Practices for the Refounding of God's People

The Missional Challenge of the West

Alan J. Roxburgh, Martin Robinson

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780819233851
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

• Speaks to the bewilderment and helplessness many churches feel in the face of current events
• Practical new interpretation of changes in the West

Throughout its history, the church has faced crises of meaning and identity in all kinds of changing contexts. The crises facing the churches of the western hemisphere today are no different. At their best, churches have recognized that their challenge is not their own fixing or even "reformation" but a deep engagement with the ways the gospel transforms society. This book explores how this can happen again in a radically changing western world.

1

The Emergence of the Modern West

Yet any history of the world’s civilizations that underplays the degree of their gradual subordination to the West after 1500 is missing the essential point—the thing most in need of explanation. The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is the story at the very heart of modern history. It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve. . . . For it is only by identifying the true causes of Western ascendency that we can hope to estimate with any degree of accuracy the imminence of our decline and fall.¹

The place of Christianity in the rise of Western modernity has been under discussion for more than a century. Those who are sympathetic to religion tend, these days, to give it an important place; those who are less so tend to minimize its role. Thinkers with a favorable stance toward modernity see it as the realizations of Christian ideals. Christian reactionaries who hate the modern world define Christianity as its antithesis. Ivan Illich changes the very terms of the debate. For him, modernity is neither the fulfillment nor the antithesis of Christianity, but its perversion.²

Modernity’s Wager

The modern West is a construct, an idea, which has become the normative story of how we read and see our world. This chapter looks at the development of this narrative. The modern West takes up elements of a prior Christian story (designated as Christendom) and reinterprets them in terms of modernity’s wager.³ That wager was the conviction that life could be lived well without God. It represented a conviction about the sufficiency of human agency that needed neither the sponsorship nor the undergirding of God. This huge change in the West’s imagination did not occur overnight. It was the transition of some three centuries. It does not mean a majority of people in the West placed a bet, with all the concomitant risks, on living without God. Rather, there was a progression from the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries wherein leading thinkers and theorists came to believe that it was possible, reasonable, and desirable to reshape all aspects of life without reference to God. It is in this sense that modernity represented a massive wager never before attempted by any society or civilization. The institutions, habits, and practices that came to shape the West were born out of this wager. The question of a gospel engagement with this West must address this wager. Current forms of political (nation-states), economic (capitalism), and social life (the Self) in the West are all functions of this wager. At the beginning of our new millennium the modern West is experiencing its own disorienting transformations. These are, however, not moving away from the wager, but offering new proposals for making it work. The first half of this book looks at the emergence of the modern from this perspective.

The Idea of the Modern

The idea of the modern is not new. It emerged as the medieval synthesis broke apart starting in thirteenth-century Europe and into the fifteenth-century reformations. The notion of the West emerges in the nineteenth century. The word modern was part of a spiritual and intellectual struggle around the identity of Christendom that would, from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries, change the very basis upon which the West had been formed. As such, it is a word that expresses the ending of the Christendom that began with the Germanic peoples and the formation of the Frankish kingdoms. The notion of the modern is formed around a conflict between the ancients and the moderns, and an intellectual movement known as nominalism. Only in the nineteenth century did the notions of the modern and the West came together to form the powerful, ideological imagination that has shaped our world over the last two centuries. Today, we take for granted the idea of the modern West. We assume a broad-based, common understanding of what it means. It is on this basis that many of us interpret and read our world. For some, there is the “West and the Rest.”⁴ Others wonder, “West of what?” The missiological challenges before the Euro-tribal churches must give attention to what happened in the formation of the modern West as a reigning narrative.

A Passage to Modernity⁵

[M]odern civilization differs radically from other civilizations and cultures. The truth is that our culture is permeated by nominalism, which grants real existence only to individuals and not to relations. . . . Nominalism, in fact, is just another name for individualism, or rather one of its facets.⁶

Today people write about the modern West in terms of its transformation or decline, the end of an ideology, the end of history, or the renewal of the West.⁷ While engaging these discussions, the intention here is to describe what is generally meant by the phrase the modern West today. The term means far more than a geography. It refers to ideas, institutions, values, and ways of seeing the world. The West came to view its social, political, economic, and religious forms as the apex of all civilizations. This viewpoint was then generalized into every society on earth. The idea of the modern West found its antecedents in European reformations and enlightenments that began in the late fifteenth century that would result in the end of Christendom. Those of us of European and North American descent have been inextricably born into a modern imagination, even as we participate in its continuing transformations. We take the modern as a given; we conceive of it as the normative way in which to see the world and, generally, have little awareness of the dynamics which brought it about. In its birth and the wager that it made are the clues for addressing Newbigin’s question about a gospel engagement with the West. What was it about the birth of the modern that now raises for us questions about a gospel engagement? We must go back several centuries to understand.

The Ancients and the Moderns

From the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, Europe moved through a transformative social, political, economic, environmental, and religious upheaval that remade its basic animating ideas and institutions.⁸ Over this period, Western assumptions about the nature of man, the world, and the universe were turned upside down. These were the centuries in which, for example, our understanding of the universe and our place in it underwent “one of the most dramatic changes in cosmology that the Western world had ever experienced.”⁹ Copernicus, Galileo, and a host of others upended a cosmology that had existed since the Greeks and had formed the basis of medieval theology. The established epistemologies (how we know) based on authority and revelation were also turned upside down. In the thirteenth century a theological and philosophical wrestling began between what would be labelled the ancients and the moderns. These debates signaled tectonic shifts in the Western imagination that led directly to the reformations and enlightenments.¹⁰ By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a different West had emerged wherein the modern was now its imagination.

Europe had moved through a series of transformations involving technological innovation, a fundamental philosophical reordering of the world, and an almost total social change. A new self-consciousness had emerged that demanded the name modern. These transformations hold the clues to the shape of the modern West and its continuing effects on us today. An important term at the core of these transformations was nominalism.

Nominalism

What was the nature of the break that opened the way to the modern? The medieval notion of virtue helps to answer the question. Virtue meant something different from the modern idea of values. Virtue had to do with the source of authority ordering the universe. Authority was located in the two forms of God’s law: nature and revelation. Nature was infused with God’s laws in what were called universals. Being a virtuous person meant forming one’s life in obedience to the laws set out in the universals. The virtuous life involved the schooling of one’s desires around those laws. Virtue, therefore, directed one toward that which lay beyond the self and nature—toward God. The true end of life was found in the universals, the overarching laws given by God, which determined how the world operated.

The notion of universals is not easily translated into our time, but their meaning is important for understanding this passage to the modern. To the medieval mind there existed particular, concrete things: people, such as Mary, or Tom; a star cluster, such as Ursa Major; the actual chairs in an office; or the houses in which people lived. All of these objects and individuals were clearly present to people every day. At the same time, Mary and Tom, for example, belonged to a common species or group, along with millions of others, known as human beings. They existed in reality, and not just in categories we make up in our minds—a universal. It was on the basis of the laws within these universals that the particular Marys, Toms, chairs, and houses received their identity. In the thirteenth-century questions arose about this taken-for-granted perception of how things worked. The theologian and logician William of Ockham raised serious questions about the existence of universals. His reasons were based on his theological concern that the notion of universals undermined God’s autonomy. For Ockham, if universals, with their laws, existed, then God could not be fully autonomous since God would also be bound and limited by these laws even if God had made them in the first place. Nominalism’s critique of universals may seem abstract and esoteric to the modern imagination, but it was this debate that made the West modern.

Ockham made a sharp distinction between things as they existed in reality and the ideas, words, and signs we use to make connections between these real substances. To oversimplify, for Ockham, Mary and Tom really existed, whereas, human being was only a construct in our minds that people used to order the world. For Ockham and the nominalists, things in the world, to be real, had to be simple, unique, and distinct (there was only one Mary and no other Mary in the world). Neither man, woman, or human being were, therefore, a real thing in the world. Universals might be helpful generalizations, but they were not real. Today, his argument is reasonable because it is the way the modern mind understands the world. But in the medieval period the challenge to universals signaled something far more critical. It had to do with how God worked in the world. Furthermore, it represented a fundamental shift in the understanding of the sources of knowledge. Something was shifting in the established Western imagination. In one sense, the source of authority and meaning was moving from “out there” (external laws in the heavens) to “in here” (constructs of the mind), but that is getting ahead of the story.

For the medieval mind, universals carried within them God-given laws that shaped the particularities and determined their actions. Virtue was about aligning life with these laws. But if universals were merely the constructs of our minds, then there were no transcendent laws determining how the particularities behaved. The ontological, epistemological, and moral basis of the world had turned. The nominalists probably did not consider these unintended consequences; their concern was that universals presented a set of intermediary laws that undermined God’s absolute power to act in any way God chose. Universals limited God’s autonomous power, but God could be limited by nothing except God’s self.

The rejection of universals meant that gradually the source of meaning in the shaping of the world moved from God to the individual. A new understanding of the individual set a path for it to be the source of authority in the world. This development took several centuries as it worked its way into the imagination, institutions, and social structures that would remake the West. In this are the seeds of the modern.

Because the medieval understanding of the relationship between God and the world was so radically different from the modern, it is challenging to grasp the radical nature of the changes involved in this passage. At the core of the transformation was nominalism. Catholic theorist Ivan Illich gave a significant portion of his life to understanding the twelfth century as a way of interpreting the modern West, offering important insight into how nominalism led to the modern.¹¹ Charles Taylor wrote the introduction to David Cayley’s The Rivers North of the Future, a series of interviews with Illich near the end of his life. For Taylor, Illich’s work demonstrated the ways the modern West was a mutation of Latin Christendom.¹² The medieval West was an ordered cosmos suffused with God’s presence. The world was a living organism that did not get life from itself; it was, in every way, dependent upon God. The reasons for its existence did not come from within, but were given by God. God was not, however, some distant lawmaker who had wound up the universe like a clock, and then left it to run by its own mechanisms. Rather, the universe was a good, abundant, and gratuitous gift of an all-good and merciful God. God’s brooding presence oversaw the unfolding of the created world as one filled with grace and abundance. According to Illich, the language used to describe God’s engagement with the world “literally means womb, or more precisely the particular movements of the womb when it is inflamed with love.”¹³ In this sense, God is conceived as present in everything through God’s goodness and love. The virtuous life was a participation with God who was the primary agent governing all of life. Nominalism undoes this imagination and offers a new sense that the universe was an undetermined and unpredictable place thrown on God’s mercy.

The nominalist protest against universals was intended to protect the radical autonomy of God and ensure God’s transcendence. The removal of universals as laws of nature and revelation created the sense that people now lived in an unpredictable world over which there was no control. How, then, could anyone know that the world he or she experienced one day might not be completely changed tomorrow by God’s free and arbitrary choice? The answer that emerged was that human beings were freed with the power to shape the world through their own rational minds: the birth of the idea of the autonomous self. The medieval belief in a dependent, contingent world was ending. A world ordered by God’s power was replaced by one wit...