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We are slowly losing our amnesia. Thanks to recent tomes – in particular Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and Larry Siedentop’s masterly Inventing the Individual – the idea that the modern world was hatched in smoke-filled room by Voltaire, Kant and Rousseau is losing to its credibility. The West had a history before the Enlightenment that was marked by more than ignorance, theocratic violence and industrial-scale witch-burning. Neither a commitment to equal human dignity (let us call this ‘humanism’), nor to a state whose legitimacy is grounded in its obligation to administer equal justice under the rule of law (let us call this ‘secularism’) is natural; neither is an invention of the 18th century. Both rest on deep Christian foundations.
Theo Hobson’s is the latest book to argue this case, which he narrates at a brisk pace and in engaging prose. From the Hebrew prophets, through New Testament, Christendom, Reformation, Enlightenment, 19th and 20th centuries, to a slightly longer chapter on where we are now, he tells the tale of how what he calls “secular humanism” came to be our common creed today.
His purpose is polemical rather than purely historical. Believers need to be less hostile to “secular humanism”, he argues, as it is the ideological child to which their faith has given birth; non-believers need to be less hostile to secular humanism’s Christian roots, not least because, he intimates, it is only those roots that will sustain it in the long run. The “humanitarian ideals” which mark our time are not natural, nor “rationally deducible” but the result of “complex cultural traditions, brewed over centuries… the main ingredient [of which] was the story of God taking the side, even taking the form, of the powerless victim.”
Nick Spencer | Read the full article from Church Times
Image available from Church Times.
