Despite the many errors and evils wrought by modern-ism in theology, I suspect that modern-ity† has in many ways, and perhaps on balance, been good for the discipline of theology. If I were trying to make this case, it would include at least some of the following reasons:

1. There are more theologians writing and reflecting from the different Christian perspectives than ever before. This is of course a mixed blessing at scale — but close to an unalloyed good for any given aspiring theologian. Some of the gatekeeping imposed on the discipline by the combination of medieval technology and institutions was good, and some was bad, or at least counter-productive, for the discipline’s health. Broadly speaking, before the technological and institutional revolutions of modernity, only the bishops (or those in their favor) could produce works of theology, which unavoidably limited the scope of theological writing (ruling out many heresies) and put any aspiring theological writer more or less at the mercy of his or her bishop’s opinions (on whether a certain heresy might or might not be latent in their work). Without in any way wishing to disavow the Church’s proper role as convener and authorizer of theologians, a certain freedom from scrutiny is of course necessary for really creative thought to come to full flower, and it seems to me hard to dispute that the Church’s bishops have not always scrutinized correctly or had sufficient patience with budding theological minds. (To take the most extreme example: one can only imagine how the early years of Reformation might have proceeded differently had the already hot-headed Luther been met by less intransigent bishops and papal emissaries.) There is no past golden era of free-flowing thought in theological education, not even when an Albertus Magnus taught in the University of Paris; that golden era in a way really is now, for some of the reasons that follow.
2. Along with this goes the possibility of a better, richer mutual understanding of those different Christian perspectives. It really is remarkable, when reading pre-modern theological writers, not just the degree of vitriol they often exhibit against their opponents (especially in Reformation-era polemics) but how frequently they misrepresent or indeed misunderstand them as well. This, like most of my other observations, applies less often to the genuinely top echelon of theologians — Sts. Augustine, Thomas, Gregory, et al. — as to those closer to the middle of the bell curve; compare Richard Hooker’s generally temperate and perceptive (even, occasionally, sympathetic) approach to the arguments of his presbyterian opponents, to his forerunner John Jewel’s rather more vehement approach to the arguments of his Romanist opponents! But those in the middle of the bell curve are still often influential in their own days, even if they are later remembered only as foils to the greater thinkers who moved beyond and reacted against them; think of the way that Gabriel Biel is now utterly forgotten as a theologian in his own right and his thought is only taught as the background (for good or ill) to Martin Luther’s theology. It is better if those generationally, if not millennially, influential theologians have a more rigorous and a more charitable understanding of their opponents’ positions. One of the great accomplishments of the ecumenical movement has been the reversal of sweeping anathemata against those Christians outside one’s own tradition, and the recognition that, say, Roman Catholics and Lutherans genuinely have much to learn from one another about justification (aside from not being as far apart in the first place as the rhetoric suggested).
3. This has partly resulted in, and partly been begotten by, the modern revolution in hermeneutics: hermeneutics considered not in its pre-modern sense as the set of rules for reading and interpretation, but in its contemporary philosophical sense as deep reflection on the act of reading, the problem of historical understanding, and the construction of meaning. To be sure, “revolution” really might overrate the degree of discontinuity; much of what is apparently new in Schleiermacher and Gadamer can also be found, in at least inchoate form, in, say, St. Augustine. Nevertheless, we have now in the contemporary world these significant hermeneutical possibilities: a chastened understanding of the “literal sense” that admits the unfixedness and unparaphraseability of textual meaning while simultaneously accepting its reality and its real effects; an appropriately moderated view of what can and cannot be established about a text on the basis of allegorical readings (as well as the fluidity of what constitutes “allegorical reading”); a proper admission of the inescapability of personal prejudices in interpretation and the indissoluble role of trust in knowledge; a fuller, if never full, perception of how a text’s “history of effects” (Wirkungsgeschichte) influences how it is read by me today; a recognition of the dialectic structure of thought and the complexity of acceptance. It has taken several centuries, but modernity has provided us with this methodological foundation — a methodological foundation which, ironically, should free us from too great a concern for closely observing properly “historical” methodology.
4. To the hermeneutical — if not “revolution” at least “evolution” — may be added what should fairly be called the text-critical revolution. We have more widespread and straightforward access to more theological works, from more perspectives and periods of Christian history, in ever more accurate texts, than at any previous point in Christian history. This has opened up genuinely new frontiers for theological interactions that would have faced exceedingly greater obstacles, or simply did not exist, hundreds of years ago. (One wonders, for example, how Calvin’s theology might have differed had he read St. Thomas without mediation, or for that matter St. John of Damascus at all.) You really can bring Karl Barth and Pseudo-Dionysius into conversation, and you might find that you want to — and when you do, you have the benefit of the most accurate texts of the Areopagite, freed through long scholarly labor from the corruptions that unavoidably creep in as texts are manually copied and recopied over centuries. Not to mention that we have an enormous text-critical apparatus for that Book which is the fountainhead and norma normans of all theology, that is, the Bible; though much of the value of that apparatus is found in recognizing (cf. Brevard Childs) the theological judgments that accompanied the Bible’s transmission, beyond questions about its most accurate or probably original text (we should, of course, have an appropriately chastened view of such historical judgment calls).
5. My last reason — for now! — may seem a curious one. In displacing Christendom, the secularity of modern civilization re-awakens the urgency of many crucial theological questions which could be taken for granted in an era of greater assumed cultural consensus. Today there is a critical need for a thick theological anthropology and doctrine of creation (almost the same thing) precisely because what it means to be a human creature is so contested in the secular world. Similarly there is a great need for a theological reckoning with the fact and reality of cultural and theological plurality. Or — take issues where the Church’s historical record is more lamentable. One of the only good effects from the unmitigated disaster that was the Shoah has been the long-overdue Christian reckoning with the degree to which reflexive anti-Judaism and its racialized descendant anti-Semitism had infiltrated our civilization and thinking; hardly any Christian preacher would today be willing to deploy the invective which a St. John Chrysostom or a Martin Luther hurled at the Jews. Similarly, the crisis of “gender roles” brought on by first industrialization and then feminism has, for all its enormous fallout, helped to illumine how remarkably sloppy has been much historic Christian reflection on what it means to be, and what is possible/permissible for, a woman — that is, when it has been reflected upon at all, rather than simply taking up unbaptized and unconverted notions from pagan culture or philosophy. For the Church to consider more deeply than before what is really true about God, the world, and herself is always an unalloyed good, even when this consideration is (as it usually is) for reasons of controversy and tragedy. Secularity is in countless ways a great (and occasionally self-inflicted) tragedy, but the Church’s business is discovering the redemptive effects of tragedy — just as it is her God’s business.

For all these reasons, and no doubt more I have not articulated here, I am grateful to live in modernity, despite wishing I could do away with the bad fruit of modernism in myself and in others. The correct answer to “When in history would you like to live?” should always be “Right now.” This is in part a simple matter of the honor that is due to Providence. But it is also a matter of recognizing the particular gifts of Providence in and for this time: as long as it is called “today.”

† At least, modernity in its “first watershed,” to crib Ivan Illich’s opening gambit in Tools for Conviviality.

Three incredibly important paragraphs from Polanyi:

Every acceptance of authority is qualified by some measure of reaction to it or even against it. Submission to a consensus is always accompanied to some extent by the imposition of one’s views on the consensus to which we submit. Every time we use a word in speaking and writing we both comply with usage and at the same time somewhat modify the existing usage; every time I select a programme on the radio I modify a little the balance of current cultural valuations; even when I make my purchase at current prices I slightly modify the whole price system. Indeed, whenever I submit to a current consensus, I inevitably modify its teaching; for I submit to what I myself think it teaches and by joining the consensus on these terms I affect its content. On the other hand, even the sharpest dissent still operates by partial submission to an existing consensus: for the revolutionary must speak in terms that people can understand. Moreover, every dissenter is a teacher. The figures of Antigone and of the Socrates of the Apology are monuments of the dissenter as law-giver. So are also the prophets of the Old Testament—and so is a Luther, or a Calvin. All modern revolutionaries since the Jacobins demonstrate likewise that dissent does not seek to abolish public authority, but to claim it for itself.

Admittedly, submission to authority is in general less deliberately assertive than is an act of dissent. But not always. St. Augustine’s struggle for belief in revelation was much more dynamic and original than is the rejection of revelation by a religiously brought up young man today. In any case, at every step of the process by which we are brought up and continue to participate in an established consensus, we exercise some measure of choice between different degrees of conformity and dissent, and either of these choices may mean a more passive or a more assertive reaction.

We should realize at the same time how inevitable, and how unceasing and comprehensive are such accreditive decisions. I cannot speak of a scientific fact, of a word, of a poem or a boxing champion; of last week’s murder or the Queen of England; of money or music or the fashion in hats, of what is just or unjust, trivial, amusing, boring or scandalous, without implying a reference to a consensus by which these matters are acknowledged—or denied to be—what I declare them to be. I must continually endorse the existing consensus or dissent from it to some degree, and in either case I express what I believe the consensus ought to be in respect to whatever I speak of. The present text, in which I have described in my own way the interaction of every utterance with the public consensus, is no exception to what I have said in the text about utterances of this kind. Throughout this book I am affirming my own beliefs, and more particularly so when I insist, as I do here, that such personal affirmations and choices are inescapable, and, when I argue, as I shall do, that this is all that can be required of me.

— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, 208–09

There is currently a discussion going on about the supposed contrast, and transition, between the “gospel-centered” “third wave” of evangelicalism (associated with figures like John Piper and the late Timothy Keller) and the “spiritual formation” “fourth wave” of evangelicalism (associated with figures like John Mark Comer and the late Dallas Willard). I am suspicious of over-relying on this periodization, partly because like all periodizations it conceals as much as it reveals about its subject matter; from my acquaintance with Piper’s and Keller’s works, they are by no means soft on the need for spiritual transformation as not only a result of coming to know the gospel but as a means of more deeply apprehending the gospel itself, and from my acquaintance with Willard’s and Comer’s works they are by no means soft on articulating the substance of the gospel or the importance of recognizing it as a gift of pure grace. (Do not take anything I say below as a judgment for, against, or even particularly about any of these particular teachers.)

But if there is any use in this periodization for general heuristic value — as describing “normative moods” or “characteristic emphases” and not classifying individual teachers or intellectuals — my sympathies generally lie with the normative moods and characteristic emphases of the spiritual formation wave. This is for a very straightforward reason. We do not come to “know” anything at all without already holding and giving at least tacit commitment to it, and we do not acquire more than a tacit commitment to anything we “know” without purposely apprenticing ourselves to it — a kind of apprenticeship that entails our trust in the Master of our apprenticeship, which is to say a submission to His purposes in our learning and training and a corresponding abandonment (at least in principle) of our own purposes. (Lewis’s remarks about this in “The Weight of Glory” are unsurpassed for clarity, even if there are more philosophically sophisticated treatments available in print — hello, Polanyi!) In other words, the gospel has to be lived to be understood, just as it has to be understood to be lived.

The spiritual formation wave recognizes and receives this core phenomenological insight as its basic impulse. Squabbles about how precisely articulated certain doctrinal commitments of the spiritual formation movement and its leaders are (or are not) miss the basic point. Yes, faithfulness to the teaching of Holy Scripture is of utmost importance; but how will they know how to faithfully rearticulate what Holy Scripture says if they have not understood it, and how can they understand it without living it, and how can they live it without obediently imitating the One Who speaks its words in the first place? An accurate, if of course not maximally precise, summary of the Gospel really is “Jesus loves you and wants you to be like him.” Absent a real emphasis on spiritual formation as discipleship — as apprenticeship to Jesus — there is a real danger of “gospel-centrality” morphing into a Tillich-style “accept the fact that you are accepted!” gospel proclamation accompanied by what can only be experienced as disconnected legalism in the realm of, you know, actual lived behavior (the very thing that, after allegiance to Him, the Jesus who meets us in the New Testament makes it eminently clear He cares about).

Of course there are characteristic and formally similar dangers inherent to the spiritual formation movement — “it doesn’t matter what you believe, it’s all about how you live!” readily slips into an equally legalistic “if you don’t live this exact way / practice this specific discipline / have this precise emotional experience you are No True Christian.” (It was, of course, necessary for John Piper to write a book entitled When I Don’t Desire God.) I know of no paradigm that lacks such dangers. No approach to Christian faith is guaranteed proof against misunderstanding or hypocrisy. But the spiritual formation emphasis begins with the premise that, as St. Augustine taught, the human being is homo amans precisely before she is, and in order to be, homo cognens. It is not merely that faith seeks understanding; it is that understanding depends on faith.

Aim, truly aim, for spiritual formation into the image of Christ, and the whole knowledge of the gospel — which is Christ Himself — will be added unto you; even as indeed in this life you struggle to imitate Him and will never finally reach the fullness of His likeness (yet, perhaps, much more than you think!). Aim for the knowledge of Christ without expressly seeking the power that kindles that knowledge into love, and you may well find that you get Christ anyways — He is, after all, notoriously gracious like that; or you may, more tragically and horrifyingly, ultimately find that you have not gotten Him after all, and that His words to you and your ilk are not “Enter now into the joy of your Master” but “I never knew ye; depart from me.” Both waves may get you where you want to go; but I know which I would prefer to ride.

“This was one of the central problems confronting all the foreign policy executives [in 1914] (and those who try to understand them today): the ‘national interest’ was not an objective imperative pressing in on government from the world outside, but the projection of particular interests within the political elite itself.”

— Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, 190

Two notes, with no pretense to originality, from my most recent reread of The Lord of the Rings (probably the 15th lifetime or something like that):

1. One of the many things that elevates Tolkien’s trilogy to true greatness is how deep and subtle an exploration it offers of political philosophy/theology. What is the ideal king like? What is the good, if any, of political violence? How is power to be used? What is true peace? What does a flourishing society look like? What responsibilities do we have to the past — and the future? What is true greatness, and what responsibility do the great have to the humble? Tolkien addresses all these questions, and more: sometimes by way of explicit statement (usually in the mouth of Gandalf, Aragorn, Elrond, or Faramir); sometimes less directly but still explicitly spelled out in the course of events (the tragedy of Boromir, or the Scouring of the Shire); sometimes more by the narrator’s showing than telling (the spiritual dimension of the conflict, or the changes in narrative voice and register). One wonderful narrative example: the transformation of Merry and Pippin through their great deeds and their sufferings (and the Ent-draughts), and the great authority and “lordliness” they possess on returning to the Shire — yet without losing their deep love for and connection to the Shire and its people, who do not really understand what they have survived and done.

2. The conflict in The Lord of the Rings is more spiritual than it is material. Of course there is much heroic violence and the clashing of great armies and many glorious deeds and so forth; but Tolkien perceives, and shows, that his heroes and armies depend more on their hope and the strength of their spirit than on their bodies and their arms, and that before and after any physical blow is struck the chief weapon of the Dark Lord and his servants is fear and despair. The powerful weapons and tokens that appear in the story — Aragorn’s sword Andúril, Galadriel’s star-glass — all work by possessing and exerting a spiritual influence to bring hope and courage in dark places. Most of all, the One Ring is no mere MacGuffin, but it is a malevolent agent in the plot: drawing the allies of Mordor to harass and hunt down the Ring-bearer, while tempting the Ring-bearer and his companions with delusions of grandeur and unearned power — yet ultimately the Ring’s malicious hold over the wills of both Frodo and Gollum is its own and its true master’s undoing. The strength of will and spirit of any character is always his or her most important and relevant feature to the plot, before the ability to perform any particular deed. So the great ones — Gandalf, Aragorn, Galadriel, and Faramir — all pass the test by refusing to take the One Ring from its humble yet rightful bearer, so enabling the only bearers who could creep undetected into Mordor to take the Ring to the Mountain of Fire. Aragorn has the strength of will to wrestle with Sauron in the palantír of Orthanc, so inducing him to strike Gondor before he is fully ready. Sam fights off the Ring’s temptation on the fences of Mordor by love for his master and the characteristically hobbitish practical humility (a small garden at home is quite enough for him to manage!). The spiritual dimension of the conflict is more important to its progression than the material. A lesson for us all.

Thesis: The appearance of effortless inhumanity is practically always dependent on the sacrifice or exploitation of hidden persons.

‘Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.’

— Gandalf the White, in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King: being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings, 1150

‘Dear me! We Tooks and Brandybucks, we can’t live long on the heights.’

‘No,’ said Merry. ‘I can’t. Not yet, at any rate. But at least, Pippin, we can now see them, and honour them. It is best to love first what you are fitted to love, I suppose: you must start somewhere and have some roots, and the soil of the Shire is deep. Still there are things deeper and higher; and not a gaffer could tend his garden in what he calls peace but for them, whether he knows about them or not. I am glad that I know about them, a little.’

— Peregrin Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck, in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King: being the Third Part of the Lord of the Rings, 1139

“Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves.” — Gandalf the White to Peregrin Took

— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Two Towers: Being the Second Part of the Lord of the Rings, 780

We should also remember that the rules of induction have lent their support throughout the ages to beliefs that are contrary to those of science. Astrology has been sustained for 3000 years by empirical evidence confirming the predictions of horoscopes. This represents the longest chain of historically known empirical generalizations. For many prehistoric centuries the theories embodied in magic and witchcraft appeared to be strikingly confirmed by events in the eyes of those who believed in magic and witchcraft. Lecky rightly points out that the destruction of belief in witchcraft during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was achieved in the face of an overwhelming, and still rapidly growing, body of evidence for its reality. Those who denied that witches existed did not attempt to explain this evidence at all, but successfully urged that it be disregarded. Glanvill, who was one of the founders of the Royal Society, not unreasonably denounced this method as unscientific, on the ground of the professed empiricism of contemporary science. Some of the unexplained evidence for witchcraft was indeed buried for good, and only struggled painfully to light two centuries later when it was eventually recognized as the manifestation of hypnotic powers.

— Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, 168