a few words

Series Index

Below are my notes from Charles Taylor’s presentation at the end of the conference a little more than a week ago. I’ve put a bit more effort into filling in the gaps of these notes to make them more intelligible than the notes from the previous sessions. Hopefully that effort pays off in increased understanding. [Why am I posting notes?]

VARIETIES OF SECULARISM IN A SECULAR AGE

Apologies for an “incomplete” book. [!] It’s unapologetically a master narrative—an attempt to tell the whole story. Master narratives are unavoidable because we all live within them. We all tell the story of our world (in however proscribed a manner) in order to “place” our lives in context. The only way to beat a bad master narrative is with a slightly better one. This book is an attempt to trace the master narrative of secularization, the book is introduced at a time when the old narratives were crumbling. Forty years ago many people expected us to have progressed beyond religion altogether. The more a society develops, so the story goes, the more secular (in the sense of atheistic) it becomes.

What was wrong with the “old” narratives of secularization is that they were subtraction stories. Once inhibitions to “secularity” (like superstition, disbelief in science, parochialism) are gotten rid of, then the secular simply comes to the surface, secularity is taken as “basic” or “natural” for humanity in a question begging way. In other words, the presumption of many people is that “rational” or “natural” human beings have no religious commitments; religious commitments are something added to humanity, an unnecessary accretion.

Against this kind of story Taylor asserts that we all “construct” a way of being in the world. What distinguishes modernity is not only what we have lost, but what we have created. Secularity is not the result of getting rid of the impediments to secularity, but rather is one way of constructing human social patterns among many.

The enchantment which was “un-done” by modernity (i.e. “disenchantment”) is not the same as the enchantment which is being reasserted in the present. Taylor is attempting to look back through history to find the “boundaries” at which we began to see things differently. We cannot go back. If by “re-enchantment” we intend to restore the possibility of naïve or unreflective belief in the transcendent comparable to what we imagine to be the case for people of the past, we will only be disappointed. Re-enchantment of that sort is a project that cannot be attained because we cannot simply change the way that we see the world; we have crossed a boundary which enables (and forces) us to see in a new way.

It is not totally clear what the boundary is between the spiritual and personal. In an enchanted world, the self is porous, and includes the possibility of things like possession by spirits. In our “self-understanding,” our “selves” are simply not porous in this way. We have buffered selves, and in that we have lost a sensibility and a sensitivity toward the transcendent in our daily operations. The difference lies not in ideas, the difference lies in (at least) two ways of experiencing the world.

The immanent frame:

What is a “social imaginary”: an attempt to describe the way in which a whole society or group understands what is acceptable, meaningful, and worthwhile. It is the understanding we share about society. It is what people have to have a grip on in order to make sense of their own actions. [This seems quite similar to what Taylor calls elsewhere the “background.”]

An example of a shift in social imaginary: 17th c. revolutions were justified by looking backwards—they were efforts at restoration. The American Revolution starts this way (the violated rights of English-folk rather than the dream of a glorious “land of the free”). But the Declaration justifies a revolution on the basis of a forward-looking stance. Revolutions today can only be justified publicly by articulating what they will accomplish; they are forward looking events. Our conception of “what justifies a revolution” has shifted. When did those shifts take place and what were the underlying logical steps that led to the shift?

Taylor’s use of the word “fullness” has been widely misinterpreted. Taylor only means to signify a quality of life that we all seek to attain. Our distinction between “higher” and “lower” points in our life (and our attendant desire to have more of the “higher” and less of the “lower”) points to what Taylor means by “fullness.” We all make these distinctions and make our life choices in these terms, regardless of what we have in mind when we think of something analogous to “fullness.” We fail to understand other people (especially Other people) when we fail to understand their particular notion of a motivating life-intensity (i.e. “fullness”).

The main thesis:
Reform Master Narrative (in Christendom): the attempt to bring the masses up to the ideal, real, best, most authentic, expression of Christianity. The first seeds of the RMN show up in the high medieval period. The RMN came to be seen as genuinely plausible. The RMN is the first seed of secularization in the N. Atlantic world. Attempting to bring everyone “up” to the higher expression of the faith changed the perception of the faith to those who were preached to. It made a distinction between “the way things are down here” and the way that they should be “up there” (in the higher, ideal sense). All of this leads to the immanent frame. What we think of as the Lower, (the way things are) is something can be understood on its own terms (and must be in order to be brought “up”). In the “old” world understanding things within our immanent frame simply would not have made sense.

Conditions of Belief:

The galloping multiplication of the “options” of belief. The presence of a multiplicity of plausible identity and belief structures makes living within any single account feel narrow, cramped, or implausible. In other words, it makes believing anything difficult.

Taylor writes as a Catholic, but he is trying to start a conversation with everyone. He is trying “explain” in a larger sense. Taylor’s kind of Catholic has a calling to understand very different perspectives, and especially the concept of fullness within those other perspectives.

We don’t understand ourselves until we drop the crutches of narratives that paint the other perspectives in negative terms. Until we cease to regard people who view the world in ways very different from our own as “irrational” or “unnatural” then we don’t authentically understand the degree to which our own views of rationality and naturalness are equally contextual. There are better and worse ways of seeing the world and we should talk about these, but our own views don’t actually grow any more plausible simply by denigrating the views of others without making at least minimal efforts to understand where they are coming from.

It is possible to build friendship across these boundaries, based on a sense of what motivates the other. Taylor is not looking for an “average” position that is somehow more foundational than distinct traditions (by means of transcending them—this is the myth of modernity). But an “agonistic” friendship across the boundaries is a worthwhile goal. “Agonistic” not because conversation ought to tend toward battle, but because we all come to the table thoroughly owning our own positions and intent on both understanding and being understood across difference (rather than around it…) A reconciliation across differences.

Is the book an apologetic? It can be read that way. And Taylor is speaking to his co-religionists along with many, many others. He’s not a big fan of “Catholicism from high places.” But the book is also bigger than an apologetic project for the faithful, it’s a book for all of us. We need enough people who have a gut sense that there is something valuable in the Other that merits an understanding across the boundaries of difference.

“I have borrowed the term ’self-responsibility’ from Husserl to describe something that Locke shares with Descartes and which touches on the essential opposition to authority of modern disengaged reason. What we are called upon to do by these writers, and by the tradition they establish, is to think it out ourselves. As with Descartes, knowledge for Locke isn’t genuine unless you develop it yourself:

‘For, I think, we may as rationally hope to see with other Mens Eyes, as to know by other Mens Understandings. So much as we ourselves consider and comprehend of Truth and Reason, so much we possess of real and true Knowledge. The floating of other Mens Opinions in our brains makes us not a jot more knowing, though they happen to be true. What in them was Science, is in us but Opinatrety, whilst we give up our assent to reverend Names, and do not, as they did, employ our own Reason to understand those Truths, which gave them reputation… In the Sciences, every one has so much, as he really knows and comprehends: What he believes only, and takes upon trust are but shreads.’[1]

Plato, of course, says something analogous…. But what is different with the moderns is that the requirement to work it out oneself is more radical and exclusive, and tis in virtue of their very notion of reason.

Plato enjoins us to stand out against custom and ‘opinion’ in order to arrive at the truth. But the truth at which we arrive is a vision of the order of things. It is not absolutely excluded in principle that our best way of getting there might be to be guided by some authority–not, indeed, the corrupt and erroneous one of popular opinion, but by someone with wisdom. Once we have science [according to Plato], of course, we can dispense with guidance, but it might help us to come to this independent condition.”

I think that our first instinct is to apply this “scientific” mode of reasoning to religious questions—and it tends to strip religions down to bare and vague transcendence—which is about all that any of us can “work out for ourselves.” I’m more and more confident that this mode of reasoning itself needs to be questioned, not least because it is a “tradition” all its own. Taylor is proving immensely helpful in that project.

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[1] John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:4:23.

[2] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 167-68.

Prof. John Stackhouse, writes in explanation of his signature on a recent response to the letter from a group of Muslim clerics and scholars who drafted a statement acknowledging common ground between Christian and Muslim faiths as the basis for (at least) political coexistence. When the letter was initially released, I offered a few comments as to its importance.

The substance of the original letter, as well as the response, is an acknowledgment that wherever Christians and Muslims are bound up in hatred for one another marked by violence, then neither Christians nor Muslims are being faithful to God’s commands: to love Him above all else, and to love our neighbors. Whatever our theological differences, no one is being convinced or converted in the bloodshed.

Apparently, Prof. Stackhouse has met with some criticism for his signature on that letter, and if he has, then other signatories have likely been chastised as well. I haven’t heard any criticism, but I am persuaded that any objection must rest on misunderstanding. I would really like to run into someone who opposes this mutual attempt at understanding, perhaps he or she can clarify things for me. 

The letters are essentially political documents, in the sense that they attempt to structure a relationship in such a way that the parties involved can get along. The theological content of the letters is by no means dishonest about differences between the faiths. Is theological truth being sacrificed to political expediency in this exchange? If this is the objection to this effort, then theological truth and political expedience (in this case, a rather minimal desire for co-existence) are being falsely opposed to one another. There is no theological truth that can be taught with weapons of war. Differences between the faith are not maintained by means of hostility, they are maintained by means of teaching that is faithful. Children of both faiths who learn in a context of violence are taught by fear, which only perpetuates violence. Dialogue on the other hand, does not negate difference but defines it. We all, Christians and Muslims alike, bleed red—no difference there.  

If it is objected that the Muslims who sent the original letter do not represent the “true” Muslim faith, which is rather to be seen in those more radical elements which do want to inflict harm on their neighbors, then I would reply that the objection is irrelevant, or at least it should be to a Christian. The location of “true” Islam with the violent ought to be disputed, but the more relevant point is that disregarding the efforts of these Muslims who are reaching out in a gesture of peace, is a shameful begrudging of hospitality. These are neighbors whom we are called to love. In light of the tensions between historically Muslim and historically Christian nations (whatever they are now) the least we can do is return a gesture of respect and acknowledgment. That humility is only the beginning of the love and service that we owe our Muslim brothers and sisters—even those who may hate us.

No one’s identity is being compromised in these letters. Nothing is being swept under the rug. I can’t conceive of a viable objection to this effort at mutual understanding. Perhaps someone can help me understand.

Oh, Prince of Peace, come quickly.    

Over lunch (triple-decker peanut butter and jelly, to be precise), I ran across a paragraph that reminded me of an ongoing conversation with a good friend:  

“The central image the Wuthnow uses to describe twenty- and thirty- somethings, when it comes to life generally and religion specifically, is ‘tinkering.’ They are, he says, ‘a generation of tinkerers.’ These are a people who pragmatically piece together a jumble of disconnected and sometimes contradictory bits of belief and practice as they—supposedly autonomous individuals—see fit. Tinkering, Wuthnow argues, is a style or habit or strategy driven ultimately by the many economic and cultural uncertainties that characterize American society in recent decades. Tinkerers are resourceful and adaptable but also often live makeshift and less than fully coherent lives.” [1]

Tinkering already assumes the disjunction of trust and truth. Trust is an impossibility in the tinkering life because truth is always something that I (a tinkerer) possess or assemble myself, truth is always contained within my own experience, and therefore there is no room for trust. If trust becomes a truth, it is appropriated as a subjective feeling of dependence, rather than as submission or obedience. Tinkering is a way to remain self-contained, self-controlled, and self-directed. Like every Babel, it tends toward confusion and fragmentation—and leaves every tinkerer alone.

This is the spiritual expression of the American Dream, the entrepreneurial spirit, and the capitalist manifesto—work hard and don’t let anyone tell you what to choose. You can make it!

This deep in history, there seems to be something of the tinkerer in every theologian, but the best theologians self-consciously work within a tradition. Christian theology is born out of the depths of prayer, not out of a sense that it would be nice to have a habit of praying, or that praying might make me a deeper and more sensitive person. This means that Christian theology already presupposes trust as its resting point, the precarious stance from which the whole gospel is proclaimed.

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[1] Christian Smith, “An Unbooming Business: Review of After the Baby Boomers by Robert Wuthnow [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007]” First Things, no. 179 (Jan 2008): 50.

“What is crucial is that on which the contending parties agree, namely that there are only two alternative modes of social life open to us, one in which the free and arbitrary choices of individuals are sovereign and one in which the bureaucracy is sovereign, precisely so that it may limit the free and arbitrary choices of individuals. Given this deep cultural agreement, it is unsurprising that the politics of modern societies oscillate between a freedom which is nothing but a lack of regulation of individual behavior and forms of collectivist control designed only to limit the anarchy of self-interest. The consequences of a victory by one side or the other are often of the highest immediate importance; but, as Solzhenitzyn has understood so well, both ways of life are in the long run intolerable. Thus the society in which we live is one in which bureaucracy and individualism are partners as well as antagonists. And it is in the cultural climate of this bureaucratic individualism that the emotivist self is naturally at home.” [1]

This quote of MacIntyre could be the launching point for any number of fruitful conversations, but I’d like to set it alongside the film that Carolyn and I went to see on Friday night. Into the Wild is the story of Christopher McCandless, a restless college graduate trying to exercise the demons in his family (or at least their hold on him) by throwing himself into solitude, adventure, and unbridled exploration of creation’s wonders. If ever there were a model for someone seeking truth in “the free and arbitrary choices” of a sovereign self, McCandless (or the cinematic reconstruction of him) is that figure.

[Spoiler Warning---from here on, I discuss the plot a bit]

The story is tragic, there is no doubt. But it is powerful because it draws on an instinct present in many of us, the drive for purity, for truth, McCandless launches himself on a quest for truth, convinced that deep within himself—if only he puts himself deep enough into the wild—there lies a spark of divine truth that will emerge to outshine all the pain and corruption he has discovered in his short life. He follows the instinct for purity to its utter end; he will allow no corrupting attachments or relationships in his quest for natural/divine truth. Yet, in seeking to overcome the pain his parents caused him, McCandless leaves a sea of tears in the eyes of people who come to love a reckless wanderer. But, truth, for McCandless is a force more powerful than love.

In the end, when McCandless comes face to face with “nature,” that naked spark of truth he sought all along, it becomes for him a mirror. The realization that his own face is empty, nameless, sends him back to the relationships he abandoned. It is of course, too late, but his dying act reaches out from beyond his own death, calling out to his family by re-claiming their name.

McCandless is a tragic figure because he sought freedom apart from service to others; because he sought truth apart from love; because he sought knowledge in nature apart from any wisdom; because he sought healing apart from forgiveness; because he sought new life without facing the death that was already at his core. He lived out, to the extreme, character traits that we all value, and he died all at once the death that we subject ourselves to little by little.

MacIntyre notes that both bureaucratic scripts and individual quests for meaning are ultimately intolerable. The truth, it seems to me, lies neither in bureaucracy for its own sake—collectivist order to which individual lives are sacrificed; nor in the escape from every hindrance, beholden only to the voice within. There is a bureaucracy whose structure is upside down, whose Head washes the feet, whose last are first. A bureaucracy in which freedom is measured by service and in which control is first turned inward, to be expressed more fully in love for others. It is likely that McCandless never met that good news, or never recognized it if he did, so rare is its presence. May God grant his church the courage to live in its calling.

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[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd Ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 35. 

One hundred thirty eight Muslim leaders have sent a letter to the foremost Christian leaders of the world urging peace and reconciliation between the two faiths. Below is a summary of the letter, the longer version can be found here, or at the organization’s website.

In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful

A Common Word between Us and You
(Summary and Abridgement)

Muslims and Christians together make up well over half of the world’s population. Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians.

The basis for this peace and understanding already exists. It is part of the very foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbour. These principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and Christianity. The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbour is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity. The following are only a few examples:
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Father Stephen wrote a challenging essay on what he calls the “myth” of reformation–including the poignant quip, “Semper Reformanda is not Scripture, it’s just modernism with a Latin motto.” He urges humility in our relationship to the church, and offers a reminder that we do not save the church, the church saves us. Plenty to think about, even if one would like to argue.

Avery Cardinal Dulles has an excellent article in First Things, available online, which gives a brief history of growing Roman Catholic openness toward Darwinian evolution, a typology of three coherent Christian positions on evolution, and a call for dogmatic anti-theists to interact with theologians better versed than the straw-man portrayals of faith that they lampoon.

The serpent’s first question to Eve is an attempt to get under her skin, fomenting second thoughts about God’s gift and command. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The serpent calls the content of God’s speech into question by twisting the command and putting a harsher edict in its place. Eve is sharp enough to set that twisted serpent straight–for the most part. “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say…”

The story is centered on controversy among God’s creatures as to what God actually said, and what was meant when he said it. The snake and the human bring different versions of God’s command–and different gods. The god of the serpent is a restrictive fellow who hoards all the garden’s fruit to himself (even though there is plenty to go around) and threatens transgressors with death (even though he doesn’t really mean it). Adam and Eve have another God’s breath in their veins; they know his generosity and his character, but in their naivete they act on the serpent’s sermon and fall into the serpent’s world. Adam and Eve claim the fruit for themselves, and awake to find themselves shamefully bent. This story is our story.

This post, however, is not about Adam and Eve per se. I want to look at a few other Old Testament representations of God’s speech, and eventually raise a few questions about the nature of revelation, inspiration, and our relationship to scripture.
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The last entry thinking about the creeds focused on the relationship between the creeds and scripture. As normative confession, the creeds guide the boundaries of our interpretation of scripture in order to enable us to read scripture well. The creeds stand as a history lesson about God’s people reading God’s word; they are our opportunity to hear and understand the thought of those Christians who down through the generations have passed on the gospel and put the scripture in our hands. We disregard their advice at our own hazard. We cannot even touch scripture until someone gives it to us – and that event (taking the book into our hands) links us to a long chain that reaches back to the roots of our tradition. Any loss of memory constitutes a crisis of identity, but especially an intentional ignorance with regard to tradition.

In this entry however, I’d like to dig into questions about the normative influence of the creeds within the church today – look at how we relate to these ancient documents, and how we are to look at them. How do creeds function within our communities? What do communities that move away from creeds replace them with? Read the rest of this entry »

Reading Telford Work’s book Living and Active, I’m recognizing the amount of breathing room available within the biblical tradition. We often speak as if there were only one way to be “biblical” people. We imagine that there is one cookie cutter mold for how to be faithful (and not surprisingly, that cookie cutter looks an awful lot like our own silhouette). But even within the Bible there are traditions at tremendous tension with one another, and in the world that Scripture describes, there is room for many different sorts:

Wisdom literature portrays a world where the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. The wise are blessed and saved, the wicked judged and condemned. God’s mercy is then a kind of converse of God’s justice. The apocalyptic vision turns this conception of salvation on its head. In a world where the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer, one is not saved from God’s eschotological judgemnt. Rather, one is saved from injustice and wrath, through God’s eschatological judgment. God’s justice is itself a dimension of God’s mercy. (159)

There is a breadth to truth that acknowledges the validity of many perspectives. What a relief that God speaks through many voices. The “American Dream” wisdom of Proverbs (work your tail off and you’ll do alright) stands side by side with Daniel’s very different version of wisdom. Daniel reminds us that beastly and inhuman empires have their way on the earth only for a time, but that in the end, God’s power and God’s judgment are ultimate. As Ghandi says - every oppressor dies someday. Read the rest of this entry »

I hate to give it attention (even disdain is a form of advertisement), but I came across a product so mindless today that I’m having trouble imagining the person who would actually spend $15.50 on something so inane. After we tried an odor-less, color-less free sample, the friend I was with captured it in a single phrase: “For people with more money than brains.” In fact, I’m pretty sure that the only possible use for this product is to show other people just how much money you have to waste on something that you can get elsewhere for free.

So what is the offending product?

In a double lined, pressure treated, painted, labeled, aluminum aerosol can sitting in a prominent cardboard and plastic display (featuring a beautiful young woman who is obviously deriving meaning and purpose in life from her use of the product), is well… um… water. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite the contemporary desire to treat it this way, the Bible did not fall out of the sky. Christians are not “people of the book” in the same way that Muslims or Mormons are. The Bible is not eternal truth dictated word for word from the clouds to faithful scribes waiting pen in hand. Christianity’s attitude toward its book is significantly different.

As a starting point, we need to realize that the Bible wasn’t written for us. At least not primarily. Paul was not thinking of you when he wrote (or dictated) his letter to the Romans. We abuse scripture itself if we refuse to let Paul write to his friends at Rome, and recognize this as a conversation that we’ve been allowed in on. And if we start there, we had better understand what his friends would have understood from his writing before we start proof-texting individual verses out of context. That means hard work and study. Read the rest of this entry »