Current Research

An Invitation to the Historic Christian Life

This project aims to be an introduction and invitation to the historically rich Christian life. It is a book to give to new Christians and non-Christians searching for what Christians believe and how to live as Christians, as well as for Christians who want to consider how to more deeply live their faith rooted in the history of the Christian people.

Christianity and the Ahistoricism of Modernity

Central to Western modernity is an idea of historical progress which involves emancipation from the past. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century European thinkers from Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and Rousseau, to Hume, Ferguson, and Smith, put forward naturalistic models of historical development which posited that the origins of human society consisted in a metaphoric state of nature or primordial condition. It was from these various hypothetical primordial states, devoid of location in historical time and place, that human social development and progress began. Paradoxically therefore, at the core of these Enlightenment theories of society’s origins was a deeply ahistorical conviction, namely, that the origins of human society can be understood abstracted from history.

This project argues that embedded in modern ideas of historical progress and emancipation from the past is a deeply ahistorical current of thought which became central to the modern liberal tradition, epitomised in John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”. In tension with this tradition, however, is the Christian self-understanding as a historical people who inhabit sacred history. Drawing upon approaches from intellectual history and historical theology, this interdisciplinary project charts the ways that these two intellectual traditions – secular and theological – shaped modernity’s attitudes to history. Beginning in the late seventeenth-century, it explores the way that the early human sciences secularised theological understandings of the origins of human society. Entwined with this tradition but also in tension with it, it explores an intellectual tradition in modern theology from the Puritans to Soren Kierkegaard to John Henry Newman, which wrestled with the way in which the Christian life is lived as consciously part of sacred history.

By uncovering and charting the relationship between these two intellectual traditions of thinking about history, this project seeks to revise our understanding of modernity’s attitudes to the past. In doing so, it helps illumine the origins of the profoundly ahistorical character of contemporary Western culture which is plagued by a sense of rootlessness and disconnection from any larger historical story.