Theological Genealogies of Modernity: An Introduction

This special issue of Modern Theology gathers together full research essays that were first presented, in summary form, at the 2021 online conference Theological Genealogies of Modernity. For both the original event and now this collection, theological genealogies of modernity serves as a term of art referring to any complex, broad-sweep narrative account of the rise of a modern Western cultural order that highlights theology’s role within that process. The conference organizers deliberately employed the term in a capacious sense out of a desire to find a rubric under which to include a range of narratives and disciplinary perspectives on them. Defined broadly, the terminology extends both to stories celebrating the Enlightenment for bringing about progress and also to narratives stressing the need constantly to recur to a pre-modern cultural synthesis from which people today should continue to receive instruction. Of course, this simplistic distinction deserves to be challenged, and several of the essays here contest this stark division of options. The overall aim of the inquiry into genealogies is to help theologians understand how these narratives work, regardless of which account is attractive to them, so that they may develop a well-informed position on how (and even whether) to employ them.