Episode 82 Transcript

Ryan: My guest today is Joseph Minich, a teaching fellow at the Davenant Institute, which is in its 10th year of “retrieving the riches of classical Protestantism to renew and build up the contemporary Church.” Based in South Carolina, the Davenant Institute publishes modern editions of understudied early modern Protestant texts, as well as the journal Ad Fontes, a lively blog and a fun and engaging podcast.

And Davenant Hall is the institute's education arm, and it offers a range of astonishingly affordable in-person and online courses in Protestant thought, Church history and languages, so you can check them out online.

Joseph is most recently the author of the book The Bulwarks of Unbelief: Atheism and Divine Absence in a Secular Age, which I've come to think of as Irenaeus of Leon’s Against Heresies for our present moment. Just as Irenaeus probed the wisdom and limitations of pagan and heterodox ideas in the early Christian world, Minich engages deeply with modern philosophy and culture. And like Irenaeus, central to his thought is the motif of divine pedagogy, the idea that God created humanity in a kind of infancy and that history is the story of humanity's coming of age under God's patient tutelage. This long perspective affords Minich a sober, but also, dare I say it, optimistic, take on Christian life in what Charles Taylor has called a secular age.

Joseph Minich, welcome to the podcast.

Joseph Minich: Thanks so much for having me. I’m very excited to be here.

Ryan: What did you learn about the modern conditions of labor as a full-time administrative assistant at a biotech company during your master's degree at Reformed Theological Seminary, and then, as I take it, also a full-time university administrator while you did your PhD at University of Texas, Dallas?

Joseph Minich: That's a unique question and you’re the only one to ask it. But in point of fact a lot of my reflections on labor do come out of various labor experiences. When I was doing the biotech company one of the things that – that was in Washington D.C. while I was doing my masters – while I was part of a biotech company there, one of the things that was unique about it is it was it was a family-owned company and so a lot of labor reflection I did there came from the fact that or was related to the fact that I was sitting in a company that made decisions very personally. Because it wasn't very large; it was mostly owned by a family and the relationship to the employees was something culturally of an extension to that. And so it was actually a fairly unique job in that particular context.

But two other jobs that I suppose maybe – I don't want to use the word but I can't think of another one right now – that sort of “negatively” you might say inflected my reflections on labor was during my undergraduate I worked for IKEA in the Returns Department for a hot minute. And anybody who’s been to the IKEA Returns Department can imagine what that felt like. There was that: sort of belonging to a big institution, watching its rules, watching who gets employed and what spheres and what that does to people's psyche day in and day out.

But then University of Texas at Dallas I worked for a big bureaucratic state university. And I think that experience especially probably highlighted for me the possibility that there are modes of labor where a person's perception of their link into a chain of meaningful human action is kind of foreclosed. That is to say, I think in a lot of big bureaucratic institutions this is at least existentially what I began to reflect on. It seems like there's a lot of people in an admin-heavy university, where thirty percent of the university is admin, right, where there's chains and paperwork in bureaucracy, but chains that you don't fully see. You kind of only see your random part in the assembly line of human action. And it's a part that's extremely replaceable. It’s a part that’s not deeply a reflection of probably your own dispositions and talents. And it's a part that disappears into a fog of movement such that you don't really know how you belong to the big process, and everybody else in the process also doesn't know how you belong to the process. Unless you're the one dot before them or after them; something like that. And so that I suppose the erasure, you might say, of the personal in labor is something I've deeply reflected on, I suppose, in kind of a big bureaucratic context, if that makes any sense.

Ryan: So taking that as an example of some of the phenomena that Charles Taylor describes in his description of the modern experience of the world, what is it that Charles Taylor gets right in his description of our experience of the world now?

Joseph Minich: It's just as simple as to say what it's like to believe when you're believing against the backdrop of everybody else believing is very different than what it's like to come to, say, Christian Orthodoxy or any kind of religious faith against the backdrop of feeling like people I know, friends, family, coworkers, believe radically different things, and so I experience myself in a sense to be in a sea of options, that sort of thing.

And I think he gets that dynamic really very correctly. And in a sense what my work is trying to do both in this book and in a book I'm writing right now is to extend that analysis and say “How does that structure play out in other dimensions of life?” How does – maybe not even religious options but let's say moral options or even existential options – what is it like, for instance, to start a family and get married in a context where don't have to do that? Conceivably you could act otherwise and a lot of your friends act otherwise. I think that kind of motif is really rich and potent for reflection.

Ryan: Sure. And then what you argue Charles Taylor misses or just doesn't follow up on and develop is the conditions of a technologically-mediated modernity that actually makes his subtraction story of secularization plausible – not his subtraction story, he's against these subtraction stories – but he says that subtraction stories, where this idea is that if we just strip away the idea of the numinous, if we strip away religious myth, what we're left with is a natural substrate of human relationality that is what we call the secular.

Joseph Minich: Right.

Ryan: And we are then able to see clearly. And Tiller challenges this, but what you're trying to do, as I take it, is to give an account for why those subtraction stories seem so plausible.

Joseph Minich: Yes.

Ryan: What's a concrete example of our common experience of the world that makes a story like that plausible?

Joseph Minich: What I'm trying to do is fill in the gap that, as you just said, to say “Why did it become plausible that God was” – it was unclear to me in Taylor's account why it was that, say, God as such, just the existence of God, but in a very basic way, metaphysical monotheism, say, was so much more of a threat to the modern moral order than, say, Christian Orthodoxy specifically. Why couldn't we have just gotten rid of orthodoxy and clerocricy in churches but still had metaphysical monotheism? Why would that have been a threat to the modern moral order?

And so what I try to do in the text is argue that part of the push factor for God out of kind of the cosmic furniture of the universe, you might say, part of the push factor for that was our relationship to the world as mediated through technological artifice and ultimately the impact of all of that on labor.

One way of putting it would be this: How obvious is God in the mirror of a perception of reality that's deeply shaped by our relationship, our contemporary post-industrial relationship to technology and the labor systems of the modern world? And I argue that if we kind of fill that gap in, we can bring kind of – far be it for me to say we're trying to improve on Charles Taylor here, right – but I think maybe we can bring the plane in for a little bit more of a landing if we factor in that material condition within which God is discarded not just because he's a moral threat to the system, but because he ceases being obvious in some way relative to a particular way of being attuned to reality metaphysically.

Ryan: I was just talking to a friend who is in the middle of a move and part of this move involves moving his family into the house of another family. And they're all living on top of each other, not enough beds to go around, and it’s putting a tremendous amount of stress on everybody. And I said to him, “Well, on the positive side of that, I was just reading this book that describes the possibility of other humans crashing in on us as the necessary base-level expectation in order for God's own personal presence to us to seem natural and intelligible.”

And I've lost that in my life. We have a schedule and we fit people in where they fit in the calendar, and we create a space for that when it's time to have someone over for dinner or something. And I can silence my phone when I don't want to hear from people, and so on. So, what is it about this experience of not being able to control our social boundaries that's necessary to opening us up to the experience of God?

Joseph Minich: That's a really good question. Going back to that metaphor I used earlier of mirrors, I think one way of putting it is – and I think you know this certainly in the book. The book, it's not nostalgic, in a sense, for the past, but what I'm trying to recognize is that one way of thinking about it is that in the mirror of a pre-industrial existence, the felt agency – that's the language I'm trying to talk through – the felt agency of the world, I think, was just tacitly obvious.

So you live in a town of two hundred people. You have two churches to choose from. You don't have an automobile. You go to one – or, if you're going to go to church, you're going to go to one of the two or three churches in town. There's one grocery store. To survive, you actually are forced to move around with these people whether you like them or not.

And similarly with the natural order, when you read of Sam… in Lord of the Rings, when you read of Sam's relationship to the Shire. He doesn't know the outside world outside the Shire very well, but he knows within twenty miles of the Shire extraordinarily well. He knows it very personally. But it's experienced as a set of stubborn, agentic actors, you might say, around which I have to learn to navigate. And so trees and a hill and a mountain and rocks are all things that are around me, and I can't just… what you have in the world of, I think an increasingly technologized world is the ability to just sort of, I hate to put it this way, but “move things out of your way.” But to feel like they're acting on me and I have to move around them just kind of reinforces that reality itself perhaps is just agentic all the way down.

And so one way of putting that is: in the mirror of a historic subsistence existence, both the world of nature and the world of labor and working with others, just was so ineradicably felt to be agentic. I'm working with agents imposing themselves on me in different, lesser, more intense ways. And in the mirror of that experience of the world, the idea that it's agency all the way down, that bottoms outing in the Agent God. That's almost just like, it's not a philosophical – it's not “because I've read Thomas's five proofs” that I conclude that. That's just what reality seems like very naturally.

Then switch over to kind of the modern order. And I think what you can see is that through the reality-shaping impact of the proliferation of modern technologies in cities and in suburban areas, especially the more than that, you suspend in some sense the active, agentic dimension of the world around you. So now, it's like, if a hill is in my way, I can knock it down, right? If trees are in my way, I can knock them down. None of this is a moral evaluation. It's just a phenomenological evaluation. In point of fact, I relate to the world around me as a thing I can just move through with my will, and its own internal agency is a little bit silenced.

You add to that the world of modern labor, like I just described in that bureaucratic system where our mutual agency is also a little bit invisible to each other. Both my own agency in terms of the connection between me and what I do. Now, no longer am I farming for an obvious end, but doing paperwork for a non-obvious end. But then the agency of others, to the extent that I can limit my contact with agentic others through things like the automobile, through the ability to unfriend on Facebook. I don't have to go to church. I can mostly live a fairly independent private life and engage people as little as possible. And I'm not forced in a lot of ways to engage.

In the mirror of that conflagration of forces, the kind of de-agentification both of people and of the world and of ourselves – and I think that's crucial – what is reflected in the mirror, you might say, of all of those movements is a world that might feel very non-agentic all the way down. And so even if your mind can grasp that it's metaphysically impossible that God does not exist, like my mind, trying to understand, says, “No, that can't be true,” my experience is such that the agentlessness of it all can be something I feel very viscerally and therefore metaphysics in the mirror of that might be agentlessness all the way down, right?

Ryan: So if God were not a person, if God were say, a force, or if God were a prime mover, this presumably wouldn't matter, that we have a diminished sense of agency and personality in the world, right? It wouldn't matter to our sense of the existence of God. But it sounds like what you're saying is that because God is personal and relational, when we diminish our relationality in our own life, we unlearn or fail to learn how to relate to God's presence.

Joseph Minich: Yes. And we fail, I think, to see the world itself as God's presence. In the sense that in the classical vision, there's almost not a gap. Not that God is distinct from creation in the classical vision, but it's so thinly suspended atop his act that creation is almost the exhale of God. And we don't viscerally feel that. It's kind of there and it either evidences God or doesn't evidence God. And you argue about that. But the phenomena itself is kind of neutral and inert in a lot of those discussions. And I think for our ancestors, the phenomena was not inert. The connection to something God-like, at least was just kind of natural.

But you're right that there is a kind of spiritual discourse which is fitted to our experience. You could still talk of the Supreme Force or something like that, but it would wind up having to be a fairly predictable, inert, mappable kind of thing. Whereas, once God is alive, as Lewis says, anything is possible once it's a living thing. Yeah.

Ryan: There's a genre of movie that I understand has become consistently profitable. And these are basically offered only over streaming. And one of these we just somehow randomly came across while browsing on our Fire TV and it's called “The Girl Who Believed in Miracles.” And it was something about the poster for it on our screen made my seven-year-old daughter just clamor to watch the trailer, which we did. And then she insisted on watching the movie. And in the movie there's this, maybe ten-year-old girl who essentially sees Jesus, if I recall correctly. Jesus appears to her, the existence of God is manifestly revealed to her. And because she has this incontrovertible proof of God, her faith is bolstered and therefore she can perform certain miracles.

Why doesn't God do that, or why doesn't God do that more often?

Joseph Minich: Yeah, that's a good question. I try to get into to some of that in the book. And one of the things I try to argue in the book is that God's revelation of himself – I think this is really toward the end – God's revelation of himself is tailored to his intentions in revealing himself.

And so in one sense, if we just get to the question of the clarity of God, is God clear or not clear? Something like that. I think there's a more basic answer to that question which is to say, “Is the world disenchanted or are we disenchanted?” And I think the answer is it's human beings who've become disenchanted, not the world.

But even if you have that, you could still have the problem of divine silence, you might say. Even if God exists, there's still the problem of why doesn't God sort of show up when it would comfort me or help me. And that kind of question, experiencing miracles or something like that, robust, New-Testament-looking things: why doesn't that happen anymore? Or at least why does that happen seemingly less, to not prejudge that question.

And I think that gets down to the question of what are God's purposes in revealing himself? And I think you can go to Scripture. And I think to answer a question like that, what we'd want to do is think of what's going on between the gap between, in Genesis and Exodus, right? In the scriptural account, the Sons of Israel are kind of in slavery for three or four hundred years and nothing seems to be going on. Why does God do that? There's the gap between Malachi and Matthew, and there's a kind of divine silence for several hundred years.

And, you could add to that, that I think the, even though God's existence, I think, has been clear to people in the past, the obviousness of his personal living presence, you might say, while it's existent, while it's obvious in Creation, a certain more potent dimension of his presence associated with something like the Temple and that sort of thing, also has a presence in absence dialectic, even in Scripture.

So you have the sense that God in the garden is depicted as kind of coming down and up. He walks with Adam in the day and then leaves. There's a coming and going element. And even in Christ – and I find this fascinating – it's interesting how much time Jesus spends confusing people, not quite answering their question, being a little evasive, not doing miracles when he is asked to do miracles and not revealing his identity, even when he could, answering indirectly identity questions about himself.

And so there does seem to me to be a pedagogical purpose, largely, in God's posturing of his obviousness or his manifestness in different circumstances.  God's intention, typically, broadly speaking, I think, in allowing us to experience miracles in the history of the Church – I'm speaking coming from a kind of orthodox Christian, broadly speaking, background here – but in the history of the Church, I think it's very often been associated with moments of divine Revelation. And so the miracle signs are meant to confirm what is actually the greatest miracle, which is divine speech. And after that kind of moment of potent revelation, the speech continues, but the kind of miracles don't need to keep happening, basically.

And that would be less of a problem in a world where divine obviousness was obvious on a different register as it was for so many centuries. So the absence of felt miracles was more a crisis of theodicy for our ancestors than it was a crisis of God's existence.

And so the question of why doesn't that happen as much anymore, I think, probably belongs most properly in that sphere, though it has extension into our own sphere. And there I just say, there's something, a divine pedagogy there. And because God's obviousness and faithfulness, the evidence of God's existence and of his faithfulness and “for-you-ness,” you might say, there's sufficient action already there in the world and in history for the believing soul. And so it's not fitted to God's pedagogy to, ordinarily at least, work in that manner. Though that is not at all to limit what God can and does do you know, sometimes even in contemporary society. I'm not saying God can't do anything cool, extra cool these days, so…

Ryan: Sure. But you have this great line, “God is actually not that interested in people simply believing in that He exists.”

Joseph Minich: Yes.

Ryan: Which is… And you go on, and this was to me a really helpful reframing of salvation, historical perspective. You say, “God is not interested in people merely believing in him. Why would he then fix what is not by his standards broken?” That is, in terms of a secular age with widespread non-belief in the “existence of God.” Again, you say,

Was that medieval world suffused with divine agency, the so-called “sacramental universe,” a world of godliness, of love for God, of pursuit of his kingdom? Was, in either the Jewish or the Christian account, ancient Israel full of faithful Hebrews because God's cloud was in their midst? Was the New Testament Church in good shape because as it is claimed, they had the immediacy of the Spirit's presence?

Joseph Minich: Yes.

Ryan: These are obviously tongue in cheek.

Joseph Minich: Rhetorical questions.

Ryan:  But so what is the purpose that God has in mind? It's this divine pedagogy. What is God driving at and why does it seemingly not matter so much that we have a conceptual assent to the existence of God as a being?

Joseph Minich: Yeah. Maybe I'm drawing a little bit on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's “Mankind Come of Age” in his prison letters, but it seems to me that there's an opportunity for maturation here, meaning that when you don't experience a certain pistic or moral option as a default option and you have to choose it, you gain a different relationship to it.

And what I try to do in the book is develop this metaphor of the juvenile that's been forced from home, right? You can imagine the 17-year-old where dad says, “Leave home, go fend for yourself,” basically. That happens on occasion. And your options when you're that 17-year-old are… You have a handful of options. You can either establish your own home totally repeating the traditions of your parents. You can entirely reject the traditions of your parents. Or, you can critically relate to your own tradition and to your own your own heritage in a sense.

And I think one of the things going on in the modern world, whether it be the world of belief, whether it be the world of gender, whether it be the world of politics, all of those things, it seems to me one plausible account is that the inevitable effect of this will either be, well, the disillusion of civilization or the maturation of civilization such that we… It's not that you get rid of the tradition, and it's not that you get rid of all of the Christian Orthodox and orthopraxy heritage, but the re-relation to that heritage, this new relation to the heritage where it's an option forces you to own it and possess it in a deeper way.

And so a parallel there I could think of is in the world of something like gender, right? I'm writing a book right now and this is my running definition of modernity in the new book, is: the simultaneous global renegotiation of all human custom. So the simultaneous global renegotiation of all human custom.

And what I'm trying to do there is, it's implicit in this book already, but it's like Taylor does this kind of, what is it like to believe against the background of other belief options? In a sense, we can extend that analysis to everything. What's it like to be a citizen of a nation, or a gender, a male against the background of perceiving that I'm told I can have other options there. You don't have to have this gender performance. You don't have to think of America this way. You don't have to have these politics. You don't have to live in America actually these days if you don't want to. All of it. What's the boundaries between states and nations? How do we relate to immigrants? All that. It's just all up in the air.

And so in the same way in which kind of gender options you might say, but that sense that we're disoriented from our own genders. Will that ruin what it's like to be a male and a female? Or will that force males and females to press further into the depths get rid of the dross element of it, but press into the depths of those most primal realities.

And it seems to me something similar might be said about religion or about Christianity and orthopraxy, that the ripping away of these things as default options forces us to own them in a whole-personed way. Where it's not just a lazy appropriation, but the mind and the will and the whole person have to grab onto it.

And the temptation is to do that in an ideological way, where my Christianity and my orthodoxy become an escape hatch of modernity, and it's just another system among the sea of systems, which was a temptation in the first-century Church as well. They also experienced – that's really our parallel right now, I think, is that those first generations of Christians experienced their sect among a sea of other sects, and they felt that self-relativization, and it nevertheless pressed them into a deeper self-possession of their own faith in such a way that they weren't just another sect, there was something different about them. And I think perhaps those pressures are doing the same purging thing to us now, even as we recognize this is a bit unnatural. And it would seem like the human race ultimately perhaps does inevitably have to get to some point where there is something like a common view of some of these realities and that sort of thing. But we're in the middle of a trial where that's not in the foreseeable future for quite a while.

Ryan: One of the things that I've done in some of these interviews is play a little game of Would You Rather, where you have to choose between two undesirable options. But you've actually gotten out ahead of that because have this wonderful blog post called “A Very Nuanced Take on Everything” on the Ad Fontes site.

Joseph Minich: Yes.

Ryan: And it begins, and I really commend this to the listeners,

Whereas we denizens of late modernity are wandering in the fog of the simultaneous global renegotiation of all human custom and consequently pining for nodal points of orientation, it seems fitting to remind ourselves that it is of the very essence of said nodes that they force no ultimate choice betwixt truth and love mind, and will…

And this list goes on to a total of one hundred –

Joseph Minich: Things we don’t have to choose between.

Ryan: Things we don’t have to – folk and hip hop…

Joseph Minich: That's right.

Ryan: Profound hope and profound realism. Disagreeing about guns and seeking to stay united and build upon what is common. “The Godfather Part One” and “The Godfather Part Two,” as you gloss that they are one.

So I love that. And so as an alternative interlude, I want to introduce another game that some friends and I play, initiated by one friend who noticed when he was traveling that it was very hard to tell the difference between the names of churches and the names of climbing gyms. And so I want to give you some names of institutions and ask you to decide whether it is a church or a gym.

Joseph Minich: And they are all one or the other.

Ryan: Yes.

Joseph Minich: Okay. Oh, wow. Okay.

Ryan: So, are you ready?

Joseph Minich: Yeah. I'm just going to go with my gut.

Ryan: “Ascend.” And this is local to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Joseph Minich: Church.

Ryan: Wrong. Climbing gym.

“Elevate.” And this is in North Carolina.

Joseph Minich: Church?

Ryan: Climbing gym.

“The Rock.” Also in North Carolina.

Joseph Minich: Well, I've known a lot of “Rocks” so I'm going to say church?

Ryan: Also climbing gym.

Now here's another, “The Rock” in Lander, Wyoming.

Joseph Minich: So church in that case? At this point I just need to keep saying “church.”

Ryan: It is…

Joseph Minich: Is it also…?

Ryan: And it’s a climbing gym!

Joseph Minich: And it’s a climbing gym! Of course!

Ryan: “The Summit” in Pennsylvania.

Joseph Minich: Well now I'm just going to – church?

Ryan: Yes, correct.

Joseph Minich: I got one! All right.

Ryan: “Apex” in Ohio.

Joseph Minich: I feel like that's got to be a climbing gym.

Ryan: That’s a Church.

Joseph Minich: That’s a terrible name for a church! Oh sorry, Ohio Apex. I thought Ascend was a good, hey, there's a little apocalyptic theme in there, but you know…

Ryan: And then this one really got me scratching my head. My brother sent me this recently: “Cross Life.” Is it a church or a CrossFit gym?

Joseph Minich: Both? It sounds like a ministry that could be both. What is it?

Ryan: Well, so I said a CrossFit gym because I thought that, under the conditions of late modernity, we've so lost the reminder that the Cross is something that you wouldn't want to name your gym after that they would go ahead and name it Cross Life. And that this particular type of non-denominational evangelicalism is famous for in the 1980s, 1990s, removing Crosses from their churches, so as to make them more seeker-friendly, that it couldn't possibly be the name of a church, but it is in fact the name of a church.

Joseph Minich: The Cross Life. All right. There you go. Yeah. Perfect.

Ryan: So some kind of interesting turn in 21st-century evangelicalism. Thanks for playing along with that.

Joseph Minich: My pleasure.

Ryan: Back to more serious matters, in The Chronicles of Narnia, there's Susan, who is known, when she is a queen in Narnia, as Susan the Wise. But then at the end of Prince Caspian, Aslan tells her and Peter that they won't be coming back to Narnia. And the explanation at that point, I think, is that they've done what they were called to do in Narnia, and then also that maybe they've gotten a bit too old for it. But then later on in The Last Battle, Susan is not there. Peter is there, and we hear Peter, who says she's no longer a friend of Narnia. And then Jill Pole reports, “She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.” And Eustace quotes her, “What wonderful memories you have. Fancy you still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.” And then Polly Plummer says, “She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age.”

How would you evaluate Susan's trajectory in terms of this divine pedagogy, the model you’ve been developing?

Joseph Minich: That's a really interesting question. I can't say that I have a strong reading of this. And I know there's some debate about what is Susan's fate among Narnian nerds. Is it that she doesn't come? Because I guess they all die in a train crash at the end, if I recall correctly. And the possibility is she's not on the train and there's some future hope that she'll join the brethren.

But she seems to get caught up, it sounds like, in the modern image of keeping up with the Joneses, that sort of thing. And Lewis does also have this motif that they can't come back when they're after a certain age. So that's an interesting thing. She can't come back – and that's an interesting comment: “She wanted to get to the silliest time of life.”

Ryan:  I think one of the things that that reflects is something that, as a metaphor, is in tension with the divine pedagogy model, where, according to Iranaeus of Leon, salvation history is about humanity growing up into adulthood. But at the same time there's this gospel call to become like little children, to be children of the Father. And that's a kind of return that's necessary and that seems to be reflected in Lewis's idea that once they reach a certain age, they won't be coming back to Narnia again.

So maybe you could also reflect on that.

Joseph Minich: Yeah, that's a really good question and I think it's really helpful to distinguish between young and mature adulthood because we can think of – naturally we think of the transition, Paul saying, “When I was a boy, I thought as a boy, then I became a man.” And there's a kind of definitive moment Paul can say “I'm a man now” versus a child.

But there is this third stage, you could call it a third stage, maybe it's stage 2.2 or whatever, but it's mature adulthood. It's the elder.

So the Jews can also say to Jesus, “You've seen Abraham and yet you're not fifty years old?” There's the sense that the elder in the community is especially the wise person. And I think one thing we notice about elders, if we could use that category kind of abstractly, is that there's a tendency among the elderly either to kind of grow into a more crotchety sort of person, you might say, for their vices to kind of take over, or for the elder to actually soften, to become more gentle and reconnect with the child. So grandparents very often reconnect with – becoming a little more childish might not right be the right way to put it, but something of the child in them is reactivated and integrated in a deep and late reflective way for a lot of people in later life.

And I think Lewis deeply is aware of this. He is this in a sense, right, that 60-year-old who can look back at a four-year-old and say you're holding, at that age, onto something real about the world and you never really leave it. What the busyness of adult life does – lipstick and nylons – what that does, it doesn't actually pull you fully away from the world of the child. It sort of suspends it in your attention. And this is why the adults can't go back to Narnia.

The elders, in a sense, I think can reconnect to it because you've had the career, wife and kids are raised, you're not running around as much. And there's this sense of that that tranquil reposing state of life where maybe it's a more reflective stage. And in that stage, it's very common, I think. And through the trial of growing into that stage when you realize, “No, I'm leaving something of myself behind that I actually need to stay connected with.”

And I think what happens in pedagogy just as – you know, you and I are fairly educated people and have been through a PhD program, but we never stopped using the alphabet. We still use our ABCs all the time, even though we learned them when we were four or five or something like that. And I think that's a decent metaphor of a lot of things about childhood. The child's orientation to the world doesn't fully go away. It gets added to. In Robert Bellah's statement about the history of religion, right, nothing is ever lost, is the way he'd put it. There's a sense in which we don't lose that, but we can become disconnected from it.

And I think what true maturation is, is exactly what you said about Jesus. It's the Pharisees, who fancy themselves adults, rediscovering the humility and wonder of the child, and the receptive posture of the child and faith and innocence that actually is, in a sense, the measure of an adult's maturity at that stage.

Ryan: I love that. There's something about theological genealogies of modernity and philosophical genealogies of modernity that were developed in these muscular, gigantic books of the middle and late 20th century and even early 21st century that places us on the other end of all of the transformations of – and this is where we get this, I think, unfortunate term “late modernity.” It's late enough that we can look back and we can see that we’re near the end of it. And therefore, you can place the emphasis, you can see these watershed moments back in, say, the 13th century, with early nominalist ideas, or in the 15th century, when nominalism gets taken up again in Gabriel Biel, and Luther reads him, and then the Reformation disintegrates the previously integrated picture of reality. There's so many different ways of doing this.

Joseph Minich: And that’s how Marxism came on the scene. Yeah exactly. And trainees teaching at libraries. It’s like all the things… Nominalism! Yeah, exactly.

Ryan: Yeah. So, but you provocatively begin your book and say that it's quite possible that the changes that took place between 1850 and 1950 are far more consequential than anything that took place between 750 and 1750. Why?

And just to point out that that then places us maybe at the beginning of what we might see as a watershed moment or modernity or early modernity. What if we're in early modernity?

Joseph Minich: That's a great question. That do we really… Certainly the years – I'm not enough of a historian to be as precise as I wish I were here, but, you know the years, roughly speaking, 1350 to 1850, right? That is a period of rapid change on a certain level of scale. But certainly by the time you get to 1850, and we're talking about the kind of the fullness of what we now term the industrial revolution and that sort of thing. By the time you get to the late 19th century, I think one measure that helps us here is to ask the question – and really I'm borrowing this from Jason Josephson Storm's book, right – “When did we begin to think of ourselves as modern?” That's an interesting measure. Maybe we became modern the moment we began to be disenchanted and secular, the moment we began to tell ourselves that we were this thing.

And that's what's interesting, is all of those discourses saying, “Hey, we're modern, we're secular, we're disenchanted.” They all kind of show up, roughly speaking, at least the way we could use them now, about the same time. And they developed together as terms of self-understanding.

And yeah, I think it's actually very possible that these self-perceptions that we're trying to trace back genealogically in an intellectual way, that the crucial shifts that we're looking for are very recent. They're to be dated, if we were to be historical archeologists, as it were, they'd be dated about the time we begin talking about ourselves self-reflexively in this way. That's when you see the crucial shift. That happens to correspond, it seems, to a massive technological shift and labor shift. And so that's just a correlation. You kind of pick out and say, “Maybe there's something to be mined there.”

And I think what that does to those other narratives is it says, it's not necessarily wrong. It's not totally wrong to say that nominalist mental habits or the enlightenment or all these sorts of things in concert become the philosophical grammar within which I'm going to articulate the secular condition, or at least by many degrees of derivation at least.

But I think the better way to think about that – and here I'm just kind of methodologically, I suppose, following Taylor, who does this I think, implicitly – to say that it's better to think of those ideas as latent available possible ways of self-conceiving. That yeah, they do take up nominalism influences this and that. But perhaps that kind of totalizing sense of self, it doesn't quite have that potent, holistic explanation until the lived world, until what it feels like to be alive is X way. And then these are redeployed as a fitting description of what it already seems like to be alive.

And I think the contrast you see there is with somebody like you know, Diderot and d'Holbach, I don't do French well enough to know that I'm pronouncing those correctly, but you know, the early modern French atheists who, where everybody kind of identifies, these are among the first really self-conscious full-on materialists. They don't speak of it as, I understand it, as though these are super plausible accounts. Their atheism comes at the end of a very long chain of inferences. Even Voltaire is like, “Hey, that's super weird. You're doing something really edgy there.” It's not very instinctive to go that direction. Atheism was felt to be a kind of arrival, in the same way that like, for a Jordan Peterson, say, Christianity might be an intellectual arrival at a long chain, in a contemporary setting.

There it was an arrival, whereas now, I think, you were in a context where even if you are – well, this is just Taylor, right? – if you're a persuaded Christian, you can kind of feel the sting and the plausibility and “maybe-that's-trueness” of that radical other option.

And so one option, it seems to me, is that a lot of these conceptual histories are just concepts that are redeployed, you might say, in a lived material context. Not that that's unshaped by ideology, but in a lived cultural context within which those descriptors are just a good exegesis of what you already experienced. In the same way that – the reason I often compare to gender is not to do culture wars, it's just because I think it helps us get a handle on it – in the same way that part of the reason you might say that gender discourse is difficult and big and confusing. And we're all a little bit confused is that a lot of the material lived conditions within which maleness and femaleness have been historically enacted after the Industrial Revolution go away, the kind of suburban context of the housewife and the guy who goes off to work and comes home: that's modern; that's very weird. And the way men and women historically exercised household economy gender was alongside each other. Lots of overlapping tasks. But the world itself kind of reinforced where the distinctives came out. Like, who's going to chop the tree down? Well, sorry, I've got bigger muscles, so I guess I'm going to chop the tree down. And it was negotiated at a level that was so practical because the world demanded those practical actions.

When you remove all of that material context, well, all of a sudden gender becomes very performative. It's very hard – you're not reinforced in being a male or being a female by all the things around you. And now it can feel like it's a mere choice or performance in the same way that I think our ideologies do.

And so, yeah, I may be talking over about that. But I think similar dynamics are at play in the suspension of these things and then how we begin to relate to our faith, to the claims, to our interpretations of the world and our orientation in a more abstract way.

Ryan: I've been working on this Genealogies of Modernity narrative podcast along with colleagues and a bunch of different disciplines, and we're telling eight different stories about what it means to be modern. And one way that we've come to frame what it means to be modern is that to say modern, to invoke the language of modernity in its strongest sense is to make a claim to a pretty stark break with the past and particularly experiential difference from the past.

And then there are two different ways to make that move. One is to erase the past and to say that the past has no hold on us. And that can involve actual erasure of memory, as in the case of enslaving people and cutting them off from their cultural and genealogical memory. Or it can happen in far more symbolic ways.

That's one way of making a strong modernity claim. And then the other way is to – and this we can associate with Hegel –is to say that we are the culmination of the past and, in particular, the culmination of everything that was good about the past. And we have complete control over the past in such a way that we can leave behind everything that was wrong, all of the conflicts and limitations, and we can carry forward only what was right. And because of this, history now has ended and we are living in a perpetual, peaceful, progressive modernity.

So those are very strong and, we would argue, dangerous ways of engaging in modernity talk. However, it's hard to do away with the language of modernity. It's hard to talk about the kind of phenomena we've been talking about in this conversation without the language of modernity. I think it would be wrong not to recognize that there are profound differences in our experience of the world in 21st century United States compared to the year 1000 in Old England, let's say.

So this is the thing that has been a real sticking point for us as we try to shape these narratives. And that is: what are the affordances of modernity talk? What would a wise and chastened kind of modernity talk gain us? What do we have to gain by saying, “This is modern; that was pre-modern. We live in these ways in a modern age”?

Joseph Minich: Yeah. I think you gain… Yeah, I think I can answer it this way. I'll speak from my own context. I think in the context of a profound historical, cultural, moral, religious, existential disorientation, it's normal to be looking for something to ground you.

So a lot of people are going to the traditions, so it's, I mean there's all sorts of conversions these days to all the traditional orthodoxies, including Islam and all that sort of thing. That seems to be a trend over the last several decades.

And I think what you gain by talking about modernity, at its best, is self-understanding. So again, Taylor, right. For Taylor, just to say out loud, “Hey, imagine being in a place where there were no other options. And then imagine you.” And you kind of know, like, “That's existed before.” It's very historically plausible that there's a bunch of places and a bunch of people, not everybody, but a bunch of people where yeah, there are mores, there are traditions. We're just so thickly encoded into the social habit and it's not for us.

And what you gain then is to say, “Well, that's peculiar,” at least. So you gain some sense of what you're struggling with. A bit of self-understanding. And I think that self-understanding helps you recognize… here's what I think it could help us do. I'm shooting from the cuff here, obviously. But I think what it helps us do is also be oriented to our task. So if in fact we are a bit disoriented, if in fact we all feel some need to be reoriented, that is to say it's a kind of historical peculiarity, a historical idiosyncrasy we are these people who exist in an ideological and moral environment where there's just a sea of options and noise. There’s something in our nature that doesn't that doesn't sit well with us. There's an adventure to it and it's exciting in a lot of ways. But there's also…

So for instance, I could just say this out loud: the idea that there's no public common civil worship, like my community is a worshiping community and that we as a community praise God together or something like that, that was just so normal. Like at a human basic animal level, that's just how it is to be alive and be a part of a community. That we don't have that, I'm not even saying is all bad, but it's weird. And there's something in us that feels a little itchy without it, I think. And one way of looking at this… You made these two options, this kind of erasure versus this preserving of everything good. And I think another way to do this is – again, going back to that metaphor of the unhomed juvenile – the smartest way to be kicked out of a house, if you're forced to be free and you're forced to relate to – again, “simultaneous global renegotiation of all human custom” – if you're forced to relate to your own gender to your religion to where you lived, all of it, through choice: that's haunting in one sense. But it actually I think clarifies the nature of our relationship to tradition which really is the old Protestant concept which is: it's not infallible. You can't just believe something because it was in the past, but you do wind up… I think the wise posture just winds up becoming something like, “Hey I'm just one person floating in the sea of human options, and what do I know. “I really go Socrates and Plato about this. Genuinely I'm sitting amidst a sea of intellectual options.”

And as it turns out there is this tradition. So the example I always use is if you were going to go study physics everybody knows if you're going to go study physics, it would be just stupid – you don't have to make a big argument for this – it would be dumb not to read other physicists. You're not the first person to ever study physics. It's not because they're infallible, it's because an enormous amount of minds have been working on these problems, and their working on those problems is helpful for you.

And I think what a mature relationship to our own circumstance is and what we can get out of it is a relationship to our tradition that's in orthopraxy, orthodoxy, that's not slavish but nevertheless – and I find this as I grow intellectually a lot – lots of the tradition, Scripture even – “Scripture even:” that's a dumb thing to say.  “Scripture definitely; The tradition even:” I should put it that way – is ahead of me intellectually. When I confront it – and in a whole intellectual project, when you spend twenty, thirty years studying the existence of God or the rationality of our Christological or Trinitarian formulas or “are sexual ethics really just old, primitive patriarchy” or something like that, when you press into those things and you say, “Hey I don't feel as oriented to all those truths as perhaps my ancestors did,” but these have been worked out over many many many many generations, years, in contexts and probably in that hive mind – the way Stephen Clark would put it is what you get in a tradition like that is 3000 minds over many many centuries have agreed on one thing, versus your one mind in your moment thinking one thing. There's an there's a weight to that that it's actually just prudential to recognize. And that doesn't even – again it doesn't even give it intrinsic absolute authority. It just says it's rational, it's very reasonable to defer to the weight of that. There's something weighty about that. In a sense, to be modern implies that there's a whole history before you history that in fact is for you and you can draw upon in the modern circumstance.

And that's the thing to me when I speak of modernity and this relationship to our customs. I don't think of it as we can just discard the past. We're violently – historically, violently, let's put it that way – ripped away from the necessity of those customs, from being forced to have those customs you might say. But that doesn't mean the customs are not for us. That doesn't mean they're not pointing at things we should still think and do. And a free person, in a sense, kind of has to say like, “I might not be forced to go to church and read my Bible and pray, but it's still very good and helpful and good for me to go to the church and read my Bible and pray.” That sort of thing. And I think that's relatively true of the whole tradition. It actually presses you deeper into it in some ways. That’s the other thing, is you become an adult relationship to it at that point.

Ryan: All right. Thank you so much, Joe.

Joseph Minich: Thank you.

Ryan: And have a great rest of your day.

Joseph Minich: All right, you too man. See ya.