1776: The Origin Story of the Post-Christian West

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Andrew Wilson: Good morning. So I have to start with this. i This has been a lot. It’s been a long time in wandering back and forth. My wife is very nervous that there’s just you just don’t read the room. No, you don’t. If you don’t understand Americans, they won’t think it’s funny. And like it’s a blue coat, not a red coat, it’ll be fine. And it’s rumbled on. So what I decided to do was to take the costume which I actually own I know that sounds odd, but I do because we because of the book. And so I took the costume in the just a transatlantic, you know, put it in the suitcase. And I’ve had a lot of fun debating whether or not to do it. And basically my sensible friends all said no, no, no. And my fun friends all said yes, yes, yes. And in the including I was saying sandstorms are sitting back there. And he was very mischievous. They going, Are you going to wear the thing? Are you going to wear the thing? And then John Piper arrives during the dinner? And he goes, No, this is a bad idea. And so I don’t know, we’re just gonna have to wait and see. But we we I thought it’d be fun. So anyway, it is a great privilege to be speaking to you on the bounce as well. Two sessions in a row. You’ve gluttons for punishment for English accents, and that sort of thing. But what I’m going to try and do is I think and want to set up what a little bit what the book is, I imagine you’d help me even for some context, has anyone in here already read it? Or anybody knows what it is? Okay, so about three, that’s great. So no, but that’s really good. Because you don’t want you don’t want to do is then tell people about something that they go, Yeah, we know, we just so that’s very helpful. The three of you might be going, wow, I’ve been here before, but that’s okay. One of them’s Bob’s, so we’re going to be fine. And then I’m what I’m gonna try and do is sort of summarize the argument of the whole book in one page, which I will put up on the screen in a moment. So one screenshot, I used to be a management consultant, which means that you basically go into companies and ask them questions that go away, turn it into a page, or that sort of a clever graphic, and then return and give it to them. And they go, Wow, this is amazing, is 100,000 pounds. So that’s, that’s a little bit what I’m hoping will happen. So I’m going to summarize the book. And it’s all summarized the book. And then I wanted to put what I want to lead into, I think in our time together, is to have plenty of opportunity for questions. And also to give a bit of thought to, particularly towards the end of the book, where I try and talk about how we respond in our post Christian moment, which I think, for most of us is probably the cash value of the idea. I hope it’s interesting. I hope people having come to this would think, Oh, that’s a good book, I’d like to read it. But even if you don’t, I’d want you to feel equipped, at least to some degree as to how we engage with the post Christian world. And it’s something obviously, I’ve just written this book about. And then I think they they introduced the podcast, didn’t they? While I was backstage, the post Christianity podcast that Glenn and I have done, which is another attempt to do this. So some of you guys, you know what that book is probably not for me, but either the podcast or even what we talk about today. And they help. And then we’ll have hopefully lots of time for q&a, which mic stands will appear somewhere and it’ll be fun. Okay. So that’s where we’re going.

As Todd said in his kind introduction, there’s the conceit of the book is in a way that two things really, it’s the idea that the world we live in now, is well summed up by being the acronym weirdo, which stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, ex Christian, and romantic and that those seven features of our world much of which I borrowed for From psychologists who’ve done work on Western people, and how different we are to say we some of you are probably not Western, but most of us are, and how different we are from everyone else that are billion of the world’s people thinking this way, and about 7 billion of the world’s people think very differently about power, family, diet, taboos, sex work, the economy, politics are very different, which anyone who’s ever been to another country will know. But actually to understand why we are as we are, and therefore how those of us who are I think, in many ways, all of us as missionaries, to a increasingly post Christian culture, how we should understand that world and then what we can do about it. So the first conceit of the book is that that W, E, IR, D, our sums up our modern world, that’s half of it. But the reason I’m wearing this, and the reason why the number 1776 is on the front cover, is because the other part of the book, and in fact, more of it in terms of the story, is that those seven things are true because of things and in ways that can be very well explained by things that occurred in 1776. And so one of the first things I have to do when talking to my American friends about this book, and every time this has happened, someone say, Why is a British person blaming American independence for post Christianity? And that’s honestly not what I’m doing. Although the Mr. For subtitlers at crossway have clearly tried to imply I am. But what I’m actually doing is to say, No, that is one of the seven transformations taking place in this extraordinary year. And it’s the one that probably most of us in the room are very familiar with. As for most people, I’m obviously I’m not American, I had, that’s the chapter I found the hardest to write. Because I didn’t know anything about it. I’m like, okay, I’d heard of Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, but if you’d ask me, so who’s Benjamin Rush, and who’s John Hancock, I’d be like, see the guy with the big signature. But that’s all I knew, I didn’t know anything about it. So actually, for me, that was a small slice of those seven transformations. W e, IR D democratic, that’s very American, the American Revolution is really key to the Democratic story. And so I go a lot into it in that chapter. But all the others, the developments and transformations taking place, that make the world today haven’t very little to do with what’s happening in North America. And Saqqara have things to do with other parts of the world. Were also which also lived through this year, and didn’t most of them didn’t know what was happening in North America. And they are connected. But I want to walk you through that. And so what I’m this is probably a little bit of fanfare here. But so this is in one page, what it’s taken me I suppose three years, I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of books, and obviously written quite a big one, myself. But this is basically all that that book says. And so now none of you need to buy it. And crossway will drop me as an author on that note, I hope I hope that this up. But this is basically what the book is saying about somebody in 76. And I found when I’ve taught on this before, it’s helped people just to see all in one place, what’s going on. So if you just track down the far left hand column, you’ll see the acronym W, e, i, r, d are, the first five of those are, as I said, psychology, psychologists have used for 10 or 15 years to explore What’s distinctive about Western people, that obviously they’re Western, but they, they often almost all, almost every neighbor, you everyone who lives within 10 miles of your house, is relative to most people in history, highly educated, they and you live in a very industrialized society, this room is at a very abnormal temperature. Right? This if you’ve got 500 people in a room like this, it should be much hotter than it is. But it’s cooled artificially, and everything in here, the fact you can hear me now, obviously, it’s all built on industrial technology, and everything about our world is shaped by that reality. And if you don’t live in an industrialized society, you think very differently about lots of things. You think very differently, because you’re rich, which in North America, I imagine maybe per capita, not quite, but would you know, economically by far the richest nation on earth. You are and I am democratic. And our thinking, which does not just mean that we vote once every two years or every four years for our representatives. But it also means that you and I almost if I can even this might be too strong, but we almost fetishize choice, that we will say actually my capacity to choose not just my my government, but everything is one of the most fundamental things about me. And that is partly baked into the political system your nation has and mine does. But it’s baked into many other aspects of ordinary life that make Western people fundamentally chooses people who who pick and obviously that is if you bundle together ai r&d, you get consumerism, because you have industrial possibilities. You have sufficient affluence and you also have a mindset of choice, which means that people are by and large, driven and able to make choices about everything including, you know, as their breakfast cereal their mouth Each partner, most people in history, have not particularly thought that what you do is you survey the world and consider which of these people might I like to marry. That’s just not how most cultures do marriage is not how any culture in the Bible does marriage, but that we would just almost find it abhorrent. Many of us to think, an arranged marriage, you think that’s what most people do, and those sorts of things. So that because we’re democratic is very baked into us. It’s not just, we have, you know, founding fathers on our banknotes, and we have an election that’s democracy runs deeper than that in our thinking. And then the bottom two are that what I’ve added to the acronym so weird, some of you have may have read Joseph Henrich, Jonathan Hite, people like that, who make a lot of the idea of us being weird. And I’ve added to at the end, that we are also in that sense, X, Christian and romantic, which means that they’re more to do with the ideas and the ideals that drive people, rather than the top five, which are more to do with their economic and political and social circumstances. So but when you step from the circumstances, to the ideas that drive people, actually post Christianity by which I don’t mean, no one’s Christian anymore, but I mean, you can’t assume Christianity, Christendom is long gone. And people have got a Christian foundation for everything they think, even though they don’t realize it, ex Christianity. And then romanticism which is, if those of us who have read Karl Truman’s work on them either break up strange new world, or the rise and triumph of the modern stuff, he he does a bunch of this. And what I write in that chapter tracks a bit with what he’s saying, although it does it very differently. And that’s the idea that there’s this idea that you the inner self, gets expressed initially in art, poetry and music. But now, really, in every Disney movie, in every part of natural your, your society, you think of yourself as like a romantic person does, even if you think I don’t want to believe that, in the end, it shapes us nevertheless. And it shapes our families and our kids. So that’s the that’s the final section. And so those seven words are intended to encapsulate what is distinctive about the modern world we’re in and, and I hope, give some explanatory power, which means that when you look at your modern world, lots of these things, hopefully will connect things and go. I mean, at one point, I do a sort of several pages on trying to just tell you about you, and I make about over 100 generalizations about you. And my bet would be that at least 95 of them are true of everyone in this room. There might be one or twos and well, that’s not actually for me. But these things ranging from you’ve never witnessed an animal sacrifice, to you have done at least one personality test are lots of things like that, that would be true, because of these seven things that you are, that there is a flush toilet within 60 seconds walk away, you’re sitting. And that’s obviously true. Now I know that because I’ve just visited it, and so have you. But actually, that’s true of almost everybody who will ever read the book I’ve written. And it’s just that our lives are extremely unusual relative to most people in history. So the left hand column is that, that that first premise, which is this as the Manuel, the rest of the book is then about, oh, yeah, those things are true, because of things that happened in 1776. And you can see the transformational the revolution, you might call it I mean, depends how patriotic are feeling, I suppose by the way, I’m very patriotic about being American, even though I’m not when I you could put me in a baseball game, and everyone thinks the national anthem, I just feel so proud to be American tears come to my eyes and the raw kids, right. I mean, this is people blowing up me and my ancestors, but I still feel so proud to be part of it. It’s always been true. There’s some, it’s just such a good national anthem. And we’re like, you guys like? Fantastic, very staring. So this is not out of this is all in love, rather than, you know, bitterness or anything like that.

But the transformations are the revolutions that take place in this extraordinary year, probably one of these seven is very familiar to you. And the other six, maybe less so depends on how much history you’ve done and all that stuff at the top, what is globalization and this, I tell the story of the voyages of James Cook, who you may have heard of Captain Cook. That’d be a familiar name. So sort of man from sort of north in the Northeast of England, Yorkshire. And he has is sort of these great voyages which take place during the as his first one starts in 1769. But he goes on three major voyages of exploration and discovery and ends up being killed in Hawaii. But he his voyages are an extremely important step in the process of globalization. He goes out on a scientific research trip, initially to sort of plot the transit of Venus, but they got on the ship, but as they do they discover and obviously, lots of people already living there, but they discover countless places that had never been mapped to many of the best maps you had for 100 years were drawn by him. He was an extraordinary character. And so his ships the endeavor, and the resolution, and they tell the story of those voyages, and tell the story about how in that the fascinating thing to me is about that when he’s going on these journeys, where he is encountering people Will whose level of development or technology or wealth is dramatically different from all the people he’s ever met before? And he and the people on his ship, I will try and work out why that is. And there’s some fascinating discussions that effectively they’re having. So when we sail to the tip of South America, as Europeans, why is the level of quote development so different here than it is where we are? And then they sail on and they go to the South Pacific, and they meet more people. And think that’s weird. These people are a lot more developed than the people in South America. But they’re much less developed than in Europe. Why is that? And then they show around Australia, and they have the first ever Western encounter with Aboriginal Australians. And they’re sort of setting up the coast and they have a meet these meet Aboriginals, and they think this is very unusual, because these people are very would seem, in some ways very similar to the Polynesians, but totally different in the levels of development and their interest in us. And they aren’t they, they’re sort of debating this thing. And there’s an amazing story, amazing moment where this Tahitian man who travels with them, for a while on the journey encounters another Polynesian island, what we now call Easter Island, obviously, it wasn’t called that at the time, and encountered this island. And, and this teacher man is saying this is very, very strange, because these people look just like me. They have the same practices, they do tattoos, they know. They’re very obviously connected to my people. Yet our culture in Tahiti is metal, what we now think of so he’s much more much more advanced and developed than these people, even though they’re just a short one boat trip away. Why is that? And this young man has called Mackay day from Polynesia, he comes up this lovely line, and he just says, oh, good people, bad lands, there is the reason these people are limited is not because they have to do with the people. It’s because of the geographies with where they live. It’s because of the whether or not they have enough trees, whether or not they have we have an asset navigable rivers, whether the local animals are what they are in Eurasia, pigs, sheep, cows, horses, very suitable for food, plowing domestication, farming clothing, or whether they’re the native animals of say, Australia. So you, because otherwise, what happens is Western people looked at the world around them and thought, we have more advanced than these people. That must be because we’re clever, better, nobler. And this young man Mahina made this beautiful statement is effectively to say no, that’s not why that’s true. It’s true, because the people are great that people are just like you. What’s the difference? And that’s a very, it’s a very important comment against racism, of course. But what’s different is the geography. The difference is that if you had been bought you had been born I had on all everyone in this room had been born in Australia, in the 18th century, which is simply you can’t I mean, how can you try getting a kangaroo to pull a plow? I mean, you can farming wallabies, and I mean, it’s just unthinkable. And the same is true, of course, in southern Africa, you’re gonna go even as EPRA, you could try and get a zebra to do what a horse does, right as ever into battle, it will not go well for us, my friend, no matter how skillful you are. And so Mahina makes this lovely comment. And that that’s a comment. And that chapter goes into quite a lot of globalization and why the world is connected in the way it is, and why the nations that advanced faster to a particular point, are the ones that are on the map where they are, and talk a lot about maps in that chapter, and telestroke Attica. So I gave more time on that one because it wouldn’t be obvious from what I said that what it was, then the Enlightenment chapter, that’s the second transformation that made us quote, educated, and tell the story of the European enlightenment and talk about a whole load of things happening there. With some stories of the salon in Paris, where Baran doback hosts pretty much everyone you would have heard from this period outside of North America and fact Ben Franklin himself went as well, the poker Club, which sounds like a lot of fun. In in Scotland, the club Samuel Johnson’s club in London, and Immanuel Kant is drafting the Critique of Pure Reason in 1776. Edward Gibbon writes the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in 1776. This is this year is not just significant in this country, it’s very significant in Europe in what’s happening in the enlightenment and tell that story and in a way critique it as well. David Hume writes his dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and then dies in 1776. So it’s very, a lot of very important thing, because for the modern world, industrialized the Industrial Revolution, I would say the key year in the history of industrial technology is 1776. But actually three major things happen, but the biggest one is that James Watt steam engine, so we now measure power in watts, as you buy a lamp, I like bubble, whatever, and it says said and so and so W stands for the all of these, all of these terms come from this period, Alessandra volta also that’s why you call them volts and that’s why you have probably a plug socket with a V within a few yards away. You’re sitting now as well. And he was also working in this period. In fact, this this year, he just in 1776, he discovered me thing. James Watts establishes a steam engine with a separate condenser that makes steam power basically useful in settings that means you can move it somewhere other than simply outside a coal mine. So until that point, the only way you’d ever use steam for stuff was just next to a coal mine didn’t really do much. But what devise an engine was so much more efficient that it meant you could use steam power in many other settings. And within 30 years, people were building trains. And within 50 years, people were building railways and connecting up the whole of Britain, using these using these things. Your nation decided not to go with the whole train thing and although there’s an Amtrak station near isn’t it, but most most of the time Americans can. We can, we can live without trains. We’ve got airplanes now. But the rest of us it was very important development and industrial technology. But at the same time, art writes mill at cromford, which is in sort of Midlands in Britain, the opening of the Bridgewater canal connecting Liverpool and Manchester, which is extremely important. So you could get cotton back and forth through the port. And that was very important. And the meeting of the lunar society who you may not have heard of, but they all met Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, and James Watt and Matthew Bolton, Josiah Wedgwood, the Patos might have come across Wedgwood pottery. Really the first sort of the first guy who came up with almost modern marketing, you know, buy one, get one freeze magazines, celebrity endorsements, Josiah Wedgwood. So it’s an extraordinarily important period, and that that society started meeting in 1776, as well. So it’s a very interesting year for the Industrial Revolution. And I talk about as a sidebar, I think telling that story is very important, because we generally think about the important developments in history as simply being about ideas, particularly as evangelicals, and that actually, often the material factor is changing underneath, making new things possible, and other things harder, or at least as important in the story we tell about the modern world and why it is as it is. So that chapter on industrialization does that that is then connected to the next chapter, which is about the wealth of the modern world. And I won’t put a chart on the screen, but I can basically enact the chart of the GDP per person of the human race, it basically looks if you started in 10,000 BCE, it looks like this 9000 8000 7000 6000 5000 4000 3000 2000 1000 notes 1000 1500 1600 1700 1770.

And since then, life expectancy has gone from about 30 to 60, or 70, depending where you live, or even at the GDP per person has gone from about $400, for most of history, to that $500 when Shakespeare was alive to goodness knows what it is in your country, but certainly a lot lot more than that. And that we call the great enrichment, or we call the Great Divergence, or there’s all sorts of economic terms for it. But that development inflected in the middle of the 1770s. There’s one historian I’ve read, in some detail looks at these development charts, and basically says the inflection point is in 1773. And it also as it happens is the same year that Adam Smith 1776 wrote The Wealth of Nations, which is the most important textbook in modern economic history. In fact, what Adam Smith wrote that book The day after James Watt steam engine started running in Bloomfield colliery, that’s a pretty important weekend for these gentlemen. Well, and you’ve never heard of it, because you’re like, No, we’re all marching away and the Redcoats are coming and all that. Actually, at the same time, these incredible, I think you could argue and I don’t mean to be, you know, provocative about it. But I think you could argue that the invention of the steam engine and the Wealth of Nations, and certainly that, that enrichment change is much more important for the conditions of your daily life than the American Revolution. It’s certainly more important for my and most other peoples on this planet experience. They’re all connected in various ways. But I think some of these changes are even more important than the ones that most of us are familiar with. I may not convince you of that, but that’s fine. I’m English, I’m allowed to. So then democratic this is what you know, of course, the Declaration of Independence, the Battle of Brooklyn, Franklin’s diplomatic mission to Paris, which is extremely important at the end of the year, because bringing in the French, and this is probably where my English bitterness will come out. But it is I basically put that line in Hamilton, you know, where the king says, You cheat with the French now I’m fighting with France and with Spain, like, Okay, we might have won this war, if it was just us against you. But then you’ve got the French involved and all our all went wrong. And Washington’s crossing, so you know, Christmas night, that story, which of course, many of us would know very, very well, better than I do. But I try and tell that story and judge the narrative of the year as a whole from an American perspective. And it’s incredibly important, the Democratic innovation, because in 1775, there were no people on earth that lived in countries purporting to be democratic republics. And now pretty much everyone on Earth lives in one. Even countries that are not Democratic at all. claim they are the Democratic Republic of North Korea. That we we live but actually it shows how deeply embedded this ideal has become that even countries where no one is remotely democratic still feel the need to play that game. Because of how significant what happened in this country are not they’re very far From here, actually was for shaping the ideals people have. And you probably don’t need me to convince you that you now the patriotism is coming back, isn’t it after my snarky remark about you only winning because you had the fringe on your side. Now you’re going Oh, actually, yeah, no, he does like us afterwards, and try and tell that story. But actually, and try and map its significance, as I said earlier, not only in political terms, but also in the way we think about everything has become democratized. The way families work has become democratized the way communities churches, economic institutions, the whole caboodle that translates, do you have caboodle? You do. I often throw out little anglicisms like that. And then people go, What are you What language are you speaking and it was like, English. But I can’t, I can’t promise it’ll always land. Then the post Christianity but and this is I think, in many ways, I think this is probably the most significant for me the most significant chapter or most significant story, and it’s the one that Glen and I have drilled into in the podcast. But the story again in 1776, David Humes dialogues and death, as I mentioned, Ben Franklin’s edit to the Declaration of Independence, where Jefferson sends him the letter saying, can you make any changes, this is what I’m going to take to the committee. And Franklin makes a number of different edits, most are pretty trivial. But he crosses out the words sacred and undeniable, we hold these truths to be sacred, and undeniable, and Franklin puts a line through it, and you can see the image on line, and writes and said, self evidence. And I use that as a parable for the modern West does, in saying these truths, which actually are Christian in their foundation, the dignity of every human person, the idea that the Creator has given us certain rights, those things are actually sacred truths. Really, Jefferson was right. They aren’t religious truth. They’re based on Christianity. They don’t come from natural observance of the, you know, if you have an evolutionary worldview, for instance, which most modern people do, it just doesn’t follow from those premises that all people are endowed by their creator with rights. And so what Franklin said, no, these things aren’t sacred and undeniable, they’re self evidence. And of course, modern people hear that and think it’s not quite what it meant in the 18th century, but modern people who then think, yeah, obvious to everyone with a brain. self-evident, you think, what are you talking about 7 billion of the world’s people still don’t believe those self evident trees, many of the founding fathers didn’t believe them in 1760. That’s one of the reasons they said we hold them to be self evident, because they weren’t up in this in a modern sense of everyone knows it. They have grounded in Christian assumptions about the world about human beings, about dignity, about charity, and love and rights. And if you don’t have Christian foundations, you’ve really, you’ve built a house on a foundation, and then taken away the foundation and you’re wondering how long the house will remain before it subsides. And there’s obviously modern implications for us there. And I give examples of other rejections of post Christianity, which were more fiery Ben Franklin, in the end is not rejecting Christianity. He’s just saying we can take it for granted, which of course, is the first step to rejecting it. But in France, you have much more dramatic moves afoot. You have Voltaire in this period, you have Dennis did a row. And his his interference interview, which you read is a very, very strong, clever case against Christianity. David Hume, as I mentioned, one of the best modern arguments against Christianity ever written again, in 1776. All of this happens in his ear. You have the market Assad, who I won’t go into here, not a pleasant man. But he really goes a whole stage further even than that, and says, I don’t just want to keep the foundation’s keep the moral fruit of Christianity while rejecting God, I hate God, I hate everything that comes with the gods. And I want morality to be completely reframed. So that actually the strongest the weak and I can satisfy whatever desires I like, in some ways a foreigner in some ways a Friedrich Nietzsche, and in some ways of Adolf Hitler, or many in the 1930s. And then finally, the romantic revolution, which is the story of of how again, 1776 is really about 15 to 20 years before romanticism kicked off properly. But it’s it’s an extremely, extremely important gathering point. For a lot of the most influential thinkers who would set the tone for what romanticism became. People like Greta clinger herder lens in Weimar, John Jacques Rousseau wrote his reveries of a solitary walk in the autumn of 1776. And if you read it, you think, Man, this is how people talk in Disney movies. is remarkable. And now we will say, Oh, of course, yeah, you write about yourself. You contemplate things like authenticity, what Rousseau called sincerity occur, like truthfulness of your hearts, being your being true to yourself. These people go to the storm and Tonga, they they wrote this way, they talked this way. They said, This is what got us and I returned into myself and I find a world and actually heard it literally says, You have to be true to yourself. Now you go, that sounds like Toy Story, or frozen or whatever it might be. But these ideas were almost unheard of, before this group of people in Germany and in Paris, and I tell the story of Jacomo Casanova, who will be a name many of us will have heard of it and Casanova don’t just a lover really but again, fast An amazing story of him in 1776. So that’s, that’s probably my favorite chapter in terms of the story because I just find these characters so fascinating even though often you might find them in places a bit of horror as well. They’re just really compelling people. So that is a summary of what almost all of the book is about.

I didn’t mention I should have mentioned that that line at the end first sexual revolution. That’s a really important bit of the story. I didn’t mention actually that I have a section in the romanticism chapter about that which the sexual revolution, what we normally think of as happening in the 60s, I argue, and many others have as well, is really a trickle down of things, changes that were really taking place in the late 18th century in particularly in London. But eventually wood for all sorts of reasons, which are then trickling down into more mainstream society by some around that, you know, elites and artists are doing it. And then it gets into the the upper middle classes, and really the 60s in our in the last century, is the time when those ideas go mainstream, and the practices kick off, but they’re not really where the transformation in thought and practice actually take place. So to try and tell that story as well. And but what I want to do now is talk a little bit about the way that the church at the time responded to those developments now, I don’t think that these individuals were necessarily responding in a conscious way to the developments they were seeing in each case, one or two of them definitely were some of these might be faces, you know, in fact, let’s throw this out there. Can anyone in this room name any of those six people will seven people I suppose if you include the baby eight people, but I very much doubt anyone knows who that is. Anyone want to name any of them? Yes, sir. No? Good guests, but it’s not George Whitfield, actually. David Hume round of applause for the man in the eighth throw. Just for me in the first place. You got it. So David Hume is the by the way, you know which one he is right rather than just throwing the name out? That David Hume is the one on the bottom right. So um, yes, you don’t want to get David Hume confused with all Lauder Equiano, who was on the bottom left, they they do not look alike at all. So there’s, this is basically a way of trying to go through the of introduce you to the final two chapters in what I’m doing, which is just to really to make to two comments about how the church can respond in a post Christian world. One of the chapters I do is to say, what was the church doing in 1776? What were they leaning into? What were they discovering what was what what was changing in the church in the the worldwide church, particularly the evangelical church, but not exclusively? And then in the final chapter, I say, Now What might those discoveries and practices look like today? And how might they help us reach a post Christian world which is my as a pastor preacher, right? That’s my concern, and no doubt ours. So a few people to introduce you. So John Newton, way up top left had John Newton it would be well known as that the author of amazing grace and most of us would have sung Newton’s, probably all of us in this room have sung at least one of John Newton’s hymns, and many, probably many of us have sung many of them. And depending on who we are, we might not have realized how they were written by John Newton, how sweet the name of Jesus sounds. Many, many of us so we, we would know a lot of Newton’s but I think a lot of Newton’s best hymns are bad about grace. And Newton was obsessed with grace, like he, he mentioned grace in his only hymns which are being written between 1773 and 1778. So right across the middle of this period, John Newton mentions Grace more than he mentioned, God or Jesus or the spirit. So he is absolutely captivated. Now, that of course, you might say is unique to John Newton, because he had experienced such a paradigmatic journey from slaver and had been his is a dark dark man. Why’d you read his pre Christian boss? I mean, this is not you know, we’ve we can sanitize it because and to be honest, we can sanitize slavery because we don’t like thinking about it for obvious reasons. But he is a vile man. And he gets converted and he gets radically changed. And then of course, becomes a prominent abolitionist. But you might therefore say, well, Newton is unusual. And of course, he’s obsessed with grace, because he’s so aware of what a bad guy he was. And there’s probably some truth in that. But what I found beautiful studying this period, is how many other hymn writers are writing about grace. And actually, how many of Newton’s hymns about Grace are Doc’s better than Amazing Grace? That actually, I think a lot of the things Newton wrote, so his quatrains his poetry about Grace are more arresting and compelling in describing the grace of God even than the most famous one, actually a Newton’s life Amazing Grace wasn’t the thing he was known for, that really became popular to the extent it is now after the Second Great Awakening, and particularly reduced in the African American community. But at the time, just as I quote lots and lots of examples of not just Newton’s unity, but many, many others who were writing glorious hymns at this period, like the church has probably never before and arguably even never quite since experienced a period of such intensity of hymns that focus on the grace of God transforming the individual. It was a huge hit. Obviously, the Wesley’s are still writing, you know, the collating primarily at the by this age, they’re older, but they’re writing a lot of their hymns, obviously, very focusing on the theme of grace 1776 was the year that Augustus Toplady wrote Rock of Ages. And that was a lovely, lovely story, because, again, a very, very powerful him about grace, but one that kind of came out of Toplady getting into a squabble with Wesley if you know, the story that is doesn’t reflect well on either of them. Actually, I know that we like our heroes and evangelicalism, but you see the way that they wrote about each other you think these guys, this is not going? Well, it does. It kind of puts Twitter into context that in a sense, very, very sort of quite virulent and angry, but on top of it, in part wrote Rock of Ages, to give a bit of a slap to what he understood as the Wesleyan misunderstanding of grace. And if you reread Rock of Ages with those eyes, you’d think oh, yeah, it does, you know, nothing in my hands, I bring simply to the Cross I clean, naked come to the for dress, helpless look to the for grace, foul eye to the fountain fly, wash me savior or I die, beautiful lyrics, but in top and his context, trying to give a poke to the Wesleyan understanding. But by God’s grace, this him that top rated partly written almost as a polemic turns into a him that’s such a powerful statement of grace that the Wesleyans will go yes, that’s exactly what we believe in, they will start singing it.

And called does that God does that in controversy doesn’t eat good. You see the history of God even in think about the Creed’s or think about so many major developments where you think God meant you meant this for evil, but God meant it for good. And as a result, now, Rock of Ages is one of those much loved hymns about God’s grace, and again, written and published in 1776, along with many others, and I talk about you know, John Barrows, you know, that’s probably it. John Barrett is not in this particular year, but he’s within a few years, he writes, it’s my favorite line on explaining the difference between power law and grace, Ron John and work the law commands but finds me neither feet nor hands, better news the Gospel brings, beats me fi, and gives me wings, it’s just been find loads of people are writing stuff like that in this period. And there’s many William Cooper, God works in a mysterious way. They’re all working in this period. And I just love deep digging into the discovery of grace. And that’s where my friend all oder Equiano, who’s probably the single most interesting book, to read from this periods, I would say, I mean, the wealth of nations history, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, lots of great work written in this year. But followed Equiano is interesting Narrative of the Life of allowed Equiano is just astonishing. He is a, he’s from what would now be sort of Nigeria, Benin, and he gets kidnapped and taken to the West Indies. And then he gets taken to foster work as a slave and he gets taken to North America. But eventually he gets converted, he buys his freedom, he becomes an abolitionist, and in 1776, he’s travelling to Britain where he will then settle and become a major influence in the abolitionist movement. And the reason I talk about all I would Equiano, in the context of grace, is because one of the most moving passages, you’re reading any, in any book from this period, or any period actually, is is on owed or describing the the vileness of the people who he’s seen and what they’ve done on slave ships. In a gut wrenching pastures is horrible to read, but you need to read it. You need to see it for what it was and then talk about worshipping alongside white people in London. And not only being prepared to do that, but also being able to worship God and say, Actually, God has given me more than I deserve. And all owed his understanding of grace is so deep that even though he’s experienced violence is we can’t even contemplate he’s still says the grace of God, to me, a sinner is so profound that God has blessed me more than I deserve. It’s just an astonishing. So in other words, it’s not just, you know, white men with wigs in Bedfordshire who are talking about grace, it’s actually it’s beginning to take root everywhere in evangelicalism. And that experience of grace is profoundly important in this period. Then if you move along to the sort of middle kind of column, so at the top, that lady is called Rebecca Platon. And the man at the gentleman at the bottom is called Le mule Haynes, who was the first African American to be ordained as a pastor. And I tell their stories really through the lens of the left hand, left hand, two fingers are about grace, the middle hand, the middle fingers are about freedom, and understanding. But as I tell the story of abolitionism, which is probably a bit more familiar here to some degree, and tell the story, not just of abolitionism in terms of freedom from slavery, but also religious freedom, which is a story that will be more familiar again, here, probably abolitionism more in Britain. So obviously, our journeys on freedom for slaves were very different in our two nations, but then our journeys on religious freedom were inverted. So you guys came to a religious freedom much sooner, and came for freedom for slaves later, and that the stories are interesting and interwoven. And I try and do that justice in that section, and introduce you to some Christian brothers and sisters who might not be so familiar to many of us. And then on the right, we’ve got David Hume in the bottom right, but I bet there’s no one here who knows who the guy in the top right hand corner is unless they’ve already read my book and seen he looks like a pirate. If I didn’t know who he was, I would not think he was regarded by a Christian Lutheran philosopher, who was regarded by gutter as one of the brightest lights in the land as regarded by Kierkegaard as one of the two cleverest men who ever lived along with Socrates. Hegel wrote a review as monograph. He was a good friend of Immanuel Kant and then he went can’t publish the Critique of Pure Reason. This man published a book called The meta critique of the purism of reason, which basically outflank Kant on his own ground and debunk. And these when he was he was influential on the storm on Dragon he was influential on howdah. He was, as I said, all, pretty much any German philosopher you’ve heard of was profoundly shaped by Harman and the only reason we aren’t is because he wrote in German, much of it is only now being translated into English and he’s not he’s not known as much as anywhere near as much as he should be. And his name is Johann Georg Harman, and he am a double n. And he’s just a mischievous impish prank playing Christian, very Christian German philosopher. And you should know more about him than probably most of us do. Unless John Betts is in the room or something I’ve just astonished by this man because he just didn’t just wander the so he does it. He’s continually arguing against the Enlightenment desire to separate the separate out reason and faith and saying, in the end, it reuses you and says, you just can’t separate out reason and faith because the things that you believe, and plays on the fact that belief and faith are ultimately the same thing in Greek and German. The things that you believe are statements of faith, you actually need to need faith to believe that the sun will come up tomorrow. There is no logical syllogism that tells you that it will. David Hume, he says, needs faith to boil an egg or drink a glass of water. And actually one of the biggest mistakes the Enlightenment is introducing into the world. Harman is saying is that the wedge between reason and faith, they’re united in language, the United every time you have a conversation, the words I’m speaking to you now are both physical and immaterial phenomena, atoms are vibrating. But the ideas that you’re thinking about right now, whether they have anything to do with what I’m saying or not, are not reducible to the atoms, they are almost transcending the atoms, reason and faith are continually being connected in Speech, Language, conversation, and ultimately in Christ. And you would find it surprising I expect to know that German philosophers in the 1770s were talking about the hypostatic union of the natures of Christ as a way of explaining the relationship between reason and faith and the relationship between words and flesh in philosophy and critiquing the enlightenment on its own ground. The man is a genius. And he wrote a fantastic whimsical essay defending the letter H, which is one of my favorite little essays that you can read because it’s not very long, but it’s basically a an almost like a parody of an enlightenment German rationalist had written an article saying, we need to get rid of H’s when they’re on pronounced at the end of our surnames or end of our words, and Hamid was talking about you. Your last name is Dom d a, m m should be removed the M at the end of your name as well and maybe that What damn is gonna be able to resist this orthographic Deleuze I’ve got Harmon I’ve got two ends at the end of mine and we get rid of that. And he says, this is a parody of the Enlightenment. That’s what they do. They try and make everything rational, as if you can remove reason from history, contingency, language and faith and you can’t and the Enlightenment is trying and it doesn’t work and it’s a dead end. Anyway, you may not want to read Harman you may not even want to read Wilson, but if you do, I hope you’ll enjoy that bit. He’s brilliant. Okay. And then so that’s that grace, freedom and truth. And then I’ll very quickly just say, in the last chapter, what I try and do is to apply those paradigms of thinking through grace, freedom and truth into the modern world and apply it in the sense I use the story of Hamilton, that question, Have I done enough? I’d say that is the question your people in your community are asking, particularly if they’re privileged. So have I done enough? How do I know when I’ve done enough? And some of those sort of faith statements to Protestantism as, as we were talking about in a panel last night, actually, a behind statements like this, it takes a lot of courage to be who you are that actually for people to find out? How do I find identity? How do I justify my privilege? How do I pursue status in the modern post Christian West, they need grace. They don’t need grace in the same way that the Reformers sometimes talked about it. They’re not my people in my city in London are not wandering around going, how do I please the holy gods, but they’re asking all sorts of other questions to which the answer is grace. And it’s important that we see what those are. And that’s what I’m trying to do in that chapter. I then talk about freedom, and a sort of both and vision of freedom, where freedom is both freedom from external oppression, like slavery, and this is the Hunger Games, you know, people with guns and fences, but also freedom from internal slavery, which if you’ve seen the Hunger Games, those guys in the Capitol, who are sort of just slaves to their passions and their desires, and our Christian vision of freedom involves both external and internal liberation. You know, anyone whose sins, Jesus says in John a slave to sin, but if the sun sets you free, you’ll be free indeed, both from that stuff, and from this stuff. And then finally, a post a post Christian response of truth and the importance of truth in a post truth II kind of age where people talk like that, and where people some best selling books that sell 30 million copies will make the case that yeah, it isn’t Christian values are not true. But we have to believe them anyway. Because if we didn’t, we’d become nasty people. And how people like, live with that dissonance and why it is that as the church, we have a really, really great news really like that, which is no those things you believe are true, but they’re true for reasons you may not have thought about. And this is where Jesus comes in.