Today we’re supposed to be wrapping up the textbook reading and getting ready to move on to Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. It seems to me that we’ve spent the last two class sessions talking about the basic premise that the textbook author, who I think is John Esposito, uses to describe contemporary Christianity: the conflict between modernism (not the same thing as modernity) and fundamentalism (an unsatisfying term because of its strongly negative connotations, but none of us could think of anything better).

What we haven’t done is spent much time on Christianity itself (though of course you could make a good argument for discarding that kind of essentialist terminology). Here is my thought: basically lecture today, and isolate three points in the development of Christianity that I want to talk about. We could talk about the meaning(s) of Jesus, the development of the Augustinian and Constantinian models of Christendom, and the Reformation and the emergence of modernity.

Something that’s been sticking in my craw since Wednesday: the Muslim student I mentioned (in the afternoon section) raised the question — completely non-confrontationally — about the relationship of the idea of “modernity” as discussed by the textbook to the non-Christian world religions. He wanted to know whether there was another, different definition of modernity that was more appropriate to Islam and other traditions. I was kind of thrown by this. If you were to buttonhole the textbook’s authors and challenge them to answer, I suspect they would say that “modernity” as they are using the concept has to do with globalism, i.e. it’s a global phenomenon, and therefore not distinctive to any tradition, but that it is inextricably intertwined with the expansion of Western societies geographically into the non-European world — and thus every society, via colonialism, has had to come to terms with Christianity in one way or another. But still, that seems like a remarkably and naively ethnocentric way of thinking about this very complicated idea.

Anyhow, I think I’m going to go with something like the following:

1. Ways of thinking about Jesus
2. Notion of kerygma
3. Importance of belief; e.g. trinitarianism, Chalcedon
4. Growth of Augustinian synthesis
5. Collapse of medieval synthesis with Reformation & coming of modernity
6. Fundamentalism-vs.-modernism debate as the result