Metamodern Christianity
Reflections on the Evolution of Faith
As you may have noted, 2024 has been marked by a popular revival of interest in the Christian religious tradition, with a few high-profile conversions seemingly representative of a still broader cultural trend.
The question some have been asking is, “Is this trend a metamodern one?” Such public inquiry (by Christian YouTubers like Paul Anleitner and Paul VanderKlay), along with conversion discussions happening in the metamodern scene itself, led me to feel the topic had to be engaged head-on, and in some depth.
Given my extensive engagement with both Christianity and metamodernism, I felt I had a unique perspective to offer on the issue. Indeed, the matter came to seem urgent. For, as the forms of Christianity being touted by some as “metamodern” increasingly landed to my ear like little more than re-branded traditionalism and anti-modernist neo-orthodoxy, I grew concerned that “metamodern Christianity” might simply become the buzzword for a pervasive kind of reactionary retreat from the contemporary world’s complexity into unhelpfully narrow religious dogmatism—one with all the outmoded two-worlds mythology and mythic literalism of premodern thought.
But if deploying postmodern contextualism to reject modern ways of thinking and thereby reclaim more traditionalist religion wasn’t “metamodern Christianity,” what is?
Since March, I’ve been trying to communicate what I think a metamodern approach to the Christian faith actually looks like—a Christianity that, like metamodernism more broadly, incorporates the genuine knowledge gained from modernity and postmodernity while also moving beyond them.
In conversations with folks like Paul Anleitner [1], Paul VanderKlay [2][3], Sam Tideman [4], Nate Hile [5], Christian Baxter [6] and others, I’ve tried to bring some missing and much-needed modern perspectives to the traditional (and to some extent postmodern) thinking people are turning to in their attempts to reclaim religion. The integration of modern historical-critical findings strike me as an essential component of any meta-modern Christianity—even as they, too, must be contextualized within a broader frame. The general ignoring or ignorance about such material, even and especially by leading figures like Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau, is, to me, cause for true concern—at least if one genuinely wants to posit their perspectives as somehow moving beyond modern viewpoints. Any metamodern Christianity, I believe, must be based on a thorough integration of modern insights, even as it avoids their pitfalls and excesses and thereby transcends such insights to become something new.
But what does this look like? If metamodernism really does signal a process of self-reflective critique followed by transcendence to higher, more inclusive frames (as I argue in my book Metamodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Cultural Logics—Chapter 1 available through my Substack HERE), what does Christianity look like after it has reflected on its premodern, modern, and postmodern modes to achieve a meaningful vantage on its entire developmental trajectory to date? Indeed, how might this developmental arc itself be seen as the real sacred history Christianity has been revealing?
While I’ve been able to talk a bit with John Vervaeke about this [7], on the whole there are rather few conversation spaces in which to explore this topic in detail. As a result (and owing also to a hand injury that left me unable to type), I set about recording a handful of video reflections on the topic over the preceding months.
For this post, I thought I would share these videos in sequence so as to offer an easy reference resource for those likewise interested in post-postmodern Christianity. Here, then, is my series on Metamodern Christianity, beginning with an overview, then considering the missing engagement with modern historical criticism, then moving to integrate modern historical insights while moving beyond them to a “trans-historical” perspective. After that, I discuss what I think “Christ” means in all of this before concluding with some thoughts on how such a framework might serve to guide religious instruction of future Christians.
Feedback welcome. (Metamodernists are always looking for reflections on reflections, after all…)
Metamodern Christianity
Here I lay out my conception of what a metamodern version of Christianity looks like. Drawing on the insights of all the previous cultural paradigms, the revelation of God's nature and the deepening quality of the relationship between God and man can be understood as progressing through a series of covenants/dispensations that map to a learning process unfolding through time. Such a perspective helps us non-arbitrarily coordinate tribal, imperial, traditional, modern, and postmodern conceptions of God that have manifested across sacred history. All of these are necessary and contribute to a coherent story of deepening understanding about and relationship with the ever-transcendent Divine.
What’s Missing from the Discussion
Reflecting on my interview with Jordan Hall, I discuss what I see as glaringly absent from the broader conversation of metamodern Christianity, particularly in online scenes like “This Little Corner of the Internet”: namely, the modern historical-critical perspective. Therefore, I ask: 1) How does the Traditional-Devotional perspective differ from the Modern Historical-Critical one with regard to the Old and New Testaments? 2) What might a metamodern Christianity look like that could successfully and syngergistically toggle between these different lenses to yield something progressive and robust?
Metamodernism, Miracles, and the Historical Jesus
Does the modern historical-critical lens on the Bible reject miracles on principle and thereby exclude in advance what it presupposes not to be true? Here I counter this critique (leveled by some) by explaining how the miracles in the Gospels are problematized not by metaphysical prejudice but simple historical analysis. Taking the miracles in the Gospels at face value as historical events is problematic even if we work within a metaphysical frame that allows for miracles. Ultimately, it's a matter of historical reconstruction, not worldview, that forces us to rethink how much of the materials can be taken as reliable accounts of "what happened." But if the Gospels aren’t history, what are they?
Metamodern Christianity is Trans-Historical
To get beyond the enduring impasse of the debate between "science vs. religion," “history vs. myth,” etc., let's give science and history their due—then leave them in the dust! There's no need to affirm the historical basis of the Christian story to relate to the Christ of faith. If we can accept that the Gospels are prehistorical materials, we can get beyond the classic hangups and begin to see how "it's all made up" AND "it's all real!" are both true simultaneously. Here I frame the current debates around history and religion in light of the "pre/trans fallacy" so well described by integral philosophy. This framing, I think, helps position us to appreciate what a truly metamodern Christianity can look like. By accepting the historical Jesus account, we are freed to embrace the Christ of faith and tradition—not in spite of the facts, but because we have transcended them.
The Metamodern Christ
Who is the Christ of faith? What if he is the telos of existence itself? The direction to which all of thought and action tend? What if Christ Consciousness is the goal of a more comprehensive, open, de-centered, contextualized, and other-sensitive perspective? What if this is the bigger picture, the meta picture, in which Christianity’s own development is the real “sacred history” leading to Omega? Not traditional Christianity, then, but Christianity’s evolution from traditional to modern to postmodern and beyond—what if that is the good news? What if we (you and me) actually participate in this unfolding process, the body of Christ in the world? What if we do service to God by how we help in His evolution through time?
Catechism for a Metamodern Christian
Catechism has meant "religious education," especially as a coming-of-age initiation into the fullness of spiritual community and engagement with its mysteries. It has to do with what sort of support and instruction young people and converts receive about their faith as they move into deeper spiritual relationship with God and church. Here I ask: Given all we’ve explored about a metamodern perspective on the tradition, what would a supportive catechism look like for Christians on the path towards a metamodern form of faith? How might religious learning unfold in healthy and sustainable ways such as would foster a kind of Christianity that is truly metamodern in outlook? What are the right developmental moments for literalism, doubt, even atheism, and conviction? And, after all, aren’t all of these important moments of God’s ongoing revelation—moments we can and ought to experience for ourselves as we participate with God in the ongoing creation of the world?
Thanks for all your work on this subject, Brendan. We are clearly in the midst of an exciting and dangerous cultural moment. The meaning crisis has brought people to their wits end, and as the Puritan John Flavel once said (and I don't think I agree with anything else he said!), "man's extremity is God's opportunity." But in the rush to retrieve the deep meaning of Christian theology, many are simultaneously retreating from hard won developmental thresholds. Thus "Christian nationalism" and various other attempts to immanentize the eschaton (Voegelin) by conflating myth with history.
Personally, I think Gebser gets at something important by emphasizing the transparency of an integral structure of consciousness. There is a seeing through the various developmental structures rather than a replacement of one with another. In other words, we ought not to imagine that scientific rationality simply replaces mythic and magic modes of consciousness. That leads us straight into "deficient mental" consciousness, which because it denies its magical and mythic roots, ends up being pathologically magical and mythic in its thinking (witness modern fetishizations of technology and money, the myth of progress, etc.). So the point is emphatically not to dispel "efficient" magic and myth because now we are big boys who only need rationality and science. The point is to understand the unique and mutually enriching phenomenologies and ontological insights provided by each structure of consciousness.
I’m pretty sure I’m not smart enough, or patient enough, to track every movement of your thought, Brendan. But I get the gist of it, I think, and if that’s true then it’s like the first breath of actual oxygen I’ve inhaled in quite some time.
My own thoughts have increasingly turned toward a pan-religious human ethic which would basically look around in our current era, see what human civilization needs to become next, and carry forward (only) those aspects of our various religions which will inspire humanity toward those ends.
A Christian biblical scholar, I’ve already tried several times, Thomas Jefferson-style, to start with scripture and excerpt only those passages and themes which still have value and force today, in order to focus only on these in teaching. But doing so only creates a pastiche, not a narrative which is cohesive enough to become our human/religious story, moving forward. However, starting with ethics and reaching backward into scripture, to trace them to their source, works much better — and works for most major religions, at least at my crude level of excerpting from contexts.
My doctoral professor (James Sanders, translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls) suggested that we say ‘First Testament,’ in order to avoid the dismissive anti-Semitic term ‘Old Testament.’ I always liked that practice because it created intellectual room for humanity to be viewed in every era as a ‘Third Testament’ — and that’s how I see your exciting work!
Thanks for giving me so much fodder for thought.