The (Actually Kind of Weird) Schism of Our Era
Christianity and modernity -- metaphysics and modernity, really -- have never been sufficiently reconciled. Why not?
Note: A couple of people have kindly supported my writing by becoming paid subscribers to this Substack. (I wouldn’t expect anyone to do this, but you’re welcome to, if you want.) And recently it occurred to me that that constitutes some amount of a bond to actually write things with some regularity — which is a very supportive spur, and one that I’m grateful for.
One of the things that’s been most striking to me recently is the fact that the Christian tradition and modernity have simply never been reconciled. In some ways, this is so obvious that it might be unsurprising to think about it, but when you really dig into it, I think it’s striking how weird this is, and in some ways how calamitous.
Perhaps not unlike you, I grew up believing that I lived in the wake of a slow dawning of intellectual light, which began in, say, the sixteenth century. Early Enlightenment thinkers like Bacon, Descartes, and Locke started testing reality with refreshed approaches to reason and relatively new methods of empiricism, and the eventual result was a pervasive story about the world that was more grounded, more materially focused, and less haunted with illusions. By the 1970s these principles were entirely bedrock to the culture I grew up in. Gradually existentialist thinking — successive to, say, Kierkegaard and Kant —began to creep into the mainstream, too. So if you’re younger than me, you might have grown up within an ambient understanding that no perspective is totally objective and healthy social engagement involves a willingness to qualify one’s convictions a little bit (and then, sometimes, to articulate new social or philosophical orthodoxies into the frowzy, agnostic gaps, clutch these stubbornly, and crucify dissenters — but I digress).
Obviously, there are things in the Bible that don’t jibe with a modernist consensus about how the world works — including the resurrection story at the heart of Christianity. And it’s no secret that Christianity struggled to keep pace. Many people notice the fundamentalist reaction in particular, telegraphed through things like Lyman Stewart’s booklets, The Fundamentals, published from 1910 to 1915 or, like, Princeton Divinity Professor J. Greshem Machen’s railing against any form of modernist liberalism. (You may not know these events, but you’re probably familiar with later expressions of the fundamentalism that followed in their wake.)
What you may or may not know, though, is that there are also some theologians who tried harder to bridge a Judeo-Christian theological tradition with a modern philosophical one: folks like Alfred North Whitehead, who conceived of God as the sensing, feeling, changeable ground of reality; or Rudolph Bultmann, who argued for a demythologized vision of Christ; or Paul Tillich, who articulated a sophisticated synthesis of tradition and existentialism. (I’m reading Tillich now, and he’s super thoughtful, but I hesitate to summarize, feeling that, while climbing the mountain, I have no way to summarily describe it.)
What’s most striking to me, though, is that no matter how sophisticated 20th century Christian theologians have gotten in their modernist thinking, no one seems to me to really have gotten there. I’ve yet to read any theologian who I really feel is saying, “Yep, I hear all of your questions. I had them, too. And here’s how I answered them,” in a way that scratches my itches. (Note: If you think it’s C. S. Lewis, trust me, it’s not.) Every one of the theologians that I read loses me at some point — either in their willingness to treat something of the Christian kerygma as more solid than I think it should be treated (as Tillich does already), or in their mystical assertions of a perspective that I just can’t jibe with my own perceptions of reality in some fundamental way (as Whitehead loses me, when he asserts that God’s ultimate being is fundamentally malleable and has no unchanging aspect).
I’m left with the impression that just nobody really gets at a restful, full truth. A thoughtful person who embraces the insights of modernity while also embracing a theistic vision of the world — and, especially, while resonating with the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Jesus story — just doesn’t have a systematic theology to go to. Christian theologians don’t get there. Modernist and post-modernist philosophers don’t get there — largely because they tend to ignore mysticism altogether. And other mystical traditions don’t get there, in my opinion, because to my sense, anyhow, they don’t sketch out the fine contours of Christianity that have drawn me to a deep dive with the faith.
To be clear: I’m not saying that Christianity should be the supreme religion. I’m saying that whatever in Christianity is enduringly true, it hasn’t been articulated in a way that can jibe with the best modernist and post-modernist thinking, and no other tradition fully represents the most enduring features of Christianity, either. I’m also saying that metaphysics and modernity have not jibed altogether. And, again, I think it’s worth noticing how weird that actually is.
We’re deeply accustomed to a separation between the spiritual and the day-to-day. Partly, this is the result of socio-political necessities. A modern free society is a pluralistic culture — rightly so, I’d say — and in the search for common ground, pluralism pressures us toward secularism. Also, we separate church and state — rightly so, I’d say — and this puts further barriers between spiritual life and common life.
But also, we live at peace with an even stranger dynamic. These separations are not only socio-politically necessary, they result from unresolved philosophical issues: The prevailing metaphysical vein of the Western world, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the prevailing intellectual tradition of the Western world just fundamentally don’t jibe. And I think that’s actually really weird.
There will be atheists or maybe some atheistically-leaning agnostics who might read this and say, “Well, of course they don’t jibe. That’s because all those sky-dad stories are a bunch of hooey.” I can understand this perspective, I think, but it should be obvious that this post just isn’t for that camp. My apologies.
For anyone with some amount of a theistic bent, though, it’s worth noticing the weirdness. One way to do this is to notice the weirdness of the prevailing theological camps
Team Fundamentalist: The Bible is the infallible, inerrant Word of God. Get in that container, and God will sort out the rest. (Some folks on this team expect God to smite a lot of Americans — probably with Trump’s second presidency, which will probably last for the rest of his life. Also, some folks on this team quite notably don’t feel this way.)
Team Modernist: Whatever you think of theology, modernism is the way to understand things. Stick with the philosophers, sniff at the theologians. Try not to worry about the fact that life feels vaguely haunted by the eventual heat-death of the universe. Maybe take an antidepressant.
Team Social Gospel: Seek to live Jesus’ social example. Be mild and sweet. Take up causes. When exerting yourself in the world, be bright-eyed and strong. Be, in many ways, uncontroversially good. Pray, definitely pray. But more or less ignore the theological conundrums altogether.
Team Wait-and-See: Be nice. Go to church. Go to work. Go out with friends. Read some books. Go to some group meetings. Speak in those groups, maybe, sometimes. Try to find a good person to marry. Have kids. Get a better job (‘cause now you have kids). Etc.
Team Actually-Kind-Of-Bullshitting: Become clergy in a religious tradition, or some other form of prominent figurehead. Recognize the questions and perhaps even the fact that you don’t have answers to them. When asked, be cagey, charming, and rhetorically evasive. Eventually they’ll stop asking, and they’ll probably think you said something. Maybe you will think so, too.
Team Out-of-the-Box: Adopt another spiritual approach. Internalize its logic. Blithely and superficially deconstruct Jesus in terms of your new tradition. Move on.
To be fair, not everybody falls in these camps. There are lots of sincere, thoughtful seekers, and there are lots of thoughtful sincere religious leaders. But still, do you see what I see? None of these camps is sufficient. Don’t you find that strange?
Here’s another way to go at it. We think of the Enlightenment as an awakening from illusions. But we don’t always think carefully about what life would have been like before. I don’t feel like I’ve really grokked this myself, so I tread carefully — but consider this: In the second half of the thirteenth century, when Thomas Aquinas was working on his Summa Theologica, he was trying to articulate a perspective on reality that comfortably relied both on reasoned proofs and Biblical exegesis. It sounds silly rely on the Bible so easily today, but it’s worth noting that for Aquinas, it was possible to have a cutting-edge philosophical discussion and a cutting-edge theological discussion at the same time, with little or no essential friction between the two. I don’t mean that we should admire Aquinas’ now-dubious epistemology. I’m saying that it’s worth noticing that the most brilliant thinkers for over a millennia — Christian or otherwise — could feel relatively assured that they were not trying to reconcile theology with philosophy; they were just trying to understand reality. Philosophy was invariably metaphysical, in ways that it just isn’t now.
Or perhaps you could think about the famously God-saturated world of ancient Israel, as described in 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, or 1 and 2 Chronicles. Obviously, some of that world is best left behind. But I think it’s possible to admire the spirit of invocation in those days. Those books were written by people and about people who had some distinct sense that they knew something about the divinity that they were relating to.
The overwhelming majority of people in the United States, and on Earth, believe in some form of a higher power. But our collective, institutional connections to this higher power are in peculiar shape for such an important reality — as is our individual practice. Do the revelations of empiricism and existentialism really mean that we can’t talk to God anymore? Either individually or collectively? Does it really mean that there is no such thing as a prophet?
As it is, there are simply no large-scale metaphysical institutions in the West that jibe fully with modernity. But why not? And why shouldn’t Christianity and modernity be friends in particular? It’s just not the case that these are two buddies who were close close grade school that should admit they’ve grown apart, and just break up. From my point of view, each one is manifestly incomplete without the other.
Briefly, I think it is worth noting the the failure to better integrate them has indeed been calamitous. When modernism nudged people out of the churches, for instance, nothing took the place to stitch the moral and social fabric of the country together. And now when, for instance, as the easiest example, a former president who fomented an insurrection is the defendant in four major criminal cases, and a dangerously large swath of the electorate doesn’t seem to care at all, we can see that that that moral and social fabric is plainly coming apart. Meanwhile, when religious conservatives talk about people needing to get back to church as a panacea to all the culture’s ills, I feel like their idea is simplistic and incorrect. But also, I do feel like they’re intuitively sensing a genuine metaphysical revival that needs to happen in the core of the culture.
I am not arguing from something regressive. I’m really not. The point is not that we should forcibly become a Christian nation again. At all. And the point isn’t that we should try to ratify some new universalist theocracy — and then suppose that that means everyone can live in public with a full integration of their spiritual side and their social, societal side.
The point is more to notice that our access to the spiritual is strikingly garbled — and that it matters. And also, specifically, to notice if you resonate with Christianity, if you want to integrate your modernist thinking with your Christian theology — and to get some really well-formed guidance in doing this — there really isn’t anywhere to go. Much of Christian theology still gets elbowed by what is reasonable in the rest of modern and post-modern philosophy, while modern and post-modern philosophy loses the magic of the a loving God, and a joyful, liberating Gospel.
On a cultural level revolution we seek is indeed metaphysical, I believe. And while the revolution definitely doesn’t have to be Christian, it is worth noting that the Christian infrastructure is all over the place — threading the culture, deeply, not yet sealing the major gaps.
Perhaps it could.
As I’ve said before, it seems to me that the approach to Christianity can be made — and should be made — but involves a well-structured inquiry into eight topics:
God
Jesus
Holy Spirit
sin
salvation (sanctification)
ethics
church (sangha)
Kingdom and/or eschatology and/or directionality in life
I feel like maybe I’ve been treading over this ground again and again. If so, my apologies. Going forward, I’d like to try to articulate some of the enduring things that can be said about several of these topics. Perhaps more and more over the summer. I have some ideas.