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Hi, I'm Luke Bretherton, Director of the McDonald's Center for Theology, Ethics and Public Life. Welcome to this podcast, which is part of an occasional series from the McDonald Center that explores one of the oldest and most urgent questions we face today. What does it mean to be human? At a time marked by political polarization, religious conflict, rapid technological change, and renewed debates about identity and belonging, ideas about humanity itself are being contested. Who counts as fully human? What do we owe one another? And can we still speak meaningfully about a shared humanity in a deeply divided world? These episodes address these questions. They're drawn from a major international conference that brought together scholars, religious leaders, and practitioners to explore the idea of religious humanism, particularly within Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Far from being simply a secular idea, humanism has its roots in religious traditions, and these in turn have inspired movements for abolition, humanitarianism, civil rights, democratic renewal and reconciliation. Across the series, we explore how different traditions have imagined the human person, how those visions have shaped public life, and whether religious forms of humanism might offer resources for addressing some of the most pressing ethical and political challenges of our time. At its heart, this podcast asks a simple but profound question. In an age of fragmentation and fear. What kinds of ideas, practices, and communities can help us build a more humane, just and generous form of common life together? We're glad you're here and we hope you enjoy this episode.

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His research and teaching focus on religious and political ethics, theology, political theory, and the role of religion in public life. He's the order of author of politics and the order of love from 2008. And more recent articles on myths and politics, on the philosophy of history, secularity, nationalism, and morals super arrogant, which I think is something an interesting thing about. He's a graduate of Harvard, but he spent time here in Oxford as a race scholar, dealing not only an MFL, but also a diploma in theology before moving to IR for his graduate work. He's held many distinguished roles, but most recently the wonderfully titled Old Dominion Research Professor in the Humanities at Princeton and Senior Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry. Among his current projects is a book tentatively titled The Ingathering of Strangers, Glable Justice and Political Theology, examining secular and religious perspectives on global justice. He's going to talk to us today about Christian humanism and theological proclamation.

SPEAKER_07 3:38

Thank you, Professor Mortimore. I'm very old school, and I brought a handout, not on A4 paper, so unfortunately it's a bit tiny letters, but um and it just gives you something to look at while I'm talking, but it has some key quotes that you might want to uh follow up and with some citations. So almost 20 years ago, toward the end of a long book on religion and democracy after Christendom, uh inspired in part by the sort of freedom movements that we talked about last night in the opening keynote, I argued that the task of Christian social ethics was to engage the moral and political diversity of the present age with something like the Augustinian humanism of an Erasmus, rather than a new Augustine assailing the pagans. So count me on Team Brotherton in the effort to make uh Christian humanism great again, um, to resurrect a new Christian humanism in our context of threats to human creaturliness. The vicious sources of dehumanization are legion, I think we're familiar with many of them, convulsed by new technologies, new totalitarianisms, new Christian nationalisms, new market commodifications, but also new cosmopolitans that sometimes conceal their particularity. This is something we also talked a bit about last night. The latter include potentially religious humanisms that seek to revive the civilizing function of religion in denying particularity, and maybe Christian humanisms that seek to control the creativity of the divine purpose that is known only to God in its fullness? That might have echoes with the talk we heard this morning. So, what would it mean to reimagine Christian humanism as a theological proclamation, given deepen awareness of the complicity of that tradition with discredited colonialist and racist Enlightenment universalisms? How might a concept of Christian humanism function better given various historical dysfunctions of exclusion and domination? By my lights, repairing rather than abandoning such humanism is not merely a moral and political challenge to navigate post-Enlightenment tensions between the universal and the particular. It is that. Matthew's critical but conciliatory reading of Schweiker follows in the direction of a kind of Protestant Christian humanism that itself was significant for the development of the academic study of religion and broader streams of the humanities. My own religion department at Princeton, for example, was founded by Christian humanists like Paul Ramsey and George Thomas, who regularly invoked the term. Matthew's turn to a confessional Christian humanism betrays a longer history with roots in biblical and patristic sources. So in McIntyrean terms, we might say Christian humanism is a living tradition constituted by fraught debates over its application in changing circumstances. Next section, from Bart to Brotherton. I aim to articulate a theological understanding of humanism. And again, this might be a contrast with our earlier talk that was kind of putting most of the weight on the philosophy. I want to do so in the same way that Karl Bart, I think, sought a theological understanding of theology itself as a human witness, contingent on faith, in an evangelical proclamation that Jesus Christ is the fundamental reality of God's speech to humanity. This is the proclamation that shaped the soaring heights of his dogmatics, but also found concrete political expression and ecclesial expression in the Barman Declaration. According to this proclamation, Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, Colossians 1. In Christ, God was reconciling himself to the world, 2 Corinthians. Those who were once far off, aliens to the Commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenant of the promise, have been made members of the household of God, Ephesians 2. They are now included in the large family of the incarnate son, Romans 8, with echoes of the Abrahamic promise and a revocable, gracious election of Israel. In this gathering of Jews and Gentiles, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, Christ is knitting together a new humanity, Ephesians 2, a royal priesthood, 1 Peter 2, of native and wild branches, Romans 11. This is the vision that John sees of a restored Israel with representatives from all the nations in a great multitude, Revelation 7, making room for Gentiles to join Israel without becoming Jews. This is a joyful doxological humanism of a great Eucharistic banquet that will gather Israel and the nations in divine love. I take this to be a fundamental biblical narrative of a universal but differentiated humanity. It is one that Christians have wrestled with in telling to accommodate the significance of particular conceptions of peoples bound by language, culture, and kinship, and has fueled anti-Jewish polemic and violence by rendering an insecure or merely instrumental place for the Jewish people in the story of God's creation, in its relation to all that is not God. Or the story of God's relation to all that is not God. The glory of God is a human fully alive, says Irenaeus. This is the hallmark patristic proclamation of human flourishing for Luke Brotherton and his renewal of Christian humanism. It's often paired with the parable of the Good Samaritan and Matthew 25. For Brotherton's relational account, love of God and love of neighbor, which includes non-human creation, are the ground and fulfillment of what it means to be a human. The word humanity, he tells us, is a placeholder for the commitment to discover a shared way of being alive with outsiders. His agonistic humanism is ethical and political. It's a welcome response, I think, to the crisis of agency and institutions. His humanism does not seek refuge in a romanticized post-political republic of letters. It comes alive through participatory democratic politics that refuses to absolutize the friend-enemy distinction. It pairs an unapologetic appeal to a common humanity with a moral imagination and ethnographic curiosity and wonder that makes difference legible. It refuses radical individualism and lazy identity politics. To be sure, Brotherton's humanism is narrated theologically. It includes a cosmic eschatology that sighs for the transfiguration and praises the one in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. I take this to be one way to explain his language of ground alongside placeholding. There's something that all humans share in common. Christian humanism takes us back to our roots, terra es enemata, Augustine held. Human stems etymologically from humanus, closely related to the Latin hummus, or earth or soil. So there are creaturely kinds, the sorts of things maybe that McIntyre talks about as dependent rational animals with a natural habitat. But our full humanity is only proleptically realized, waiting for the fullness of time when all things are gathered into God. In the context of Barth's account of near and distant neighbors, Brotherton affirms a deep theologic within the Christian tradition that orders the good of a particular community as being fulfilled in the good of humanity as a whole, which is then fulfilled in communion with God. But Brotherton's humanism, like that of Jacques Marathon, is told paradigmatically through the incarnation and the call to fructify creation. Did I get that right? It's a good word that Luke uses a lot. It's an incarnational humanism of mortal life that trades on a divine intimacy with creation. Marathon's integral humanism, that we heard mentioned last night, posited a contrast between two conceptions of humanism, exclusively anthropocentric, that is governed by sovereign human willing, and a theocentric humanism of Thomistic confession. Marathon was an intervention in broader post-war debates about humanism, one that exercised Marxists, communists, existentialists, and French Catholic personalists. Edward Baring has shown that when Sartre famously declared existentialism as a humanism, he was engaged in a tactical move. The central question in 1945 was not whether existentialism was a humanism, but what type of humanism it was and why that mattered. Humanism appealed to the Christian left because it made room for generous encounter and an affirmation of the secular. But it was a word in which pitched battles over academic freedom, political unity, cultural identity, and social liberation were playing out. And Bering shows that humanism can be a powerful tool for opposing other parties, but if it interpreted in a certain way, had the potential to backfire on some of their most cherished political projects. So humanism had to be handled with terminological care. One reason Bart avoided the term, all the more so after Heidegger's letter on humanism. Christian humanism in the United States doesn't inherit the burdens of this European history fully. In fact, in a provocative discussion of Catholicism and the theological significance of America, John Courtney Murray approaches the topic in terms of the problem of Christian humanism in the American position, he called it. Like Maritan, he has two conceptions of Christian human, two conceptions of humanism, but now within the history of Christian humanism. One he calls eschatological humanism, the other incarnational humanism. Eschatological humanism looks to the perfection of the human in the vision of God that is radically discontinuous with history. The only true human values are those that are supernatural and eternal. Incarnational humanism, predicated on a grace that perfects nature, affirms a place for all that is natural, human, terrestrial. Now it's not hard to see analogies with H. Richard Nieber's more Protestant account of Christ and culture, with themes of participation versus withdrawal or transformation. Now, Murray held eschatological and incarnational humanism are not exclusive. They are in fact complementary. There is, if we could coin a term, this worldly otherworldliness. Each, however, results in a distinct style, and in this essay, he leaves it an open question about what best fits the American experience in what he called the ever precarious synthesis known as Christian humanism. Now, crucially, the often neglected full citation of Brotherton's favored Irenaeus declares a necessary corollary. The life of the human being consists in beholding God. To be fully human is to become participants in the divine life through a gracious communion with God in Christ, through the power of the Spirit, according to the Christian testimony. This is a humanism of the resurrected life, of life beyond life, one that superficially resembles transhumanist aspiration. Christianity wants to conquer mortality itself. In fact, some provocative readers of Augustine have suggested as much, numbering him among those who desire not to be human, to enjoy a body that dwells outside of time, outside of nature. He longs for incorruptible goodness. But like Dante, who coined the term transhumanism in the Paradiso, he doesn't merely contrast time and eternity, or the human and the divine, or the incarnate and the resurrected. Augustine is, after all, one of our most time-sensitive theologians. He refuses to stand in judgment of time or run ahead of God's time in confessing the goodness of creation. His meditations on the gift of the broken flesh of a God are at odds, I think, with transhumanism or anti-humanism that's untethered from the solidarity of divine incarnation that suffers timeliness and mortal goods. The human body, like all of creation, is not meant to be escaped, but it is a gift to be resurrected. In the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, maybe another great Christian humanism, Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in limbs, lovely in eyes, not his, to the Father through the features of men's faces. So this Augustine is not a God-intoxicated metaphysical idealist, maybe also not anti-metaphysical. Matter, however, is what makes our humanity infinitely receptive to formation. So eschatological humanism is still humanism. It's not angelology. But it's a strange humanism that tries to coordinate incarnation and eschatology. And I think it's at odds with some of the Christian humanisms that historically have been circumscribed by a more familiar home only in anthropologies rooted in doctrines of creation, not indexed to our consummation. It's decidedly theocentric rather than anthropocentric, but it identifies humanity in irreducibly theological terms, and I think biblically in terms of Jews and Gentiles as image-bearers reflecting God's presence in the world. It's not a complex humanism disguised in the language of Christianity. We might even call it Christocentric Christian humanism, aware of all the baggage that risks. I think this humanism is fully capable of adopting historical and phenomenological approaches to religion, which I think Karl Barth actually does, which is one reason why Barthians, maybe like myself, are comfortable in religion departments. But it might even render the Christian part of its humanism invisible, hidden in Christ, told only in parables, agnostic about the final shape of the body of Christ. Maybe that also tracks a bit with this morning's lecture. But my goal here is just to tell briefly the story of Christian humanism as a theological story, as a Trinitarian one. So I follow Bart's narrative method and trends in systematic theology that have migrated accounts of anthropology across a variety of doctrinal loci. I take inspiration from recent efforts, in fact, to lift up a minority tradition in Western Christianity, supralapsarian Christology. And that is the view that prioritizes the incarnation as the key to creation and its eschatological transformation rather than primarily a contingent response to the problem of sin. Why did Jesus come? Supralapsarianism decenters the story of the fall and tells a larger story of creation to consummation. My basic goal is to reimagine humanism transformed by the whole exposition of a faith in the eternity of a triune God. Christian humanism is a story about God. It's a story about God's abundance, not God's scarcity. But it's rooted in God's fidelity to creation. For superlapsarians, incarnation in fact precedes creation in the order of divine intentions. It reflects the universal shape of Christianity. God incarnation assumes a particular history through the election of Israel and a human being, Jesus of Nazareth. In the words of Catherine Tanner, the point of the incarnation is not what happens to the word, but what happens to us. Superlapsarianism is a pretty maximalist Christology. It's often assumed to lead to supersessionism. But the logic of incarnation, of God taking a particular human nature rather than a generic one, should be read in the narrative context of God's familial relation with Israel. The covenant with Israel cannot be superseded because it is rooted in the very being of the incarnate one himself. Now, all of this will invite philosophical, ethical, political implications. And we live in a very fearful time full of mourning, anxiety, rage, catastrophic uncertainty. The purpose of higher education, the fate of democracy, the nature of our religious traditions are radically condisted. In my context, even movements that used to inspire my students, like human rights and international law and effective altruism, are under a cloud of critique. My students, I asked them last year, name your moral hero. They couldn't come up with one. There's a kind of despairing quality. And I know Slava has argued that the most significant challenge to humanism, in fact, can be found among debunkers of Western humanitarianism, constituted by its religious and secular forms. And I'm writing a my current book is looking at the Jewish and Christian pre-modern traditions to think about the origins of humanitarian ethics before Kant and utilitarianism, to see if those traditions of mercy for a common humanity have anything to say to debates about immigration and poverty and war. In my earlier advocacy of a more humane, charitable liberalism in the context of citizenship, I didn't linger over Erasmus's differences with Augustine or their comparative Christian humanisms. It was a kind of rhetorical gesture to mark a spiritual moral disposition that shaped my engagement between Augustine and liberalism. My focus, like theirs, was the dialectic of love and sin during an earthly pilgrimage. Others have identified the ecstatic structure of Christian love in Erasmus's humanism, joining Platonic Eudaimonism to understandings of virtue as a divine gift in the ereditus of all creation to God. Both Augustine and Erasmus were shaped by Stoicism, but they were critical of its limits, of its elitism, of its rationalism, at odds with the folly of the Christian wisdom that bends to human weakness in mortal flesh. Both thought of a redemption of society in terms of a participation in the perfections of Jesus as the exemplar of the good and the beautiful. Both did social criticism of the false semblances of Christian charity within and outside the church. Christian humanism, then, is no merely lofty sentiment or an optimistic sense of progress or an objectification of human ideals. But as Jennifer Hart argues, Erasmus offers a mimetic account of Augustinian Christian virtue without Augustine's anxiety about splendid vices and pagan virtues. Now, the sources of Augustine's anxiety, which are recapitulated in the Reformation debates between Erasmus and Luther, I think are relevant to ongoing debates about humanism. But I take it scholars have shown that those debates are intural within the Christian tradition rather than the more popular secular story that contrasts Christianity to an essentially pagan Renaissance humanism. Christian humanism, in short, is not an oxymoron. But it complicates humanism by inviting all the disputes about what Christian means. It names a way of disciplining humanism in light of the judging and reconciling presence of God. Christian humanism has been revived often in moments of crisis. In Alan Jacob's book, The Year of Our Lord 1943, he tells the story of a prominent group of Christian intellectuals who tried to reimagine humanism as a response to their own time that was in the helpless thrall to propagandistic machinations of unscrupulous nationalistic movements. Marathon, Auden, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, you know, all of this has a very Oxford story to it. And even Simon Vay sought not so much a political response as a cultural one. To be sure, they often address questions of Western democratic social order, but theirs was primarily a literary and philosophical humanism. Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana is often heralded as a foundational text for that kind of humanism, a return to sources, a training in the liberal arts that preserves the wisdom of human communities. The signature verse is, like the treasures of the ancient Egyptians, all the branches of pagan learning contain not only false and superstitious fantasies, but studies for liberated minds. The treasures of the Egyptians can be applied to their true function, he says, the preaching of the gospel. Christian Hermionism in the service of proclamation, one that solicits maybe more argument, but also amen. What is most perhaps striking about Augustine's text, however, is a claim he makes in the preface. It's more of a musing. Here's Augustine and the nature of divine revelation. All of this could certainly have been done through an angel, but the human condition would be wretched indeed if God appeared unwilling to minister his word to human beings without human agency. According to Augustine, the proclamation of the humanity of God by human beings to one another, rather than using trumpets from heaven, is the way love ties people together in the bonds of unity. To make souls overflow, he says, as it were, to intermingle with each other. Matthew Elia has provocatively put it in dialogue with Lorraine Dastin and Sylvia Winter, that Augustine's humanistic vision doesn't yearn for unmediated Platonic truths, but a hermeneutical vision that enacts a lived ethic of human solidarity. It's a testament to a loving God who in freedom wills that there be other than God, a universal creator God who's patient with particulars. Indeed, on the Christian story, a God who no longer calls us slaves but friends. John 15. Now, Augustine is not everyone's model of humble, falliblist, dialical humanism. Despite the best efforts of some of us to domesticate the critics, and just as an aside, I think in the United States, the humanities were re-founded by mostly German Jewish refugees in the mid-20th century who engaged Augustine's problems. Eric Auerbach, Hannah Rendt, many others. Some of his closest readers, however, including Elia, see in him identity consolidation that dominates adversaries under cover of humility. Relentlessly supersessionist, Augustine enacts conquest of adversaries through judgment, not vulnerable dialogue. Christians often assume the role of the Good Samaritan, of cultural privilege. Augustine homogenizes interiority in a way that fails to see the genuine this-ness of other creatures. His confession masks assimilation. And disentangling the position of the master in Augustinian Christianity, it seems to me, is an urgent task for Christian humanism. It might still find resources in Augustine's own psychology of self-deception and self-giving. But I want to suggest we turn beyond his anthropology, beyond abstract discussions of nature and grace, or even the two cities, to his larger story, what he terms in City of God 18, the calling of the people of Gentiles who did not formally belong to God. It's a difficult way of thinking, even for most Christians who no longer think of themselves as Gentiles, adopted peoples who worship the God of another people. 20th century political Augustinianism emphasized Augustine's emphasis on the dignity of a shared humanity creating the image of God, independent of capacity and achievement. Now, to conceive of human dignity in relation to God poses familiar ontological questions. Is humanity a generic term? How does it relate to individual human beings? And about the extent to which the humanity of God is itself constitutive of the divine essence. Political Augustinians largely bracket these issues and mobilize the image of God language for practical purposes. A previous generation, for example, Martin Luther King Jr., and abolitionists in the 19th century, did so under the banner of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They adapted Augustine's vision to create institutions and adopt practices to support democratic humanism. Augustine famously declared every human being, qua human being, should be loved on God's account. And his celebrated discussion of the Ordo Amoris is now perhaps subject to sparring exegesis between J.D. Vance and the Vatican, taught that the commandment to love our neighbor excludes no human being. To deny equality is what Augustinians term sin, birthed in freedom that tends towards domination rather than peaceful belonging. In a fallen world, Augustine says the perversity of pride inclines us to hate a fellowship of equality. In fact, the duty of Christian love in Kierkegaard's radicalization is to will to exist equally for every human being. Ironically, such efforts tend, while rendering no one a moral stranger, rely on institutions that, intuitions that make us seem as we are actually all simply strangers to each other. I take the appeal of utilitarianism as an impartial morality that renders all human beings substitutable to be this universalism. Now, Augustine would admit, however, that only God could love everyone in their concrete particularity. Love doesn't erase what he called the plurality of persons and allow for proximate loves. J.D. Vance was right about that. He may not be right about immigration policy and other things, that's a separate question. But there's not an abstract statistical humanity. But Augustine also, the Vatican was right, was deeply preoccupied by the idea of the basic unity of the human race. I give you an example of a sermon he gave, 299 D. Everyone is a human being. He may remain a friend, he may become a friend. In fact, some of the stranger passages in this City of God, in 1608, for example, Augustine says, anyone born anywhere as a man, no matter how unusual he may be to our bodily senses in shape, color, motion, sound, derives from the original created man. He goes on to talk about people who have crescent-shaped feet, hermaphrodites, people who can, well, my children aren't here, so I could create music by farting. It's really impressive discussion. A man born in the East with a double set of upper members. And for Augustine, this all weaves the beauty of the whole out of the diversity of humanity. It's an aesthetic, beautiful relation between wholes and parts that I think spreads across his theology against Manichaeanism. The corporate relation to Adam and the second Adam, sensuous descriptions of the natural world, the quality of light, shady woods, flowers, diverse birds, all in the vision of a kind of dappled grandeur of creation. But as mortal creatures, we only have a limited sense of the whole. We only encounter Christ in the here and now. In a sense, for Augustine, we're all monsters. We're all vitiated in the wake of Adam. We await our redemption in Christ to praise the beauty of God in its fullness. Augustine becomes a question to himself that I think destabilizes a fixed idea not only about others but about ourselves. So there's no firm line between an us and a them. And one remarkable sermon on the parable of the Good Samaritan, which historically has been preached as Christians love everyone, Jews only love themselves, Augustine says the whole human race is the man lying in the ditch. Now his cosmopolitan affirmation is now seen with very critical ambivalence. Notably, his discussions of slavery, gender, and disability revealed the extent that he too naturalized his Roman sensibilities about what it means to be human. Even as he tried to outnarrate Rome theologically, he was embedded. Augustine's studies has come to question its own misleading situatedness in European colonial and racial discourse. A recent work on Augustine's Africanness highlights, to borrow from Chakrobardi, how his thought is related to his place. Catherine Conibert argues that in celebrating Augustine's influence on Western humanism, we miss a key point. Augustine was African. In a moving description of his appropriation, she limits his existence, the landscape in which he thrived, the people he loved, the passions that shaped his life have been completely occluded. Now, Conebert notes, African though he was, he had no time for the claims of fellow Africans that the African church was the right vision of Christianity. Augustine lived in a world where the tight fit between ancestry, cult, and gods was coming apart. He recognized diverse customs, perhaps reflecting his own Punic culture, that we shouldn't conflate what it means to be Roman with what it means to be Christian, what it means to be African with what it means to be Christian. And I think to turn to Augustine the African, to use his biblical idiom, is to turn to Augustine the Gentile. And here is I want to bring these remarks to a focused conclusion politically. Liberal internationalism, imagined by Christian humanists like Grotius and Las Casas, was once an attractive choice between religious nationalism and fictive cosmopolitanism that challenges the idea of nations as morally suspect. That position earned pragmatic support by Christian humanists who were hoping to defend a universal human community of equal standing that also recognized cultural specificity. The way in which distinct people groups mirrored divine goodness in a distinctive way. Critics now claim that that juridical idea, wedded often to humanitarian charity, obscured structural inequalities and massed historical injustices. Now, these tensions are familiar within liberal political thought, pressed by demands for a more global political thought. And they face tremendous backlash now by post-liberal critics of the liberal world, sometimes invoking Augustine. But the God Augustine confesses is different than a Kantian divinity that doesn't have preferential loves or providential plans. The ingathering of strangers by Augustine's light is a historical process that takes place within social bodies. It's the same God in whose name Paul prophesied the erasure of master slave, male, female, Greek, Jew. The time of the nations is running out. Long before post-colonial theory, the strange creatures of spirit rather than flesh proclaimed the nations belong to the old age. But at the same time, Paul's mission as apostle to the Gentiles is to bring a light to the nations, to include Gentiles in the Jewish story. Paul's God is Isaiah's God. The prophets portray the nations as a mere drop in the bucket, a little dust on the scales of divine judgment. But when God gathers all flesh before divine presence, it is as nations that they assemble. The prophetic horizon of Israel's vocation to the holiness of God is universal. From Babel to Pentecost, the gathering of the different nations proliferates the languages in which the God of all creation is named. For most of Christian history, it was this vision that charged national identity with providential significance, including assigning angels of peoples to different peoples' groups. Now, this is uncomfortable language for us. But whether imagined or not, nations have not disappeared. Rumors of their demise, I think, are comparable to the secularization thesis, which once attracted many scholars. None of us live in a world where nations don't matter. They arrange our mental world. They're at the intersections of our narratives, our history, and our place. They're as restless as Augustine's heart. It's a commonplace to distinguish nations from states, though I think there's definitional ambiguity in the debates about the modernity of the nation-state. I'm inclined to reject the view that nation-states and stateless nations are wholly discontinuous with nationalist sentiments of the past. There's a family resemblance. And a lot of late antique and medieval theology wrestled with how to fit, after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, the new world of post-Roman Ghentes into the biblical drama of Israel. There's a rise of so-called liberal nationalism today that pits itself against the cosmopolitan left and the nationalist right. But I think a preoccupation with the evils of nationalism has let the identity of nations slip away from our theological consciousness. The relative silence of Western theology on nations as guardians of communities of wisdom is understandable given the grotesque record of Christian nationalism. Often it was an Israel-forgetting theology that bound racialization under the guise of Catholicity. Now you might think nations have enough defenders, we should just rest in the wounds. But the image of concentric stircles that Stoics like Cicero and Christians like Augustine used when recommending we bring the socially distant closer is getting scrambled today. Compared to most fellow Christians, Augustine, who rarely of his day, most Christians who rarely traveled beyond their local village, Augustine was a cosmopolitan. He was familiar with wealthy landowners in Rome and local peasants in North Africa. He didn't know people on the opposite of the globe, but he wished them well. In our world, things have gotten more complicated. And this is, I think, a theme Smith, Hume, and Emerson pick up when they use the language of concentric circles, trying to awaken their readers to the ethical consequences of trade in spices and sugar in slaves. As Emerson concisely put it, the sugar slaves raised was excellent. Nobody tasted blood in it. Our world is smaller and smaller. The feet of countless migrants blur the boundaries that capital leaps over in a single bound. And if the rise of globalized capital is Arsilla, the resurgence of religious ethnonationalism is our Charybdis. The boundaries of nations matter less and less, but they matter more and more. Distant widows, widowers, and orphans populate the news, yearning for homelands they might never see. Born-again Christian nationalists in my country shred constitutions, scorch the earth, and call for ethnic purity. So defending nationalism as a community of wisdom is rightly met with anxiety about moral chauvinism. It's simply obvious to most philosophers, perhaps most theologians, that nations are morally irrelevant. They might be defended on consequentialist grounds. It would be better if it were otherwise. Now I'm not ending here by valorizing or divinizing nations. But I think dealing with the psychology of national identity is therapeutic for Christian humanists. Christian humanism can be tempted to render itself generic, the voice of the ahistorical universal human creature. The Christian story is for every man and every woman, like Christian in Bunyan's Pilgrim Progress, who leaves his near and dear and is reborn as a creature of the spirit. This is maybe the view from nowhere or the view from everywhere that worried Hegel in his critique of Kant. It's what Howard Thurman criticized in his claim that the love of humanity is meaningless. Humanity has a name, was born, lives on a street, gets hungry, needs particular things. On the other hand, Christian humanism can be tempted to claim the distinctive identity of Israel, the special people called to hallow God's name in a way that threatens the integrity of Israel and Gentiles. By my lights, one virtue of imagining a Christian humanism. Of the nation and a politics of internationalism, far from encouraging chauvinism, humbles the pretensions we might have and defers the comprehensive perspective of eternity and reimagine us as earth creatures. It's a third relational point of view. I agree with Brotherton. A mutual belonging and difference. It humbles Christian humanism by coming clean about our finitude. Christians should not try to be more than Gentiles. Christian humanism, reflective of Jewish universalism, needs the flesh of the nations to realize its incarnational vision. Now, Christian humanism can be put in the service, and here I end, of many things: visions of education and medicine, support for democracy, movements of social justice, efforts at interreligious understanding. All good things. A framework for building common life in a fractured world, as we're trying to do. None of that requires theological consensus. Christian humanism is not a doctrine of the church. Superlapsarianism, if you first heard of it, is not a doctrine of the church. No church adopts it as a status confessionist. But my claim is Christian humanism needs to distribute itself across the articles of faith, not just doctrines of creation, in order to be practically useful. Christians are not loyal to an ism, liberalism, postliberalism, or Christian humanism. The source of our piety is outside of us, even as it's given to us. All isms, Bart once declared, are inventions of the devil. The history of Christian humanism is fraught with ism-mongering. There's a dark side to this idolatrous tendency. Yet it's not a term we need abandon. Brotherton notes the paradoxical appeal of humanity is a claim that is diachronically and synchronically universal in scope, but which can only be understood through determinate forms of life. What I try to suggest here this morning is the same holds for Christian humanism as a theological proclamation. Christian humanism that is incarnational and eschatological is only realized through the determinate forms of life that the Bible names Jew and Gentile. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 46:56

But without losing sight of that eternal, of their relationship to eternity and also what unites us in our shared humanity. But I wanted to ask you. So I want to take out some of your comments about Erasmus. And ask you.

SPEAKER_07 47:14

Uh oh. When an early modern expert there's a reason why it was a rhetorical gesture in my book.

SPEAKER_02 47:20

I respect your rhetorical gesture. This is not about Erasmus the 16th century figure necessarily. But about Erasmus the theorist of folly. Erasmus who's interested in paradox. Because your vision of harmony, of unity, of concentric sarcals is a very particular one, which perhaps is a little bit different from an Erasmian vision of Christian folly, but perhaps also a kind of more one Corinthian Pauline vision of the folly of the cross, of the ways in which God sometimes acts in ways that seem very counter to human communities. So I'm wondering: in your vision of Christian humanism, concentric circles, redeemed nations, what place there is for paradox, for folly, and perhaps also for the cross?

SPEAKER_07 48:11

Yeah, great question. And it it may be because I tend to bring Christian humanism in dialogue with analytic philosophy and ideal political theory, that there is this kind of perhaps harmonious vision. But I hope I try to also emphasize by talking about the broken body of the flesh, and I cut some things here about the way in which the concentric circles are scrambled, particularly by the Christian emphasis that the folly of the cross means the solidarity with the weak, abused, and marginalized, are the particular expression of how those circles should be scrambled. So I would be very open to a kind of maybe more cruciform incarnational humanism that still, though, is gonna have to have the connection to the eschatological. So, how can you have a joyful, cruciform Christian social ethics? And maybe it's because so much of Christian ethics has taken a cruciform turn. I was trying to counter that a bit with this suggestion that we need an eschatological humanism as well as an incarnational one. So, but yes, I would say that I certainly would think, I hope I have space for that kind of paradox kind of. I mean, one of the great things Augustine taught the church was how to lament and how to grieve, which I think is a very hard practice in our secular society. You know, my university is having a very hard time coming to terms with the history of its relationship to slavery. It doesn't have a vocabulary or a moral repertoire to think about a common humanity across time and their obligations, the stain of sin, you know, the ways in which ironically a lot of religious institutions have that repertoire in the US. And I think it's because of this, maybe this more cruciform, paradoxical, you know, how to lament and grieve without just becoming defeated by despair or defeated by the cross. So I'll just say, with Paul, if Christ was not resurrected, then the cross there's always always this relationship between death and resurrection.

SPEAKER_02 50:38

I think holding lament together with play is also really important. But we have lots of questions, which is great. So um I'll take you a bit later, Leek, if that's okay. So the gentleman with a white hair, please do introduce yourselves.

SPEAKER_06 50:53

Hi, um Stephen Gownry Smith from Ripham College Cudston, uh here in Oxford. Uh Eric, thank you so much. It's such an interesting talk. There's so much in there, I don't know where to start, and I'm gonna have to look at this to really focus my thoughts. But you touched on um the whole or the contrast between uh Christian humanism and transhumanism. And I think this is a really important area because it opens the door to you know a nuanced um and actually culturally accessible discussion about religious humanism and science, uh and think you west sciences at the moment. Um and you mentioned the kind of one point of tension, namely about the status of the body. Um so so I I I think there are different transhumanists who would um have different approaches to the negation of the human body. Some are more anti-body than others. Um there's some debate to be had in there, but I just wonder if there's any other points of tension that you think are important between transhumanism and Christian uh theology for to for the development uh of a humanism that can speak to scientific concerns. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 52:06

I mean, I'm tempted to say, read the recent letter that the Pope has done, because I think not just about AI, though. Not just about AI, yeah. When I was a student here, one of the leaders of transhumanism, I won't name his name, but he's a philosopher. Uh you probably know who I now am talking about, but he would refuse to eat with us because it kind of slowed him down. He only ate, drank shakes, right? He was not a smoker, but he chewed nicotine gum because it kept him going. But there was something kind of radically unhuman about that, right? So, yes, this is about the way in which the, at least in the Christian tradition, I think it borrows from the Jewish tradition here, this emphasis on our embodied conviviality and the constraints of that as something to be celebrated rather than lamented. Even though, as I was trying to suggest, there is something transhumanist about the Christian vision. But even in the ascension, Christ brings his full humanity into the eschaton. Irenaeus has, I mean, one of the reasons he's interesting is because later in that text, he talks about having the historical, can will we remember the wounds of our sin in heaven? We will, but without tear. And Augustine talks about this at the end of the city of God. So we never flee from our humanity. We will become fully realized human beings because we will then imitate perfectly Jesus Christ. So there is, I think, a tension that Christians shouldn't be so off-put by transhumanism. But I think it, you know, in some ways Peter Thiel adopts some of this initially by talking about how the Christian tradition is more open to this than many contristians feel. But I think it's kind of, yeah, I would think it's this concern about the body that I would want to emphasize that the Christian tradition in its humanism doesn't regret being created with a human nature. And part of that, then we just have to discuss what is the, you know, maybe I go a little more Aristotelian than I usually do, what is the natural habitat of our humanity? Right? It is all the sorts of things that we often do together with our bodies. And so that's why I am, you know, not just AI, but in general, the kind of aspiration to escape the human condition, which Hannah Arendt identified in space exploration, all sorts of things to transcend our mortality, is a refusal of the gift of our givenness, of our createdness. And even as we Christians at least hope for the resurrection, again, it's a kind of transfiguration of our humanity, not a denial of it.

SPEAKER_09 55:15

Uh thank you. And also in the spirit of um imbibed conviviality and also the way in which um Luke opened the conference, I respond to your um talk. First, to say that my partner is Philo of Alexandria, who does a same kind of, you know, a humanistic universal thinker who is a Jew, um, um, a philosopher, and a theologian, with all of the limitations. So, and I think it's an important conversation between Augustine and Philo. Um so my question is a complicated question. You know, you you said uh generously Paul's God is Isaiah's God, but Paul's reading of Isaiah is not Akiva's reading of Isaiah, and picking up on problematically so, and picking up on Sarah's comment, you know, Augustine's Lamentations 3, very, very important and very destructive reading of Lamentations 3 for the history of Judaism, is not Lamentations Rabbah reading, contemporary reading of Lamentations 3. So my question picks up on something you said yesterday, that when you teach with Leora Batnitsky, you teach each other's texts, which I thought was very profound. Um and picking up on this a challenge to scriptural reasoning, I think, this language of being rooted in difference that is not we're not all the same, and to allow for that kind of difference. So I have a twofold question um which uh kind of asks, you know, can I stand in a Christian space and teach Christianity? Can you stand in a Jewish space and teach our um Judaism faithfully and responsibly in this spirit of universal um um humanism? So twofold, one speaks directly to work, and I know you've addressed this in very profound ways, but I want to ask it in a very public setting, how to overcome embedded hatred and accepted bias, which is urgent for so many of us today, um, a bias which continues to resurface in the name, tragically, in Christi of Christian love. Um and the second part is is it the case that in order to overcome hate and the threat of erasure and terror that we need to be able to stand in the space of Christian humanism?

SPEAKER_07 57:20

Yeah, wow. Um I think there I mean part of my interest here in proclamation, and I didn't really work this out here, is I I have a very different conception of what it means to do theology in the academy versus what it might mean to do theology in a religious community, right? So I don't proclaim Christianity in my classroom. Uh I sometimes get an amen after a lecture, but it's not, I'm not trying to. I'm not a preacher. I'm not the son of a preacher, I'm the grandson of a preacher. Um I think that that's an interesting question for theology faculties. I I don't think theology is not revelation, theology is a second-order discourse. I mean, I sort of still think of it as a grammar. Most of my students are completely theologically illiterate. And I tell them this is a foreign language class. I'm gonna invite you to eavesdrop on a set of traditions that once had big impact on the world, still do in their afterlife often, but um, and they surprisingly, it's a really popular class. Our students are very curious about theology, um, somewhat to the dismay of some of my religious studies colleagues, right? But I think in a weird way, religious studies has gone by seeing now the opponent or the rival is not so much theology, it's rationalistic, autonomous, enlightenment visions. So, in a weird, this is why Talal Assad and John Milbank are all of a sudden like partners, right? So unmasking the assumptions of religious studies invites more theological inquiry. But again, as inquiry. So maybe maybe here this is where I agree with Randy that you know these are philosophical grammars that we're trying to negotiate. It's different than what a um, I but I just don't think post-Kantian epistemic fallibilism is enough to sustain a form of life. And not that you were proposing that, but whereas I think in the churches, there what I'm trying to suggest is in order to have a Christian humanism that overcomes hate, it it at least it requires us to go deep back into the way the Christian story has been told, which is radically historically different at different times and will be context-dependent. But I think one of what I've been trying to reimagine is the way in which especially the exclusion of the Jewish people in the Christian story has been so, you know, I use the word neuralgic. One of the kind of constitutive conundrums of contemporary Christian theology is a kind of post-supersessionist one, not for kind of merely moral ethical reasons, but for theological ones. And so I think a Christian humanism it kind of has a kind of public-facing generosity that I think is important. Maybe I'm not a community organizer, I'm, you know, I'm just an academic. But I think that that kind of the humanism part is to kind of inspire this kind of generosity towards others that has that one of the things I thought about last night's talk, giving us historical exemplars of that tradition that might excite our imagination and our practices. So while I'm sort of more on the intellectual side of doing that, um, I think it's it's it's gonna have to take flesh, you know. Um but it and in recognition of all the um tensions between Paul's God and Isaiah's God, right? Umthough, again, I'm pretty persuaded by our efforts to reread Paul within Judaism, right? Not as a kind of new religion, right? So that that it's just gonna, you know all of those, they're theological hard, complex problems that manifest themselves in our actual history. So there is a relationship between what we're doing theologically and what happens in the world. Um, but I think for a lot of it is um trying to embody this kind of um willingness to inhabit each other's traditions enough to um engage in the kind of dialogue we're imagining.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:55

Hi, I'm Esme Partridge, and that was really beautiful, thank you. Um perhaps following on from that last question um uh about hate, uh certainly not going to endorse hate, but I wonder about rivalry and if there is any room within this Christian humanism for a certain degree of rivalry. Um what I mean by that is so well, one of the perhaps most radically universalist uh Christian theological texts is Nicholas of Cusa's On the Peace of Faith, which imagines the concord of all of the world's religions and nations, as you know, absolutely wonderful and sort of early modern dialogue, uh one which uh, well, late medieval um, but was actually very influential uh potentially on Erasmus, so there is a sort of line to be uh drawn there. Um but what's really interesting about On the Peace of Faith is that it concludes with um the interlocutor of St. Paul, who's who's actually in the dialogue, uh observing that actually when there's a sort of rivalry and this kind of uh impassioned uh debate and dialogue between the different religions, that that uh sense of opposition even actually encourages their zeal and and their piety. And so, in a paradoxical sort of way, um by by sort of defining and understanding themselves in relation to the other in this quite competitive way, uh it actually makes them even more inflamed in the love of God and therefore actually leads to a kind of ultimate unity, um, at least in this life, of course. Um and I just wonder is that is there some truth in that? And obviously that can be taken too far, um, but but if there is an ethical role of rivalry in some in some sense.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:30

Yeah. I sometimes Christian humanism is mistaken as the sentiment of being nice to each other. Right? Now, I think I would not lament a return to decency and civility in our public life. But I think in you know, just to maybe say something like when when Luke Brotherton says we don't absolutize friend-enemy distinctions, or even in the passage I gave you from Augustine, it doesn't mean we erase or deny friend-enemy distinctions. Maybe we're trying to mitigate that rivalry into the kind of productive zeal that you were mentioning. And there's lots of biblical iron-sharpening iron or the kind of race metaphors you find in the New Testament. Um, and yeah, I mean the Bible's a story of rivalries, right? Sibling rivalries all through the script, um, prodigal sons, and et cetera, et cetera. And it's about what do we do with those rivalries? And so, so I mean, maybe this, you know, again, we were talking earlier about uh kind of how do we manage our rivalries better, um, and whether there's a kind of ethics of rivalry. Um, and uh yeah, I think whether that necessarily implicates us in supersessionist discourses, or whether or not there's a form of a kind of maybe like ethical nationalism, ethical rivalry, um, that, you know, again, honors difference. That's kind of maybe a platitude. Um, but I it it would be interesting to even think about it um eschatologically, because often the vision is of a kind of peaceful dwelling where we just roll back our eyes and all commune with like at the movie theater and see God. But you know, in the Christian tradition there's debates about this. Gregory of Nissa talks about going deeper and deeper in glory glory, that we still have desire and we still have difference, right? There's not stasis. And so that difference will be something that kind of constantly marks us, but it's rivalry without conflict and hatred.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:44

I know we have lots of questions, which is great, but I've definitely seen three. So the woman there that didn't have the microphone before, and then Leek, and then I know there's one up there. And we let's see how much time we have after that.

SPEAKER_08 1:05:57

So I just had a really quick question, uh Eric. Um It was a great paper and it was beautiful and I enjoyed listening to it. You mentioned a really very important uh theological claim that revelation is not just for us, but it's actually to us. That is to say, God needs us in order to be able to express revelation. Then you um had a subsequent claim that you advocate Christian humanism means somehow the Christian taking on the Gentile, reclaiming what it is to uh be Gentile. And then third, you've been um sort of suggesting some kind of interaction between proclamation and exegesis. So I guess what I'm asking you is how do you see your understanding, what are the exegetical implications? So it's a follow-up of Hindi's question, really, what are the exegetical implications of the Christian as Gentile? Um and again, you can apply it even to the words that you just offered vis-a-vis rivalry. That is to say, aren't there, shouldn't there be, if it is the case that you make this really radical theological claim that God needs us for revelation? That puts exegesis in a really in the driver's seat. And how does that exegetical activity, how is that a mode of proclamation? Is it a mode of proclamation? How does it change what Christian witness and testimony actually look like? Does it?

SPEAKER_07 1:07:20

Yeah, I mean, well, so this leaned maybe a little too much on that Augustine passage, which is provocative that it's coming from Augustine, but he has other sermons where he talks about the um the delight we should take in the difficult struggle to understand Scripture together. Augustine's not a Democrat. Augustine's not a low church congregationalist, but I think that invites an interesting kind of um ethos for understanding the engagement with scripture as something that kind of hermeneutics as the difficulty of hermeneutics as something we should celebrate together in a way that you know is at odds with kind of more hierarchical and also you know, efforts to kind of render crystal clear the exegetical meaning. I mean, we might say all exegesis is eisegesis and be okay with that. This is a talk one of my colleagues just gave that New Testament studies at least has created a kind of moat around the Bible by kind of saying in order to interpret scripture you must have philological and certain um qualifications, which has been a way of excluding a wide range of voices for interpretation of scripture. So maybe, again, I mean we've talked about democracy, this invites a kind of more democratic ecclesiology. So that might be one of the implications, but also a kind of joyful encounter with the text and its as a living word for us, given to us, interpreted by us. So I think it's kind of consistent with some of the things you were saying. I, you know, there's still going to be some serious work done there, again, about what is the authority of the text, which I think, you know, again, on the Christian story is also something that has to be proclaimed. It's not, we're not um irreducibly constructivists about the text. It's still revelation, but it's given in human words, requiring human agency.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:49

Well, maybe you could both ask quite short questions, and perhaps Eric might give relatively short replies. We can continue the conversation at lunch and then we'll give a look at the last question.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:59

Okay, short as I can. Um Marvellous lecture, Eric, thanks. I want to pick up the point you made right at the end, which is to point out rightly the serious dearth of theological reflection on the concept of the nation. Uh it it's quite astonishing. Um I'm on the lookout for this all the time, and I've come up with almost nothing, certainly in the in the Christian tradition at least. But also as I struggle to find it in other traditions too. Uh you uh quoted a wonderful line uh nations can be construed as guardians of communities of wisdom. Where do you plan to go with that? Who is doing serious work on this and and and where?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:44

Is it working? Okay. Uh just to suggest two theologians actually from Christian tradition on nationalism and nation. One is uh William Kavanaugh and the second one is Dorian Levelin, who writes a lot about uh Catholic theology of nation. So it's really interesting, yeah. Uh a question for you, Eric, um, is has to do with uh the way you uh conceptualize the relationship between Christian national uh Christian humanism and nationalism. You said it would be therapeutic for Christian humanists to actually uh address it, right? To address nationalism. So if you can say a little bit more about that, uh because it seems to me that that relationship could be a little bit more productive than that. The second thing that I want to ask you uh, you suggested also that Christian humanism has to come to terms with its particularity. Uh it seems to me that all humanisms have to come to terms with their particularities. So if you can speak a little bit about whether Christian humanists addressing this question of particularity would be different, especially if you're thinking of it as proclamation, right? Is it unique? Is it different in and in what way, if so?

SPEAKER_07 1:12:06

Okay. Uh yeah, wonderful. Um yeah, I have been I've been reading there. That got me interested in this this kind of maybe more deflationary notion that doesn't have a kind of big metaphysical picture of the nation, but thinks of it in terms of communities of wisdom, which I think was a language we heard, and maybe I've overheard that before, but that's that's kind of where I want to go, thinking about guardians of community of wisdom in ways that distinguish the national community as not being uh you know the citizenship state community, right? But I I I was a good American uh civic nationalist. You know, it's it's a patriotism of ideas. But I've been challenged because I think civic nationalism is often parasitic on cultural nationalism. We have holidays, we have public education, we have, you know, I'm raising kids in a certain national context. So that's what kind of got me away from my easy cosmopolitanism as a kind of elite white male. Cosmopolitanism is great, I'm here at Oxford. But our political context, I think, demands for reasons. I think Slava's work is particularly good on kind of rethinking this. And it is true, I've kind of sometimes searched in vain. I think after Bart, most theologians just didn't want to talk about the nation. But in the United States, the criticism of Christian nationalism by most liberal Protestants invoking the parable of the Good Samaritan, I think travels with a certain kind of anti-Judaism as well. So that's the paradox of how do you get a kind of anti-racist theology that's not anti-Jewish? And that's what I was trying to kind of rethink. Um, but if, you know, maybe, you know, I'm I'm trying to write the book to kind of figure out theologically how to think about this in a way that doesn't recruit all the familiar problems with the theology of the nation. I like the Dorian Llewellyn, he's the Welsh Catholic who gets, who actually turns to um debates about Heseity and nominalism and things like this. So I just think it's it's also just an interesting theological problem. That is why I think it's therapeutic, because so much of modern, at least Protestant theology, is cosmopolitan that it kind of raises questions about particularity and embodiedness that it might otherwise not be forced to address. So there's other kind of ways of thinking about particularity that might do the same work. So I agree, it's not just therapeutic, um, though it is that, but I think it kind of invites constructive inquiry that that might have political and moral good effects, um, but in themselves might um kind of revive the doldrums of neoliberal Christian ethics in a different way. Uh kind of trying to push conversations in different ways. It's still, you know, these are kind of long-standing issues. And again, I've mainly been reading historians of kind of the Carolingian Empire and things like this, where they're interested in the way in which identity is always fluid and hybrid, etc., etc. So it's not fixing, but it is attached to these communities that give us a kind of social embeddedness in the world so that we can make sense of our lives because most people can't live as cosmopolitans.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:54

One final question from me.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:00

Thank you. Um fantastic paper. Um so my question, well, just a quick response to the to the lack of theology of nations.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:08

I actually I just really don't think that's true and and not true historically, and not true um in terms of contemporary debates. I I think though it i it it's often taking place in places not familiar to kind of what we might call mainstream uh theological academy. So myssiology thinks a lot about this. Um debates about enculturation, I think about the work of Kwemi Bedeako or Laminsenna and the question about the kind of a theology of the peoples and the role of the relation between gospel and culture in proclamation and validation of uh distinct cultures and how you uh have a kind of wisdom that you're uh taking up from a place in a people. Um so I think yeah, I think there's actually a very rich set of reflections on this question. It's just perhaps uh not in the Western Academy um as as currently conceived. But I think my my question kind of picks up on that and and this lovely phrase around nations as uh repositories of wisdom or a kind of a shared inheritance of wisdom that can be honoured as distinct from a kind of um purification story about nationalism. Um it's an invitation to think with us a little bit more about the kind of internationalism and whether it's kind of early modern, but you know, you think about people like Victoria and others, uh, or I'm thinking of things like Hedley Bull and Martin White and the English School of International Relations who very explicitly drew on Augustine to think about a val evaluation of nations in relation to many nations and and a whole vision of international relations born out of that. That was not cosmopolitanism. Um we can also think about uh thinking about John Cradders' work but a kind of labor movement and a socialist internationalism um that was both a particular and uh international rather than universalistic. I think with us about that tradition which is Augustine sits in the background too, about a kind of internationalism so that the the wisdom of the nation is never um singular, it's always realized through relations with other nations and their wisdoms and inheritances.

SPEAKER_07 1:18:30

Yeah, that great. On the first point, I should have said the best work done on nations, at least that I've encountered, is often by theologians in stateless nations. So it's kind of Welsh theologians and um a number of African theologians, Palestinian, uh and uh yeah, they that it does sort of pose a question, I think, to the kind of um, you know, how we encounter that. And I will say in not just mystiology but ecclesiology. So obviously in the Orthodox community there's big questions. I mean, it was declared a heresy, but there's questions about what it means to be the Greek Orthodox Church or the Indian Orthodox Church. That um when I've read those, that's kind of also got me interested in this because it kind of challenged my, you know, Americann-ness that kind of everything starts to look like California, so we can kind of flatten things. Um I think, yeah, kind of how but but you know, mystiology and ecclesiology are not prominent parts of most Western uh academic um theology faculties. Um yeah, I think when I yeah, I don't I uh at least I hope this is a kind of invitation to think of internationalism not just as like the UN or post-Westphalian kind of political institutional forms that may no longer be serving us well. I'm not I'm not um you know in indebted or subscribed or bound by those. And maybe internationalism of a Christian humanism is beyond politics, beyond power. Maybe it is the kind of transnational movements um that also are a part of this kind of Christian tradition of Christian internationalism that have been very important and influential. Um you mentioned the socialist international, um, but yeah, I think we can have transnational movements. I guess I'm still thinking the nation state is still the most effective source of agency politically in our world, and so there is a sense in which we have to kind of attend to that international society of states that Groshi's that that that kind of and a lot of the Christian humanists like Marathon, that's where they put their energies, right? But let a thousand flowers bloom, let internationalisms of different kinds, cultural, educational, medical, um, labor and economic. Um I think that it but it kind of gets at this idea that just to be flat-footed, on the one hand you have cosmopolitanism, on the other hand you have nationalism. The alternative is internationalism, which also, again, strikes me to the nations are all over the Bible. And but the question for Israel is how to be peaceful with the nations. And that's what the kind of vision is to think about internationalism as, again, there's going to be a big distance between modern nation states and the biblical idiom of the nations. But I think kind of trying to think about internationalism, especially since it's so heavily criticized today, to resource it in the same way that Christian humanism might be a kind of healthy uh language to think about internationalism.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:54

Well, if we think about Christian humanism as a kind of invitation to generous conversation, I think the fact we've gone on so long suggests how successful that's been. Let's thank Eric for his wonderful paper.

SPEAKER_05 1:22:09

Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Feel free to explore the other podcasts on our channel, especially the Listen, Organize, Act Podcast, which explores the relationship between religion, community organizing, and the renewal of participatory democracy from the ground up. To learn more or see what's coming up next, do please visit the McDonald's Center website at McDonald Center or one word.web.ox.ac.uk