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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.

Book Review, How Not to be Secular

23 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Book Review, Church History, Culture

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Apologetics, Atheism, Book Review, Charles Taylor, Culture, How Not to be Secular, James K. A. Smith, Secular, secularism

taylor

James K. A. Smith, How Not to be Secular, Reading Charles Taylor

This is a book about a book. Canadian philosopher wrote an 896 page treatise on the development and nature of the secular in our current age. Smith wrote a 143 introduction, overview and “guide” to Taylor’s work.

Taylor’s work concerns our social imaginary: the sort given rubric through which we understand the world in which we find ourselves. This is not precisely a worldview, which is a developed set of ideas; it is rather a framework in which we live. The initial trajectory for the book is the movement in the West from a situation where it was almost impossible not to believe in God to the current “secular” world:

 a situation of fundamental contestability when it comes to belief, a sense that rival stories are always at the door offering a very different account of the world (10).

This is not what we usually mean when we think of “secular”. Taylor breaks the usage of the word down into three types. First, “secular” as opposed to “sacred” — as the word was used in the Medieval period. Second, secular as overt lack of religious affiliation (secular 2). Third, the primary concern of Taylor, the circumstance where belief in God is contestable (indeed all beliefs are contestable); this is secular 3.

 In our current circumstance has lead to the option of “exclusive humanism”: “accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything that is beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true. 23

A great part of the book concerns “how did we get here.” Taylor rejects the simplistic “subtraction stories” for explaining exclusive humanism: those stories which say that atheism is a maturity, a willingness to accept the world “as it is.” With the advent of “science” we became able to dispense with myth and superstition and walk in the light of reality. While that story is appealing to those who embrace exclusive humanism, because it makes them the hero of the story, the grown-up; it suffers from reality.

To work through this story, Taylor begins with medieval imaginary which Taylor notes includes three elements:

  1. A cosmos that pointed beyond itself to that which was more than nature.
  2. A society that saw itself grounded in a higher, a heavenly reality.
  3. “In sum, people lived in an enchanted world, a world ‘charged with presences, that was open and vulnerable, not closed and self-sufficient.” (27).

Taylor (and Smith) work through a series of historical and philosophical twists and turns which result in the modern secular age. Two things where necessary, first, these elements of the social imaginary had to be lost and a new basis had to be gained in order for meaning to continue. You see, modern secularity requires a loss and a construct:

[Rather than a mere subtraction], Taylor’s account of disenchantment has a different accent, suggesting that this is primarily a shift in the location of meaning, moving it from “the world” into “the mind.” Significance no longer inheres in things; rather, meaning and significance are property of minds who perceive meaning internally. The external world might be a catalyst for perceiving meaning, but the meanings are generated within the mind — or, in stronger versions (say Kant), meanings are imposed upon things by minds. Meaning is now located in agents. Only once this shift is in place can the proverbial brain-in-a-vat scenario gain any currency ….

To sense the force of this shift, we need to appreciate how this differs from the “enchanted” premodern imaginary where all kinds of nonhuman things mean -are loaded and charged with meaning — independent of human perception or attribution. (28-29).

The modern self is “buffered”, meaning is sealed inside:

 In the shift to the modern imaginary, minds are “bounded,” inward spaces. So the modern self, in contrast to the premodern porous self [open to meanings] is a buffered self, insulated and isolated in its interiority, “giving its own autonomous order to its life”. (30).

Chapter One of Smith’s book traces Taylor’s thesis on how the medieval imaginary was lost. Chapter Two explains how the imaginary of exclusive humanism was created: a process of locating meaning within the “universe” (as opposed to a meaning cosmos). The god of the deists eventually became utterly superfluous.

However, this loss of the transcendent, the enchantment has not worked as well as planned. The buffered self finds itself at cross-pressures, disenchantment and enchantment, transcendence and immanence press in on the self, creating a sense of loss and malaise:

 Sealed off from enchantment, the modern buffered self is also sealed off from significance, left to ruminate in a stew of its own ennui. (64)

So where does one now go for significance, seeing that the transcendent has been lost? We are forced to look for this significance within immanence, which pressures the immanence. “If the immanent self is going to be self-sufficient,, as it were, then the material has to be all there is” (72).

Since we are cross-pressured, we move about between options, we hold inconsistencies. Only the most sealed persons (the most devoted atheists and the “fundamentalist” religionists) who try to seal themselves off from all of the influence of this current, find themselves affected by the pressure.

An example, here, from the devoted Christian side may help. Imagine a Christian who suffers from some trouble, say a sad marriage. Rather than aiming at the transcendent purposes of marriage, which very well may mean the marriage in some ways does not improve (the Scriptural direction on marriage seems to even presume that one spouse may very well be difficult: how then must we live?), the couple wants only their marriage to be better. The highest goal is immediate human flourishing. While no one should look for suffering and while no one desires suffering, Christianity has almost pointed to something greater than immediate human flourishing. Consider this language from John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding:

I never knew what it was for God to stand by me at all turns, and at every offer of Satan ‘to afflict me,’ &c., as I have found him since I came in hither; for look how fears have presented themselves, so have supports and encouragements, yea, when I have started, even as it were at nothing else but my shadow, yet God, as being very tender of me, hath not suffered me to be molested, but would with one scripture and another strengthen me against all; insomuch that I have often said, Were it lawful, I could pray for greater trouble, for the greater comfort’s sake (Ecc. 7:14; 2Co. 1: 5).

The strangeness of Bunyan’s words to modern Christians shows the extent to which even devoted Christians feel the pressure of the secular age.

Likewise, all sorts of secularists hold inconsistent positions when it comes to meaning and the mechanical universe. The number of people who hold to superstitions and astrology is striking. I once spoke with a science professor at a world-renowned institution, his colleagues where women and men at the absolute peak of “science”. He offhandedly said, “Oh my colleagues are very superstitious.”

Smith ends with a discussion of how the positions of the secular age play out in practice. We have the religious, the humanist and the Nietzschean who all have powerful critiques of one-another and often in surprising combinations (such a Taylor using a Nietzschean critique of a humanist position to great effect).

Smith’s book is excellent. While I have not read through Taylor’s work, I do have a good understanding of the basic thrust. For a work so detailed and profound, a guidebook (such as Smith’s) is more than welcome before I wrestle with Taylor directly.

As Smith works through Taylor, he does not passively recount everything. He explains, develops and often pushes back against Taylor (particularly Taylor’s reading of Reformed Christianity). I found Taylor’s questions and Smith’s help of great value in thinking through the age in which we live. Often times our current circumstance is invisible to us; only some perspective (such as the historical and philosophical perspective provided by Taylor) gives us sufficient room to think and respond.

Smith helpfully includes a glossary of Taylor’s special terms (such as “buffered self”, “fragilization” “fullness”, et cetera).

Buy and read the book. It is well-worth the time.

The Existential Character of Christian Theism

17 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Theology

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Charles Taylor, Contingency, Existentialism, Matthew Rose, Philosophy

For thinkers working in this tradition, Augustine and Aquinas preeminent among them, the fundamental philosophical problem was that of contingency—how and why anything exists at all, when it plainly need not. In the course of wrestling with this question, Christian philosophy arrived at its great insight: that contingent beings depend on a God whose very nature simply is to be. Its central theses, clarified over a millennium of philosophic labor, comprised what Étienne Gilson called the “existential” character of Christian theism. They included the demonstration that God does not “have” existence but is himself the pure act of existence; that contingent things are not identical with their existence and are sustained in being by God; and that to know the nature of any finite thing is to know its likeness to its divine cause. These claims, and the conception of rationality embedded within them, provided the metaphysical infrastructure of Catholic Christianity, whose intellectual history is unintelligible apart from it.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/12/tayloring-christianity

Matthew Rose on Charles Taylor

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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