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Tag Archives: A Secular Age

Charles Taylor’s Temptations and The Wonderful Combat, an aside

16 Saturday Jul 2022

Posted by memoirandremains in Lancelot Andrewes

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A Secular Age, Charles Taylor, Lancelot Andrewes, temptation, The Wonderful Combat

John Starke, notes that in A Secular Age, Charles Taylor, notes opposing temptations for the self-sufficient and for the believer:

Yet, at the same time, there is a “malaise” amid this self-sufficient humanism: “The sense can easily arise that we are missing something, cut off from something, that we are living behind a screen. . . . I am thinking much more of a wide sense of malaise at the disenchanted world, a sense of it as flat, empty, a multiform search for something within, or beyond it, which could compensate for the meaning lost with transcendence.”59 There is a fear and anxiety that “our actions, goals, achievements, and life, have a lack of weight, gravity, thickness, substance. There is a deeper resonance which they lack, which we feel should be there.”60 There is, then, a temptation among the secular toward transcendence. We cannot seem to live without it. At the same time, we Christians live and breathe in this secular age as well. This self-sufficient humanism becomes part of the muscle memory of our own souls, even if we are often unconscious to its effect. What Taylor tells us about secularists hits awfully close to home in the pews. So, then, while modern self-sufficient secularists are tempted toward belief, believers are constantly tempted toward self-sufficiency. The task of the preacher, it seems, is to aim at this dual temptation.

John Starke, “Preaching to the Secular Age” in Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor (p. 41). The Gospel Coalition. Kindle Edition.

What I noticed with these two “temptations” is that they an observation of Lancelot Andrews in The Wonderful Combat: There is a temptation to despair, that God will not come for us. There is also the temptation of presumption, the temptation that God will do what I need. I think that these two temptations are the same as the “temptations” noticed by Starke.

There is the temptation that God has abandoned us, or perhaps there is no God at all.

Alone, what did Bloom feel?
The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Reaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn
.

Ulysses (p. 806). Kindle Edition. The self-sufficient is unsure in this position, but so is the believer. We live in an age when belief is constantly contested, challenged. And thus both are constantly pressured (cross-pressured) into something approximates the others place:

Haunting Immanence Taylor names and identifies what some of our best novelists, poets, and artists attest to: that our age is haunted. On the one hand, we live under a brass heaven, ensconced in immanence. We live in the twilight of both gods and idols. But their ghosts have refused to depart, and every once in a while we might be surprised to find ourselves tempted by belief, by intimations of transcendence. Even what Taylor calls the “ immanent frame ” is haunted. On the other hand, even as faith endures in our secular age, believing doesn’t come easy. Faith is fraught; confession is haunted by an inescapable sense of its contestability. We don’t believe instead of doubting; we believe while doubting. We’re all Thomas now.

Smith, James K. A. (2106-02-06T22:28:15.000). How (Not) to Be Secular (Kindle Locations 195-201). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

Notice here the temptations of despair and presumption, and how they play to both groups. The self-sufficient secularist begins at the place of presumption: he has already taken on this temptation, although the temptation is not to presume upon God to act, but to presume upon God to ignore:

Psalm 50:16–21 (ESV)

16  But to the wicked God says:

“What right have you to recite my statutes

or take my covenant on your lips?

17  For you hate discipline,

and you cast my words behind you.

18  If you see a thief, you are pleased with him,

and you keep company with adulterers.

19  “You give your mouth free rein for evil,

and your tongue frames deceit.

20  You sit and speak against your brother;

you slander your own mother’s son.

21  These things you have done, and I have been silent;

you thought that I was one like yourself.

But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.

However, the fact of God can never really be shaken. The irreducibility of the world is forcing its way in. In fact, Taylor’s secularist already seems to be outdate. The atheist of Dawkins or Hitchens was an untenable and never going to be popular version. We can see the movement into a rank paganism. Self-sufficiency contains within it a temptation to despair. Hanging on magic is a way to make bread out of stones (indeed, the temptation which the Devil made to Jesus seems to have been a temptation to become a conjurer or a magician in light of contemporary expectations!).

The believer seems to have avoided this, but the constant pressure of the secular age, the battering of doubt is constant:

Nothing is easy about faith in a secular age. “Faith is fraught, confession is haunted by an inescapable sense of its contestability,” Smith writes. “We don’t believe instead of doubting; we believe while doubting. We’re all Thomas now.”

Collin Hansen, “Doubt in our Secular Age,” Our Secular Age: Ten Years of Reading and Applying Charles Taylor (p. 4). The Gospel Coalition. Kindle Edition. This doubt then contains within it a seed of presumption: If God can be doubted, then perhaps I should myself. I should presume that God will not interfere. It is much the same as the temptation to turn stones into bread, but it is not bred from the same despair. It is more of a boast: I guess I’ll have to do it. It is not despair, God won’t come. It is the presumption, there is no God.

The problem of evil and a reduced God.

12 Tuesday Nov 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in affliction, Apologetics, Biblical Counseling

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A Secular Age, Affliction, Apologetics, Biblical Counseling, Buffered Self, Charles Taylor, Deism, Enlightenment, Immanent Frame, Tim Keller, Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering, Western Thought

In chapter two of Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering, Tim Keller begins by recounting the answer of Stoicism (which parallels in many ways and Buddhism) to suffering: the divine impersonal force is at work. Therefore, don’t give into to your affections, your hopes or loves, be restrained so that you will not be hurt. There is a future for you and your body, but it is impersonal, dissolved. You’ll be there, but you won’t know it.

Christianity triumphed over this worldview by placing suffering into a matrix of beliefs and valuations of the world. First, the universe is under control, but it is the control of a personal, wise, loving God. God is infinite and thus inscrutable. Second, God in Jesus Christ entered into the suffering of this world — most importantly on the cross. Thus, God has shown his love and power. Third, by entering into our suffering and having triumphed over death, salvation is now possible by grace through faith. This gives great comfort in suffering:

As Luther taught, suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you. Secularity cannot give you that, and religions that provide for salvation through good works cannot give it, either (58).

Fourth, salvation will lead to restoration and resurrection of the body. There is a reversal of the loss of suffering and death.

Why then does Christianity seemingly suffer now when evil arises? At one time, Christianity’s strength in Western thought showed itself most brilliantly in the face of evil and suffering. Keller relies upon philosopher Charles Taylor (A Secular Age) for the observation that around 1500, Western thought shifted to an “immanent frame”:

He says that we live inside an “immanent frame,” the view that the world is a completely natural order without any supernatural. It is a completely ” ‘immanent’ world, over against a possible ‘transcedent’ one.” …Another phrase he uses is the “buffered self.”..It was often assumed that one was required to look outside of the self–to nature and to God–to learn the right way to live. Modern people, however, have a “buffered self,” a self that is bounded and self-contained. Because there is no transcedent, supernatural order outside of me, it is I who determine what I am and who I will be. (53).

By means of this intellectual move, coupled with deism which allowed only enough God to blame for trouble to remain, created the “problem of evil.” Before this move, Christianity had an answer to evil and suffering. Yet, after this move, a reduced God existed who had the job of making us comfortable and at ease. Rather than an infinitely holy God, who created us for his glory, and against whom we have sinned and need reconciliation through the cross because of our sin, we have a lesser “God”:

Instead, human beings’ main purpose is to use our reason and free will to support human flourishing….The older Christian idea that we exist for God’s glory receded and was replaced by the belief that God exists to nurture and sustain us (54).

Thus, the problem of evil stems in large part from a reduced God.

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