Genealogies of Modernity — Christ after 100,000 Years of Human History

Our friends at the Beatrice Institute produced this exciting Podcast interview. Beatrice is one of our two sponsoring Institutes. Ryan McDermott, who directs the Genealogies of Modernity Project is also the Founder and Senior Research Fellow at the Beatrice Institute.

In this episode, Ryan McDermott interviews historian Brad Gregory, Henkels Family College Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. In his book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, Brad connects the Reformation in surprising and sometimes controversial ways to the making of the modern world, from secularization and the privatization of religion to the battle between faith and science.

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Brad argues that the naturalism proper to the natural sciences can’t provide a full understanding of human life; as temporal beings who live in a present that has been shaped by events of the past, history is a vital component to meaningfully understanding the world around us. In this packed conversation, he and Ryan discuss how historical knowledge impacts our understanding of such diverse fields as economics, theology, and eschatology.

Among the many questions they ask, some pose painful challenges to the modern Christian. What if Christianity in the Western world holds responsibility for such things as the climate crisis and the sin of slavery? If pre-history was characterized not by scarcity, but abundance, what justifies the avarice so characteristic of our times? Can we hope for goodness here on earth, or is the virtue of hope only fulfilled in heaven?

Current religious theory seeks to explain religious experience in nonreligious, naturalist terms; religious experience is not allowed to be “real”
Societal: the overarching shape and character of a society’s institutions, ethos, etc; social: personal interactions and relationships
Many students arrive at college without the background knowledge needed to study the humanities
In order to understand history, students should have a developed sense of chronology
“We are living in a world that is literally impossible to understand in meaningful ways if we don't understand that we're temporal beings [who] exist in time, and that the course of the past has shaped the present”
Naturalism is proper to the natural sciences, but not to metaphysics; they are categorically different things
Because the natural sciences are powerful and visible, the social sciences want to be like them, and the humanities get pulled along in that wake
A Christian metaphysics of economics must prioritize needs over wants, rather than grouping both under “demand”
Economists often define human nature by modern, consumerist standards that would have been meaningless for much of history
Dorothy Day: “That kind of self-sacrificial service on behalf of others: that to me is the heart of what it's about, and it's also the core of what we see virtually non-existent among modern Christians”
Historically and in the present day, Christians use the fallenness of the world as an excuse for accepting and even collaborating with sins such as slavery
Recent research has shown that the Holocene epoch was one of abundance, not scarcity
Sustainability does not consist of living with as little as possible, but realizing “that you need much less than you think you do in order to live a fulfilling human life”
It may be impossible to undo the harmful progress we have made during the Anthropocene epoch
Historically, the predominant Christian understanding of hope was eschatological, not tied to material progress
Since Western civilization, which is predominantly Christian, has shaped the global culture, then Christians are part of the story of the climate crisis
Theologians should try to understand God in relation to all things, including cosmology, when and how humans came into existence, etc