A Critical Review of 2022 Theos Annual Lecture by Tom Holland
Dr Neville Buch is a scholar in studies in religion and Australian-American intellectual history. He was a higher education policy researcher for Professors Roy Webb, Glyn Davis, Kwong Lee Dow, and Alan Gilbert. He is an active member of the Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society (ANZHES), and works as a history consultant.
by Neville Buch, Ph.D., MPHA (Qld)
One has to admire Tom Holland, as an intellectual historian, and yet there is something very unchristian. At the 2022 Theos Annual Lecture, he makes a claim for humanism as a Christian heresy, and in my humanist judgement he is not wrong; the only issue is how one evaluates heresy, and with innuendo Holland blackens those who move beyond the orthodox position. In what follows, I review the lecture for the critical problems in the historiography; that is, the approach taken by the historian in the arrangement and hermeneutics of his material.
Holland starts off well in the lecture with a few contestable inferences. I found reading his Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World the same way. The subtitle reveals the problem. What vague ‘Christian Revolution’ is being referred to? Orthodoxy or heresy? It is the same problem with the way apologists of all stripes talk about ‘Marxist Revolution’. The best Marxist scholars will tell you that revolutions in the name of Marx rarely understood Marx. Similarly, the best Christian scholars will say that social and political revolutions in the name of Jesus Christ rarely understood the scholarship of critical biblical reading. Holland is well above the pay grade of the apologist and he has reasonable criticisms of modern humanists’ claims; although failing to acknowledge that the best humanist scholars do not follow the apologetics of ‘The Four Horsemen’. Holland’s criticism has a certain fairness; his perspective on the abuse in the telling of the ancient texts, to legitimatise a particular modern scientificist humanism, is on point and correct in a fair reading of the historiography.
Holland’s approach, in what should have been a very good lecture, began to collapse at 13 minutes into the lecture. Holland appears to argue that because one can identify ancient Greek or Buddhist humanist tradition, it does not lead to an evolutionary claim and connection to modern humanism. The difficulty Holland has for modern humanism is 1) the claim for the worth and dignity of all human beings, and 2) that superstition is a problem for human enlightenment. Holland’s argument appears to boil down to the fact that these claims were not common in antiquities. In its place is an argument for the “Judeo-Christian” original claim of the special and privilege status for humanity — theologically conceived. This then became an attack on the ‘superstition’ of the pagans. The one true God versus the many gods. Here we have an argument for the dominance of the “Judeo-Christian” outlook but the deficiency is what is not said. Is this meant to be an unquestioned celebration of faith or merely stating the historical facts of the matter?
Holland rightly challenges the universality of western assumptions, of humanists and including Christians. It is agreed that cultural framing, as opposed to the ancient doctrine of human nature, must be considered. Holland seems to be concerned that we have failed to see how all of our western outlooks are “swimming in Christian waters”, but in 2023 I think Holland has failed to grasp an understanding of the “Post-Christian” paradigm. Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Christianity are worlds apart. The common outlook, even among educated Christians, is “Post-Christian” — not against the Christian faith but well beyond its ancient orthodoxies.
Holland, on the other hand, claims that belief in universal human rights requires no more faith than belief in angels and the trinity. Here the historiography takes a strange twist. Holland argues that Christian humanists of the late medieval and renaissance periods establish human universal rights, and with the secular unhinging of such rights from Trinitarian Christianity in the French and American revolution, which somehow undoes the humanist tradition in being separated from orthodoxy.
Holland’s argument, as it comes to a close, oddly contradicts the orthodox outlook. He begins with a journey to the conclusion with the application of Dominic Erdozain’s concept of Protestantism as revolution, in the idea of Erdozain’s book, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx (although Holland does not identify the source).
Holland concludes where his otherwise very intelligent argument had not gone. He stated, “when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from one’s feet,” quoting Nietzsche. The messaging then becomes conflated between denying the “faith of the humanists” and affirming the “faith of the humanists” as something that is orthodox but not belonging to the humanists but to ‘Trinitarian Christians’. Forms of philosophic double-speak. The hermeneutics becomes what suits the apologetic advocacy, and does not allow any other interpretation. Nietzschean humanism represented cruelty as the Anti-Christ figure, as Holland would have it; and yet many interpreters such as Walter Kaufmann would disagree. And there is little context for the German culture and philosophy of the time. It matters not; Holland would have his apologetic blunt point. All humanism then comes under this caricature of Nietzschean humanism interpreted by the Nazi ideology. The implication in Holland’s words is that Humanist ethics are no better than those of the Nazis. And here, in the worse of Christian apologetics, Holland’s lecture comes to an end.
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