Transcript for Episode 54
Ryan:
My guest today is Brad Gregory, the Henkels Family College Professor of History at University of Notre Dame. Brad was the founding director of Notre Dame's Institute for Advanced Study. He's a historian of early modern religion by trade, but also has two master's degrees in philosophy from Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. His 2011 doorstopper, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, might be the most widely reviewed and discussed book ever written by an early modernist.
Brad, welcome to the podcast.
Brad:
Thanks very much, Ryan. Thanks for having me on. Before we go on, I never want to claim credit for anything that is not legitimate, so I'm actually not the founding director of Notre Dame's Institute for Advanced Study; I was the successor to the founding director, the philosopher Vittorio Hosle.
Ryan:
Oh, okay. I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for correcting me.
Brad:
Don't give me credit for anything that I didn't do.
Ryan:
When it occurred to me to write that line in your introduction—the line about the most widely discussed book—I was just going by an anecdotal impression. I have a whole folder of reviews of that book, and responses, and response to responses. But then it occurred to me that there's another book by an early modernist that might rival yours, and that’s Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which also came out in 2011. It was the first ever nonfiction book to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. So I searched both on Google scholar. And which do you think had more hits?
Brad:
I'm sure his does.
Ryan:
No, actually; yours has 1,360, his 1200. His book was maybe more well-received than yours, but yours generated far more controversy; and given the culture and the academy we inhabit, I think it means yours is a much better book.
Brad:
Well, the wider culture of controversy has its own idiosyncrasies and characteristics. But I will say, I'm actually no fan of that particular book, The Swerve. In fact, in one of the reviews of my book, Carlos Eire from Yale referred to the two in comparison to one another and specifically said, Gregory's book is going to stir all kinds of controversy. Whereas Greenblatt's of course was celebrated to the skies, because his is a screed against the Middle Ages and celebration of all the liberatory, wonderful things about Western life since then, without any footnotes and really without any responsible scholarship. I mean, I felt bad for the Renaissance intellectual historians that really have done the careful work on the retrieval and the dissemination of Epicurean philosophy in the 15th and into the 16th centuries, because there's virtually none of that in The Swerve.
In any case, I have nothing personal against the book. I just think it's symptomatic that that book was celebrated, because it said the right things. It confirms the prejudices of the academy.
Ryan:
Carlos Eire’s review is my favorite review of The Unintended Reformation, by the way.
So, Luther Bible or King James version: which is better from a literary standpoint?
Brad:
They're really quite different. Probably my own assessment of that is colored by the fact that I'm a native English speaker. If I was a native German speaker, I'd probably say the Luther Bible. But I would have to go with the King James version.
Ryan:
Which had the greater impact on the language?
Brad:
Tough call. To be honest with you, it's not something I've really read about or thought about seriously. Both of course had a massive influence respectively on the emergence of modern German and modern English.
Ryan:
When you were studying philosophy in Leuven, what did you think you were doing? Would young Brad Gregory be surprised by what you're doing now?
Brad:
My interests, at Leuven itself, really shifted over the course of the time that I was there. I started studying philosophy seriously during a junior year abroad there. They had a one year BA program in philosophy. I thought, oh, that sounds great. I'll just take 15 courses, pass the exams, and I'll come back to my senior year at Utah State with a European degree in hand. And that's what I did.
What really fired my interest most was 20th century metaphysics process philosophy. At the time I got really into Whitehead and Hartshorne. When I was thinking I was going to come back to Leuven, after going back to Utah State for my senior year, I thought I was going to write a master's thesis comparing Aquinas, Whitehead, and Hartshorne, showing all the ways in which the 20th century thinkers were so superior.
That sort of fell apart my senior year. My interests shifted dramatically, and I went back and decided I was going to focus more on early modern philosophy, and this crucial period of the generative and controversial relationship between questions about theology and faith, and revelation and the traditions of interpretation of revelation in Catholic and Protestant Christianity on the one hand; and what was generated out of that, the new forms of modern philosophy for Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and so forth forward. I wrote a master thesis actually on Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.
There's a long answer to your question. There was a time in which I would've thought, oh, I've left that stuff behind. But interestingly, partly in the project that became The Unintended Reformation, I thought, you know what, I'm really glad I studied all that philosophy. There are crucial pages, particularly in chapter two of The Unintended Reformation, about contested doctrines regarding the answers to the life questions in which there's no way I would have had the kind of background or wherewithal to do what I did without that earlier study philosophy.
So there's a very roundabout way of answering your question. I think I would recognize myself, but it certainly hasn't been a linear path from all those decades ago until now.
Ryan:
That makes sense. And did you grow up in Utah?
Brad:
No, no. I'm from Northern Illinois, originally from a small town northwest of Chicago called Woodstock, Illinois. Anybody who's ever seen the movie Groundhog Day has unwittingly seen my hometown, because it was shot in Woodstock Illinois, not Punxsutawney PA.
No, I went to Utah State, and I chose it very deliberately and specifically, because I thought I was going to study wildlife science, or forestry, or something in the life sciences on the environmental-minded side. So that too has connected up. As my wife reminded me a couple of years ago when I started thinking deeply and reading seriously about the Anthropocene epoch and our current environmental situation, she said, you know what? You're actually coming around full circle to the things that were most important to you when you were a teenager. And there's something actually correct in that.
Of course, I chose Utah State and then promptly changed my major to psychology, which had nothing to do with anything environmental, at least not in an obvious way. I was all but an officially declared music major my sophomore year; I'm a percussionist, and if I'd had a piano background, I probably would have tried to make it as a starving composer. But I didn't, so instead I went to Belgium and studied philosophy for a year; and then, realizing I didn't know anything about the historical context for the whole history of Western philosophy that I’d absorbed, I thought, might as well major in history and actually learn something about the political, economic, social context.
Now you know my whole early intellectual and undergraduate trajectory.
Ryan:
So out there, in terms of modern history, there's not much there; but in terms of pre-conquest history of human habitation, it's extremely rich. And in terms of Mormon historiography, the landscape is just saturated with sacred history. Did you experience any of those aspects of Utah's history while you were there?
Brad:
The pre-conquest stuff, not at all. I was aware of it, but I wasn't like, oh, let's go see that archeological site. That wasn't on my radar screen at all at the time. But Utah though—the experience of being a Midwestern Catholic outsider in this religious subculture, that had an enormous impact on me. I never had felt myself as so culturally alien. It was more of a culture shock to go from Illinois to Utah, that it was to go from Illinois to Belgium. I didn't realize this really—it dawned on me years later when I was a graduate student at Princeton—but it was crucially formative for me, particularly because what started to coalesce was a kind of inchoate awareness that I was able later, with much more reading and reflection and hopefully intellectual sophistication, to articulate: that there's a fundamental, categorical difference between trying to understand religious people in terms that they themselves would recognize, and explaining the categories of experiences of those religious people in terms that they would utterly repudiate.
Ryan:
When I was growing up, “social” was the adjective used to describe something having to do with the larger society. In middle school, I took social studies, social science, social class, social history. It wasn't a modifier that undergrads commonly used either. Now people barely use “social” in this sense. Societal has become perhaps the more common modifier, and the most common modifier that my undergrads use in any context: societal impact, societal issues, societal structures. What’s going on here?
Brad:
I actually think that is a significant distinction, and a useful one. I try to use it myself. If I’m referring self-consciously, deliberately to the overarching shape and character of social institutions, the dominant ethos, and so forth, I will try to use societal.
Social—it can mean that, in the past it has often meant that. But I try to use it, for example, [about] the interaction among people in a family; those are social interactions. The interactions among friends are social interactions. I would not call those societal interactions; they’re not of the whole. Societal is the social of the whole, the big designation. Social I try to use it with a more restrictive delimitation.
Ryan:
Most of us in the humanities these days have to assume that even our best students didn't get the most basic disciplinary education required for the level of learning that they're actually capable of in a given discipline. So one example is that very sharp students come into my English classes, even ones who want to study literature, and they don't know what a genre is. They call everything a novel, even Beowulf, which they’ve read in high school. So I have to teach them what a genre is before I teach them about particular genres.
I imagine that the remediation required in the history classroom is even more drastic. How do you handle this? And what kind of disciplinary formation would you want [your students] to be getting in high school so that you could hit the ground running in a college classroom?
Brad:
I absolutely get what you’re saying. There’s no doubt about it—the desert that is most primary and secondary school history instruction in this country is arid indeed.
What I would like to see is age appropriate introduction to things as basic as chronology. Things that happen before other things influence the things that come after, but not always, and not all of them in the same ways. I think there's a way to make that clear to an 8 year old, that's different from the way you make it to a 13 year old, that’s different than the way you make it to a 17 year old, increasing substance and content to that as kids move along, so that by the time they get to their junior, senior year in high school, they understand that things didn't have to happen the way that they did, but they did happen in a certain way. The ways in which they have happened have had consequences, and we are living in a world that it is literally impossible—and I mean this in the strongest sense, 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. If students would come just with that basic awareness—medieval is between ancient and modern; if I say the early Middle Ages, you know I'm not talking about the 15th century. If they would come in just with that kind of basic knowledge, then you wouldn't face a sense that some students come in absolutely ready, and they're sponges ready to soak up a serious kind of discourse and further learning; whereas others, you have to say, well, no, the Greeks that were really influential came before the Romans.
Ryan:
Yeah, it’s not as much fun to trouble periodization if they don’t have a periodization to begin with.
Brad:
Exactly. It’s like they can’t understand what’s at stake.
Ryan:
You talked previously about the implicit metaphysics of the history discipline. How do you teach undergrads about the metaphysics of history? Do you discuss final causes or teleology in history class?
Brad:
I do not. It depends on the subject matter and the specific issues that you're treating within history. I'm very careful when I'm talking about religious traditions and religious people; I do make a point to say to students, although it's widely assumed among many scholars that none of these things can be true, that's actually not the case. And I probably have a little digression about that.
I teach a two semester honors humanities seminar, for example, at Notre Dame. I've taught it many times. At the very beginning of the semester, we spend a couple of class periods [as] kind of a crash orientation: nobody's going to tell you this, but you really should understand these things. The difference between a normative rights statement and a descriptive one—nobody's going to talk about that, but it's absolutely crucial.
We read this book, Science and the Good: The Tragic Quest for the Foundations of Morality, by James Davison Hunter and a co-author. It's basically about the Enlightenment/post-Enlightenment attempts: Hey, the scientists can do all this stuff. Wouldn’t it be great if on a scientific basis, we could resolve all of these contentious issues about morality scientifically? And it's about the aim to do that, through influences of Darwinism, and more recently things like neuroimaging: “oh, when we talk about this issue, this part of the brain lights up,” et cetera.
It's a really, really good book. I read that with students before we go to Plato and Aristotle, because I want them to understand: you're going to learn a lot of stuff in your science classes. Don't ever make the conceptual error of thinking that biochemistry or ecology or particle physics is somehow going to be able to tell us whether it's legitimate to divorce somebody, or to pursue a policy of a redistribution of wealth, or anything else. That's never going to happen. These are categorically different things.
The underlying misstep is to take the perfectly proper methodological naturalism of the natural sciences—that’s the way in which one does the natural sciences; you don’t get an anomalous experiment and say, “Ah, that must have been God’s intervention, because we can’t make sense of it otherwise.” Once upon a time people did reason that way. We don’t do that, and the fact that we don’t do it is a large explanation for why the natural sciences have been as successful as they are. It’s another thing altogether to say, therefore, metaphysical naturalism is true, to move from the methodological to the affirmative metaphysical claim.
But because the natural sciences are so powerful—look at all the stuff they can do; the technology we’re using right now for this interview wouldn’t be possible without the discoveries and application of the natural sciences—social sciences want to be just like them. Economists want to be like physicists, et cetera et cetera. And of course the humanities are pulled along in the wake of that, to a large extent.
Ryan:
One of your most famous essays—in fact, the way I first encountered your scholarship—was this 2008 article about the implicit metaphysics of history and of the discipline. I know you're not an economist, but if you were to describe the implicit metaphysics of economics, would it be any different? And what difference should it make to have a Christian metaphysics and then to do economics?
Brad:
That's a complicated question, partly because it's less the metaphysics of academic economics than it is the overwhelming assumption of a consequentialist, utilitarian ethical framework within economics, as well as the deliberate collapsing of any sort of substantive distinction between needs and wants into demand in virtually all mainstream economic modeling. It doesn't matter, as far as your economic models are concerned, whether you're talking about people getting basic nutrition or whether they're buying a third vacation home. That's individual preference, and so it doesn't matter.
But that distinction is absolutely critical to not only a fair-minded reading of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but also to understanding the history of Christianity. And I would say the way in which religious ethics in most, if not all, of the world's religious traditions are understood, human beings are understood to have a moral imperative to care about, and to the extent that they are able to provide for, the most basic needs to prevent a fellow human being from starving or going homeless—over against the fact that they might happen to want some nice new clothes or go on a vacation or anything else. If you have a whole discipline that basically brackets that entire issue, that's a huge problem.
There are exceptions. I was recently interviewed on Steve Levitt’s podcast, so I was glad to know that at least I'm somebody that Steve mostly admires. There are exceptions among economists; but most economists are, I think, conceptually the narrowest and the most confined among social scientists in the academy. I think anthropologists are at the other end, generally speaking, because they study a wide range of different sorts of people. Economists assume human nature is simply what has been constructed and reinforced endlessly in the modern, post-Adam Smith, post-capitalist consumerist world. Of course all human beings want to maximize their self-interest, and of course more is better, and of course they want to get it at the lowest price possible. What else could there be?
The fact is that most human beings who've ever existed through the vast majority of our species wouldn't have even known what to make of these categories or aspirations. It was neither here nor there to them.
This is one of the reasons, going back to the issue about deep history, that it’s so instructive, so analytically powerful, to read archeologists and paleoanthropologists, people who are trying to understand how the transitions from what traditionally was called pre-history to the earliest ancient history took place, and what those implications meant. Most economists don't get that.
Ryan:
I do want to come back to those issues a little bit later.
Your first book was on martyrs, many of them Anabaptist martyrs of the Reformation. To what extent would you say your own theology has been formed by Anabaptism?
Brad:
Not in an explicit way, I don't think. I have reflected on this to some extent. There are some interpretations of reformation Anabaptism that see it as sociologically analogous in its separatism to traditions of Catholic—and Orthodox, for that matter—monasticism. It's sort of family based, non-celibate, expressions of Christianity; but to a large extent, at least in most of its earliest forms, deliberately world-denying, austere, not seeking to acquire more and more, and so forth. And so there are analogies that way.
I would say my outlook—whatever the resemblance is to certain aspects of Anabaptism—is more explicitly shaped by the asceticism of the saints in the Western tradition, as the ones to me that seemed most nearly to have actually sought to live out, and to very various extents have lived out, the radicalism we see in the New Testament. I'm like Dorothy Day, except not really like her, because I don't actually do what she did; she really was saintly. But I admire her enormously. 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.
Ryan:
It also strikes me that another similarity to Anabaptism is your historiography. The Unintended Reformation talked about how developments in Christianity led to present day formations, like secularization, that are inimical to Christianity. It seems from what I've heard and read of the current project that you're working on right now that it could be titled The Unintended Christianity, because you take that idea—that Christianity is its own worst enemy—back to almost the very beginning.
That's an Anabaptist historiography: that at the very latest with Constantine, the entire Church has betrayed the essence of the gospel, and maybe even earlier.
Brad:
I see what you're driving at now. I think that's right. To a very large extent, the degree to which the established Christian churches—in the West, in the Eastern world, the Protestant churches after the 16th century, and so forth—have taken it as a sort of sina qua non of the sustainability and of efficacity the possibility of following Christ in the world, a kind of necessary presupposition, that of course you have to accommodate yourself to, accept, and basically abide by structures of domination, coercion, control, violence.
What is that? What does that get chalked up to? “We live in a fallen world. What can you do? We live in a fallen world.” [That’s] always the sort of explanation for why something more isn't possible. Or indeed to pursue it in a proactive way would be anti-Christian—you're going against God's established order.
But I don't think, for example, in the 17th, 18th or 19th centuries—contrary to what many Christians argued—I don't think institutionalized slavery was part of God's established order, any more than I think that the de facto slaves who work for virtually nothing in Southeast Asia or China or certain African countries or Mexico to make the stuff that we buy today is part of God's desired order. I think it's a massive mess of exploitation that is used by Christians to justify their affluence on the backs of other people. And I think it's been that way basically from the start.
Ryan:
I've been giving you a lot of fast paced questions, but now it's time for me to go on for a while. I have a kind of essay question that I felt like I had to write out, because it's a little complex.
In your contribution to the Theological Genealogies of Modernity conference that happened last summer—and now you've revised that for an article that's coming out in the journal Modern Theology—you argue that Christianity has, nearly from the beginning, rationalized avarice, which you were just discussing. This has led to climate crisis, to really compress the narrative. The acceleration of economic modernization since World War II has moved us from the period that geologists call the Holocene—that’s the period defined by the retreat of the last major ice age, about 11,000 years ago—into the Anthropocene, which is defined as the first epoch in history in which humans are the major factor in global ecology, and we're headed toward some kind of mass extinction.
If you accept this picture, then you probably entertain the thought: what if we had just stayed in the Holocene? The liberal democratic response to that is usually the Holocene was miserable for humans. Life was nasty, brutish, and short; scarcity was the defining feature of life, and only industrial modernity could break us out of that. The present is far better than the past; the future is bright, because technological progress always manages to get us out of whatever jam it gets us into in the near term.
But that answer doesn't make as much sense if the Holocene was actually characterized by abundance. And that's the picture that emerges from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which has just been blowing my mind. For example, compared to the cycles of famine in medieval European agricultural society, pre-contact North American peoples lived far more stable lives. Among the Wendat people of what would be modern day Quebec, for example, they lived lives of simple abundance and social equality, despite not having the concept of private property. So here was a society that could appreciate the New Testament approach to economics as you characterize it. Instead, they got French Jesuits justifying the avaricious behavior of their hosts.
But you characterize New Testament economics as radically ascetic, because no one needs many possessions in order to practice the virtues in a community whose members demonstrate their love for one another through their actions. There's enough for everyone. One's life does not consist in the abundance of possessions, and a socio-environmental corollary of ascetic self-denial is Holocenic sustainability.
But what stands out to me here is that the Wendat did not need ascetic self-denial to achieve sustainability. So it seems to me that this should be your big takeaway from Graebar and Wengrow: that the Christian idea of ascetic poverty isn't necessary for us to remain in the Holocene, and that the Christian idea that ascetic simplicity is for the few—the monastics, the saints— and the rest of us living the mixed life have to just manage as we can. That's a false dichotomy. There actually is a way to sustainably live in the Christian middle-class according to this new anthropology of prehistoric peoples.
Why isn't that a move that you make?
Brad:
The essay that I wrote is in itself super compressed; not as compressed as your one line compression of it, but it's super compressed. The first thing I wanted to do right in the article is to show just how starkly juxtaposed the dominant modern acquisitive ideology—in which Christians are full participants, by and large, just like non Christians are, in the Western world—how starkly that contrasts with many very explicit directives, warnings, and so forth in the New Testament.
It's true that even the community of goods that's described in Acts of the Apostles 2 and 4, if read strictly, is not a manifestation of the renunciation of all possessions. It's a distribution of all the things that are owned by the believers, so that each has his needs taken care of, which is what you're describing.
I think that's quite plausible. Whatever it might have been or how that actually might have expressed itself, we have to think away and re-imagine a huge swath of at least 1700 years of historical development to try to imagine it. But I do think Holocenic sustainability might have assumed any number of different forms if what you're describing had been sustained.
Now, I don't at all think that one of the implications of it—and I don't want to misstate or mis-characterize what you just said—but I don't at all think that it's remotely plausible, given the forces of advertising, marketing, acquisitiveness, consumerist capitalism the way that it exists the world today, that even if you made a cogent, compelling, and even beautiful case for a kind of widespread Christian self denial, sufficient to move the needle on the kind of ecologically disastrous things that we're doing to the planet. I have a hard time imagining it. I don't want to be a Christian devoid of the virtue of hope. I think I have an obligation to be hopeful, although I do perhaps casuistically keep open the form that hope assumes. But I think our global path depends on the kind of profit-minded, extractive, wealth-generating, possession-minded form of human existence that is not only characteristic of the West now, but is pervasive in China. It's everywhere.
I'm kind of unfolding a few initial responses to what you proposed. But I take your point, and I agree with it: that the point is not how little can you live with. It is a statement [that] you need much less than you think you do in order to live a fulfilling human life. Whatever particular form that Wendat or other Indigenous Peoples took, I don't think it's going to look too much like the material surroundings of however we define a middle-class American or Western existence today. It was a lot sparer than that; but it means they did a lot of feasting. It means they had joyous communal celebrations. And I think that's the kind of thing that we can interpret and understand what Jesus is talking about in the kinds of communities and groups of His followers that He envisions [as] the most important things in life. It's not how much more can you get and can you upgrade all the stuff that you have; it is what kind of relationships do you build with the people that you have, and what kind of a shared life do you have together?
Ryan:
It seems to me that in these big picture debates about the Anthropocene, one of the biggest divides among those who accept this basic picture—Graeber and Wengrow’s account of prehistoric societies—the big divide is going to be possibility. To what extent is it possible for humans to change and to do something differently?
David Graeber and Wengrow are almost laughably optimistic about this possibility, as you point out in your review of them. I think Christians in general are far more sober about the prospects of change; but it does seem like there were times in history when humans collectively decided not to pursue greater stratification or greater power.
So actually I was just accidentally reading Michael Mann's The Sources of Social Power alongside The Dawn of Everything. What I realized is that in 1986, he made a lot of the same arguments that they're making against an evolutionary model of human civilization. What's astounding about that is that their argument is based on discoveries in the last 20 years. He didn't even have the data that they have. It's remarkable, but he says, in fact, human beings devoted a considerable part of their cultural and organizational capacities to ensure that further evolution did not occur. They seem not to have wanted to increase their collective powers because of the distributive powers involved.
Brad:
Agriculture is a good example, which Graebar and Wengrow take up as well.
Ryan:
And they could go back and forth. There could be an agricultural revolution, and then it could return. And it did.
Brad: For thousands of years.
Ryan:
Right. And Graebar and Wengrow went to draw from this the conclusion that we could do it again. I think you're saying that the fact of the Anthropocene makes it so that there's no going back. Where does that leave Christian hope?
Brad:
It's an obvious question. That doesn't mean it's not a great question, which it is. This is something, to be honest with you, I struggle with in a serious way. Is hope ultimately and necessarily, and therefore only, to be understood as entirely eschatological?
Because this is a vale of tears, because human beings are sinful and constantly fall back to their same habits that are destructive to themselves and others, our hope is for the hereafter. It is for a heavenly reward that will wipe away every tear. I would say throughout much of the history of Christianity that has been the predominant understanding. I think it has been in various, quite significant ways, probably ways that it's difficult for us to appreciate fully because of the narrative we were talking about earlier—the medieval versus modern look at how, of course things are better now than they were then. The extent to which we do live materially and more satisfying lives—we live longer. We live healthier. We have all kinds of opportunities that people centuries ago didn’t have. All that is absolutely true. I think though, that means that our understanding of hope and also the way in which we understand divine Providence has been deeply imprinted by that reality, such that it's almost inconceivable to Christians, at least in a preliminary way, to imagine that what has been construed as a sort of tightly fitting double helix of material progress, human opportunity, individual self-determination, rise of democracy, et cetera, all the things that are folded into the back road narrative that the dominant minority; and an understanding of, of course God is behind the process of a history, how could he not be? Those two things, moving in one direction over centuries, it's presumed—the idea that that might be fundamentally mistaken is almost unimaginable, at least initially, to many Christians.
That's my initial way of thinking about it. Don't get me wrong—I’ve said this to the author of the essay too: I would love it if we find technological ways out of this. I love the world's wildlife, including other human beings; let's hope that we can do it. But to read seriously in this literature, it really doesn't look good. And to look at what happened at Glasgow late last year, it doesn't look promising. “Let's come back next year and maybe we'll actually do something.” We don't have time to do that.
Ryan:
Just as an aside, a little Bayesian thought experiment. If it turns out 300 years from now that the ice caps are actually back to where they are, the ocean levels are about the same as now—what assumption [would] most likely have been, been wrong in this?
Brad:
I think it would have been that a certain hitherto non-existent and/or unforeseen series of technological innovations in fact were made, scaled, and implemented in ways that people in the early 21st century could not have foreseen. I think that's the most likely. I don't think it will be because starting in the late 21st century, people reduced consumption by 90%; I’d really doubt that.
Ryan:
What do you think of Paul Kingsnorth’s prognosis, that there's no possibility that we are going to avert a major climate crisis, and therefore we just have to begin already living in the small, sustainable communities that are the only kinds of things that are going to be left after that crisis?
Brad:
That, to me, is one among any number of rational responses to where we find ourselves today. I gave a talk in the fall at a small Christian college about higher education and Christianity in the future. One of the things I speculated on there is that I think the later 21st century might actually see a major Christian revival. The reason I think that might happen is because the Christian tradition—you know this, because you work in the late Middle Ages—has such an incredibly rich and fertile and multivalent theology of suffering.
In other words, because we’ve got the tools to deal with that. We've got a suffering Savior—the whole devotion of Christ's suffering and so forth in the late Middle Ages could very well come back. Because the chances of there being massive and horrific human suffering on a scale that's very difficult for us to contemplate—we're talking about the possibility of billions of climate refugees by the late 21st century—that will make what's going on now look like child's play. And once you have flows of movement of people like that, leave aside all the other agricultural and climatological and other problems and so forth, geopolitical stability is out the window.
To me, all that is speculative. I'm not drawn toward specific future scenarios; it could take a lot of different forms. It seems absolutely clear, whatever the future holds—the amount of evidence, the way in which it all kind of overwhelmingly goes in one direction, the range of the different models that are done and so forth—none of it looks good. So to that extent, it seems to me, Christians have a duty to look for and try to understand the truth, even when it's not pleasant.
I don't like any of this. People have told me, oh, Brad, you're so upbeat, you have a sunny disposition—that's neither here nor there for this. It doesn't matter what your outlook on life is or so forth. It only matters whether you're aware of the evidence, and what does it show? I mean, it's brutal. I'm self aware enough to know that I individually can do nothing about that; but what I can do is from my opportunities, my training, my outlook on life and so forth, I'm going to do my best to try to understand this in a serious, long-term, convincing way that at least tries to understand our current predicament and how we got into it. And I don't think that that could be understood apart from the Western world, because of its disproportionate influence since the 15th century in creating global institutions, practices, and assumptions that dominate our world today.
And secondly, because Christianity was the overwhelmingly dominant religious tradition within that geographical focus, it has to be a story about Christianity. And because there's such a discrepancy between what the New Testament says and what most Christians have done, that has to be part of the explanation.
Ryan:
To turn to the deep history aspect of your current project. At some point in my education, I learned that humans had been around for 40,000 years, but in the last 20 years that's been pushed back to a hundred thousand years. Recent evidence might even put homo sapiens at 400,000 years. What difference does that make to our understanding of God's election of the people Israel?
Brad:
Super complicated question; I haven't worked out what I think about that yet. Generally speaking, theologians are sort of like economists in their narrowness. They are—it's like, oh no, I don't do the Pauline letters at all, I only work on the synoptic Gospels. It's like, what are you even doing? It's easy for me to say, I'm not a theologian.
But the point is theology itself has, for a very long time, overwhelmingly been a specialist discipline, like any other. And that can't be what the intellectual calling of theology must be, if it's actually to be the overarching discipline that, at least in the Middle Ages, could command its place as queen of the sciences. If that’s the case, then theologians, if they're to do their duty and be true to the greatest calling and the widest compass of their own discipline, they have to try to understand God in relation to all things.
Now, God in relation to all things implies God in relationship to everything that the natural sciences have disclosed about God's creation. Now you can't know all of that—not in a technical or comprehensive way—but way more theologians should know more about what cosmological theories of the universe are, if those do bear on our understanding about how God works through the material created contingent reality. And so too for the evolution of life on earth; so too for the emergence of hominins and hominids. And so too even the fact that as recently as 40 or maybe even 35,000 years ago, homosapiens, our ancestors, shared this planet with Neanderthals and Denisovans, who were also members of the genus homo. And we know from DNA we interbred with them. Most of us with some Northern European background have 1 to 2%, some as many as 3 or 4%, Neanderthal DNA in us. Some Southeast Asian people have even a higher percentage of DNA of Denisovan.
What does this all mean for theologizing, and for the emergence of the ancient Israelites, and whether there even was that united kingdom between the north and the south, or to what extent was that crafted later on during Hezekiah’s or Josiah's consolidation or during the Babylonian captivity or when they returned and were part of the province under Persian rule or so forth—I don't know. But I do know in principle that theologians should think about this stuff, because it's either you’re a science and theology guy, and you're doing, how does modern physics relate to theologies of creation; or it's, I'm working on the way in which the book of Psalms was put together.
I have no idea about how long our species has been around or whatever. It's just a symptom of the fragmentation of modern knowledge, and it's tragic. It's tragic.
Ryan:
I did want to note that I have for a while loved to speculate about humanity continuing for another 400,000 years, and what Christianity would look like in that context. And if the end of the world were 400,000 years from now, it would put the advent of Christ at a nicely symmetrical point, based on what we currently know.
One final question that I think a lot of people would like to hear the answer to. James Simpson put this well when reading The Unintended Reformation: he says “there are exceptionally useful tracks through entire libraries of books compacted in his notes.” That's an experience I also have. I'm just wondering, how do you do that? What are the nuts and bolts? What time of day do you read? How do you take notes? Do you read as you write, or there are two distinct stages?
Brad:
I've been asked this before; I'm going to try to give a simplified answer. I started my career in a much more conventional, normal way: you go, you read sources, you take notes to them. And then when it comes time to write, you consolidate, you figure out how you're going to arrange it, and so forth. That's basically how I wrote my dissertation, and it’s made more readable in I hope in Salvation at Stake, but the structure of the book was largely the same.
Unintended Reformation wasn't like that. I was working, uninspiredly and increasingly in a frustrated way, on a much more conventional narrative of Reformation Europe Christianity that would have been more like Carlos Eire’s book Reformations. Starting 1450, or late 15th century, and going basically to the end of the 30 Years’ War, English Restoration, let’s say. And some other big books came out; how different will mine be? And then it always seems to me, I can't stand it when somebody does a kind of contrived move just to make their book different from somebody else's, even though they very well know that if they were honest with themselves, the evidence would show that their cast-aside version would have been more or less just like so-and-so. So it just wasn't going.
Unintended Reformation—all the actual notes that I took for Unintended Reformation will fit in one file folder. And this is kind of the way that I work now. You have to know something to put something down. I knew something. I did a really super fast [draft], knowing each sentence I'm writing, this is not adequate; this will not last. But I just kind of let it come out. I drafted the first three chapters of Unintended Reformation like that in about two and a half months.
I could see what it is that I want to do, and I wanted to convince myself, to see whether or not this would work. And then I sent that. It wasn't totally embarrassing: it was coherent, It made sense, there were complete sentences and so forth;, but I knew much of it was inadequate. For notes I would just have an author's name and title and check such and such. I knew it was there, but I wasn't going to take the time to deter myself from the flow. And I sent it to the three super eminent scholars that I knew for different periods—I'm going to let them remain anonymous. But I sent it to them and I said, is this promising or is this stupid? And they all said, oh, this is really good. This is really interesting. It's promising. I see what you're doing. And so I resolved it: that's what I'm going to do.
I originally conceived Unintended Reformation as 12 chapters rather than 6, and I had an outline of about 80 pages, three to four or five pages of just a shell narrative of each of the 12 chapters. And I started working on chapter one before I wrote the three that I was telling you about, and it was like 70 or 80 pages long, and I wasn't even done with it. I thought, this is not going to go; it's going to be too long. What am I going to do? I'm going to choose the six chapters that I think are likely to have the greatest explanatory power for the argument I want to make, and I'm going to focus on those. And get this: I'm going to run like a 200 page book, and I'm going to make it really, really small and really kind of sketchy. I'm just going to get it out there and just let people react to it. And then I'll write the big 12 chapter version.
Well, long story short, those six chapters grew because I didn't think I could sustain. Hence some of the long, expository notes that Simpson was referring to, just to show the learning and the thought that went behind certain moves that I made.
But now it's even more that way, because I'm way out of my ordinary field. Almost everything I've written over the last year plus has been in the ancient world. I've written almost nothing up beyond the early Roman empire over the last year, and that has necessitated a massive amount of reading. But basically what I do is I try to, when I don't have other obligations, I get up and my most productive hours are early in the morning until midday. No question. I'm getting older, so I think that's part of it too. I try to get something down; I have to have at least a scheme, but I’m going to write something very basic, even if I know it's wrong. And then I come back, and I just, oh, that won't work at all. Get rid of it completely.
I started writing about the ancient world. I kid you not, I bought like five or six of those Oxford very short introductions, to the ancient near east and ancient Syria, the early Greeks or whatever the case may be. I read those. And then I said to myself, okay, if you only had this, if you could only draw on what you know from this, what would you say? And I just started to write something that combined with two other inspirations. One was James Scott's fantastic book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, which was just a mind blowing book to me; I love that book. The other was rereading Marshall Sahlins’ classic essay, “The Original Affluent Society” in Stone Age Economics, which is a great essay. It's wrong in the specifics, but its impulse and its insight are keen. And he says there are two ways that affluence can be fulfilled. One is by acquiring much, and the other is by desiring little.
All you have to do is juxtapose that to somebody who knows the New Testament and Christianity well, and then what Jesus looks like is a radical intervention in the string of first millennium BC empires, the most powerful of which, the Roman Empire, is in an unprecedented way crushing millions of human lives in what is a full-blown big time slave society, especially on the Italian peninsula, and to which Judea has been subjugated for 50 or 60 years before Jesus is born. And this peculiar anarchism of the kingdom of God, it's not a new regime that is going to be more powerful than the others. It's going to be a regime that envisions a form and a way of being human together that simply has not manifested itself very often.
Ryan:
That's a great note to end on. Brad Gregory, thank you very much.
Brad:
Really a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Ryan. This was a lot of fun.