Deleting Theology: Examining a Curious Historiographical Phenomenon (Part 1)

[This is a paper I presented at the Northwest Region Evangelical Theological Society Meeting in 2018 - Part Two - Part Three - Part Four - Part Five - Conclusion]

We … remain unaware of the full extent to which characteristic concepts and patterns of … philosophy and literature are displaced and reconstituted theology, or else a secularized form of devotional experience. … [We] readily mistake our hereditary ways of organizing experience for the conditions of reality and the universal forms of thought.

—M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism[1]


History is the product of a technology. It does not simply lie around like stones or apples, ready to be picked up by anyone who pleases. It must first be produced.

—Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History[2]

Let us begin with a parable of sorts. In 1881, when the London Natural History Museum in South Kensington opened, it was not only one of the pinnacles of the Gothic revival in the Victorian period. It also encapsulated the newly minted Victorian spirit of scientific investigation. Though the concept of a “scientist” as we now know it is so familiar it may appear ageless in its self-evidence, William Whewell coined the term in 1830’s.[3] To be sure, the Latin term scientia is quite old. It signified, however, any area of knowledge that could admit of some type of systematic investigation appropriate to its object of inquiry. The term, moreover, indicated a type of habitual virtue taking root in the individual. It was a form of mind, a mode of knowledge, indeed one could even call it a way of life.[4] The term “scientist” supposedly inaugurated something quite new, especially in Anglophone circles.[5]This term was meant to delimit its object of inquiry from theology, metaphysics, aesthetics, natural philosophy, and other matters (including what was to many at the time the annoying social prestige of the Victorian cleric). Regardless, at the inception of the Natural History Museum, outside the walls of this house of wisdom, sitting at the apex of its highest gable resided a terracotta statue of the Biblical first man, Adam.[6]

This was no aberration, some vestigial holdover from a quant religious and theological past that had yet to be discretely removed, now juxtaposed awkwardly with the newly won vistas of legitimate human knowledge. Just as the grand Cathedrals of old (in whose style the museum itself was crafted), “The Natural Museum in Kensington … encouraged its visitors to view it as a temple of science.” Indeed, one commentator even remarked that as visitors came to this “animal’s Westminster abbey” with its “stained glass windows, and church-like atmosphere,” were known to “respectfully remove their hats as they entered the building.”[7]

Gazing down from his parapet, Adam represented the interlocked worlds of science and theology. As the historian of science Peter Harrison records, many at the time saw the figure of Adam as the prototypical investigator of nature. “Much as [Adam] surveyed the creation, named and classified the creatures, and bent them to his ends, those who now labored within the confines of the museum also sought to bring order to the unruly diversity of nature, and to organize the whole of the living world into a kind of material encyclopaedia.”[8]Knowledge was seen in all its variety as restoring the primal wisdom Adam lost in the Fall. Far from some enterprise justified in terms of “knowledge for knowledge’s sake,” the rapidity of scientific advance, and indeed the unity of a bewildering variety of new disciplines, were all justified and circulated in explicitly theological terms.

Yet, visitors to the Natural History Museum in Kensington will not today come upon the terracotta Adam, gazing down as a unique symbol unifying the variety of disciplines, discoveries, and data held within the towering spires and dizzying hallways yawning beneath Gothic archway stones. “Intentional or not,” writes Harrison, “some time after the end of World War II [the Adam statue] was toppled from its commanding position.” This, in turn, serves as a powerful metaphor for our theme:

This particular fall of Adam might also be vested with symbolic significance, for the twentieth century witnessed the final stages of the secularization of scientific knowledge along with the development of a degree of historical amnesia about the role of religion in its early modern origins.[9]

This is, I think, a concise summary of one of the major problems the perception of theology faces today, and what will be our focus in this paper. The fascinating histories of theory and practice, of human intrigue, of bravery and sorrow, to which theology has historically contributed leading up to what we now take to be the ordinary and utterly non- or even anti-theological, have been forgotten, or selectively erased. Put differently, there is a sense in which God and theology continuously appear to be an extrinsic addition to people’s ordinary lives precisely because theology and God have been excised from our understanding of the complexities that led up to where we are today. Or, if memories of God and theology are retained, they exist only as elements that appear as repressive of human flourishing.

Specifically, we need to focus on the idea that there is a feedback loop in which the knowledge contained in secularization theory circles around into the purportedly descriptive narrations of history supposedly giving warrant to categories like “secularization,” “disenchantment,” and a whole array of other concepts and practices in the first place. For the purposes of our paper, this results in the obscuring of the place of religion and theology in the historical record through the assumption of its irrelevancy, by bracketing it out, or even by acts of explicit erasure. This procedure is on occasion broadly termed “Whig History” after Herbert Butterfield’s famous book The Whig Interpretation of History.[10]The Whigs as a political party tended to divide the whole world between friends and enemies, and usually isolated and narrated only the elements of history they believed directly led up to themselves and their own perceived strengths. Everything else was discarded as so much chaff. While the specific context and nature of Butterfield’s contested use of “Whig” or “whiggish” is often overlooked,[11]the major point to be had from his study for our purposes is that “history is never the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.”[12]

In the terms of our paper, secularization theories constitute a form of Whig history precisely because they isolate elements deemed secular or scientific or rational, which can and have been retrojected into histories of the genesis of the secular, the scientific, the “everyday”. Thereby, the distance and possible antagonism between, say, science and Christianity embodied by the stories that are told—even in crude form by Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins—are also exaggerated because the crucial role played by Christianity in the production of such knowledge and practice is selectively unseen, modulated, or filtered out implicitly or explicitly by the interpretive grids of the historian. To put it boldly: what we have here are implicit and explicit examples of deleting theology.

As Dominic Erdozain puts it in a recent monograph critiquing the notion of “secularization” for example: even the most hostile aspects of “Modernity [are often] characterized” not by exteriorhostility to religion, but “by the internalization of religious ideas, [and] not their disintegration.”[13]Erdozain’s argument points us to the fact that theology done poorly can often be its own worst enemy, eventually producing what he terms “the soul of doubt” cultivated from within, and not from without, Christianity’s own resources. And Bruce Holsinger, as another example, writes about how postmodern theorists including Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Pierre Bordieu so often touted as bogeymen in popular apologetics works in fact find much of their inspiration from both medieval thought and, through Bataille, a sort of inverted school neo-Thomism.[14]This of course does not make them friendsof Christianity by any means. The point is rather that to see them as merely outside the pale of Christian theology is to misdiagnose the situation considerably.

What I want to stress is that secularization theories often turn less on exposing different epistemologies or ontologies, or an array of other possibilities—as most of these were in fact crafted within the horizons of Christian theology and practice. Rather, as for example not just Erdozain, but also Michael Buckley and James Turner have famously stressed, forms of atheism and secularism are in fact dependent upon their host theistic contexts.[15]Secularization theories are much like Dan Edelstein describes the French philosophes relationship to the Enlightenment: “the key contribution these French scholars made” he argues, “was less epistemological than narratological.” He continues: “in other words, they did not propose a new method of reasoning or advocate a new philosophical understanding of the world.” Rather they created a seductive account “of the events and discoveries of [their] past century, in conjunction with a more overarching history of human civilization.”[16]Here Charles Taylor’s insight is especially key as well:

[All the various subtraction narratives of secularization] make a crucial move which they present as a ‘discovery,’ something we ‘come to see’ when certain conditions [like the Scientific Revolution, or Enlightenment, or the Death of God] are met. In all cases, this move only looks like a discovery within the frame of a newly constructed understanding of ourselves, our predicament and our identity. The element of ‘discovery’ seems unchallengeable, because the underlying construction is pushed out of sight and forgotten. … All these accounts ‘naturalize’ the features of [of a current supposedly secular situation]. They cannot see it as one, historically constructed [and for our purposes, theologically constructed] understanding of human agency among others.[17]

Taylor continues: “Unbelief for great numbers of contemporary unbelievers is understood as an achievement of rationality. It cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness. It is a condition that cannot be only described in the present tense, but which also needs the perfect tense: a condition of 'having overcome' the irrationality of belief.”[18]

So too I argue that historical narratives examining the rise of secularization do not really provide scientific historical data for the theory of secularization, so much asthey are that theory, expressed in the form of history and pressed upon it. As Ian Hunter puts it in a recent essay on secularization:

[I argue] that someone wishing to develop an historical understanding of secularization cannot do so by taking up a position within [the current] field of debate. This is in part because there is no historical evidence that a process of secularization of any of the envisaged kinds actually took place, while there is significant evidence to the contrary. But it is also because these various accounts of a process of secularization are not themselves histories in the empirical sense. Rather, they constitute an array of competing theological and philosophical programs, each advancing what purports to be a history of secularization, but only as a means of prosecuting various factional cultural-political agendas, some dedicated to secularism, others to sacralism.[19]

To start our investigation, let us turn in the next post to the demise of Positivism in the 20th century.

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[1]M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 65-66.

[2]Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), xiv.

[3]See: Sydney Ross, “Scientist: The Story of a Word,” Annals of Science, 18 no.2 (1962): 66-67; H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 27-39.

[4]Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 1-21.

[5]Donald R. Kelley, History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (New York: University of Rochester, 1997).

[6]Carla Yanni, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Architecture and the Culture of Display (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 142f.

[7]David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 39, picture caption 9.

[8]Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 245.

[9]Harrison, Fall of Man, 245.

[10]Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1965).

[11]On this, see Nick Jardine, “Whigs and Stories: Herbert Butterfield and the Historiography of Science,” History of Science 41 (2003): 125-140.

[12]Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, 47.

[13]Dominic Erdozain, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 6.

[14]Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

[15]Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

[16]Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 2-3; 116.

[17]Charles Taylor, A Secular Age(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 571.

[18]Ibid., 269.

[19]Ian Hunter, “Secularization: Process, Program, and Historiography,” Intellectual History Review 27 no. 1 (2017): 7-29. See: 8.