Forgetting Christian Humility

Abstract

Recent scholarship on humility can be grouped into five major accounts of humility. This chapter canvasses those accounts before suggesting that two accounts—“low concern” and “limitations-owning”—have become the dominant contemporary views. A recurring feature of the current discussion is the need to distance contemporary accounts of humility from their Christian antecedents, since those antecedents are typically thought to be grounded by unacceptable metaphysical commitments. But the contemporary “memory” of the major contours of Christian humility is mistaken. The chapter isolates a recurring story told by contemporary theorists about what Christian humility once was, and then shows why that story is almost certainly false.