A Few Brief Comments
by R.E. Slater
I haven't read James Smith's book on Charles Taylor but did just buy it. I have heard James a few times speak at Mars Hill Bible Church by invite by Rob Bell who was a fan of his. He also teaches at Calvin College where I am active in the CALL curriculum program. So my comments here are more from my point of view than they are criticism of his work and effort.
One of the reasons I have turned rightly from evangelical Christianity is because of its messaging. It seems that the metanarrative of evangelical Christianity has become less Christocentric and far less Love-Centered and much more focused on judgmental hell-and-damnation aerial verbosity. Many segments of "secular" society are being called out by the evangelical church for not respecting church traditions and beliefs not realizing it has become as secular as the society it is condemning.
Adding to this mud pit of self-righteousness is how the church has also fallen headlong into cultural identity politics - sic., Trumpism; which is a radical rightwing authoritarian movement to remove the bedrock of America's democracy, the Constitution, with the intention of replacing it with the church's dogmas under the banners of Kingdom Now Dominionism.
If the European Protestant v Protestant v Catholic religious wars of the Middle Ages showed anything, they showed that religious faiths should never run governments. Which is why Thomas Paine and John Locke had saved Europe from itself when announcing the separation of Church and State. Thereby raising up the democratic ideal of many voices and views under the banners of a liberal democratic Constitution working together as a team towards equality, liberty, and justice for all.
Further, the website here, Relevancy22, is currently exploring the philosophic theology of Process Thought sometimes referred to as Open and Relational (Process) Theology in order to recenter biblical theology in atoning, redemptive, and sacrificial transformative narrative. It has been a monumental effort these past ten years but seems to be much improved over evangelicalism's secular modernisms built upon eclectic philosophic usage of Platonisms, Neo-everything, smatterings of Scholasticism and such like.
Which is where my critique of the following article comes in... more probably of Charles Taylor but perhaps equally as much, if not more, of James Smith's approach to Taylor from his own West Michigan evangelical perspective. It is with realization too that Whitehead's Process Philosophy is only recently becoming better known and written about in Process Theological articles by a number of scholars and theologians. So to Taylor and Smith's perspectives - as with mine own before stopping, questioning, and trying to work out my past indoctrinations - they, like myself, were not acquainted at the time with these newer developments.
As simple example is the dipolar problem between a natural world (they term immanence) with a "spiritual" world (commonly termed transcendence). Using psychological or sociological/cultural archetypes, the subject is approached commonly utilizing Closed World Views (CWV) and Modern Moral Order (MMO).
However, the problem lies in separating the two ideas of Platonic thought which stately says there are eternal objects out there we describe as immanent or transcendent. In Process Thought all Platonism is rejected... there are no eternal objects "out there" but only as secondary ideas we utilize in language for communication purposes as descriptors.
Further, in Process Thought immanence and transcendence are no longer near and far metaphysical descriptors but resident actualities combined together as one moment of many evolving moments neither eclipsing one another or separating from one another. All of creation is in the God who is hear and not far; whose creation is hear, now, and not in some lived fantasy world we await. Which is where classic theism fails when seen through the eyes of panentheism (I've describe these many times here on this site).
One other observation is the traditional church's need for a metaphysic which only allows enchantment or disenchantment in because of its dipolarism of immanency and transcendency of God and creation. But under Process Thought, all is as mystical as it is concrete. All is wonderous in the sciences and disciplines which had erred in the past of mechanism and reductionism (part of secular modernism).
The idea of panexistentialism says everything is related to everything and there can be nothing that is isolated or alone. The universe doesn't work this way. Hence, the examples of isolation used below cannot stand; they defy the nature of the universe as a relational living "organism". Further, panpsychism will not allow for any one thing to be so infinitely broken down to its zero state as to lose its "living life" emanating from it. The universe we live in, like ourselves, like God, is boundless in its state both in relationship to itself and to its God who gives life to all.
And so, this despair Charles Taylor has proposed to find a way around, cannot be simply had through the crutches of "secularizing" everything and blaming it on this principle alone. No, the despair of the human species comes from its disconnectivity from one another and from this world and from its God. Atheism is an idea that isn't. So too is despair if looked aright when seeing how this world is meant to lift us up and heal us in so many abundantly wondrous ways. Despair is only despair when we allow societies, communities, churches, families, or individuals remove us from life. It is not life which works against us but those entities consuming wholeness and health.
R.E. Slater
July 16, 2021
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How To Not Be Secular;
Reading Charles Taylor
by Bill Bilbier
July 30, 2017
I often describe my pilgrimage as from a 1974 tiny rural HS, 1978 no name university BS graduate, culturally flat technical hick; to autodidact idiot savant pseudo-intellectual student of Western civilization, Christianity, Philosophy, Literature and Science hick, as a series of pitches going up a mountain on which I often THINK that I have seen the peak, but realize at various junctures that all I have seen are outcroppings, many of which involve yet another LONG pitch I must traverse to gain a glimpse of the next dizzying (to me) height. I've ceased to imagine it will be the peak -- that will be in the life to come.
This is a review of Smiths sort of of extended cliff note narrative summary of Charles Taylor's 874 page mountain of a book, "The Secular Age" which I now have on order (don't expect the review blog anytime soon)! Here is a review of The Secular Age" if you want a different / more extensive take on the larger work.
Smith says that Taylor "gives us an account of our cross-pressured situation -- suspended between the malaise of immanence and the memory of transcendence". Immanence meaning "matter and the physical is everything" and transcendence meaning this is not all there is -- there is a higher Platonic / spiritual / metaphysical reality that is more real than what our imperfect senses can apprehend.
Taylor perceives and makes plain to us "that transcendence and immanence bleed into one another; that faith is pretty much unthinkable, but abandonment to the abyss is even more so;" ...
"Employing a kid of intellectual colonialism, new atheist cartographers rename entire regions of our experience and annex them to natural science and empirical explanation, flattening by disenchantment. (graveyards of the gods are always highlights of this tour).
My favorite diagram from the book is this one -- I apologize for having to resort to taking a picture of it.
I think a reasonable attempt at tiny summary of the Smith book is that Taylor tells the story, AS A STORY, of how it became possible to exist in a disenchanted immanent world where the most important thing is the Buffered Self -- meaning the self devoid of attachment to culture, history, religion, or even family. A detached self that is never the less haunted by being "pushed by the immanence of disenchantment on one side, but also pushed by a sense of significance and transcendence on another side, even if might be a lost transcendence".
We all live by a narrative -- the pure humanist narrative of "progress" is that we once lacked physical vs metaphysical explanations for what we saw around us, so we imagined "enchantment". Spirits and gods were all around, but we were only children. The definition of "progress" or "maturity" is NO ILLUSIONS ... we live in a cold meaningless universe that is ONLY matter. Meaning IS matter ... man is the measuring creature, measurement is meaning. If it can't be measured, it is an illusion, and therefore does not exist!
"If one were to preserve God's sovereignty, one would have to do away with "essences", and with independent "natures". And the result is a metaphysical picture called "nominalism" where things are ONLY what they are named."
If you can name it and measure it, it exists. If not, it doesn't. So, with the Nietzschean "demise of God, we are the only authorizing agency left" ... these two paragraphs give the barest thumbnail of the "CWS", Closed World View -- it's matter and us, that is all the material available to try to construct meaning.
And so, the disenchanted immanent "meaning" constructed is the "Modern Moral Order" (MMO) -- it is pure humanism, bootstrapped from matter and human thought and ruthlessly applied to all as the most restrictive of ancient religious -- although of course with much different tenets:
"because of an inadequate appreciation for moral sources, modernity fixates or moral articulation -- a fixation on more and more scrupulous codes of behavior .... we don't know how to make people moral, but we do know how to specify rules, articulate expectation, lay down the law. This happens in policy, but also informally in cultural codes of political correctness ..."
What is lacking of course is any sense of inner motivation -- it is all external, we will yell at you if you fail to meet the ever growing MMO -- or maybe worse, we will pass more and more laws, you MUST NOT use plastic grocery bags, you MUST recycle! Thus sayeth the MMO.
It becomes clear that the CWS / MMO / Buffered Self, etc ARE a form of metaphysic, and thus effectively a "religion" -- the self is not actually "buffered", unless can exist as an effective modern hermit of constant distraction, escape and self-delusion, the Buffered Self must BELIEVE that all of this is "the good", but part of the CWS itself is that it is a "good" completely made up of whole cloth.
Man STILL cannot live by breath alone, but must have a some sort of "social imaginary" (Taylor term), metaphysical dream, or every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
So what exactly is the advantage of the certified manufactured illusion with ZERO parts transcendent content of the MMO, over thousands of years old moral order that at the minimum leave the thought of transcendence -- at least in the context of age, open to the psyche?
Well, in an immanent sense, of course NOTHING -- since there can't be anything that isn't made up by randomly developed creatures out of nothing except "stuff" (matter). Taylor -- and Smith believe that there actually aren't any honest humans that fail to sense the haunting of the transcendent. Is it real, or is it just side effect of some old cave man brain circuits that would be best excised in our modern world to allow us to be completely "grown up" as a Nietzschean disenchanted, immanent buffered self that deserves to be tamped down and unacknowledged -- even if it means they must lie about it to make it seem that the fiction of pure rational atheism exists.
Unsurprisingly, no answers are given. The task of the book is to make Christian faith POSSIBLE in our flattened, disenchanted meaningless world, essentially by just making it clear that EVERYONE has "faith", it is only a question of "faith in what". The secular owns the world intellectual playing field today -- Taylor sees us at the possible cusp of faith no longer being "allowable", although he does not predict that will be the actual outcome ... he believes that even the merest ghost of the transcendent cannot be ignored because "this heavy concentration of the atmosphere of immanence will intensify a sense of living in a "waste land" for subsequent generations, and young people will begin to explore beyond the boundaries ..."
Even for the subject Smith book of a mere 139 pages, I have but scratched the surface lightly. Yet again, I find myself regularly running to the Internet to bone up on my definitions in order to begin to understand what I am looking at. I feel as a non-english native speaker, who after a couple semesters of English is thrust into watching Shakespeare and asked to provide commentary. And this AFTER 100's of books over decades of my attempted intellectual improvement. I'm an intellectual slow out of shape fat man climbing into high country of knowledge.
In the 500 years since the Reformation, science, philosophy and religion has sold us the chimera of "reform / progress" with no concept of "to where"? It seems that in some circles the thought was "to a mature human vision of a morality built on facts rather than superstition" -- however, "morality" is more than a "set of rules", and "mature human vision" is a state of perpetual change "toward" an unknown objective rather than a "goal" ... and it likely is merely going in circles chasing it's tail.
We remain LOST so badly we often fail to even detect our lostness -- does my quest for knowledge lead me forward or into the abyss? My prayer is that with Christ holding my hand, there can be no truly uncharted abyss. I KNOW the TRUTH -- this mountain of human knowledge is only like some old guy attacking Everest alone without oxygen -- I know I'll die in the attempt, but I'll die anyway.
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