Protestantism after Modernity.........................................................

Lecture 32

We need to trace a trajectory for Protestant theology after modernity.

Of course, I am thinking of the intellectual movement, the intellectuals

in the West who tend to think that we are now post-modern, that we are

living in an era after modernity. That is an interesting question to raise.

Are we living in an era after modernity?

M

odernity has an intimate relationship with Protestantism.
Protestantism helps beget modernity in part by dividing
Christendom against itself. Christendom is a society and politics
that sees itself as Christian, with speci¿ cally Christian responsibilities. In
a divided Christendom, it is hard for members of society to discern their
Christian responsibilities. Modernity is secular in part because the Christian
religion was no longer effective as the ground of unity in much of the
West after the Reformation. Christendom secularizes itself as Christians
¿ nd increasingly weighty reasons not to want an established church, thus
generating an increasingly secular politics.

In the Enlightenment, Deists advocate natural religion, which is in effect a
secularized version of Christianity. The early Deists’ idea that natural religion
was the true and original Christianity is historically preposterous. But equally
preposterous is the idea that it represents natural and universal reason, when
it is obviously a set of Western ideas derived from Christianity—as any
non-Westerner can easily see. The Deists thus make the typically modern
mistake of regarding distinctively Western Christian ideas as natural truths
of reason. The mistake is easy to make, because what modern secularism
secularizes is always some aspect of Christendom, which means what is left
after the secularization is some residue of Christianity. A fully postmodern
society will be fully post-Christian, no longer mistaking residues of Western
Christian thought for universal truths of reason.

The Liberal turn to experience in 19th-century theology relies on assumptions
about religious consciousness that are residual products of the Christian
tradition. Schleiermacher treats God-consciousness as a fundamental feature