Abstract
In this final chapter, I summarise the evidence and arguments assembled already in this study in support of the theses outlined in Chapter 1: (1) The seventeenth and eighteenth century provide compelling prototypes for theological discourse centring on Jesus which persist in modern thought and culture, with the Gospels capable of furnishing both authoritarian and more liberal visions of Enlightenment. (2) The ‘religious Enlightenment’ is not simply faith’s uneasy accommodation to modernity: in a Christian context, it grows out of the resources of scholastic and post-Reformation theology, where forms of theological-moral realism are often central to the relevant discourses. (3) Different metaphysical commitments (e.g. monist or dualist) can and have been supported by and integrated with both authoritarian and more liberal visions of Enlightenment. (4) Religious heresy is a characteristic tendency of the Enlightenment and has contributed to the formation of modern thought and culture. In addition to substantiating these theses, I demonstrate the continued cultural and intellectual relevance of the kind of theological and philosophical currents which took recognisable shape in early modernity. Some of this is evident in biblically infused commentary on contemporary issues (e.g. defending or attacking the presidency of Donald J. Trump, discourse on Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement). But traces of the philosophical legacy are detectable in twentieth-century discourse seemingly shorn of religious foundations (e.g. Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault’s debate on human nature, power, and justice). The story of (religious) Enlightenment presented for consideration in this book is advanced as one of many traditions which jostled for influence in this formative age of intellectual and cultural pluralism.
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- 1.
Relevant primary source material is collected in Clayborne Carson , et al. (eds.), The Papers of Marin Luther King, Jr. (7 vols.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992–2014. For secondary literature see Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King , Jr. and the Word that Moved America, New York: Oxford University Press, 1995; Russel Moldavan, Martin Luther King, Jr.: An Oral History of His Religious Witness and Life, Lanham, MD: International Scholars, 1999; and David L. Chapell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
- 2.
See the Rutgers based gender and African studies scholar Brittney Cooper ’s ‘Jesus of the Resistance: Black Lives Matter Symposium’, The Christian Century, 02 May 2019: http://www.wckkkk.org/index.html. This group’s homepage invokes Jesus specifically and features the following quote: ‘Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when cometh in in [sic] the glory of his Father with the holy angels…Jesus Christ, Mark 8:38’. Though greatly diminished, in a time of increased racial tension in the USA one cannot overlook the continuing racial appropriations of Jesus and the Bible by white power movements on the fringes of American nationalistic politics : see the statement of religious identity by the Texas based White Camelia Knights of the Ku Klux Klan , accessed 7 September 2018: http://www.wckkkk.org/identity.html. The racialisation of Jesus in Europe developed during the nineteenth century, and in more intellectual climates than contemporary white supremacy movements, reaching its nadir in twentieth-century Germany : see Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
- 3.
See Tara Isabelle Burton, ‘Evangelical Jerry Falwell Jr. Defends Trump: Jesus “Never Told Caesar How to Run Rome”’, Vox, 26 January 2018, accessed 14 August 2018: https://www.vox.com/2018/1/26/16936010/evangelicals-jerry-falwell-trump-caesar-rome. Others use Romans 13 to defend Trump (also used by Hobbes ); needless to say, there is resistance to this from Christians and non-Christians alike: see Carol Kuruvilla, ‘Evangelicals Keep Misusing the Same Bible Verses to Give Trump a Pass’, The Huffington Post, 20 June 2018, accessed 17 August 2018: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/evangelicals-keep-misusing-the-same-bible-verses-to-give-trump-a-pass_us_5b297b7fe4b0a4dc9921e6e8. On the support for Trump among white Evangelical voters, see Gregory A. Smith and Jessica Martínez, ‘How the Faithful Voted: A Preliminary 2016 Analysis’, Pew Research Centre, 9 November 2016, accessed 14 August 2018: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis/. For a reflection on the reception of Trump in American Christian culture, with reference to the Pew date, see Cindy Jung, ‘The Trump Exception: Christian Morals and the Presidency’, Harvard International Review (vol. 37.4), 2016, pp. 7–9.
- 4.
See Cathleen Falsani ’s interview of the then Senator Barack Obama , ‘Obama on Faith : The Exclusive Interview’, Patheos, 27 March 2004, accessed 16 August 2018: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thedudeabides/obama-on-faith-the-exclusive-interview/; and his confessional statements during his presidency, in particular the ‘Remarks by President and Vice President at Easter Prayer Breakfast’, The White House: President Barack Obama , 5 April 2013, accessed 16 August 2018: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/05/remarks-president-and-vice-president-easter-prayer-breakfast; and ‘Remarks by the President and Vice President at Easter Prayer Breakfast’, ibid., 30 March 2016, accessed 16 August 2018: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/04/05/remarks-president-and-vice-president-easter-prayer-breakfast. For a recent collection of essays on how politicians from Margaret Thatcher to Donald Trump have negotiated matters of Christian faith and public office, see Nick Spencer (ed.), The Mighty and the Almighty: How Political Leaders Do God , London: Biteback Publishing, 2017.
- 5.
For a range of Christian conceptions of Jesus as an icon of liberation, see Pelikan , Jesus, chap. 17.
- 6.
Hugo Chávez , quoted by Rory Carroll, ‘Welcome to Chávez-land’, The Guardian, 26 January 2007, accessed, 18 August 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/jan/26/guardianweekly.guardianweekly12; and by Ian James, ‘Chávez Touts Socialism at Inauguration’, The Washington Post, 10 January 2007, accessed 16 August 2018: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/10/AR2007011002300.html??noredirect=on.
- 7.
Chávez , quoted by Ezequiel Minaya, ‘Chavez Credit Castro, Jesus for Recovery’, The Wall Street Journal, 22 August 2009, accessed 16 August 2018: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903461304576524723086332838.html; on the Chávez, Castro , Jesus connection, See Hugh O’Shaughnessy, ‘Hugo Chávez Keeps the Faith ’, The Guardian, 6 July 2007, accessed 16 August 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/jul/06/chavez-faith-venezuelan-president.
- 8.
See ibid.
- 9.
See Leo Tolstoy , A Confession and Other Religious Writings, Jane Kentis (trans.), London: Penguin, 1987; and Robert Ellsberg, All the Way to Heaven : The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2010.
- 10.
See Robert Ellsberg (ed.), Gandhi on Christianity , Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991; and Gandhi, quoted in Terrence R. Rynne, Gandhi and Jesus: The Saving Power of Non Violence, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008; and see n.1 above.
- 11.
See Camilo Torres , ‘Love and Revolution ’, in Radical Christian Writings, pp. 236–238.
- 12.
See the report and video ‘Once Scrutinized by the Holy See, Founder of Liberation Theology Visits the Vatican’, Rome Reports, 12 May 2018, accessed 14 August 2018: https://www.romereports.com/en/2015/05/12/once-scrutinized-by-the-holy-see-founder-of-liberation-theology-visits-vatican/.
- 13.
See Lilla , Still Born God , where this is the focus of pt. 1, chap. 2. Where Lilla’s analysis does have something in common with my own is in his recognition of the early modern turn to the ‘Ethical God’ (the focus of pt. ii, chap. 2).
- 14.
Lilla is thinking specifically of Hobbes and his social contract theory (see ibid, chap. 2), but this was by no means the first political edifice to be based largely on human interests, with precursors in ancient Greek and Roman thought, and the resources for such a politics were present in pt. ii of Aquinas’s ST, and in De Regno.
- 15.
See Moore , Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament, Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006. This form of reading has paid particular attention to the Gospel of Mark : see Hans Leander, Discourses of Empire: The Gospel of Mark from a Postcolonial Perspective, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013.
- 16.
See Richard Horsley, Hearing the Whole Story: The Politics of Plot in Mark’s Gospel, London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.
- 17.
See T. B. Liew, ‘Tyranny, Boundary, and Might: Colonial Mimicry in Mark’s Gospel’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament (vol. 73), 1999, pp. 7–31.
- 18.
These approaches are consistent with three of the four philosophical models for engagement with Jesus in Luke Timothy Johnson , ‘The Jesus of the Gospels and Philosophy’, in Paul K. Moser (ed.), Jesus and Philosophy: New Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 63–83.
- 19.
David A. Bell , ‘Where Do We Come From?’ (review of Israel, Democratic ), The New Republic, 8 January, 2012, accessed 17 October 2018: https://newrepublic.com/article/100556/spinoza-kant-enlightenment-ideas.
- 20.
See Bulman, ‘The Enlightenment and the Culture Wars’, in God in the Enlightenment, pp. 1–75.
- 21.
See Michael Burleigh, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: A History of Now (rev. edn.) London: Macmillan, 2018, chaps. 4 and 6; Rita Chin, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017; Frank Furedi , Popularism and the European Culture Wars, London: Routledge 2017; Camelia Cmecu , ‘A Narrative Approach to Europe’s Identity Crisis’, The European Legacy: Towards New Paradigms, 23 February 2013, pp. 416–429; Virginie Guiraudon et al (eds.), Europe’s Prolonged Crisis: The Making and Unmaking of a Political Union, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; and George Weigel , ‘Europe’s Two Culture Wars’, Commentary, 1 May 2006, accessed 19 August 2018: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/europes-two-culture-wars/.
- 22.
For instance Locke ’s intolerance towards Roman Catholics and atheists (see my discussion in chap. 6), or Hume’s infamous dogmatic racism in ‘Of National Characters’, Essays, Moral , Political and Literary [1748], Eugene F. Miller (ed.), Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987, pp. 629–630. For a thoroughgoing critique of some of the least edifying features of the liberal tradition associated with the Enlightenment (or, more often than not, the shocking and illiberal things famous ‘liberal’ thinkers have said and done, including Locke and Hume), see Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter History [Controstoria del liberalismo, 2005], Gregory Elliott (trans.), London: Verso, 2011. On the more esoteric supernatural dimension of Enlightenment thought, see Paul Kléber Monod , Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
- 23.
See Horkheimer and Adorno , Dialectic; Gray , Apocalyptic Religion; and Losurdo, Counter History.
- 24.
See Roy Scott Spurlock , Cromwell in Scotland: Conquest and Religion , 1650–1660, Edinburgh: John Donald, 2007; Hill , English Bible ; and Jetze Touber, Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic , 1660–1710, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
- 25.
See Israel, Radical, Contested, Democratic, and Revolutionary Ideas, where they are all well documented; and most recently, Jacob’s The Secular Enlightenment, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
- 26.
See Schweitzer , Quest: FCE, pp. 482–483.
- 27.
See my discussion in chap. 4 of the current study.
- 28.
See Pinker, Enlightenment Now, chap. 9.
- 29.
See Rajchman (ed.), Chomsky and Foucault.
- 30.
See Foucault, ibid., pp. 51, 54–55.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 32.
Ibid, pp. 54–55.
- 33.
Chomsky , ibid., p. 55.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 46.
- 35.
See Hobbes, Leviathan; a search can be carried out at Project Guttenberg , accessed 16 August 2018: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm.. By contrast, ‘justice’ is referred to 185 times, and ‘good’ 299 (not all of the latter are used in a moral sense).
- 36.
This extends beyond Chomsky’s sympathy with an innate sense of justice, to an infinity with their rationalist philosophical psychology : see Chomsky , The Ideas of Chomsky, interviewed by Bryan Magee , BBC One, 1978, accessed 16 August 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LqUA7W9wfg&t=2335s.
- 37.
See Chomsky , Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (3rd edn.), James McGilvray (intro.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 60, 100, 104–105, 129, 142, 144–146.
- 38.
For Chomsky on liberation theology and activism in Latin America see his interview by Nicholas Haggerty, ‘Oppression Is Not a Law of Nature ’, Commonweal, 9 April 2015, accessed 26 March 2018: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/interview-noam-chomsky. On the Gospels as a ‘radically pacifist collection of documents’, see his interview by Amina Chaudary, ‘On Religion and Politics’, Islamica Magazine (issue 19), April–May 2007, accessed 26 March 2018: https://chomsky.info/200704__/.
- 39.
See C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds.), ‘August 1650: An Act Against Several Atheistical, Blasphemous and Execrable Opinions , Derogatory to the Honor of God, and Destructive to Humane Society’, in Acts and Ordinance of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1911, pp. 409–412.
- 40.
Although it was shorn of much of its Aristotelian heritage.
- 41.
See Wright for a sophisticated historical defence of Christianity’s central miraculous claim in Resurrection; for philosophically sophisticated approaches to the truth of Christianity considered in propositional terms, see Craig, Knowing the Truth About the Resurrection, Ann Arbor: Servant, 1988; Reasonable Faith (3rd. edn.), Wheaton: Crossway, 2008; and the archive of apologetic materials on Reasonable Faith: With William Lane Craig , accessed 18 August 2018: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/. Perhaps the most ambitious philosophical project of this kind in recent decades is to be found in the work of Richard Swinburne , The Christian God , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; The Resurrection of God Incarnate, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; and Was Jesus God? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Swinburne makes particular use of the ideas of a lesser known figure of the Enlightenment: the probability theory of the Rev. Thomas Bayes (1701–1761). The same theory was used in the recent crowd funded publications of a minor atheist star of the world-wide-web: see Richard Carrier , Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, New York: Prometheus Books, 2012; and On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, Sheffield: Phoenix Press, 2014. The fact that the same theory has been deployed to demonstrate that the historical Jesus was probably God incarnate and that he probably never even existed suggests that either one of these writers does not understand the theory or that (in all probability) the method is not fit for purpose. Some of Carrier’s central arguments are carefully dismantled in Daniel N. Gullota , ‘On Richard Carrier’s Doubts : A Response to Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt’, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus (vol. 15.2–3), 2017, pp. 310–346.
- 42.
The dangers of investing everything in natural reason , and the potential of a more passionate model of faith working through love (Galatians 5:6), which provides a distinctive position with which to engage the world, is perhaps best explored philosophically at the beginning of the Enlightnment when confidence in natural theology was once again on the rise, and then again post-Kant when its prospects looked much less certain: see Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings, H. Levi (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; and selections from Søren Kierkegaard , The Essential Kierkegaard, Howard H. V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (eds. and trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980; Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard, Charles E. More (ed.), Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing, 2007.
- 43.
See Eagleton , ‘Introduction’; and ‘Occupy London Are the True Followers of Jesus , Even If They Despise Religion ’, The Guardian, 3 November 2011’; and Lisa Miller, ‘Jesus at Occupy Wall Street: I Feel Like I’ve Been Here Before’, The Washington Post, 20 October 2011, accessed 24 March 2018: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/jesus-at-occupy-wall-street/2011/10/19/gIQAWzdB0L_story.html?utm_term=.f52109717d48.
- 44.
See James Cone , The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013; and Kelly Brown Douglas with Delbert Burkett, ‘The Black Christ’, in The Blackwell Companion to Jesus, Delbert Burkett (ed.), Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 410–427.
- 45.
On gender see Moxnes , ‘Jesus in Gender Trouble’, Cross Currents (vol. 54.3), 2004, pp. 31–36; see Mary Ann Beavis (ed.), The Lost Coin: Parables of Women, Work, and Wisdom , Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002; Kathleen E. Corley, Women and the Historical Jesus: Feminist Myths of Christian Origins, Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2002; Ingrid R. Kitzberger (ed.), Transformative Encounters: Jesus and Women Re-viewed, Leiden, The Netherlands : Brill, 2000; and Leonard Swidler , Jesus Was a Feminist : What the Gospels Reveal About His Revolutionary Perspective, Plymouth: Sheed and Ward, 2007. On sexuality, see Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., ‘The Gay Jesus’, in Blackwell Companion to Jesus, pp. 443–457; Robert Goss and Thomas Bonache, et al. (eds.), Queering Christianity: Finding a Place at the Table for LGBTQI Christians, Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013. On sexual violence see David Tombs , ‘Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse’, Union Seminary Quarterly Review (vol. 53), Autumn 1999, pp. 89–109; ‘Sexual Ethics and the Scandal of the Cross’, in A. H. Cole, Jr. (ed.), Theology in Service to the Church: Global and Ecumenical Perspectives, Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, pp. 122–138; and with Katie B. Edwards , ‘#HimToo—Why Jesus Should Be Recognised as a Victim of Sexual Violence’, The Conversation, 23 March 2018, accessed 23 October 2018: http://theconversation.com/himtoo-why-jesus-should-be-recognised-as-a-victim-of-sexual-violence-93677.
- 46.
See Katie Edwards , Lent Talks: The Silence of the Lamb, BBC Radio 4, 25 March 2018, accessed 23 October 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09w12jh.
- 47.
See Heschel , Aryan Jesus; and Shawn Kelley, Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship, New York: Routledge, 2002.
- 48.
See Dinesh D’ Souza , What’s so Great About Christianity , Washington, DC: Regency, 2006, along with What’s so Great About America, Washington, DC: Regency, 2015; Thomas E. Woods , How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilisation, Washington, DC: Regnery, 2012; and Stark , The Triumph of Reason ; and How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity , Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute Books, 2014.
- 49.
The Enlightenment functions both as a myth of origins for some modern secularists , and as an ongoing ethos : a set of secular values that must be continually reaffirmed, for example in Hitchens , God Is Not Great, chap. 19: ‘The Need for a New Enlightenment’; in a somewhat less tendentious and (much) better researched form in Pagden, Enlightnment, and Grayling , The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind, London: Bloomsbury, 2016; and in the more popularist and presentist Pinker , Enlightenment Now.
- 50.
Hitchens , interviewed by the former Conservative government minister Ann Widdecombe , The Bible : A History—Moses and the Law , Channel 4, 5 February 2010. The negative emphasis in Hitchens’s appeal to Marcion is best illustrated by his remarks towards the end of the interview, when he claims that Widdecombe (as a Christian) is ‘saddled with this savage Judaism’: see YouTube, accessed 02 May 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9983H54oM8.
- 51.
See a study by the Pew Research Centre , ‘When American s Say They Believe in God , What Do They Mean?’, Pew Research Centre: Religion in Public Life, 25 April 2018, accessed 17 August 2018: http://www.pewforum.org/2018/04/25/when-americans-say-they-believe-in-god-what-do-they-mean/. For a British example, in 2011 Ipsos MORI conducted a poll on behalf of the Richard Dawkins Foundation to examine the ‘beliefs and attitudes of self-identified UK Christians’, the results of which were published the following year: see ‘Religious and Social Attitudes of UK Christians in 2011, Ipsos MORI , 14 February 2012: https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/religious-and-social-attitudes-uk-christians-2011. The survey revealed a surprising combination of beliefs and attitudes, many of which would not be considered orthodox by the standards of any of the main Christian Churches active in Britain today. In the aftermath, an entertaining clash ensued on the radio between Dawkins, probably the most famous atheist in the world, and the Anglican priest and writer Giles Fraser : the former taking the evidence to suggest that the respondents were not really Christians because of their deficits in orthodoxy , and the latter defending the integrity and legitimacy of the respondents’ Christian self-identification: see ‘Majority of Christians Tick the Box’, BBC Radio 4: Today, 14 February 2012, accessed 18 August 2018: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9696000/9696135.stm. The full exchange is available to listen to on YouTube, accessed 18 August 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-kWeo0o-Jw. This reverses one trend in the Enlightenment, where many of the heterodox (e.g. Hobbes , Morgan , Chubb , Priestley, Jefferson ) would defend the authenticity of their Christian identity, within the Protestant tradition of the individual conscience before God , while Anglican and Presbyterian clerics would decry them as frauds and crypto atheists (not that Dawkins used that language here).
- 52.
See John Van Engen , ‘The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem’, The American Historical Review (vol. 91.3), June 1986, pp. 519–552; and Keith Thomas , Religion and the Decline of Magic : Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England , London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971. For a study already moving towards classic status, arguing for a more coherent and theologically literate Catholic populace, see Duffy , Stripping of the Alters.
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Birch, J.C.P. (2019). Postscript and Conclusion. In: Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51276-5_8
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