconceptualization of the Way of Jesus have crashed against the historical, ecumenical, ecumenic, scientific, political, social, moral, and religious changes of modernity, leaving Christians in a position both of varying states of crisis response but also, more creatively, of their forbears in the second century who sought new language to express the meaning of the politics of resurrection in the aftermath of the Temple’s destruction and first formulated Christianismos. If the Way of Jesus is to have long term survival and continuity into the future, if the kerygma of the Kingdom of God and its justice is to flourish meaningfully for the long haul, then the outward form of Christianity will have to, as it has many times before, submit to the logic of the cross in order to speak once more with the rhetoric of resurrection in a compelling way. That does not mean a purely “modernist” or “postmodern” Christianity, but it does mean a Christianity that has submitted to the pedagogy of modernity and can represent a mature postcritical synthesis. Trying to simply rebuild the broken barque will not help us as we, like Odysseus, attempt once again to set sail across this great sea. Salvaging what wood of our fractured Argo is still good, which Dodonian oak boards still speak the sacred oracles, and letting go of that the rot of which ran us aground in the first place, our task is now to go about once more rebuilding the Thesean ship of Christianity as our vehicle on the Way, ensuring her sea-worthiness before christening her. And once we have done so, we may perhaps find that some new name more becoming of her.
I very much enjoyed this piece. One claim confused me, so I must be missing your meaning.
Referring to Jesus' "significance," you say its "summative importance for Jewish and even all of human history is not straightforwardly obvious...." But I would think that Jesus' life is among the most significant in all of human history, regardless of one's faith commitments, and that such is obvious indeed. Put differently, though I am not Muslim, I would not disagree that Muhammad's vast significance to human history is also quite obvious. Like I said, I may be missing your meaning. Thank you, again, for the essay!