Contingencies and Convictions: The Kingdom Is Inevitable, ‘The West’ Is Not

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Andrew Wilson
We need to be very aware of not boasting in the things that we are inclined to see as great achievements of our society. Right? Yeah. Which of course is often the very first thing people do say here. This is why these values work. Look at all this wealth they’ve created. Yes, you say, Yeah, but that that wealth itself may end up for that for the things that truly matter an eternity. Yes, end up being more of a curse than a blessing. Yes,

Glen Scrivener
the West invented the individual, but it also invented individualism, and expressive individualism and this atomization of culture and oh my goodness, can we learn from our brothers and sisters around the world?

Hello, and welcome to post Christianity. I’m Glen Scrivener. And I’m Andrew Wilson’s. And this is our second episode, thinking about our historical moment here in the 21st century. But we want to see that in historical context, and the ways in which we have been a Christianized society and now are a post Christian society. Are we hence the question mark, in the last episode, we had a look at 1776. And Thomas Jefferson writes, We hold these truths to be self evidence that we have these inviolable rights. And that wasn’t originally what he said originally, he said, sacred and inviolable, sacred and undeniable, sacred and undeniable, Benjamin Franklin put a line through that and said, one wonders whether it was just for aesthetic reasons, or like he just thought it’s better for concision to have a single word self evidence, yeah, self

Andrew Wilson
evident, was a term that a lot of people at the time were beginning to use, and it wasn’t out of nowhere. I don’t think it was just stylistic. I think there was an appeal to a sort of commonality of values that we share. We I think when you say something is sacred, there’s always an implication with the religious freedom hat on that maybe people who didn’t share the same convictions about the sacred would disagree with the rights. And Franklin’s obviously trying to outmaneuver that objection, I think and say, No, these are this is self evidence, and we will affirm that it is yes. It’s a funny phrase, though, because we hold these trees. Yeah, it was actually self evident. You wouldn’t need to hold them at all, it would just everyone knows it. And you would probably wouldn’t even need to say,

Glen Scrivener
but I think it makes sense. I think the entire sentence makes sense. As long as you put all the emphasis on way, it’s like yes, millions pointless. hold these truths to be self evident. And we’re gonna have this experiment called America. Yeah, let’s give it a go. Who’s Who’s Who’s all aboard on the American experiment? Do you want to, you know, live in this castle in the air in which we treat one another as though they have these unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And we said at the end of the last episode, that helping people see that it’s not self evidence, but that it has come to us through the contingency of history and theology is really helpful. For Christians, it’s always helpful for us to figure out whether what I believe has come from the Word of God, or whether it’s just come because I happen to live in the 21st century West. It’s also helpful for our non Christian friends to say, hey, the stuff that you count as self evident, why don’t we just call that a belief? Yeah. It’s this gut intuition that you sort of navigate the world by. And what we’re trying to do in this podcast is wake people up to the contingency of things. And underneath all the historical contingencies, there’s Jesus Christ, who is working out his purposes in the worlds, and he has shaped all of us more than we might have imagined. What I really appreciated from your book, remaking the world, Andrew, is that you press into the contingencies of history, in the shaping of the West in a way that you know, my book that we breathe, it’s a little bit more like revelation 21, where the city just descends from on high.

Andrew Wilson
I don’t have a thought you compare yourself to the apostle John, that early

Glen Scrivener
heaven, heaven, I am the new Jerusalem. But Christianity is kind of like this, you know, these platonic ideals of equality, compassion, consent, and Latin and science, freedom of progress. And, in a sense, my book is an ideas book with a bit of history along the way, and I sort of get people on board the train for the history journey by saying, hey, equality, that’s quite a cool thing, and compassionate. And I sort of map that onto historical developments, whether you whereas you really dive down into 1776 and do do the spade work on that and so yours is a bit more like Matthew 13, okay. Okay, I

Unknown Speaker
want to see where this is going.

Glen Scrivener
That, you know, the seller goes out and scatter seed. And there’s, you know, there’s some soil like this, I’m sort of like this, I’m sorry, like this and and where is it going to come up? And, and it’s a long, slow process with a lot of what you might feel is like, utterly random contingency in these things. And in particular, in your book, you point to the history of the West, in terms of three things that are sort of absent from from my book and and you talk about globalization industrialization and enrichment as things that have developed and might have developed in totally different ways, depending on all sorts of contingent factors about geography, and climate, and those sorts of things. So why is it important to understand our cultural moment? To figure out what is contingent historically,

Andrew Wilson
I think it’s very clever that you’ve done this through the metaphor of soils and seeds, because you basically make it sound like you are seeding things and I’m soiling things. I only realized as you’re introducing, it, definitely makes me the beggar your other chapters, there’s seeds as well. So I actually think is genuinely seeding ideas. And then there’s the sort of there’s the land and the geography. And I, I think, before getting into any of the detail of that in not just in the, in what I’m saying in the book, but the the history of the West, I do, I think it’s important to see because I’ve just seen in My Big Fat Greek Wedding where the dad is just continually saying, you know, this famous thing is Greek, from the Greek and everything seems to be, it’s almost like if the Christians looked like they’re saying, everything you value is simply from us. Then as much as iPhones you like your iPhone, yes, Christian. And the thing is, a large part of that is true in as we, as we’ll see, and probably touched on the previous episode. But I think we have to also see that there’s a whole load of what we might as if you look at the Christian philosophy of history, you’d say these are providential contingencies, ultimately, nothing is outside of, right, I don’t believe anything’s outside of God’s control of God’s gift. But there are all sorts of factors in terms of where oceans are, and where minerals are, and how fruitful land is. And when it rains, and all sorts of things like that, which actually, and what inventions take place where and a lot of accidents of who meets whom, and who finds which continent when, which they look like accidents to us. And I think they’ve actually been very instrumental in the forming of the modern west as well, and of the post Christian world. And I think it’s important to at least give recognition to that even though most of the series we’re going to talk a bit about, talk more about, what are the Christian specifically Christian contributions, and how they relate to post Christianity, understanding some of those contingencies, I think still critical because otherwise you tell a very one sided ideas based version and you really only focus on the seed, not the soil. So I do like the metaphor as much as

Glen Scrivener
the funny side of the lion. At one point in the globalization chapter, you begin with a quote by a Polynesian who found himself on was a Captain Cook’s ship. Yeah. Was he called Mahindra and

Andrew Wilson
Mahindra? Yeah, Heaney, okay, I might Polynesian is great. But it’s an amazing story that they are sailing around the South Pacific, again in the 1770s, trying to understand the peoples they meet, and they arrive at what we now call Easter Island. And they find that the people are off, even though they look just like Mahina, who’s from what again, now French Polynesia or Tahiti, that area. They just they the people look just like that. But they are at a very different stage of development. In fact, they’ve got these very impressive statues, which are still very famous today. Which, but the the society now is incapable of building anything like the statues, which is almost mocking them, they’re going, this is what your ancestors built, but you are much poorer than that now. And they’re trying to make sense of this phenomenon. And it this Mahina this, Polynesian man says in his own language, good people, bad land. So basically, something’s wrong with the land here. That means that in the last 100, odd years, they begin to speculate, maybe it’s that there’s been some ecological disaster, which has meant that people who used to be able to build these very impressive things now certainly don’t have the rainfall, or the wood or the soil or whatever it is to be able to advance in that way. And I think it’s a lovely little metaphor of what was going on more widely in the 18th century, as the West was technologically advancing very quickly, which is that it’s not just really about the people and the ideas and the things they said and what they believed, or even the God they worshipped. It was a large part of it was to do with just the land, it’s like, where are you? How much does it rain, what’s under the ground, all those sorts of things. And I think it’s quite a quite a good parable for the relationship between ideas and material things in the development of the post Christian world.

Glen Scrivener
And you have inserted these three chapters in the rest of your book. And there’s lots of stuff about the culture of Christianity and how it has shaped us and where we’ve gotten to where we’ve gotten to, but you found it very important to focus in on these material elements, geography and climates and, and those sorts of things. What Why is that so important as we do history?

Andrew Wilson
Because I think you’ve got to understand that history is not simply the idea, the matter of one person coming up with a great new idea and people all believing it. And I think if you if you take that kind of view, you can end up with a theological theology. Is it a slightly Gnostic reading of the way history works, you end up going, you know, it’s simply all about spirit and idea and it’s not about Matter and Form and substance and things. And what can happen is arrogance is one thing you can say basically, we had better ideas than everyone else. That’s why, right, we you know, and we are at its worst, you end up with a very racist vision of the world, which is, well, of course, we’ve developed the ideas we have. And that’s because we’re just better thinkers than other people. And we can now impose those ideas on other nations, as of course, people to this day, in the West often still do. And we can say you must believe these ideas we have, because they’ve led to all of this wealth, and you just read your overread your contribution to world history, and under read the fact that no, a bunch of this is because you’ve got navigable rivers, and they don’t, or you have coal under your land, and they don’t, you’re that near the sea, or you’ve got this amount of sun, you’ve got a

Glen Scrivener
north south orientation, rather than east west orientation to your continent, UK, you’ve

Andrew Wilson
got your local mammal is a sheep, their local mountain mammal is in your case, a kangaroo or a wombat, or a llama or a domestic rhinoceros. And you think, Well, of course, you’re not gonna be able to the farms

Glen Scrivener
that he did, I haven’t smelled to rhinoceros or kangaroo,

Andrew Wilson
no, even even a zebra versus a horse, you try riding a zebra into battle, you try getting a zebra to pull your plow, it was not going to go well for you. And so I think lots and lots of levels where it can take the legs out from the arrogance of Western thought often, which is effectively we’ve got great ideas and maybe a bit of Christianity mixed in with Greco Roman tradition, and you have bang this sort of wonderfully advanced civilization. Now a big part of this has nothing to do with the ideas. It does. It does. And we’re going to talk about that as well. But it has a lot to do with. Yeah, minerals and weather and mass.

Glen Scrivener
Yes. So it could one danger is it could all go towards the spirit. And you just think it’s all about great ideas that great people have. And that’s the Gnostic kind of danger. There is the sort of just the Marxist danger as well of just going it’s all material explanations, isn’t it? And tell me what that danger looks like.

Andrew Wilson
So I think if you you can also tell things almost as if there was a sense of inevitability, as if human agency doesn’t really do anything. And I think to to over to overplay, that is to fail to see that there are parts of the world that are extremely geographically similar to one another, even almost geographically identical to one another, that have nevertheless developed in very different ways. Because the ideas, the institutions, the concepts, the theologies in those places are, are very different from one another. And there are some ideas that lead people that go very deep in human beings that cause us to change our motives and our ambitions and our desires, in ways that we mustn’t be underestimated. So it’s not simply a product of material causes. Because there are all sorts of ways in which again, Christianity changes the way people think about what the future is and about the world is going to be better than it is changes your view of the world of who God is, and the fact that God is a consistent law giver who has structured the world to be understood changes our view of what human beings are, and how liable we are to be mistaken and therefore changes our attitude towards innovation. And you might now call peer review, critiquing one another’s ideas, changes or attitudes to exploration and discovery and ignorance because it makes you realize how much you don’t know. And therefore, maybe we might go and find out, change your attitude towards the past. So you don’t venerate ancestors alone, but also realize that there are important ways in which they are flawed. So if your account of your ancestors looks like Genesis, you are going to conclude, okay, so human beings, they are fathers of bequeath to us these good things, but my goodness, what a tangled mess they were as well it’s like a soapbox, yes. But if you don’t have that, if you just have a hagiographic account of your ancestors, you will over venerate their wisdom and under recognize the contribution that every generation is called to make to discover things that might be improved upon. And he put all of that together and shake it around. And you will end up with a group of people, as you know, the modern West has, at its best has been that are convinced that there is more to be discovered more to be found and a value in testing and experimenting and pursuing novelty not just preserving fidelity, right? And then you put that in the mixture with the geographical factors I’ve talked about. And you end up with something like the enrichment, industrial revolution that we have really benefited from and are still podcasting using the fruits of run out.

Glen Scrivener
Yes, because otherwise you feel like history is just the onward march of inevitable ideas, or great men. Yeah, great, and maybe

Andrew Wilson
not inevitable ideas in some ways. You see it as the onward march of ideas and a new idea can like a meme can just instantly sweep all the for it. And the reality is I don’t think that is the case, I think that most of the ideas we’re talking about are only only able to catch get any traction because they are accompanied by inventions or matter. You know, the idea of matter that effectively is like its word and flesh right? It’s sort of coming together of both of those things. And I think we are at risk of almost having a slightly Gnostic reading of history if you’re not careful. We’re the only thing that matters is that you know, it is the Spirit that gives life not in the flesh has no value at all. Which of course in Paul’s terms is true. But when you read history, that way, you end up saying actually an idea, we can almost over imagine how important you know, the discourse about a particular bill or law or tweets, or whatever it might be is, I think in this has got the power to change everything. Yeah. And that can create a lot of anxiety because individuals think, actually, my rightly thinking or speak saying the exact right word here has the power to change everything. So it’s not just a problem with our reading of the heat of the past. Right, but actually our understanding of our own place in the world, we basically get Messiah complexes, yes. For the significant people, particularly people like you and me who speak and write for a living, and many people listening to this probably very interested in ideas. That’s why you’re here. But the risk is that you can exaggerate too much the importance of those things without seeing the sort of wider social, familial, industrial, geographical, even, yes. Does that lead it to have succeeded or panned out the way it did?

Glen Scrivener
Yes, yes, you are not all that, you know, you, you are not the driver of history. And I think we’re already used to thinking that when it comes to the first century, you know, I think a lot of people are used to thinking, Well, why did Christ come in at the year dot? Well, the Pax Romana was a great help for the gospel to spread from the and the lingua franca of Greek was really helpful to have this and, and the all sorts of confluences of historical contingencies that now that you look back on it, you say, well, obviously, it’s sort of it’s sort of had to be there. And so we had this sense of God sort of Superintendent book

Andrew Wilson
of Acts 100 years earlier, be like, well, and then they got on a ship, and then they got mugged by pirates. Yeah. The whole thing was, yeah, so you’re right. We are used to reading a lot of history. And similarly, the Reformation, you know, printing. Yeah. So you we make those connections, but in our own day, we can underestimate them, at least insofar as it is creating the things that make the post Christian West distinctive. Yes. Yeah. So yes, as you say, a number of things I do in the book to try and re bring those back into the discussion, so that you can see how the ideas and the material developments interact with each other

Glen Scrivener
precisely because in our day, there are lots of people wanting to start to stand up for the West, and standing up for Western values that make me quite uneasy. Yes. And saying things like West is best, and trying to, and, and not giving particularly spiritual answers to why the West has had the dominance that it’s had. And if you don’t have a doctrine of the Spirit, all you’re left with is the flesh. So at what point does that become kind of white supremacy as well, at what point does that does that become a real colonial kind of problem? Yeah. And you push back against that hard by by talking about just Just what are some of the sort of utterly contingent aspects of Western Europe?

Andrew Wilson
Yeah, yeah. So I think one of the things I had in mind was I think it was Dinesh D’Souza. I’m not sure if that’s how you pronounce his name, where he he had this. He’s obviously become a bit of an online polemicist for a particular way of, of seeing the West and a staunch defender, like you said, you know, he doesn’t I’m not sure if he ever says West is best, but that’s the vibe you get from the book. And and he’s saying, oh, you know, so when did you last read a great Zulu novel or words to that effect? And I was like, and this is, as if there is something in the No, he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t say it’s a racial essentialist project is not at all. But what he is saying is, the ideals and ideas contained within Christianity, when mingled with Greco Roman society produce this unique thing, which has actually been uniquely fruitful at an ideological level. And therefore, you can actually have a sort of sense sense of cultural supremacy. And I hope I’m not being unduly unfair on the way he presents the argument. But I just want to hedge recoiled from it, because I think it is to completely underestimate the fact that the the A major part of the reason why the island we’re sitting on right now in Great Britain is, has had the outsized impact it has is because of all sorts of things that affect it’s actually to do with even with geography, so forget, forget inventions, and forget developments, even of ideas and the church and all that, and just say, was partly because of where it is, or the Gulf Stream. Totally, if we had the weather that you had on the opposite side of the Atlantic, we would be 15 degrees colder, you wouldn’t be able to grow anything. So all sorts of things like that which, but at a global level, the idea that you are in Eurasia, that Eurasia, if you look at the sort of the major land masses, you say, but you’ve got Afro Eurasia is one uninterrupted block of land. And obviously, the vast majority of the world’s people live there. And then you got the Americas which existed in almost isolation from your Afro Eurasia until 600 years ago, 500 years ago, and then you got Australia which again, similarly existed in splendid isolation, in a for even longer. And so you end up with the the idea that most of the people live in one place, you know that what when people eventually develop things like farming, and then eventually cities and the like and writing and all the things that come with it, which enable us to, you know, develop mentally to do all the things we’re able to do now, including podcasting about stuff that those things are as a result of being in the right set of continents, and also to being in the part of the continent that has been settled by those people who develop farming early, which was primarily in West Asia and Eastern China. And so basically, if you were going to get, quote, civilization emerging anywhere, and you’re all you had was a matter relief map, and a bit of common sense, you would say, well, that’s probably going to emerge, either in the Fertile Crescent in West Asia, where the land of the Bible and Babylon Assyria and so on, or in in between the Yangtze and yellow rivers in China, or both, and it was it was both, and then of course, you get pockets of elsewhere. But those two societies develop much quicker and establish our population explosions much quicker. And then of course, you find on the pockets in, you know, obviously, in India and in parts of Africa, and in both North and South America, but those two population cause are predominant, which is why there are so many, essentially Semitic descended, and ancient near east and descended peoples and so many Chinese descended peoples in the world today, they’re just they got a huge head start for geographical reasons. And if you don’t see that, and you don’t realize that that’s actually a big part of why I decided not just going back to Haiti, the British Empire had machinery and that I’m saying, no, no, look back 10,000 years, and you’ll see that a lot of the reason why we have some of the developments that we’re enabling us to have this conversation goes back a very, very long time to things that really didn’t have anything to do with the ideas people were talking about. In some ways, that’s the reason why the ideas that people in those communities came to believe or receive were ever heard about by anyone else is because of some geographical and then eventually technological advantages they had, not because of the ideas themselves, right?

Glen Scrivener
where do ideas come in, though, because, like I completely get, you know, Australians are justly proud of the Great Southern land, and we call it the lucky country. But actually, the soil is terrible. And there are there aren’t great rivers, and it’s mainly desert.

Andrew Wilson
And your animals are a problem, too, right? How you gonna domestically, domesticate said, We’re gonna farm kangaroos and what you’re gonna do?

Glen Scrivener
And so, I mean, North America had a bit of a head start on Australia in terms of settlement. And yet North America, you know, 330 million, is it, you know, Australia 25 million, you know, and, like, the land makes a big difference in lots in lots of ways. But then you could compare North America to South America, as someone like Niall Ferguson does. And he says, well, that that is an interesting experiment, in running a kind of a Protestant North versus a Catholic south. And it’s not that the South has worse geography or land or riches, resources, you know, you can dig silver out of the, you know, mines in Argentina and all the rest of it. And so at some point, would you say ideas do come in? Oh, they absolutely do.

Andrew Wilson
As ideas come in, you know, throughout the process, there’s never like, what we have is no matter matter, matter, and then somebody’s idea, idea, idea. It’s not like that at all, of course, although actually even in the example focus on Gibbs, and he does a lot of work on it in it in his books. But I think even then, the idea that there is a lot of development, economic economists talk about the resource curse or words to that effect, that that actually sometimes having a land in which it’s too easy to get wealth out of the ground, okay? Doesn’t incentivize the sorts of institutions and developments that so in North America, people are having to hunker down for winter after winter and farmer just scrape by. And actually, of course, and you could never set up and then comiendo system that they did in South America, in North America, because this is not bountiful enough, whereas in the south, and of course, the other classic example is, is the resources of Africa that actually the parts of Africa that have struggled in poverty for a long time, in large part because the ground is so abundant, and even to this day, the sort of minerals you can take out of parts of the DRC or whatever are so valuable. There actually, people do they come in and they raid, and then actually, there’s almost even then a disadvantage to having too much abundance in the land. But that by the by, obviously, there’s always an interaction between the two. And yeah, you can see two societies with roughly similar geographies, which develop in very different ways because of the idea. So I’ve been, I’d be the last person to deny that that happens. But I think generally, Western people are more inclined to see the ideas as mattering more than this the geographical or the territorial or than mineral or technological factors underneath it. And so I think I wanted to talk about the way that both interplay with each other and actually when a great breakthrough, so again, in the year, I’ve given a lot of time to 1776. You have Adam Smith writes in this great economics textbook about how people get rich, but in the end, and it has no idea that the West is about to explode in wealth, and in fact, he’s trying to explain why wealth is not growing as it ought to be, because he thinks people aren’t doing the right Think so his ideas are speaking at the sort of, we still study in universities today very important ideas. But actually what ends up giving the massive breakthrough and wealth is ultimately things to do with minerals and technology, which ended up causing wealth to explode in Northern Europe and, and very quickly elsewhere as well. So I think even in those great examples, we have a brilliant economist speaking on that cusp of modernity, he doesn’t actually have any idea what’s going what’s about to happen in his own generation. And that will come about because of stuff rather than its max, not chapters, the phrase people often use, and I think rightly so.

Glen Scrivener
Yes. In the Eurasian continent, though, supercontinent, we’ve we’ve got very fertile areas of China, and very fertile areas in what is now Europe. But you do make a comparison at one stage between the sorts of journeys, this the sorts of the sorts of journeys that people embark on, from China in Yes, in exploring the world, but do they explore the world as as opposed to the ships that are going from Britain named things like the Endeavour and explore and all those sorts of things? So there are sort of theological differences that are going on,

Andrew Wilson
there aren’t? Yes. And so I think ideas that’s why Why think ideas, you have to factor in the role of worldviews and ambition and purpose into these that teleology not just matter. And I think the ships one is a really interesting one, because people, there’s, um, I still find it in Waterstones or, you know, regular book shops, this book about what would have happened if the Chinese and maybe the Chinese actually did discover America in 1490, something, you know, these sorts of books, which are giving these thought experiments, but actually, the Chinese were way ahead of the West in the 15th century, and had these enormous I mean, the one of the statistics, like, massive ships that they said that, that, although they’re selling at roughly the same time as Christopher Columbus, in fact, you know, 80 odd years before that, that Columbus’s ship is the same size as one of the ships, the Chinese ships rudder. So it’s like, it’s just vastly disproportionate anything. Wow, they were way ahead technologically. But there isn’t. The idea factor is in there as well. And so what happens is that the Chinese treasure chips, and there’s a lot of writing about this and still disagreement about exactly what the agenda was. But there was a lot of collecting tributes, there was there was some settling, there were some taking back curiosities. But the the motive wasn’t, we’re now gonna go and discover how big the world is, are we now going to go and try and find new lands and new peoples and we’re not was when Captain Cook, eventually sailing in the 18th century. And again, in 1776, the motives for his trips are things like, we want to find out if the Northwest Passage can actually be reached from this side of the ocean, or we want to find out what’s what’s the transit of Venus. And so we’re studying permission out there, and eight years ago, and it went wrong. If we don’t get it this year, then Venus won’t do it again for another 10 years. So we better go out now and take all our measurement equipment. Yeah, well, while we’re there, let’s pop in on on Tahiti, and oh, gosh, goodness, I didn’t know them.

Glen Scrivener
10s of 1000s of botanical specimens.

Andrew Wilson
So Botany Bay, where I imagine not a million miles away from your, where you come from, and all these. They’re all these sort of, you know, Joseph Banks and Daniel slanderer. And these other scientists going out saying, we want to discover, and they did, they named their ships, things like resolution and adventure and endeavor and discovery, because they’re trying to find out about the work. Now, I want to be naive and say, Oh, that that’s the only thing they were doing, because obviously, there’s some flag planting and some resource extraction as well. But But I think quite genuinely, you can see a motive in many of these people, that is trying to find out more about the world at an intellectual level. Meanwhile, when they eventually head to the Chinese court and was trying to establish trade in the early 1790s, the Chinese emperor famously says, I’ve still heard in the last few years, I’ve heard Chinese diplomats quote it on the radio, because it’s still quite a notorious thing. He said, The Chinese emperor said, Well, strange and costly, exotic objects don’t interest me, we’ve got everything we need here. And actually, the contrast was pretty strong, that the ideas that led Western people to go all over the world to pick stuff up, were grounded in a sense, that was ultimately a theological one. There were things that you could discover and improve about the world and learn more, and retrieve and connect the world more together and perhaps, eventually share the gospel with people and so on. And so that’s what that’s half the story. There’s a terrible history that we would I expect no well, as well. But I do think it’s fair to say that some of a large part of why Western people went where they went, was not just because they had greater resources, often they didn’t, but because there were ideas motivating those trips as well.

Glen Scrivener
And in those senses, their ideas about progress and the the arrow of time, the direction of history. That’s that we can explore and improve Yeah. Which is sort of one sort of perhaps theological difference. Tom Holland spends spends a lot of time when he talks about science and the emergence of science, pressing into how far advanced the time And he’s were when it came to astronomy, and the instruments were so much better. And there all sorts of people from the west going out and and learning from the Chinese about that. But in the end, the scientific breakthroughs that suddenly we consider to be what the scientific revolution sort of began with, had some theological underpinnings, yes to them. Things like a single god, who could be trusted, you know, at all times, and in all places, you know, in the cosmos contingent universe that might be otherwise. And therefore, you better go out and test it. Things like the doctrine of humanity that says, People are fallen, and that actually, they’re their minds, kind of the seat of their rebellion. And we are self justifying fools that need things that end up being becoming peer review, and try to disconfirm your hypothesis and things like that. And I think that there might be another example were incredibly clever people with incredibly sophisticated technology technology that in some senses was outstripping the West. It’s a kind of a filter, in which Christian assumptions and presuppositions went through the filter, and others didn’t.

Andrew Wilson
Yes, and I think if you were even the way Chinese education at the time, and Mike to some degree probably is still true. But certainly at the time, there was a rift reflect, reflecting backwards on, you know, the the annals and the great works of Confucius and other sort of founding fathers which, of course, in in Europe, you have that to people looking back to Scripture, but you begin to is extraordinary, you get these guys beginning to write books, like everything Aristotle ever said was wrong. And why Aristotle is the stupidest of all philosophers, because was that Galileo called and that many remarkable statements, and the equivalent of Aristotle in the East would be Confucius, but people weren’t saying those things. And as I say, to some degree, still don’t. Because the way in which it what’s normal in most societies is that you look back to tried and tested ancestral wisdom. What’s unusual about the Christian West, effectively, as people began to say, there is lots of stuff we don’t know. And there’s lots of limitations to our knowledge, and there’s plenty of huge blind spots, and wow, we’ve just that continent we didn’t even know was there. And now we’ve got all these people, and we’ve got all this land. And it’s that sense of ignorance that ends up power and somebody and an eschatology that in the end, God is going to make the world better than it is now. Yes, that powers a sense that, yes, society can go forwards. It’s not simply as many Greeks believed, you know, where you had the Golden Age, then the silver rose in the Bronze Age, and we’re now here in the Iron Age or whatever. You think, no, no, no, this is a that’s a sort of downward trajectory, or perhaps the stoics a cyclical journey, where you just go ran around and unicycle death rebirth, which, if you just looked at nature is probably what you will conclude, you know, some summer down to winter, and then back to summer again, you know, whereas in Christianity you get no, no the world can get better, we can advance we can learn more. And knowledge that we have held treasure for 1000 years might well turn out to be titled bunk. And so we need to be prepared to test it. And so those assumptions percolating through society for long enough to affect so. So I do think the, the ideological part is very important, the material part is very important. And it’s the interplay between the two that creates the conditions for what we now call modernity.

Glen Scrivener
And that really feeds into the enrichment story, which, you know, you mentioned Adam Smith writing in 1776, on the Wealth of Nations, he is describing sort of what has come to be known as capitalism. But he was not, he did not recognize that he was living through a time when the resources of a culture would far outstrip, you know, the

Andrew Wilson
way he’s writing a book, he republishes the book, the day after James Watt steam engine starts working hard, Bloomfield colliery, like the Nexus to significant date 1776. It is where you should write a book about the eighth and ninth of March, it is remarkable because again, he just doesn’t realize yes, these these enormous technical technological changes that are happening. At the same time, he doesn’t see the significance at least,

Glen Scrivener
and, and that’s when the hockey stick graphs begin. And if you read some of the like Steven Pinker, he will publish dozens and dozens and dozens of such charts that talk about, you know, the world getting better, the world’s getting better. And help us to see the ways in which the contingency of you know, a rich supply of coal quite close to the surface in northern England maps on to that sort of the curiosity and the sense of novelty and a sense of progress and the theological beliefs that people have, how are they interplaying in this moment?

Andrew Wilson
So I think you particularly would look at it through what I did, and I think you can look at it through the lens of the Industrial Revolution, what we what we now got, so you, you would say okay, across, if you look at deep history, people have basically lived on, you know, somewhere around 400 to $500 a year in modern terms for almost all of human history. What happens is you think that’s crazy people are always inventing things, and therefore getting more wealth, which they are, it’s just that they’re using that wealth to ensure that more of their children survive. And so the GDP per head goes down. So you know, new discoveries made people get a bit richer, but it means they more of their children survive. So they then go back to being a bit poor and that cycle, occasionally, you get a cataclysm, like bubonic plague or a massive Paragon, and a lot of people die. And then the standard living quickly goes up. But then they have more children that goes down. And that was called the Malthusian trap and existed for pretty much all of history. I think I was astonished to discover that the standard of living per person in Shakespeare’s day was almost exactly what it was in King David’s day, right? Yeah, per person. And globally. Now, obviously, there are rich people and poor people. But but because that’s just what we do, we ended up saying, I’m going to invest this in giving my kids a better chance. And so we have more of them. What is unusual is that in the late 18th century, that ceiling gets punched through for the first time. And as obviously doesn’t like hockey sticks is flat. You know, GDP per head is largely flat for all human history until 250 years ago, and suddenly turns a corner and explodes up. And obviously, you’re still screaming upwards at a global level. And there are all kinds of reasons for that, which obviously, I talk a lot about in the book. But I think the the fascinating window into it is through British, the British industrial revolution, where you have a lot of material requirements that you have, you know, did you have a lot of coal, your minerals, you’ve got plenty of water, you’ve got a small island things are connected together relatively well, it’s easier to link the whole nation together than it is in plenty of other countries or whatever. It’s, there’s a relatively predictable seasonal pattern, which means that the rains come at roughly the same time. So it’s not like an El Nino thing or a monsoon. But you’ve actually got a fairly steady, that you’ve also got many centuries of wealth through the wool trade, and it’s linked is near enough to allow us to be able to trade and all sorts of things like that which vary, but you also have very strong sort of Christian roots to even the explosion of wealth we had through the influence, particularly in Protestants and dissenters, nonconformists. So this is obviously an Anglican speaking to a nonconformist, but the nonconformist contributed a disproportionate amount who would seem in this period to science and technology, partly because they were excluded from other things, they might be able to dry up society couldn’t go to university, for instance, and couldn’t take clerical office, there’d be all sorts of things that they couldn’t do in the nobility and in the senior hierarchy of the nation. So they formed businesses, and a lot of them were dissenters, and some of them erratically so as well, but ended up investing a lot of time and energy into discovery and building businesses. But you also had through Polly their influence and Protestantism, a very strong sense of connection between people who make things and people who think things. So there’s this lovely line from Dr. Johnson, Samuel Johnson, who says, you know, we are, you know, we are a city of philosophers and we make the boobies of Birmingham work for us. Basically, we do we are meant as in these dolts who, who just do all the work, but we are thinkers. But what happens in Britain is you increasingly through the influence of Protestant thinkers, in people like Francis Bacon and others, we need to bring together the people who make things and the people who think things, and use science and experimentation in a feedback loop in themselves. Protestantism also makes people more literate, because they believe the Word of God has given them in a book. And if you end up with a highly literate society in which people exchange and argue about sectarian ideas a lot because of, again, partly the influence of Protestantism, if you have a low level of religious, relatively low level of religious persecution, because the state is not able to suppress all the ideas at once, and there’s been lots of back and forth about what state religion will be. And you put that in a context where you’ve got lots of individuals who are making experimenting, testing ideas and arguing about them, you have the intellectual conditions, as well as the material ones for something like the industrial revolution to happen, which of course it does, and that’s not only in Britain didn’t, you know, there’s much of it happens elsewhere. But you would look from the history of the world and say, Wow, something happened in 18, late 20th century Britain, that didn’t happen elsewhere. Until that point. And it seems to have quite a lot to do with Christian ideas, yes, mingled in with material factors that other nations didn’t have,

Glen Scrivener
and things like work and wealth. So, you know, in classical thoughts, you know, the last, you know, one of the things out of Pandora’s box was work, right, right, little miss cursed thing. And so, like a view of the dignity of work, that the boobies of Birmingham actually have, they’re doing good things are doing good things in and wealth as well in terms of like a classical thing to do with wealth. If you ever got any access, which was very rarely, you would either hoard it or display it. Yeah. And what happens in a culture where you’re continually told stories of if you have any talents, don’t put them in the ground like invest, invest, invest, there is a kind of a well, this

Andrew Wilson
is what vapor said, everybody who studies sort of sociology or even like economics To the west, Dustin has to read him. And and there’s plenty that you would correct about what he said. But I think there’s essential insight that there is that different value systems have different levels of weight placed on the value of manual work and of experimental thinking and, you know, pioneering novelty. Yeah. And if you have people who really think novelty is generally a good thing, or at least to try, coupled with people who are prepared to say, working very hard and reinvesting your money is a good thing. You do have the intellectual ideological conditions yes match with but of course that had that happened somewhere completely different. There’s still wouldn’t if you didn’t have coal, you didn’t have the car. And you wouldn’t be able to do it either. But, but the double whammy seems to be what made Yeah, I was gonna say Britain specialist sounds. I definitely don’t want to go that route. I do think it’s worth you know, obviously, you’ve got to be careful how you tell the story. And that is not triumphalist. But I think at the level of his study historical causes, seeing those two things working in concert in the case of Britain Yeah, is really so rather than saying this is just because there’s something innately better about anybody who lives in the West, or there’s anything better even about the ideas they had. But the the collision of the the those ideas, particularly the Christian originated, and novelty favoring ones coupled together with sort of the material conditions they had were extremely important in generating what we now think of as the modern world. Yes.

Glen Scrivener
And so. So, beliefs, to some degree, affect the enrichment of the West, which has had an incredible impact on how we consider ourselves and life and meaning and purpose. But riches also have an incredible impact on our beliefs to do as well. So how should how should we think about as incredibly enriched Westerners in the church? It’s, it’s also a curse, isn’t it to have Mammon? So Francis, easily available to enter the kingdom of God? Yeah. So what impact has that had on what we take for granted? What we think of as self evident? Yes. Is yes, there’s a Christian heritage, but it’s but it’s also the fact that we’ve got a supercomputer in our pockets that delivers to us, you know, all the music in the world for free. Yeah. How? Yeah, what how are we meant to reflect on that contingency? So

Andrew Wilson
well, how to reflect on the contingency? I think that’s a huge question. I’m not even I think at the very least, you can say this has both been good and bad. But I think in what ways it’s good and bad. Is it a long discussion, but I think this is one of the examples that wealth is one of the examples of how I think in the previous episode, you quoted Peter Berger, Christianity has been its own grave digger. And that might be true just at an ideas level. But it’s also true at a financial economic level, because what Christianity has done, it would seem in the NorthWest Europe initially and then spreading very quickly to all over the world, is to generate conditions of prosperity that in the end, make it harder to hold to Christian faith. And I imagine you’re asking about the second half of that, how do those conditions as we’ve talked about the first bit, how do those conditions make it harder to be Christian, and one of the things they do is they make people have much smaller families, which is, interestingly, A, you got two children, I’ve got three children, if we lived 500 years ago, we would have had more and, and would have lost more. And, and actually, we’re not small families, as many people who who would have fewer kids than that, and that at a social level. There are all sorts of fascinating connections between how many children people have and how religious they are, which map not just through history, but all across the world today, which is one of the reasons Christianity is, you know, booming in Sub Saharan Africa and is stagnating in the West, and even in countries that are not ideologically, very Western, like someone like Japan or South Korea. So that’s one of the things that was when people get richer. They, it seems for whatever reason that causality is not always obvious. They have fewer kids, they invest more resources in fewer children. I think there is also a deeper theological thing that you can go way back to Jesus in with a rich young ruler. It’s it’s obvious comment, but how hard is it for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God? It does seem that people’s willingness to trust in something other than God right, obviously goes up when they have more money because they’ve got more things they could trust in. Whereas someone with very little says, I’ve got to throw all my hope on God. Yeah. And you find that coming through in the pastoral epistles in one Timothy, five and six, you find it in Proverbs, even Lord don’t want profit. I don’t want too much money or too little money, because I’m too little money, I might go here. But if I’ve got too much, I will forget you. I’ll trust in myself. And so there’s quite a basic idolatry of Mammon that the Western world has supercharged has always been there. But obviously, by lifting up the God of Mammon, the god of money or possessions, it makes it makes Christianity gradually seem less plausible in a society even though that wealth is itself, as we’ve been saying, in part significant part, a product of Christian influence. Yes. So it’s one of those Then there’s various iterations of this that we may even touch on in other episodes. But Christianity has produced conditions that have been ended up making Christianity harder, right? It’s been hoisted by its own petard or we have been hosted, in a way. And I think that is how your bigger question I don’t know the answer to how should we think providentially about God’s purposes in allowing that to happen? Except since I mean, you might have some interesting comments, the only thing that occurs to me is simply to say, we need to be very aware of not boasting in the things that we are inclined to see as great achievements of our society. Right. Yeah. Which, of course, is often the very first thing people do something here. This is why these values work. Look at all this wealth they’ve created. Yes. And you say, Yeah, but that that wealth itself may end up for the things that truly matter in eternity, yes, end up being more of a customer blessing, even as they are doing many very good things, like making people live in less pain and increasing people’s likelihood of being able to feed their families and so on. There is a dark side to it. Yes. Don’t get carried away with yourselves and believe it

Glen Scrivener
right here. Yeah. What do you have that you were not given? Yeah, in that one Corinthians. sort of sense. And, and also, maybe, maybe it sort of brings us full circle to this acknowledgement that West is not best. And our brothers and sisters around the world who love Jesus and have a lot less Mammon have so much to teach us? Yes, they have so much to teach us in terms of you know, we have gotten distorted in terms of you know, yes, the West invented the individual, but it also ended invented individualism, and expressive individualism and this atomization of culture, and oh my goodness, can we learn from our brothers and sisters around the world? And can we learn from our brothers and sisters around the world who do not have Mammon to rely on and yet trust in Jesus in ways that are so good for our for our souls? And so I think that really helps us to, you know, who knows, in all the providential things that God is doing with the bless stroke curse, that money is, it should make us look beyond ourselves. To those you know, who realized, you know, it’s only when Jesus is all I have, that I realized that Jesus is all all I need. And that’s, you know, that’s that’s the lesson for us all. I think it is. That’ll do for this episode, quite

Andrew Wilson
profound and sobering conclusion. That should cut off triumphalism at the knees. But yeah, to Yes, to recognize that to be thankful for what we have been given but to recognize the grave dangers in trusting in any gift. Yeah, and certainly that of material prosperity.

Glen Scrivener
And let’s have a global perspective on the growth of Christianity around the world. You know, by the end of this decade, it seems like there’ll be more Christians in China than there are in the United States and look around Sub Saharan Africa. Look at Afghanistan, look in Iran. There is the flip side to the fact that men can be a curse that in places that don’t have so much the gospel is going great guns. Well, that is episode two of post Christianity. Question mark. This is a podcast of the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, which is a ministry of the gospel Coalition. We are a new podcast and we would love to get a rating and review. So if you could go to the pod catcher of choice, that you’re listening to this on and share some thoughts on that that really helps us to get seen. What also helps us to get seen is if you share this on social media, either the YouTube video, if you’re watching or the podcasts, we would love that. And we’re going to do eight of these and we’ve got some special guests really looking forward to it. But Andrew Wilson, thanks for joining us.

Andrew Wilson
Thank you for having me.