The Unintended Reformation Quotes

“Conflating prosperity with providence and opting for acquisitiveness as the lesser of two evils until greed was rechristened as benign self-interest, modern Christians have in effect been engaged in a centuries-long attempt to prove Jesus wrong. “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” Yes we can. Or so most participants in world history’s most insatiably consumerist society, the United States, continue implicitly to claim through their actions, considering the number of self-identified American Christians in the early twenty-first century who seem bent on acquiring ever more and better stuff, including those who espouse the “prosperity Gospel” within American religious hyperpluralism.190 Tocqueville’s summary description of Americans in the early 1830s has proven a prophetic understatement: “people want to do as well as possible in this world without giving up their chances in the next.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“Not only have past processes made us what we are-"modern" or "postmodern" selves, rather than "medieval" or "early modern" selves-but by explaining them we both account for and implicitly justify present realities.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot both be right,”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“Any attempt to “cover everything” would succeed only in producing a completely unmanageable mountain of data. Indeed, in proportion to its increase, which has been enormous in the past half century, the sheer volume of historical scholarship—what Daniel Lord Smail has recently called “the inflationary spiral of research overproduction, coupled with an abiding fear of scholarly exposure for not keeping up with one’s field”—paradoxically militates against comprehension of the past in relationship to the present.

A different approach is needed if we are to avoid being overwhelmed by specialized scholarship, the proliferation of which tends to reinforce ingrained assumptions about historical periodization that in turn hamper an adequate understanding of change over time.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“The key point is not, as is commonly but wrongly believed, that the empirical investigation of the natural world made or makes a transcendent God’s existence increasingly implausible. It is rather that this presumption depended historically and continues to depend on a conception of God as a hypothetical supernatural agent in competition with natural causality, polemically vulgarized, for example, in the rants of Richard Dawkins about the “God hypothesis” and the putative “God delusion.” In diametric contrast, with the Christian conception of God as transcendent creator of the universe, it is precisely and only because of his radical difference from creation that God can be present to and through it.89 This is the metaphysics that continues to underlie and make possible a sacramental worldview, against supersessionist conceptions of history, in combination with any and all scientific findings.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“The percentage of leading scientists who profess not to believe in a personal God tells us little unless we also know on what they base their profession. How much do they know about metaphysics, Christian theology, and intellectual history in relationship to their particular areas of scientific expertise? The intellectual relationship between religion and science is a two-way street. Just as one ought not to place much stock in geological views of a religious believer who has never studied geology, so one ought not to give much credence to the religious views of a scientist who has never studied intellectual history, the philosophy of religion, and theology. The highly specialized character of contemporary academic life makes it perfectly possible to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics, for example, while knowing nothing about the theology of creation, metaphysical univocity, and why they matter for questions pertaining to the reality of God and the character of God's relationship to the natural world.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“It was not something called "religion" distinguished from the rest of life, but rather all of life lived in a certain way.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“According to the Gospels, Jesus did not tell his listeners to believe whatever they wished to believe as individuals, or to follow him only in their private thoughts and interior sentiments but not in concrete, public, shared human life.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“Regardless of their leaders' decisions, nation-states-their bureaucratic reach augmented by the increasingly centralized orchestration of tax revenues, industrial and communications technologies, military power, and police forces-controlled the churches and all expressions of religion with greater effectiveness than had ever been possible during the Reformation era. During the Cold War, this was no less true of the United States than it was of the Soviet Union, despite the radically different ways in which these two nations regarded religion and treated religious believers.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“human rights" cannot serve as a stable, shared basis for morality in a society riven by fundamental disagreement about what "human" means, as is apparent from the abortion debate.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“It is frequently alleged that all human meaning, morality, and values can be nothing more than whatever human beings of different times and cultures subjectively and contingently construct for themselves, or at least that we cannot know whether any among them might be more than this.”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“Some scholars in recent years have expressed a certain wonderment that "religion is back"; the wonder is rather that it was thought ever to have departed, apart from the "scholarly wish fulfillment" or projections of those who accepted classic theories of modernization and secularization.30”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“modern era of multivalent "secularity" and "exclusive humanism" in which we live, a shift from the premodern, socially embedded "porous self" to the meaning-constructing "buffered self" that lives within our "immanent frame" of disenchanted modern reality that (supposedly) lacks room for the sacred.24”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society

“difference in kind between empirical questions characteristic of science and philosophical questions about the fact of existence itself (a distinction lost on those who think that the universe as a whole, or matter-energy, or anything else that exists, might adequately explain its own being).135”
― Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society