Modern Theology

A Critical Introduction

Rachel Muers, Mike Higton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781136250927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

This book offers a fresh and up-to-date introduction to modern Christian theology. The 'long nineteenth century' saw enormous transformations of theology, and of thought about religion, that shaped the way both Christianity and 'religion' are understood today. Muers and Higton provide a lucid guide to the development of theology since 1789, giving students a critical understanding of their own 'modern' assumptions, of the origins of the debates and the fields of study in which they are involved, and of major modern thinkers.

Modern Theology:

• introduces the context and work of a selection of major nineteenth-century thinkers who decisively affected the shape of modern theology
• presents key debates and issues that have their roots in the nineteenth century but are also central to the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century theology
• includes exercises and study materials that explicitly focus on the development of core academic skills.

This valuable resource also contains a glossary, timeline, annotated bibliographies and illustrations.

1 Introduction

What is modernity?

AIMS

By the end of this chapter, we hope that you will:

• understand what is meant by the term ‘modern’ in the context of this textbook
• know about some of the controversies around the definition and assessment of ‘modernity’
• know some of the major issues that have engaged theological thought in the modern period, and be better prepared to reflect on them in relation to specific thinkers and movements.

Studying modernity: about this book

The word ‘modern’ has specific meanings in academic and theological contexts, as we shall see in this chapter, but these meanings are not completely separate from its general use. When we study modernity, it is important to examine our background assumptions about what it means to be modern. Before you begin this chapter, pause to jot down:

• what words and images come to mind when you read the phrases: ‘modern life’; ‘the modern Church’; ‘modern art’; ‘modern people’
• any synonyms you can think of for the word ‘modern’
• any antonyms (opposites) you can think of for the word ‘modern’.

Keep these notes and refer back to them as you go through the chapter. How do the ideas you automatically associate with being ‘modern’ relate to the account of modernity we are giving here?

Studying religious thought often involves learning to understand contexts and beliefs that are very different from our own. Students of religion have to learn the skill of intellectual empathy – thinking from inside someone else’s head, understanding the world from the point of view of someone whose assumptions and ways of reasoning are not one’s own. For most people reading this textbook, however, the study of ‘modern theology’ is not just an exercise in seeing things from someone else’s point of view. It is an exercise in seeing how our own ‘point of view’ – our own set of assumptions and ways of thinking – came to be as it is. We study modernity, then, in order to understand better why certain questions about theology bother us so much today, while others seem irrelevant; why some kinds of argument are accepted and others are not; why ‘theology’ and ‘religion’ are defined in certain ways and given certain roles, and so forth.

This critical introduction to modern theology focuses on how modern theological ideas arose, and were given the formulations that continue to influence and shape thinking today. When we use ‘modern’ in our title we do not just mean ‘contemporary’ but we do hope to give you some ways of being critical about contemporary theology and contemporary thought about religion, through an introduction to their history and context.

What does it mean to be ‘critical’ and why is this a critical introduction? Being critical is not the same as being negative or identifying problems; this work is not straightforwardly ‘critical’ of modernity in that sense. In an academic context, to be critical is to make reasoned and argued judgements about something. This book is ‘critical’ because we are presenting you with our judgements about the texts, thinkers and movements we describe. We are not claiming simply to ‘tell you all the facts and let you make up your own mind’; we do not think that is possible. We have made judgements about what is important and what is unimportant; we have made judgements about the connections between different texts and thinkers; we have made judgements about various aspects of the ‘big story’ of modernity. We have tried to make sure that our key judgements are pointed out and justified in the text.

The presence of judgement – the fact that this is a ‘critical introduction’ – need not, in itself, mean that our account is biased (although of course it is bound to be biased, and you should use your own critical abilities to seek out and identify our biases). It also need not mean that our account is controversial – although on some points it might be.

What is modernity?

What are we talking about when we say ‘modernity’? We want to suggest three possible ways of answering this question.

The most obvious way is to name, firstly, a specific historical period and then to start a debate about exactly when modernity begins. You will find several different starting dates given for the modern period. Different academic disciplines have different conventions – although within any given discipline there will also be debates about when modernity begins.

Thus, for example, historians often date modernity from the mid-fifteenth century, or even earlier; ‘early modern’ history covers the beginning of this period. One event that is often taken to mark the beginning of the modern period is the fall of Constantinople in 1453. In English history, the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487) have sometimes been regarded as marking the transition from medieval to modern. A slightly different view would place the beginning of modernity in Europe at the Reformation and the Wars of Religion (thus, in the second half of the sixteenth century). By contrast, in music, literature and art, the label ‘modern’ is usually associated with the Modernist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Again, sociological accounts of modernity would usually associate the ‘modernisation’ of Britain (for example) with the Industrial Revolution of the early nineteenth century.

In this book, we focus our account of modernity on a period that both social historians and historians of ideas generally agree is very important for modernity. Our focal period in the first part of the book is the so-called ‘long nineteenth century’ – which begins at or around the time of the American and French Revolutions (1774 and 1789) and ends with the First World War (1914–1918). In the second part of the book, we look at twentieth- and early twenty-first-century thought in the light of what happened in the long nineteenth century. Of course, as we will explore in the next chapter, this ‘modern’ period needs to be understood in the light of what went before it.

Two questions arise from what we have just said. First, does modernity have an end as well as a beginning – or are we still in modernity? The idea of postmodernity, and of the end of modernity, will be discussed at several points in this book. For most purposes, however, we think it is important to see modernity as open-ended. Even if some or all of us do not share all the characteristically modern concerns described in this book, early-twenty-first-century readers have so much in common with the ‘moderns’ that it is not particularly helpful to talk about modernity as something in the past.

Second, and more importantly, how are these dates chosen? Asking that question makes us realise that ‘modernity’ cannot be just the label for a period of time (like ‘last year’ or ‘my grandmother’s lifetime’). The only reason it is possible to argue about when ‘modernity’ begins is that ‘modernity’ means something more than a set of dates.

This brings us to our next suggestion for defining modernity; modernity is a set of social phenomena. ‘Modernity’ could designate ways of life, and ways of thinking about life, that only became possible or widespread at a certain time in history. Some candidates for the distinguishing features of ‘modernity’ might be: industrialisation and urbanisation; the development of (various forms of) democracy and the rise of nation-states; the development of science (as a set of practices, institutions and ways of thinking about knowledge); and the emergence of religious pluralism and the idea of a ‘secular’ public sphere.

Much more could be said about all of these phenomena. Think, for example, about the complex effects of modern ways of producing goods, and modern uses of land – the development of factories and of industrial cities. The movement from the villages to the cities meant a whole set of different ways of relating: to other people, to the natural environment, to people’s own work (and to fellow workers and machines), to food and goods and money, to time, to churches and religious communities and so forth.

When we are studying theological and philosophical texts, these social phenomena sometimes come into view directly, because the authors discuss them. Sometimes, however, they come into view more indirectly. The attitudes and assumptions that are reflected in modern society are also reflected in modern thought. The questions that are being worked out theoretically in the texts we read are often those that are being worked out practically in the society of the time. So we may find it helpful to think of modernity, thirdly, as a set of attitudes or ideas – remembering always that these attitudes and ideas never float free from particular social and historical circumstances.

There is an interesting, ongoing – and distinctively modern – question about the relationship between the development of ideas, on the one hand, and the economic and political development of society, on the other. (See the discussions of ‘idealism’ and of Marx in Chapter 5 for one set of modern debates on the subject.) In this book, we aim to show that these developments are related in some way, without settling on one answer to the question of how they are related.

In the next section of this chapter, we discuss at more length some of the key ideas that animate religious thought in modernity. Probably the most widely recognised, and the broadest, characteristic of modern thought is a focus on the human being and the human subject. It is the rise of humanism, from as early as the twelfth century, which leads some scholars to put the origins of modernity much further back in history than we do here. Modern people are interested in understanding what it is to be human; they are interested in exploring, theoretically and practically, what human beings are capable of; and they are interested in questions about who we are, what we can know, what we can do, what we can be. These are the questions that constitute the modern turn to the subject.

That is ‘subject’ as in the grammatical subject of a verb. I write a book about modern theology, you try to understand it, she decides not to bother. It is a characteristically modern attitude, reflective of the ‘turn to the subject’, to be interested in the I, the you and the she in that sentence. Who am I to think I can tell you something about modern theology? How do you understand it? And should she decide not to bother?

It is not an accident, incidentally, that we have only used singular subjects of sentences in this example (no we or they). Individualism is another attitude frequently cited as a characteristic of modernity. The ‘subject’ to whom modern questioning turns is typically singular.

Another distinctively ‘modern’ attitude, which is equally important for our discussion of theology and religious thought, comes to light if we think about the opposites of ‘modern’ (see the exercise at the beginning of this chapter). Calling something ‘modern’ tends to be a way of contrasting it with what went before, and/or with what is stable, established or unchanging – modern as opposed to ancient or outdated; modern as opposed to traditional or classic. Modernity, then, is preoccupied with change. To be able to talk about ‘modernity’ we need to have the assumption that things can change – that the basic conditions of human life, thought and activity are not always the same. If we combine this with the modern emphasis on ‘what human beings can do’, we can see the basis for a modern interest, not just in the fact that ‘things change’ but in the fact that human beings can change things for themselves.

Note that once we have said this, we have already set up a conflict between ‘modern’ thought, on the one hand, and tradition – recognising texts, ideas and practices from the past as having authority in relation to present ways of life – on the other. Note also that one of the reasons it is important to study modern thought is the modern belief, often acted out in modern history, that human thought, combined with human action, can change things. In modernity, ideas matter.

In this book, we will use many ‘isms’ in our discussion of modern thought, trying to show how particular texts and thinkers fit into larger movements of thought, that in turn relate to larger political and social movements. We will talk, for example, about nationalism, feminism, idealism, socialism, pluralism, deism, creationism, liberalism … Not all of our ‘isms’ refer only to modernity, but it is still true that modernity is the great age of ‘isms’ – the age when ‘big ideas’ about humanity and the world are thought to be worth naming, identifying yourself with, organising around and fighting for – literally as well as metaphorically. Some would argue that this age of ‘isms’ is now over, for better or worse, that the contemporary world is deeply mistrustful of these ‘big ideas’ and the movements they name. It could certainly be argued that, in public discourse (about politics, economics, ‘ethics’, religion), ‘isms’ are more often used to label one’s opponents than to label oneself. See Chapter 17 for further discussion of this (supposed) change.

One of the reasons we begin our discussion of modernity with the American and French Revolutions is that these represent the first attempts to change, comprehensively and fundamentally, the shape of human life and society according to ideas that people can understand and formulate. Particularly in the case of the French Revolution, we can see a new vision of human life set in sharp and violent confrontation with tradition. As we will see in Chapters 3 and 5, this posed an enormous and distinctive challenge for religious and philosophical thought.

Thinking about revolutions brings us to a further issue. Once we start to talk about fundamental changes in the conditions of human life, we are unlikely to be talking about something that can be viewed dispassionately. Are these changes for the better or changes for the worse? Is it a good thing to be modern? ‘Modern’ is not simply a description, it is an evaluation, and one that carries different connotations ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: what is modernity?
• 2. Historical introduction: approaching the revolution
• Section A: Key Thinkers
• Section B: Key Themes
• Glossary
• Timeline
• Index