Luke Bretherton | Scaling Up Love of Neighbor

Bretherton:

If you want to image the image of God, you contemplate and do the things of this human, Christ. Well who is this one we’re called to contemplate? It’s one who’s beaten, bruised, and about to be executed. So it’s the wounded body of Christ. And the wounded and vulnerable and fragile other, who is actually where we discover our true humanity and where we truly also discover God.

Hi, I’m Luke Bretherton, and I’m the Regis Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology here at the University of Oxford.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump.

What does it mean to be human? I’ve heard that question a lot lately, and there are a lot of ways to try to answer it. We’ve addressed it on this podcast a number of times, talking to evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and psychologists, and the science they bring into the conversation helps to inform the answers to the question. But if we only go to the sciences for answers we’re not going to get the whole story. We also need to turn to theology. 

Luke Bretherton is a moral and political theologian. Maybe that’s not the person you would expect on a science and faith podcast. But I had the chance to hear him speak at the Understory Festival not too long ago and found his ideas to be really provocative and relevant to the question of what it means to be human in this day and age — particularly what it looks like to scale up love of neighbor through institutions, even governments.

Don’t worry, we’re not going to get into partisan politics or tell you who to vote for. But Luke has a particular interest in what it means to be human as it relates to the shared societies we create through social contracts and institutions we put in place. In his view, what it means to be human is always something we’re going to find out by being in relationship with others, both human and non-human,  and the institutions that are a part of our society can either detract from or enhance our capacity to be truly human. 

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Stump: 

Well, Luke Bretherton, welcome to the podcast.

Bretherton:

Delight and honor to be with you.

Stump:

Well, we have talked to you once a little bit before on the podcast, and that was when you were a Brit living in North Carolina. It’s not a long-term stable situation. So what’s happened since then?

Bretherton:

So I was in North Carolina teaching at Duke for 13 years, and then just a year and a half ago I made the transition back to the UK where I’m from and now based in Oxford and teaching here. So it’s quite a big shift.

Stump:

Well, can you maybe back up even a little before that and give us a little bit of maybe intellectual autobiography? How did you become a theologian?

Bretherton:

I kind of fell into it really. When I first left university, I did various bits and bobs, but then the job I ended up with pretty soon out of university was working for a Christian charity, but they’d received a bunch of money to work in Eastern Europe, particularly Central Eastern Europe. And this was ’91, ’92 era, so the Berlin Wall had just come down in 1989, still kind of moving just into the post-Soviet era, post-communist era throughout Central Eastern Europe. And so I was working with folk who were trying to reengage society having been in the underground church.

And it was a very, very formative time for me and really core questions, which now when I look back on it seems like these were almost, it was a kind of foreshadowing of the world we now all live in because this was a moment when a certain kind of secular, in their terms, European Marxist project had collapsed and with it the idea of a completely secular future. And in its place, you had every religion under the sun piling in. The rise of ethnoreligious nationalism, think about the conflict in former Yugoslavia which emerged over that time. You had the rise of populist movements and leaders like Milosevic and Mečiar in Slovakia. And these weren’t really ideologically driven. The great joke at the time that they ran Christian democratic parties, which were neither Christian nor democratic.

And then with that, you had the legacies of state socialist structures, the heavy hand of bureaucracy and a red in tooth and claw, turbocharged capitalism ripping through everything and creating the kind of billionaires we see with Abramovich and others who took over the state legacy industries and then kind of pumped them dry of resources. And with that actual civil wars and wars emerging through that context.

And so I was working with churches, engaging in civil society, trying to re-weave civil society and rebuild in a kind of democratic mode these formerly communist totalitarian but deeply now affected by authoritarian and populist, right wing populist governments, and some left wing actually. And so I was like, how on earth does the church navigate this faithfully? And a wonderful colleague of mine said, oh, sounds like you should do a PhD. So I kind of fell into doing it at King’s College London.

And that context had raised all sorts of questions for me about how the church navigates what I would now call a kind of post-secular context, hyper diverse questions about the role of the state, questions about power, how we respond to suffering, how we deal with diversity. And that was really the beginning of a academic journey. I then basically fell in love with teaching while I was doing that.

Stump:

Did you grow up in a family of practicing Christians?

Bretherton:

Yeah, very much so. So that formation is also very important. So my parents are very strong Christians. They’d been converted in Billy Graham 19… There’s a very famous campaign crusade that Billy Graham ran in Britain, his first series in the 1950s. He famously debates, I think C.S. Lewis at that time in Cambridge. And so they got converted at that time. And then they were very involved in the very early development of the charismatic movement in the UK and that was in the early 1970s. So I grew up in a deeply faithful Christian household, kind of charismatic, evangelical on the one hand.

On the other hand, they had moved to Notting Hill in 1961 or so. And that era, this is long before the movie when now it’s a kind of very bougie place to live and very unaffordable. But in that day it was a center of slum landlordism and there was a notorious, for example, slum landlord called Peter Rachman. And this was the moment when folk from the Caribbean were coming over. It’s called the kind of Windrush generation and they couldn’t get access to housing because of racist housing kind of policies. And so they were very dependent on slum landlords and Rachman would take their deposit checks, they would move in, then he’d send around his heavies, throw their stuff out the window, boot them out and then move in his prostitutes. And this was a whole racket he was running repeatedly.

And some of these folk ended up in my parents’ church and they were good middle class folk about as far from social justice wars as you could possibly imagine and they were just appalled by this. And so they were, “We got to do something about this. This is just cruel and horrific.” So they literally got together with friends, neighbors based in the church initially, and then it ran out of our front room for best part of 15 years. They bought houses, did them up. A lot of my early work as a teenager was jobbing, doing painting in the houses they bought.

And they set up something called Latimer Housing Association, which is independent of state and market. It was just later legislation changed so they could get money from the local council. But initially it was just kind of people getting together to solve a collective problem. And that sense of which do you turn to the state or turn to the market as the only solutions to social problems or do you turn to each other and the role of the church in generating those solutions and a kind of theological imagination? And in the theological imagination, what my parents saw were not like the slum landlords, they saw the new people who turned up as a resource to be exploited and nor, like many of their neighbors, somehow strangers who were a threat, they saw them as neighbors to be loved.

And so that sense of the role of the church, the role of Christianity, the role of people coming together in civil society to address the shared problems first and then maybe turning to the market or the state, that was very much an ethos and an orientation I was seeing in Eastern Europe and that sense of that question and that kind of orientation has profoundly shaped my own theological work that I’ve done in moral political theology.

Stump:

Yeah, I expect we’ll hear echoes of that in the conversation as we go on here in that very formative time for you growing up in such a family.

But the immediate sort of impetus for my wanting to talk to you is hearing a lecture you gave a couple of months ago at the Understory Festival in Washington, DC on the topic of what it means to be human. That’s been a significant preoccupation of mine for the last few years too. And it’s certainly a question in some sense that we’ve been asking for thousands of years in one form or another, right? What does it mean to be human? Why though, do you think it seems to have a particular new sort of urgency these days for us?

Bretherton:

No, it’s a great question. I think it’s pressed for us in very powerful ways today. Now what I say next, I should also say I think there have been previous moments when that question has been pressed for us. We can imagine the 19th century and with the Industrial Revolution would be a similar moment. In parallel to that time, we’re faced with fundamental questions about what it means to be human in the form of what’s the relationship between humans and nature? What’s the relationship between humans and technology? So in the latter, it’s about obviously driven by questions of AI and other emerging technologies. In relation to nature, it’s driven by questions about climate change and fundamentally how do we relate to the kind of non-human life.

There’s questions about what does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? Now where everyone comes down on that, that question is being pressed and then relates to that broader questions about how do we organize family life, sexuality, right through then to how do we relate to each other, questions of social polarization and social trust. Can we live together or do we have to live in kind of hostile enclaves? And then beyond that, questions of international relations, how do nations relate? And we’ve got a new set of kind of wars, war for the first time in Europe since the Second World War.

So I think we reached a settlement after the Second World War where you either had a bit more market in America and a bit more state in Europe and around the world, variations of that theme, obviously leaving aside the communist block, and basic questions of welfare, basic questions of family life, basic questions of the pattern of work. That has now all been blown up for various reasons. We could tell a complicated story as to why it’s been blown up, but we’re living in that reality. And those realities are the ways in which and through which we have to make sense of what it means to be human and the question of the quality and character of human relationships and the meaning and purpose of humanity and particular human life.

And so I think all of that is pressed at a really basic existential level today. And so we see a huge variety of responses to those questions played out simultaneously, and this is where we struggle with it. The basic question, whether it’s about sexuality, basic questions about nature, basic questions about technology are simultaneously personal questions, economic questions, broader social questions and political questions and ideological questions all in the same register. And that can be very confusing, feel very pressured, feel very disorientating.

Stump:

In your talk, you noted a crisis of agency as part of that. Is that a thread that is running through all three of those areas you mentioned there too? Can you connect those dots a little bit of what the crisis of agency is as it relates to technology and nature?

Bretherton:

Absolutely. So I think, again, to use the kind of historical parallel, if you think broadly speaking from about 1790 to about 1920, to use a kind of historical analog, what you saw in that transition, if you were wandering around in about 1810, you were probably walking on foot or going by horse. By 1920, you’re in a car or a train or maybe even a plane. This fundamental shift, you’re living in Chicago in 1810, it’s about 30,000 people probably. By the end of the century, it’s over several million. They’ve had to redirect the river to get the pollution down the Mississippi rather than go into the lake. Everything is changing, how you eat, how family life is organized. And how do you metabolize that massive seismic change?

And within that change, part of the change is you move from quite local structures, particularly think about the village and the rural context and move to the city. The emergence of massive state structures, your life in 1810, not much engagement with the state. As we all know from going to the DMV, you can’t move without getting a license. You can’t change your house without getting a license. Suddenly bureaucracy and the reach of the state is intruding into your life in a way you’ve never experienced, people haven’t experienced before. And suddenly you’re part of global market chains. To put a T-shirt or a shirt on your back, you’re probably getting cotton from India. It’s been processed in Lancashire and imported into America or up from wherever the global chain is. A pencil would be the same.

And so these massive abstract systems you have no control over and life itself is being, to use Marx’s great phrase from the Communist Manifesto, probably not often quoted on this podcast, but “All that is solid melts into air.” But that kind of gives you a sense of the disorientation that people were experiencing at that time. And so within that, the question of how you act and the sense of your agency and your capacity to have some say in agency and a means of control over the world you live in, your living and working conditions, is very hard to come by because you just feel you’re the passive receiver of decisions taken elsewhere and huge systems you don’t really understand and can’t control.

Now we’re going through a similar seismic set of changes where everything is changing and we suddenly find ourselves, having been pretty good at coming to navigate bureaucratic means and we know what to do with the DMV. We know roughly how to work in a kind of market economy now. All of that is changing as we move in the market structure to things like platforming. So Amazon, if you’re a supplier, you can’t just drive to the market and sell it at a market store. You’re suddenly having 40% of your profits gouged by Amazon to use their platform, but you have to use their platform to make any kind of living. And if you’re buying, you’re suddenly like, “What I’m seeing on Amazon, is that really the best choice or is the best choice 55 pages further down and I can’t get access to it because the algorithms don’t…?”

And that’s at a very basic level. Think about booking a hospital appointment. Will you get the interview or do you have to go through five layers of AI pre-sorting and then you’re using AI to generate your CV and letter and we’ve got kind of AI ping pong, which has nothing to do with any of the human beings involved in that chain.

And so we’re seeing these huge scale systems driven by abstract processes we don’t really understand fundamentally determine our living and working conditions, everything from will you get the job? Will you get the surgery? Will you be able to eat? How do you eat? Delivery, et cetera. How do you work? If you’re working as an Uber driver determined by some completely abstract process, you can’t go into your boss. There is no boss. We now have shops without shop assistants. It’s all driven by bots.

So I think that experience of disorientation and the lack of ability to navigate the world, let alone have agency over the world through which you have to live is a crisis of agency. And crucially then in that, like with the Industrial Revolution and our current revolution, those kinds of dominant state and market processes always do two things at once. They both individualize us, they render us alone. You think you move from the village of a kind of thick support structure to the city, classic Durkheim analysis in terms of anomie and alienation, even forgetting, bracketing questions of exploitation, just you’re left alone to look after yourself. The great French literary figure of the flaneur kind of moving through the city.

And at the same time as you’re individualized, you’re collectivized. You’re treated as a unit of social administration by the state or as merely a product in a market system and your labor kind of extracted from you as it is in a call center or any kind of bureaucratic work environment today. And so that simultaneous process, you experience yourself as without social solidarity and connection and at the same time, a kind of part of a mass society, part of a collective process under which you’re just driven along by the flow of people as you do experience if you find yourself part of a big crowd. That’s a very disorientating and alienating process. And that happened obviously with the Industrial Revolution, we have a whole raft of literature and social theory about that. And it’s happening again in more intense ways.

The difference with today is those were kind of external things which acted on your body. You ended up living alone or working. We now not only end up working alone in our houses or apartments, we’re not in offices anymore, et cetera. I mean, it’s not universally true, but true for a lot of people. And there’s a kind of psychic isolation. It’s one thing to read a newspaper and have a sense of being part of a kind of imagined community as shared newspaper readers. Seems a rather different psychic experience, psychological experience to be at the other end of a kind of Twitter feed or an Instagram feed and experience yourself and the ways in which those platforms are kind of hard jump-starting and hijacking your own psychological processes and designed to do that, to touch, to give you a dopamine hit. So there’s a way in which you’re isolated by those kind of social media feeds and by these platforms because then you’re much more manipulable through that process.

Stump:

So if the disorientation you speak of here that we’ve experienced and at least has happened at other times in our history, if that’s driving this crisis of agency, which is at least part of the pressure of us asking this question, what does it mean to be human, anew and afresh, does the answer to that question what does it mean to be human change at all over these times? When we see ourselves in very different circumstances, is the answer, what does it mean to be human the same and enduring throughout those or does it take on a new twist at all throughout any of these disorientating circumstances you mentioned?

Bretherton:

That’s a great question. I think it’s both. There’s a kind of perennial quality to the answer, even as there’s a different modality to the answer. So what it means in the Industrial Revolution to recreate social connection, to have forms of human scale solidarity and combat the isolation and the collectivization and to develop ways of acting that aren’t simply subject that renders everyone passive consumers of decisions taken elsewhere and about them without them, but to give them some say and agency over their living working conditions, that generated all sorts of responses.

Trade unions would be a very important one, cooperatives, credit unions. These are, you see it in London rather than with the move to electrification, people set up energy cooperatives to have some sense of, well, this is how actually we want energy and lighting, and whether it was gas and then electricity, organized in our area. Actually, interestingly enough, in a place like Minnesota and North Dakota, things like the use of co-operative structures to organize storage of grain and this kind of stuff. This was a very common answer like actually we need a human scale, human to human, face-to-face while also operating at a certain scale. It’s not anti-state, it’s not anti-market. It’s just re-imagining them through a different institutional imagination to address these very real problems.

Similar to my parents coming up with the imagination of a housing association, which was not simply a market structure nor simply a large scale housing project delivered by the state. It was a much more human scale, very personal. My mom knew every person who was renting off them. And I’d walk down the street, it was a nightmare to me because I wanted to get home to watch TV and they always wanted to talk to my mom. But I look back on that and realize the human scale, interpersonal nature of that institution to address a very real crisis of shortage of housing, shortage of good quality housing for low income families speaks to this kind of response.

Now in the 19th through to the early 20th century, that modality of the equivalent of the cooperative, trade union, the civil society answer, we do see similar responses today. So now there’s Cooperative AI, there’s Civic AI, these are trying to develop decentralized platform structures rather than monopoly structures that OpenAI and Anthropic and others and Meta and Google are all trying to structure. They’re trying to create alternative infrastructures with devolved decision making, cooperatively owned, that treat data as a commons. These are very creative institutional re-imaginings.

Now the modality is different from a housing association and a trade union, but the human logic is the same, i.e. I cannot be me without you. You cannot be you without me. There is no isolated human. Social anthropologists, evolutionary psychologists talk about humans as ultrasocial animals. I cannot survive, let alone thrive without others. And so I have to form some kind of social life to is a basic condition of my own self-cultivation and the quality and character of relations of that social life is key.

Now, theologically we have lots to say about that as what it means to be made in the image of God, but how do you, in a system which is anonymizing, isolating, alienating, anatomizing, how do you create the kind of associational life at work in your neighborhood, in your politics that actually enable you to become actually human through forms of the kind of association you need to survive, let alone thrive, both at not just a spiritual level, but a psychological and physical level as well? And then how do we reimagine food, production, work along those lines? And I think that’s the struggle of our time.

Stump:

Yeah. I want to come back to the question of institutions there in particular. But let’s first push in a little further to the theology you brought up there of image of God and perhaps that as the sort of perennial answer to this, what does it mean to be human that then the modalities you’re speaking of tend to be reflected in these structures of our times in some ways. But talk first a little bit more of image of God, which has perhaps too often been understood as simply this individual characteristic that each of us has and how you’re pointing to something more relational in that designation. Unpack that a little if you would.

Bretherton:

So as you say, the image of God has often been understood in what it’s often referred to as kind of a capacities approach. So it’s about rationality or language or that we’re tool making animals, and all of those have come under severe critique over the generations. I don’t think that’s the theological answer. The theological answer of what it means to be made in the image of God centers, it’s not anti those capacities, but it centers questions of relationship, that we’re made for relationship. We’re made to be with God in communion. God as Trinity is fundamentally a relational reality, persons in relation that constitutes the basic metaphysics of existence. And that’s the most kind of basic confessional creed or claim.

And so what it means to be made in the image of God is to be made as someone who is open to communion, who is filled with the kind of creative capacity to act with others in forms of cooperative fellowship. And so we see played out in the Bible that movement into covenant and crucially covenant precedes the giving of the commands. It’s this calling into covenant of Abraham, the covenant of Israel, the recreation of that with Jesus’ disciples. The church is a covenantal community of that promised life together in cooperative fellowship ordered in relation to love of neighbor and love of God in the first instance. And then how we work that out in myriad prudential judgments about what our common life should be.

And so I think that sense of what it means to image God is to live into that vocation to be a covenantally ordered creature for relationship with neighbor and God. And then what is the paradigmatic image of that? It’s Jesus Christ and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the revelation of the true image of God. If you want to know who God is, you look to Jesus Christ.

Now, when we look at Jesus Christ, the theological claim is we’re not just seeing the image of God as God the Father, we are also seeing the image of the true human. And if we’re going to recover our own humanity, we have to image Christ. We have to do the kinds of things Christ did and we have to contemplate Christ. Contemplation, not simply more in the kind of platonic sense of a participation, a mimesis’ participation in Christ.

And how do we do that? Well, who is the Christ we’re called to image? It’s the one, in taking John 19, the one who is presented by Pilate and who says, “Ecce homo” in the Vulgate, or in the New Testament Greek, anthropos, “Here is the human.” Pilate preaches against himself. Here is the true human. If you want to image the image of God, you contemplate and do the things of this human, Christ. Or who is this one we’re called to contemplate? It’s one who’s beaten, bruised, and about to be executed. So it’s the wounded body of Christ and the wounded and vulnerable and fragile other who is actually where we discover our true humanity and where we truly also discover God.

Stump:

There’s a real beauty in pointing to the wounded Christ as the exemplar there that I really appreciated in your talk when you were explaining that too. I wonder if there’s some mystery here, some paradox, maybe mystery is a better word, of you articulating the image of God in this very relational understanding. And then when we want the perfect example of this, we point to the individual of Jesus Christ. And is that mystery or paradox just a kind of reflection or the mystery of the paradox of the Trinity itself that Jesus? And this is a very particularly Christian answer to the, even to the image of God. Christianity doesn’t have a monopoly on understanding humans as being created in the image of God, but this is a very particularly Christian explanation of that, right?

Bretherton:

Absolutely, because it’s centering the person of Jesus Christ. So it’s absolutely a profoundly Christian answer. I think there are, Desmond Tutu famously takes up the notion of ubuntu from Southern African thought which is that notion that there’s no me without you or you without me. So I think there are these kind of relational logics to understanding human nature are there. Aristotle famously says humans are a political or social animal. So I don’t think that relational constitution of the human is unique to Christianity.

I think something that arguably, and we could have an interesting argument about it, but I think arguably is distinctively Christian, is centering the wounded body of Christ. And that’s two things. One, it’s a wounded body. So the centering not of the warrior king, not of the kind of warrior figure or philosopher king or self-made billionaire or whatever it is. It’s not an image of strength. So somehow centering questions around vulnerability, contingency, fragility as the site of true humanity does run counter to certainly ancient Greek and ancient Roman thought, let alone Hindu and other kind of religious philosophical systems.

But I think also then it’s that the paradox lies in this revelation of relationality in Christ that we are both, and this is the kind of Chalcedonian paradox, Christ is simultaneously God, we’re imaging God who is human and fully human and fully divine at the same time. I think that we’ve got to both image an invisible God through imaging a particular human, and in the imaging a particular human, we somehow are made like an invisible God. I think therein lies something of the mystery. So you’re always kind of imaging a void as much as you’re imaging a particular life.

Barth has this great thing about every unveiling is a veiling. Every veiling is an unveiling. So we’re always living between that tension. I think when we’re thinking about the nature of humanity, any time we think we’ve got it fixed in a nice neat box and tied up with a bow, we’ve probably then got an idol.

[musical interlude]

Stump:

Okay, let’s keep this moving here because I want to get back to institutions, but want to make one more stop along the way through some of the sciences because this is BioLogos. We’re not going to quiz you on the details of scientific theories here. But I wonder how you understand the scientific explanation of what it means to be human coming alongside or helping to inform or in some sense providing a different perspective on this? And I ask particularly because you had made a comment in your talk about Darwinism, a criticism of Darwinism and that can mean lots of different things. So I just wonder what is it that you meant about Darwinism and how this can be a challenge to us understanding human flourishing in some sense in the modern world. What is it that you meant by that and your concern with it? If you’d maybe explain that a little bit more.

Bretherton:

Yeah, so I think what I have in mind is I think I’m very allergic to the ways the questions of ends about the purpose and meaning and moral character of human life are kind of scientified, if you like. It’s a terrible term, but I can’t think of a better one. I think there are kind of good versions of this and sophisticated versions of this and sophomoric versions of this, but where somehow we read into the brain or we say this evolutionary development means that humans are X, Y, Z, and that is their true nature. Somehow then we have silly debates about egoism and altruism, both bizarre, modern, bad versions of moral discourse, substitutes for moral discourse.

So that reading into or attempting to read out of scientific analysis of brain processes, of emotional process, of psychological processes, somehow some intrinsic moral nature, moral debates and moral character, these are the preserve of moral theology and moral philosophy and debates around ethics. I don’t think you can answer moral questions with scientific analysis. It can inform it, but debates about ends shouldn’t be substituted for somehow some short-circuited scientific explanation of these things. And you see that go on. Richard Dawkins does this the whole time. You got Gad Saad’s doing it, pretty bad versions of it with notions of suicidal empathy. There’s a lot of this stuff out there. I think it’s just bad thinking.

And so an early version of that would be someone like Herbert Spencer, and you see it in the debate between Huxley and Kropotkin about the nature of evolutionary processes. Kropotkin is more mutualism, Huxley ends up with a red in tooth and claw, we’re all in competition. But someone like Herbert Spencer takes this up and we have the development of Social Darwinism, which then justifies a neo-Nietzschean view. Now that’s a particular ideological, moral, political stance, which then is justified as if it’s the science. It’s not. It’s not going to do with the science. It’s a kind of reading of particular ideological commitments. Hugely influential in the 19th century, arguably lies at one of the justificatory structures of Nazism, this kind of stuff.

So I think I’m very allergic to the ways in which Darwinist thought gets inscribed onto social processes, which need to be morally and politically determined and negotiated, and as if that short circuits the debate through a kind of social determinism that’s then justified as if that’s just natural, i.e. that’s the science. And it’s like, no, no, the science is highly contestable, contingent. We can have huge debates about is mutualism, the evolutionary process or competition and how do we think about those? Science itself, and this is what people like Sheila Jasanoff and Bruno Latour and others, itself is a social process and is a deliberative process.

So when I invoke that, I’m really reacting against overly deterministic accounts and accounts which make very bad use of science to predetermine what are actually properly subject to moral and political debates.

Stump:

Yeah, I hear the concern there and support the concern there that there are questions that science is not equipped to answer. And these are questions that have true answers to them. So it’s not that science is the only methodology that allows for discovering truth.

I think with evolution in particular—

Bretherton:

Just on that, just a quick intervention on that point. And this is where I think a key difference is, and we could tell a deep story about this going back to the 18th century, but the reduction of truth to kind of mathematical formula, the process of that’s true truth. No, no, no. True truth, and this is the point about the revelation of Jesus Christ and the image of God as a relational reality, is true truth is a relational event. It’s a participation in a certain quality and character of relationship. Revelation is not a statement of faith or a series of doctrines. It’s a human being who we’re called into relationship as a way of coming into communion with another set of relationships, the Trinitarian God.

And so on a theological account, truth at a fundamental level is this participatory, thickly relational reality within which maths and other things absolutely are crucial elements of that, but that’s not the fundamental truth we’re trying to reach for. And when we subordinate the quality and character of relationships to a kind of mathematical formula, as is happening with AI determined social systems, something has gone profoundly wrong.

Stump:

Yeah, interesting. Yes, I totally agree with what you’re saying there and it’s fascinating to talk about truth in those sorts of terms as opposed to thinking just of propositional truth of some sort that science is trying to uncover.

I wonder if I might say a word on behalf of the sciences a little bit and see what your reaction is to this though. Because I think the study of evolution in particular over the last generation since Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, for example, maybe not universally so, but there’s at least a strong voice these days among the scientists, many of whom have no religious acts to grind at all, but who are interpreting the scientific evidence about our human origins now in terms that are much more sort of amenable to our understanding of ourselves as these hypersocial creatures, as you say, who are utterly dependent on cooperation and culture and learning and on one another.

So I wonder if that sort of evolutionary anthropology that seems to support the answer you give to what does it mean to be human and to the sorts of creatures we are and how we should live, is it still risky in your mind though to appeal to those sorts of scientific answers to justify and to bolster this view? Because even if it is giving an answer that’s consistent with the answer that you’re giving from the perspective of a theologian and philosopher, it’s still a little risky to depend, to look as though we’re trying to find scientific support in order to justify it or something like that.

Bretherton:

No, that’s a great point and I kind of welcome that shift and I think it’s been really interesting. I think there were debates at the time when I mentioned the debate, well, it wasn’t really a debate, they published rival articles at the same time between Kropotkin and Huxley on exactly this question. Kropotkin and others kind of pioneered a far more cooperative vision of evolutionary process than many of those who took up what Darwin did. They weren’t anti-Darwin, they just have a different conception of how it operated. I think we’ve seen that come back, particularly work around the basic level of organisms and you see it in studies of mycelial networks I think have been kind of key in this.

I think what I would want to say at that point, it’s not necessarily finding a justification for theological commitments in the science, but there is a proper dialogue between science and faith in that respect and that there’s a kind of mutual adjudication and interrelationship. I think you see that Philippa Foot, sorry, Mary Midgley has a really interesting take on analysis of Darwinism, not kind of critiquing the science but saying look, there’s a dependence in this on a certain analogical and metaphorical framework, because all science exists in language. So what kind of language is being used to articulate and communicate is not neutral.

Now I think scientists, because they tend to be scientists and not humanists, don’t think much about the language they’re using. Some do brilliantly and some are brilliant communicators and think very acutely about that, but the kind of metaphorical analogical linguistic forms through which science is operating and therefore thought is operating, which itself is a social process, are profoundly shaped by theological and other religious and philosophical commitments.

And so there’s always got to be, because they are inherently entangled and then we take up to think about God, various scientific notions or political notions, et cetera, you can’t escape this entanglement and inter-penetration and cross pollination. So I think there’s always got to be a kind of mutual disciplining and mutual interrogation to get clearer about what it means you’re doing as theological speech and what it is you’re doing as a scientific speech and speech acts. And I think that does go against a kind of positivist kind of science and demands a certain level of reflexivity in science in how it’s actually doing its work as itself a social process. That’s not to reduce it to social construction or some silly thing like that. That’s actually for me, a more scientific claim about any kind of speech and recognize its embeddedness and contingencies.

Stump:

Yeah, I like that and could go a long way further down this path of discussion, but I need to bring us back to institutions, because I think what you’ve said about these is really, really interesting and relevant and helpful. So bring this conversation back to the kinds of institutions that can help human flourishing in our day and age and given our answers of what it means to be human, the modality of those answers at least. So maybe even starting with a question like can a hospital or a school and a church and a business and maybe even a government, can these things actually make us more or less human through the practices that they require of us?

Bretherton:

That’s a great question. I think there’s a general, and again, it’s kind of long history of this, we could trace it back to the romantic movement and people like Rousseau, but there’s a general kind of antipathy both on the left and the right to institutions. We tend to think the institution is the enemy of authentic humanity. And for the right, they’re hopelessly bureaucratic and woke and captive to things like DEI. And to the left, they’re heteropatriarchal racist hellholes which need to be abolished. I mean, I’m painting it extreme, but basically that’s generally the view in our culture war moment that institutions that everyone agrees are terrible things need to be fundamentally changed. I, like an old curmudgeonly professor, quite right think, “No, institutions are good. We can’t live without institutions.”

Now, we can talk more about what we mean by an institution, but an institution at a fundamental level is just a way we come together to solve a shared problem. How do I get potable water to millions of people in Chicago in 1890 when they’re all excreting and drinking the same water from creeks all over the place? You create an institution, the municipal sewage and water works. That institution both trains the people to do the work, cultivates the moral ethos to pursue that work well and morally, and generates the technical know-how to do the work. And so all of that is going on and it has internal goods and those internal goods are clean water and providing of good quality water to as many people as capacity allows and has external goods. It needs to get money, it needs to have certain status, it needs to have some power to complete those things.

So translate that to a hospital, a hospital is there to solve the collective problem of illness through the pursuit of the internal good of health. It needs money, status, power to do that. And always the problem in the modern age is the external goods of money, status, and power overwhelm and subordinate the internal goods of health. So medicine becomes entirely subordinated to money, status, and power, and we end up with corrupt medical systems which exploit us rather than heal us. And same with education, same with government, all the rest of it.

And so that’s MacIntyre’s philosophy, Alasdair MacIntyre’s analysis of institutions. But institutions on this kind of reading are both. You can’t live with them and can’t live without them. But they are the means through which we come together to form forms of shared life around real existential needs, water, food, education, these kinds of stuff. And through those institutions, we come to realize who we are as persons and who we are together through creating shared worlds of meaning and action. That’s what a university is. And that constantly has to be renewed and rejuvenated and reformed and think about the church, semper reformanda, that’s what the church is, the good of salvation, if you like.

Now, in our current day, I think the crisis is not just of agency, but it’s of institutions. In that seismic set of changes I talked about from kind of broadly 1780 to about 1920, we invented the modern world, the modern university, the modern school, modern healthcare systems, political parties, denominational structures, municipal sewage works, everything got invented. It was because people realized how do you cope with that change and really come together as humans to create humane forms of life through which we realize who we are as human beings with each other and through each other is through creating human scale institutions to address these, in amongst also then the struggle to resist these becoming massive scale institutions which dominate us. And that’s always one of the struggles.

But there was an extraordinary institutional imagination, and then we kind of gave up building institutions and we created a whole set of ideologies who said institutions would be bad, had to blow them up for the market, they had to be taken over by the state, we had to do whatever.

And I think our current problem is we know the problems we face, how do you get good quality housing to people that they can afford? How do you educate people and address questions of ignorance, et cetera? How do we structure family life? But we are suspicious of the institutions we have for all sorts of reasons, different ones on left and right, but we can’t imagine the institutions we need to address the collective problems we face. And I think there’s plenty of people, good people, there’s plenty of money always around if you can organize it right. It’s institutional imagination that we lack, and that was what our forebears did.

And my favorite example of this is Facebook or Meta. So they got oodles of money. I mean, they’re richer than Croesus. They have unbelievably clever people. Everyone who works there has been to Harvard or Stanford, unbelievable geniuses, they’re not short of people or money. What’s the limits of their institutional imagination? They’ve become an institution that was invented at about 1690 in the Netherlands, the joint stock trading company. I’m like, “Mark Zuckerberg, really? That’s lame. That’s all you can come up with with all that money and ideas and people, an institution that was invented in 1690?”

So I think that’s a real crisis, hence my point about things like cooperative AI and civic AI. I think these are institutionally imaginative responses, thinking about data, how we hold data, how we organize digital infrastructures, this kind of stuff. These are examples of human scale institutional forms that enable that realization of what it means to be human through the quality, character, and moral lens of what it means to be human.

Stump:

We need to draw things to a close here, but I wonder if in closing you might turn to be eminently practical here and for people who are listening to this and going, “Yep, I’m right with you. I’m convinced we need better institutional imagination,” what can we who feel that way do? Suppose we who are advising a church or a university or a hospital or even an organization like BioLogos, what kind of practices even might you put in place if the goal is not just organizational effectiveness, but forming more fully human people? What does that look like in practice?

Bretherton:

Wonderful question. I’ll have a stab at this. I mean, that’s the kind of question I wrestle with a lot. So in some ways beginning where you just ended there, I think part of our problem with our institutions is they think the only metric is efficiency effectiveness, and then all the metrics are based around optimization and we’re kind of mad with optimization. So I think de-centering, it’s not to say these aren’t important, they have their place, but they must know their place. So it’s about centering questions of meaning, purpose, and character. What is the meaning and purpose of this institution, whether that’s a museum, whether that’s a school, and getting clear about the meaning and purpose and keep asking that question. So that’s a constant source of dialogue. And then asking what quality and character of relationships would we need to cultivate in order to fulfill that meaning and purpose?

So I think that’s one key, what kinds of questions are foremost and given priority and is space given to thinking about those kinds of questions? I was involved in the developing a five-year plan for Duke, and I just raised this question at the outset and I said, “Look, if we’re going to think about next five years of Duke, we need to really take some time to think about the meaning and purpose and what are the moral ends of Duke and what kind of character relations are we trying to cultivate in our students, in our faculty, in our support staff?” I kid you not, the first, the instinctive reaction, the whole room laughed, “Oh Luke, that’s so funny,” because that was just an incredible, fantastical question to them. I’m like, “Guys, I’m really serious.” But it indicates how far we are from being able to ask those kinds of questions.

So I think that’s one thing. I think secondly, if what it means to be human is fundamentally a relational reality, then on occasions, not every time, don’t send the email, walk around the corner, go and talk to the person. Have a human encounter. That would be a de-isolating, de-individualizing. It would actually live into that quality and character. Likewise, at a meeting, perhaps substitute Robert’s rules with pass the salt and pass the butter, like eat together. We did that in a local church I was involved in. We made it a rule, we would never meet together without eating together, and it did change the quality and character of our life.

And then secondly, I think related to that, and this is something I’ve learned from community organizing, is the relational meeting. We’ll do kind of chit-chat, water cooler stuff, and we’ll have formal meetings. What we don’t do is take the time to go and talk to someone and work out what matters to you? What are you angry about? What you care about? What do you love? What do you cherish about this organization, this institution, this school, this hospital, and what really matters to you about it? What gives meaning to you in this place? So the place of the relational meeting, the one-to-one that is actually focused on the human person as a person, not treating them as an ideological checklist or simply as a unit of social administration.

And then lastly, I would say when we’re thinking about broader systems, asking of any system, not is it optimizing efficiency and effectiveness or profitability in the first instance, goods though they may be in their place, but actually asking if we’re adopting a new technology, like some kind of Teams-like structure or Zoom-like structure, whatever it is, does this system actually enable us to come together in a human way or is it going to isolate, divide, and atomize us?

And you can actually ask that of most systems and questions, and some have the design architectures to enable that, and some really don’t. But if you don’t ask the question, you’ll end up with a product that actually pushes you apart rather than draws you together.

Stump:

I would assume that part of the challenge in that is that those human interactions are difficult to scale to the size that corporations tend to want to grow to become more efficient and effective at what they’re doing, right?

Bretherton:

No, I think that’s an institutional imagination question. I think that’s a false narrative which we’ve all bought into. The best of business school teaching is not to operate like the factory that Henry Ford created in the early 20th century.

So take something like Gore-Tex, like cutting edge technology and sportswear kind of firm, and really thinking with advanced development of new technologies in regard to clothing, they have a rule that they will never let a unit grow to more than 200 people. And when it does, they will hive off a new kind of pod, as it were, and with the accountants, firm support staff, blah, blah, blah. And they are a very profitable, effective company. You see a number of companies on the cutting edge of both technology and profitability do this because they recognize.

I sit in an ancient version of this, 800 years old, Oxford does the same. We have colleges, not a monocultural, hierarchical, massive university. We have 37 colleges federated together in a single institution. We work at scale. It’s consistently the top five universities in the world. No one can doubt the excellence of this place. It’s working on a medieval model of guild federated structures. That’s suddenly been discovered by the advanced business thinking to be actually the best way to organize things, because they’re human scale, they allow for the relationality. All the tacit knowledges, learnings, interactions that occur at that scale actually make you much more cutting edge and able to sustain that excellence over, in our case, 800 years, rather than be a startup and start down in about a five year cycle.

Stump:

Well, final word here. You’ve pointed to a couple of examples that are inspiring in some sense, but anything more general on where you see signs of hope in addressing the crises that you’ve explained to us some here? Where do you find hope these days?

Bretherton:

So I think there’s some really wonderful experiments in new kinds of institutions as I think where they always emerge, which is in the civil society space. And then people thinking at the intersection either of market and civil society or state and civil society. I already mentioned things like Cooperative AI, a new, I think really, really interesting peer-to-peer lending structures using blockchain technologies and this kind of stuff, trying to address questions of access to credit in impoverished resource staffed communities.

So I think there’s some really interesting experiments in new kinds of institutions, smaller school structures, this kind of stuff, going on where people come together to try and address these shared problems like education, like access to credit, like how are we going to organize knowledge through different kinds of digital architectures? And so I think that human creativity at a human scale, I think there’s a lot of that around agroecology. There’s myriad of these kinds of examples where you see that human creativity and freedom, not exercised in a kind of highly individualized, I, Elon Musk should rule over everything, but in a creativity and human freedom exercised in covenantal solidarity. And that’s where real freedom is experienced through forms of shared life that are just and generous and meeting real needs.

Stump:

Well, thank you. Thank you for that. And thank you for your work and your analysis of these questions and problems. And thank you so much for talking to us today. Luke Bretherton.

Bretherton:

Honor and a pleasure to be with you. Thank you for the invitation.

Hoogerwerf:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere, you can find ways to contribute at BioLogos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well.

Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos’ offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River Watershed. Thanks for listening.