DISSENTING VOICES

In the previous chapters three aspects of a theology of modernity were traced, and there was an examination of the ways in which the modern world both arises out of the ancient and reduplicates, in its own distinctive ways, questionable features of antiquity's view of things. I argued that in both eras there are to be found grave deficiencies in the way in which the relation of the one and the many is conceived and practised, and that these in turn entail that the particularity of the many is in different ways endangered. The characteristic peril of the modern is to be found in the tendency to homogeneity, to the intellectual and social pressures by which the distinctive individuality of people and things is endangered. In Chapter 3, with particular reference to the concept of time, I examined one dimension of the way in which we conceive the relatedness of things, that is, the way in which the universe and its inhabitants are bound together. Here, too, there are symptoms of a lack of ease with living in the world, so that, paradoxically, the modern conquest of time has appeared to engender a new slavery, a tyranny of time, in which, once again, human and worldly integrity are brought into question. What makes modernity distinctive is its displacement of God. Modernity as an ideology arises not only out of antiquity, but also by means of an attempt in various ways to displace God as the transcendent focus of life in the world, that is, as the one who provides our being with its coordinates.