Thomas Oord - Thank Goodness, God is NOT in Control

Thank Goodness, God is Not in Control

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by Thomas Oord, March 18, 2021

It’s common for people who believe in God to respond to suffering, confusion, or evil by saying, “All I know is that God is in control!”

To the ears of survivors, victims, hurting people, this phrase is rarely reassuring. It leads many to wonder if God is punishing them, has abandoned them, or just doesn’t care about their pain.

In this essay, I explore what it means for God to act, to be powerful, and to love. I’ll introduce a new phrase “essential kenosis” as a way to point to how God always acts, is powerful, always loves, but is unable to prevent evil single-handedly.

Those Who Start with Power

To make sense of how God acts, the majority of people – both trained theologians and novices – begin with God’s power. This is understandable: action requires power of some kind.

The majority of believers have a particular view of divine power in mind, however. They use various words to describe it, including “sovereignty,” “omnipotence,” or “almightiness.” No matter the preferred word, most believe God can control others should God decide to do so. God can be controlling.

By “control,” most think God can single-handedly determine outcomes in the world. Divine control means that God’s actions in relation to someone or something allows no creaturely cooperation or resistance. God alone determines what happens in a situation.

A small group of believers in God think God always controls others all the time. This is what theologians call “theological determinism.” God is the omnicause. [1] Those who affirm this position typically appeal to mystery or the inscrutable divine will when questions about evil and creaturely freedom arise.

The majority of people I meet believe God gives creatures and creation some freedom, agency, and indeterminacy. Some think God controls everything except humans.[2]

Most who say God gives freedom, agency, or existence to creatures say doing so is a free choice on God’s part. They believe God voluntarily chooses not to control others. In their view, the God who could control usually gives freedom.

Beginning with Love

I think there’s a better way to think about how God acts. It begins with love. The alternative view of divine action I propose starts with God’s loving relations to creation rather than God’s power.

Most people believe God loves. Most wholeheartedly affirm the biblical phrase “God is love,” although theologians interpret that statement in various ways. Most say God’s love is steadfast, as biblical writers repeatedly say. I’ve never met a Christian who explicitly denies that God loves.

When I say that my view begins with God’s love, I mean, first, that God’s love is relational. God gives and receives from creatures. Rather than being unaffected by what creatures do, God suffers with and rejoices alongside creatures.

I also believe God’s love is inherently uncontrolling. “Love does not insist on its own way,” to quote the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. 13:5). To put it more clearly, love never single-handedly decides outcomes. God’s love does not control.

When I put this idea in a scholarly way, I say love is logically prior to power in God’s nature. Because God’s nature is first and foremost uncontrolling love, God never controls creatures, situations, or worlds. God can’t control.

Essential Kenosis

I call the view I’m proposing “essential kenosis.” I suspect this phrase is new to most, so let me explain it.

In a letter written to people in Philippi, the Apostle Paul uses the Greek word kenosis. He says, “each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.” He then says Christ Jesus “emptied himself (kenosis), taking the form of a slave.” This included Jesus humbling himself and dying on a cross. We therefore ought to “work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in [us], enabling [us] both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:3-13).

Scholars translate kenosis in various ways. But many believe this passage says Jesus reveals something important about God’s nature. Jesus’ kenosis tells us something crucial about who God is and how God acts.

The meaning of kenosis is partly given in phrases such as Jesus “taking the form of a slave,” “humbled himself,” and his “death on a cross.” Kenosis refers to action that looks “to the interest of others” and enables “us to will and to work.” Taken in light of Jesus, these phrases suggest that God’s power is essentially self-giving not overpowering. Instead of controlling us, God enables us to act.[3]

Essential Kenosis vs. Voluntary Self-Limitation

Is God’s uncontrolling love a choice? Could God sometimes decide to control?

Some who embrace kenosis theology say God voluntarily self-limits. God could control other creatures or creation but usually choose not to do so.

The voluntary self-limitation view has big problems, however. It says to survivors, victims, and those who have been harmed that God could have prevented their pain. God could momentarily un-self-limit to prevent evil. Notice that Polkinghorne says God “allows” the act of the murderer and the destructive force of an earthquake. The [controlling] God who freely allows evil, however, is not perfectly loving.

Love does not permit genuine evil that could be stopped.

Essential Kenosis

In opposition to the idea God voluntarily self-limits, essential kenosis says God cannot control anyone or anything. It says God is present throughout all creation, to every creature and entity, no matter how small or large. And God always acts to influence creation. From the big bang, in the emergence of life, through evolutionary history, and ongoing today, God acts with uncontrolling love.

Essential kenosis stands between two related views of God’s love and power. We’ve already looked at one: God voluntarily self-limits. The other view says external forces, factors, agents, or worlds essentially limit God. This view gives the impression that outside actors and powers not of God’s making hinder divine power. Or it says God is subject to laws of nature, imposed from without.

The “external forces limit God” view unfortunately portrays God as a helpless victim to external realities. God seems caught in the clutches of exterior principalities and powers.

Essential kenosis rejects both voluntary divine self-limitation and the idea external powers limit God. It says limits to God’s power derive from within: God’s nature of love. God’s eternal nature is to love others in an uncontrolling way.

Conclusion

In this essay, I sketched out my view and why it matters to start with love when pondering divine action. As I see it, the essential kenosis view of divine action, with its emphasis up God’s self-giving, others-empowering, and therefore uncontrolling love of God offers the best overall model of divine action.

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Thomas Jay Oord, Ph.D., is a theologian, philosopher, and scholar of multi-disciplinary studies. Oord directs the Center for Open and Relational Theology and doctoral students at Northwind Theological Seminary. He is an award-winning author and has written or edited more than twenty-five books. A gifted speaker, Oord lectures at universities, conferences, churches, and institutions. He is known for his contributions to research on love, science and religion, open and relational theology, the problem of suffering, and the implications of freedom for transformational relationships. Website: thomasjayoord.com

Notes:

[1] Paul Kjoss Helseth advocates this view (“God Causes All Things,” in Four Views on Divine Providence, ed. Dennis W. Jowers [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2011], 52).

[2] Jack Cottrell advocates an interventionist God (“The nature of Divine Sovereignty,” in The Grace of God, The Will of Man, Clark H. Pinnock, ed. [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1989], 112).

[3] I note biblical scholarship supporting this position in my book, The Uncontrolling Love of God: An Open and Relational Account of Providence (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press Academic, 2015

Charles Taylor - How To Restore Your Faith in Democracy

Note: All photos placed in this post by myself in relation to the subject 

of Democracy. The New Yorker is not responsible for these photos.

How to Restore Your Faith in Democracy

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/how-to-restore-your-faith-in-democracy

By Joshua Rothman

November 11, 2016

In dark times, it’s tempting to give up on politics. The

philosopher Charles Taylor explains why we shouldn’t.

Two weeks ago—when the election of Donald Trump was still, to many people, an almost comedic idea—Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, visited the Social Science Research Council, in Brooklyn, to talk about the fate of democracy with some graduate students. He had just won the Berggruen Prize, which is awarded, along with a million dollars, to a philosopher “whose ideas are intellectually profound but also able to inform practical and public life.” Taylor’s books tell the story of how some sources of value (love, art, individuality) have grown in relevance, while others (God, king, tradition) have declined. When we met, Taylor’s newest work was a lecture called “Some Crises of Democracy.” Citizens in Western democracies, he argued, used to find personal fulfillment in political participation; now, they were coming to feel that the democratic process was a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and that democratic politicians were con artists. Their desperation and cynicism seemed capable of turning these beliefs into self-fulfilling prophecies.

Taylor, who is eighty-five, is tall and handsome, with athletic shoulders and a thinker’s high, domed forehead. He radiates kindliness and thoughtful equanimity. Leaning back in his chair, he spoke softly, pausing frequently to cough—he had a cold—or to chuckle, in self-deprecation, at his own philosophical eloquence. (A typical laugh line: “How people understand democracy is different from epoch to epoch—that’s what the term ‘social imaginary’ is meant to capture!") Economists, psychologists, political theorists, and some philosophers share a view of personhood: they think of people as “rational actors” who make decisions by “maximizing utility”—in other words, by looking out for themselves. Taylor, by contrast, understands human behavior in terms of the search for meaning. His work has been to make a farcically vague concept—“the meaning of life”—historical and concrete. In more than a dozen books, including “Sources of the Self,” from 1989, and the monumental “A Secular Age,” from 2007, he has explored the secret histories of our individual, religious, and political ideals, and mapped the inner tensions that cause those ideals to blossom or to break apart.

Taylor speaks like he writes—patiently, at length—and, at the S.S.R.C., he explained, step by step, how we find democracy meaningful. “Democracy is teleological,” Taylor said. “It’s a collective effort with a noble goal: inclusion.” As democratic citizens, we enjoy taking pride in democracy’s achievements: suffrage, immigration, civil rights. But, just as often, we feel anger and shame about rising inequality, insufficient representation, corruption. Democracies, often ruled by a revolving cast of élites, rarely live up to their utopian promises of inclusivity. Shame prevents us from being complacent; it urges us toward self-critique. Pride provides us with a sense of direction. The balance makes democracy a struggle we can believe in. “In some ways, democracy is a fiction that we’re trying to realize,” Taylor said.

This October, in the Washington Post, a Stanford political scientist reported that forty per cent of Americans had “lost faith in democracy”; a few weeks later, eight in ten voters told the Times that they felt “disgusted” by politics. Around the seminar table in Brooklyn, the graduate students—a chic, polyglot group from the U.S., Russia, France, and elsewhere—name-checked, in the course of their discussion, the issues that had raised feelings of shame to toxic levels: the suspicion that elections are “rigged” by lobbyists, donors, or establishment politicians (Donna Brazile’s leaking of debate questions had not yet come to light); the conviction that policy decisions are shaped by financiers (some of Hillary Clinton’s paid speeches had recently been leaked); a widespread lack of accountability (for the bankers of 2008, the officials of Flint, Michigan, police officers, and others); the knowledge that Americans talk almost entirely to people who already share their political views. As each of these democratic failures was mentioned, Taylor, dressed in a down vest and hiking sneakers, nodded in recognition.

We’re used to thinking about political life as a series of battles in which different groups jockey for influence; we worry that these battles are too divisive. But in this election, divisiveness was rendered even more troubling by a creeping nihilism that made our collective behavior both more lackadaisical and more unhinged. Many people who voted for Clinton did so while “holding their noses”; others pitched in for Trump even though they didn’t really believe in him. (Sixty per cent of voters surveyed as they left the polls said that Trump was “not qualified” to be President.) As Taylor explained, during a crisis of democratic faith, we may still go to the polls. But we’ll participate in a spirit of anger, spite, irony, or despair. Some of us, Taylor concluded, will cast votes that are, essentially, “declarations of disbelief.” He laughed, softly, at this well-turned phrase, while the students took notes.

Taylor was born in 1931, near Montreal. He grew up in a household defined by religious and political commitments. His father was an Anglophone Anglican, his mother a Francophone Catholic. The household had a skeptical wing: his paternal grandfather attended Mass, but was a “Voltaireian anti-clerical” at home, he told me, in a conference room after the end of his seminar. The Second World War was the defining fact of Taylor’s childhood. “I remember every major event after the middle of the nineteen-thirties. The start of the war, the bombing of Madrid. The climax—a day I’ll never forget—was when France sued for the armistice,” he said, referring to the French surrender, on June 22, 1940. “In my family, that was the end of civilization.”

Taylor’s father was a veteran of the First World War, an avid reader of military history, and a Canadian senator. “He always had big projects going about strengthening the relationship between Canada and France,” Taylor recalled. In the sixties, Taylor helped found Canada’s New Democratic Party, serving as its vice-president and the president of its Quebec branch. He ran for Parliament four times, losing, in one instance, to Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s future Prime Minister. (Trudeau’s son, Justin, is the country’s current P.M.) Taylor is a devout Catholic—perhaps the only one to have written an eight-hundred-page history of secularism. He has raised five daughters. He loves nature and, whenever he can, works from a remote farmhouse about a hundred miles from Montreal, “in a wild area with wolves and bears.” He is the opposite of a nihilist—he believes in many things, very strongly.

Taylor often thinks that he is stating the obvious: “In moments of discouragement, I feel it’s all entirely self-evident, like two and two is four.” But some ideas, though true, are rarely stated, or need to be stated again and again. Real belief, Taylor reminded me—the kind of belief that offers some form of spiritual fulfillment—can be dangerous. Around the time of the Second World War, he said, many thinkers grew wary of such beliefs. “Joseph Schumpeter and others thought it would be better to care less,” Taylor told me. “The idea was to go to the polls every four years and elect an élite team. Don’t get excited and have mass movements of Communism and Fascism. It’s an idea that says, ‘Avoid the worst—avoid the terrible things that arise.’ ” He paused, then shrugged. “I have another ethic. I’m with Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hannah Arendt, Rousseau, Montesquieu. I believe it’s a higher mode of being to participate in your own self-government.” In Taylor's view, cool disengagement is a fiction; an ardent search for goodness is the human reality. “We all seek a sense of what it would be like to be fully connected to something. We all have a sense of what really living, and not just existing, would be. We know that there’s a level of life that’s rare to attain. And whether we attain that or not can be a source of deep satisfaction or shame to us.” It’s possible, Taylor said, to live as a “resident alien” in a democracy, going to work and raising your family without “getting a charge” out of the democratic story. But something might happen to change that. “The feeling that I’m really happy to be living in this society or that I’m really upset; that I’m either living fully or being deprived of that experience—those feelings are signs that the ethic of democracy has seized you.”

Taylor’s philosophy has been decisively shaped by his political work. “His view of social and political life,” Isaiah Berlin wrote, has “an authenticity, a concreteness, and a sense of reality” unusual in philosophy; it is “generously receptive, deeply humane and formed by the truth as he sees it, and not as it ought to be in accordance with dogmatically held premises or overmastering ideology.” During one particularly formative period, Taylor served on a government commission on the question of Québécois sovereignty. (He has argued that, while the cultural and linguistic heritage of Quebec ought to be recognized, the region should remain part of Canada.) At public forums, Taylor heard from Francophone Canadians who were torn between resentment of the Catholic Church on the one hand and regional Québécois pride on the other. One man, Taylor recalled, raged at a parish priest who had “forced my grandmother to have so many children,” while also defending his Québécois heritage, or patrimoine, which was bound up with Catholicism. “At those forums, I learned a lot about how people think and why they’re scared,” he said. “I heard the same feelings expressed over and over again, and the penny dropped. I learned the nature of the fear of being changed.”

Taylor believes that, as individuals, we derive our sense of selfhood from shared values that are, in turn, embodied in public institutions. When those institutions change, those changes reverberate within us: they can seem to endanger the very meanings of our lives. It’s partly for this reason that events in the political world can devastate us so intimately, striking us with the force of a breakup or a death. (Similarly, a charismatic candidate can, like a new object of infatuation, help us find new possibilities within ourselves.)

Taylor’s calm, scholarly empathy is reassuring; his three-point program for engaging with one’s political opponents—“Try to listen; find out what’s troubling them; stop condemning”—is deeply humane. At times, speaking about Trump’s racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic rhetoric, his voice would rise in anger. Then he would pause, take a breath, and remind me that enthusiasm for Trump could be seen as a genuine and ardent, if misguided, expression of the democratic ethos. “The belief that democracy is supposed to be a system in which non-élites have a say—that principle is built right into the nature of democracy,” he said. “But there are constructive ways of asserting it and destructive ways.” Where Bernie Sanders had proposed a program that might have actually given non-élites more power, Trump proposed to consolidate power among a subset of non-élites by, as Taylor put it, “excising some populations from his definition of ‘the people.’ ”

In answering the central question of “A Secular Age”—“Why was it virtually impossible to not believe in God in, say, 1500 . . . while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”—Taylor begins by quoting Honorius of Autun, one of the “scholar-monks of the high middle ages” who wrote during the eleventh century. At times, he seems to talk about present-day politics from this same distant and philosophical vantage. “As long as human beings aspire, they will be capable of corrupting the object of their aspiration,” he told me. “I’m a person of faith, and I would feel terribly deprived if I didn’t have that faith. But I also see how the corruption of faith is terrible. Think of the Inquisition. If I were Muslim, I would look at the present situation in Saudi Arabia and with the Islamic State and I would be appalled, as my Muslim friends are. There will always be modes of the supposed best that can be corrupted.” This principle, he suggested, is as true for democratic faith as for any other kind—a thought worth keeping in mind at moments like these, when the very meaning of the word “democracy” seems to be in dispute.

This week, I found myself thinking about Trump’s victory through the lens of my conversations with Taylor. Trump’s frank negativity—“We’re losing at everything”—spoke directly to Americans’ disillusionment; his emotional, unmediated spontaneity suggested, to some people, that a remote and overrehearsed political world might be made vibrant and fulfilling again. And yet it’s hard to see, in the long term, how a reality-TV host and élite megalomaniac will help citizens feel that their political engagement has meaning. Trump has created a pop-up movement—a media event built to last for the duration of a single campaign season. Similarly, many Americans felt empowered when they were actively involved in Obama’s candidacy—and then returned to being passive consumers of politics.

Plato proposed a republic run by enlightened philosophers, and Taylor has some ideas about what he might do if he were in charge. In big cities, he told me, it’s easy for people to feel engaged in the project of democracy; they’re surrounded by the drama of inclusion. But in the countryside, where jobs are disappearing, main streets are empty, and church attendance is down, democracy seems like a fantasy, and people end up “sitting at home, watching television. Their only contact with the country’s problems is a sense that everything’s going absolutely crazy. They have no sense of control.” He advocates raising taxes and giving the money to small towns, so that they can rebuild. He is in favor of localism and “subsidiarity”—the principle, cited by Alexis de Tocqueville and originating in Catholicism, that problems should be solved by people who are nearby. Perhaps, instead of questing for political meaning on Facebook and YouTube, we could begin finding it in projects located near to us. By that means, we could get a grip on our political selves, and be less inclined toward nihilism on the national scale. (It would help if there were less gerrymandering and money in politics, too.)

One imagines what this sort of rooted, meaningful democracy might look like. A political life centered on local schools, town governments, voluntary associations, and churches; a house in the woods with the television turned off. Inside, family members aren’t glued to their phones. They talk, over dinner, about politics, history, and faith, about national movements and local ones; they feel, all the time, that they’re doing something. It’s a pastoral vision, miles away from the media-driven election we’ve just concluded. But it’s not a fantasy.

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Joshua Rothman, the ideas editor of newyorker.com, has been at The New Yorker since 2012.

Charles Taylor - Review of Book: "A Secular Age" by Wikipedia

A Secular Age, by Charles Taylor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Secular Age

Author	Charles Taylor
Language	English
Subject	Secularity
Publisher	Harvard University Press
Publication date	2007
Media type	Print
Pages	874
ISBN	978-0-674-02676-6

A Secular Age is a book written by the philosopher Charles Taylor which was published in 2007 by Harvard University Press on the basis of Taylor's earlier Gifford Lectures (Edinburgh 1998–99). The noted sociologist Robert Bellah^[1] has referred to A Secular Age as "one of the most important books to be written in my lifetime."^[2]

Background and Overview

In recent years, secularity has become an important topic in the humanities and social sciences. Although there continue to be important disagreements among scholars, many begin with the premise that secularism is not simply the absence of religion, but rather an intellectual and political category that itself needs to be understood as a historical construction. In this book, Taylor looks at the change in Western society from a condition in which it is almost impossible not to believe in God, to one in which believing in God is simply one option of many. He argues against the view that secularity in society is caused by the rise of science and reason. He argues that this view is far too simplistic and does not explain why people would abandon their faith. Taylor starts with a description of the Middle Ages and presents the changes to bring about the modern secular age. The Middle Ages were a time of enchantment. People believed in God, angels, demons, witches, the Church's sacraments, relics, and sacred places. Each of these types of things had mysterious, real effects on individuals and society. The early Middle Ages were content to have two speeds for people's spiritual development. The clergy and a few others were at the faster, more intense speed. Everyone else was only expected to plod along at a slower spiritual speed. The High Middle Ages had a strong focus on bringing everyone along to a higher realm of spirituality and life.

Up until a few hundred years ago, the common viewpoint of the North Atlantic world was basically Christian. Most people could not even consider a viewpoint without God. The culture has changed so that multiple viewpoints are now conceivable to most people. This change is accomplished through three major facets of Deism: one, an anthropocentric shift in now conceiving of Nature as primarily for people; two, the idea that God relates to us primarily through an impersonal order that He established; and three, the idea that religion is to be understood from Nature by reason alone. Deism is considered the major intermediate step between the previous age of belief in God and the modern secular age.[3] Three modes of secularity are distinguished: one, secularized public spaces; two, the decline of belief and practice; and three, cultural conditions where unbelief in religion is a viable option. This text focuses on secularity three.[4]

In his previous work, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Taylor focuses on the developments which led to the identity of modern individuals in the West. This work focuses on the developments which led to modern social structures. The content of Sources of the Self is complementary to A Secular Age. Taylor discussed the political implications of A Secular Age in an interview with The Utopian.[5]

Outline

Preface/Introduction

Taylor is "telling a story… of 'secularization' in the modern West" (p.ix), and what the process amounts to, i.e., religion: "as that which is retreating in public space (1), or as a type of belief and practice which is or is not in regression (2), and as a certain kind of belief or commitment whose conditions in this age are being examined (3)." (p. 15)

Taylor does not believe that the decline in belief occurred because "'Darwin refuted the Bible,' as allegedly said by a Harrow schoolboy in the 1890s." So he wants to discuss belief and unbelief "not as rival theories… but as different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding your life in one way or the other" (p. 5). Where is the place of richness or fullness, and its opposite, the place of absence or exile? There is also the "middle condition", the daily activities between the extremes, and their meaning.

For believers, the place of fullness is God. For unbelievers, it is within the power of reason (Enlightenment) or Nature, or our inner depths (Romanticism). Also, postmodernism wants to stand outside reason and sentiment, on the idea that fullness is a projection that cannot be found.

In the old world, people could have a naive belief, but today belief or unbelief is "reflective", and includes a knowledge that other people do or do not believe. We look over our shoulder at other beliefs, but we still each live a "background", with our beliefs "held within a context or framework of the taken-for-granted... tacit... because never formulated." (p. 13)

Part I: The Work of Reform

"[W]hy was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?" (p. 25). God's presence retreated in three dimensions. (1) People no longer see natural events as acts of God. (2) Society "could only be conceived as grounded in something higher than human action in secular time." (p. 25) (3) People lived then in an enchanted world, now in disenchantment.

Rejecting the "subtraction" theory of secularization, Taylor believes that a movement of Reform in Christianity, aiming to raise everyone up to the highest levels of religious devotion and practice, caused the move to secularization. The disciplined Reformed self replaced the "porous" self, which was vulnerable to external forces like spirits and demons, with a new "buffered" self, a disciplined and free agent living in a progressively disenchanted world.

The success of Reform and the propagation of successful disciplined selves leads to a disciplinary society that starts to take action against rowdiness and indiscipline: controlling the poor, taming the warrior aristocracy, suppressing "feasts of misrule" like Carnival. Calvinists and Puritans were "industrious, disciplined... mutually predictable... With such men a safe, well-ordered society can be built." (p. 106) The success of the project encouraged an anthropocentrism that opened the gates for a godless humanism. (p. 130) "So disengaged discipline frames a new experience of the self as having a telos of autarky." (p. 138)

Early humans were embedded into the world in three ways: into their small-scale social group in which religious ritual was identical with social ritual; into the cosmos, the enchanted world of spirits and forces; and the cosmos into the divine, so that the gods are intimately involved with the project of human flourishing. Thus: "Human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine." (p. 152)

This embedding is broken, for an elite, by the "higher" religions of the Axial Age. Humans are individuals, no longer embedded in society, God is no longer embedded in the cosmos, but separate, and the notion of human flourishing becomes transformed, e.g., in "a salvation which takes us beyond what we usually understand as human flourishing." (p. 152) In the Reformation and after, this disembedding extended more and more from the elite to the whole population.

More and more, in recent times: "Humans are rational, sociable agents who are meant to collaborate in peace to their mutual benefit." (p. 159) This modern social imaginary is the Modern Moral Order, and it is a radical break with the two pre-modern moral orders, the idea of "the Law of a people" (p. 163) or the organization of society "around a notion of hierarchy in society which expresses and corresponds to a hierarchy in the cosmos." (p. 163)

Taylor sees "three important forms of social self-understanding." (p. 176) "They are, respectively (1) the "economy", (2) the public sphere, and (3) the practices and outlooks of democratic self-rule." (p.176) Both the economy and the public sphere are conceived as existing independent of the political power. In the notion of economy is the "invisible hand" and the exchange of advantages in a relationship of interlocking causes. The state becomes "the orchestrating power that can make an economy flourish." (p. 178)

This new moral order is no longer a society of "mediated access" where the subjects are held together by an apex, a King. "We have moved from a hierarchical order of personalized links to an impersonal egalitarian one, from a vertical world of mediated access to horizontal, direct-access societies." (p. 209)

Taylor anticipates that his approach might be attacked as "idealism" against the Marxian requirement of "materialism." But ideas and material conditions are inseparable. "'Ideas' always come in history wrapped up in certain practices" (p. 213).

Part II: The Turning Point

The program of Reform, by creating a disciplined, ordered society, in which the vulnerable "porous self" became the disengaged "buffered self", created a distance between humans and God. Thus, exclusive humanism became an option through the "notion of the world designed by God… God relates to us primarily by establishing a certain order of things… We obey God by following the demands of this order." (p. 221) A true, original, natural religion, once obscured, is now to be laid clear again.

Christianity always provided for ordinary human flourishing, but included inscrutable divine grace. With deism, grace became eclipsed, for people endowed with reason and benevolence need only these faculties to carry out God's plan. God's providence, once a mystery, is just God's plan. Eventually, we come to Feuerbach: "that the potentialities we have attributed to God are really human potentialities." (p. 251)

Taylor makes a threefold claim. First, that "exclusive humanism arose in connection with, indeed, as an alternative set of moral sources for, the ethic of freedom and mutual benefit." Second, that "it couldn't have arisen in any other way at the time." (p. 259) Third, that today's wide range of unbelief still originates "in the ethic of beneficent order."

The usual interpretation of the changing understanding of God in recent centuries is a move from a "supreme being with powers… [of] agency and personality" to God as creator of a "law-governed structure" to "an indifferent universe, with God either indifferent or non-existent." (p. 270) This is the subtraction story, but Taylor believes that it is more complicated than that.

The official Enlightenment story is that "people started using Reason and Science, instead of Religion and Superstition" (p. 273) to explain the world. The social order can be organized by rational codes, and human relationships which matter are prescribed in the codes. But the motive force behind this development was reformed Christianity and its move to a designer God in the early modern period.

In the new epistemic predicament, humans "acquire knowledge by exploring impersonal orders with the aid of disengaged reason." (p. 294) They form "societies under the normative provisions of the Modern Moral Order." In the secularist understanding, "human beings discover that they just are humans united in societies which can have no other normative principles but those of the MMO." (p. 294) "It is a massive shift in horizon."

Part III: The Nova Effect

Taylor sees three stages of a nova effect, an explosion of secularity beginning with "an exclusive alternative to Christian faith" (p. 299) in the 18th century. It was followed by diversification in the 19th century, even to the Nietzschean break with the humanism of freedom and mutual benefit. Finally, in the last fifty years, the nova has exploded to reach beneath elites to whole societies and includes "a generalised culture of 'authenticity', or expressive individualism," of doing your own thing.

But there are cross pressures. Against the freedom from "unreasoning fears" there is a feeling of malaise, of something lost. Heroism is lost in the leveling down of aspiration; utilitarianism is thought too flat and shallow. There is no room for death.

Unbelief in the middle-to-late 19th century began to take up the profound new sense of the universe, its vastness in space and time, and in the lack of a plan. Taylor calls this the modern "cosmic imaginary" (the natural version of the modern "social imaginary"). "Our present sense of things fails to touch bottom anywhere." (p. 325) Through the idea of the sublime and recovery of the "well-springs of sympathy" (p. 344) in Herder and Rousseau lost to disengaged reason, we reach eventually the Will of Schopenhauer. We experience a universe maybe without a "rational, benign plan", bottomless, and the "locus of our dark genesis".

This leads to the theories of Freud, that the "highest functions, thinking, willing, are... the product of neuro-physiological functions in us." (p. 348) The new imaginary sustains a range of views, from "the hardest materialism through to Christian orthodoxy." (p. 351) This has confounded the war between belief and unbelief.

The opening up of different ways in experiencing the world includes a shift in the place of art. Instead of mimesis, the retelling of the Christian world-view through its standard symbols and reference points, we have a creative art that must develop its own reference points. Artists "make us aware of something in nature for which there are as yet no established words... In this 'subtler language'... something is defined and created as well as manifested." (p. 353) This applies to poetry, painting, and music taking an "absolute" turn, decoupled from story and representation. Yet they still move. But why? The mystery provides a place of the spiritual and the deep for the unbeliever.

Taylor invokes Schiller and his notion of "beauty as an aid to being moral," a "stage of unity as a higher stage, beyond moralism" obtained through play, the way we "create and respond to beauty." (p. 358) It creates an unspecified space "between religious commitment and materialism." (p. 360)

In the 19th century, two additional factors influenced people in renouncing their faith in God: advances in science and Biblical scholarship, and the new cosmic imaginary.

People came to feel that the "impersonal order of regularities" was a more mature standpoint than the faith in a personal God. The new cosmic imaginary of a universe vast in time and space also argued against "a personal God or benign purpose." A materialist view is adult; faith in a personal God is childish.

Another view is associated with Nietzsche, the "post-Schopenhauerian" vision that notices the "irrational, amoral, even violent forces within us." (p. 369) These "cannot simply be condemned and uprooted, because our existence, and/or vitality, creativity, strength, ability to create beauty depend on them." This rebels against the Enlightenment in a way that echoes the old aristocratic and warrior ethos, a "revolt from within unbelief... against the primacy of life" (p. 372) i.e., that "our highest goal is to preserve and increase life, to prevent suffering... Life properly understood also affirms death and destruction." (p. 373)

Thus, it is possible for people to live in a world encountering "no echo outside." This view experiences "its world entirely as immanent." (p. 376)

After a resurgence of belief driven by the evangelical movement, by the 1830s elites began to experience again the cross-pressure between "the inescapable idea of an impersonal order" (p. 378) and the need to avoid a flattened world shorn of the values of Christianity. Carlyle attempted his own faith in "the human potential for spiritual/moral ascent" (p. 380) in the face of "utilitarian-commercial-industrial society." In Matthew Arnold, this becomes a faith in culture, "the best that has been thought and said in the world." (p. 384) Darwin and evolution changed everything, but the "need to articulate something fuller, deeper" (p. 391) continues.

The high cultural trajectory was accompanied by the slow replacement of the vertical understanding of society into the modern horizontal idea of rights-bearing individuals related in mutual benefit, a combination of constitutional monarchy, rights and freedoms, Protestant religions, and British "decency", i.e., character and self-control. This strenuous ethic of belief set up "an unbelieving philosophy of self-control" (p. 395) in Leslie Stephen and John Stuart Mill, a "humanism of altruism and duty." (p. 398)

But this moralism provoked a rebellion by the young at the end of the century. It was too materialistic and too stifling. The new rebels were opposed not only to the "ethic of self-control in its altruistic, public-spirited facet, but also in its individualistic, self-improving, 'self-help' aspect." (p. 401) In one version, with G. M. Trevelyan, it teeters on the edge of the material/transcendent divide, in another, with Walter Pater, it replaces the transcendent with aestheticism.

Bloomsbury was another approach, an ethic of "personal relations and beautiful states of mind." (p. 405) It carried immanence another step, identifying the intrinsically valuable with the internal experience and sensibility. Then along came World War I. Here was a war fought for "civilization... the protection of life from violence through order and law." (p. 407) Yet the war was a "greater negation of civilized life than any foe threatened." Thus Ezra Pound's notion of "a botched civilization" and T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land." For intellectuals, it was impossible to inhabit the mental world of Rupert Brooke. Educated people could not deploy images of dedication and patriotism without distance and irony. "The will was suspect" (p. 411), a "formula for destruction rather than virtue." We get to the post-war consensus of an interventionist state. There is an option to believe that is wisely refused, and a confident, buffered identity.

The trajectory took different forms in the Catholic cultures. In particular, in France the modern order of mutual benefit, in its Rousseau version, becomes republican and anti-Christian, if not always clearly atheist. The notion of humans as innocent and good requires a political order opposed to the Christian original sin. The social imaginary "is grounded in exclusive humanism" (p. 412) and becomes radicalized in Marxist socialism. Opposed to this imaginary was "Reaction", a vertical hierarchy "where differences of rank were respected" (p. 413) and each had his place under monarchy, albeit justified by its beneficial consequences rather than an ontic logos.

An ideal order "stressing rights, liberties and democracy, squares off against a counter-ideal which stresses obedience, hierarchy, belonging to, even sacrifice." (p. 414) But there can be crossovers, with Comte and a scientific "religion to provide social cohesion" and an unbelieving Nietzsche with heroes, suffering as an ineradicable dimension that "heroes learn to face and surmount." (p. 415) By 1912, Henri Massis and Alfred de Tarde write of a generation of youth needing a new discipline to create order and hierarchy and commitment against the dilettante generation of 1885. This movement was shattered in World War I. Many went into the war celebrating the opportunity for "heroism and dedication" only to be "sent wholesale to death in a long, mechanized slaughter." (p. 417)

The crisis of civilization dealt a body blow to established Christianity, and provoked "new, unbelieving variants of the vertical ideal of order" (p. 418) in fascism and Nazism. Thus, the struggle between belief and unbelief "has been connected with ideals and counter-ideals of the moral order of society. But this conflict has disappeared, as religion has delinked from society into "a new kind of niche in society." (p. 419)

Part IV: Narratives of Secularization

The Age of Mobilization

To combat the standard narrative of secularization, e.g., Steve Bruce's proposal that the endpoint of secularization is a widespread indifference to religion, and "no socially significant shared religion" (p. 435), Taylor proposes an age of mobilization, from about 1800 to 1960 where religious forms of the ancien régime-type suffered decay, but new forms that fit the age "recruited and mobilized people on an impressive scale." (p. 471) Churches organized their members' lives and inspired intense loyalty, so that "people would be schooled, play football, take their recreation, etc., exclusively among co-religionists." (p. 472)

In France, this process played out as a direct combat between the ancien régime church and the secular Republicans in which the Church began organizing lay people in new bodies for fundraising, pilgrimages, and "Catholic Action". In the Anglophone world this mobilization occurred through "denominations" (e.g. Methodists) that "are like affinity groups" (p. 449), an organizing force to help people struggling to find their feet in the market economy.

The Age of Authenticity

But with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the age of mobilization came to an end, at least in the modern West. The last half-century has seen a cultural revolution in the North Atlantic civilization. "As well as moral/spiritual and instrumental individualisms, we now have a widespread "expressive" individualism." (p.473) Taylor calls this a culture of "authenticity", from the Romantic expressivism that erupted in the late 18th century elite, "that each one of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one's own." (p. 475)

This affects the social imaginary. To the "horizontal" notion of "the economy, the public sphere, and the sovereign people" (p. 481) is added a space of fashion, a culture of mutual display. The modern moral order of mutual benefit has been strengthened, mutual respect requires that "we shouldn't criticize each other's 'values'" (p. 484), in particular on sexual matters. Since "my" religious life or practice is my personal choice, my "link to the sacred" may not be embedded in "nation" or "church". This is a continuation of the Romantic move away from reason towards a "subtler language" (Shelley) to understand individual "spiritual insight/feeling." "Only accept what rings true to your own inner Self." (p. 489) This has "undermined the link between Christian faith and civilizational order." (p. 492)

The revolution in sexual behavior has broken the culture of "moralism" that dominated most of the last half millennium. Developing individualism was bound to come into conflict with moralism, but in the mid-20th century, the dam broke. Thinkers started to think of sexual gratification as good, or at least unstoppable, especially as "in cities, young people could pair off without supervision." (p. 501) Now people are not bound by moralism: "they form, break, then reform relationships;" (p. 496) they experiment.

It is a tragedy, however, that "the codes which churches want to urge on people" still suffer from "the denigration of sexuality, horror at the Dionysian, fixed gender roles, or a refusal to discuss identity issues." (p. 503)

Religion Today

Today, the "neo-Durkheimian embedding of religion in a state" (p. 505) and a "close interweaving of religion, life-style and patriotism" (p. 506) has been called into question. People are asking, like Peggy Lee, "Is that all there is?" They are heirs of the expressive revolution, "seeking a kind of unity and wholeness of the self... of the body and its pleasures... The stress is on unity, integrity, holism, individuality." (p. 507) This is often termed "spirituality" as opposed to "organized religion."

This has caused a breaking down of barriers between religious groups but also a decline in active practice and a loosening of commitment to orthodox dogmas. A move from an Age of Mobilization to an Age of Authenticity, it is a "retreat of Christendom". Fewer people will be "kept within a faith by some strong political or group identity," (p. 514) although a core (vast in the United States) will remain in neo-Durkheimian identities, with its potential for manipulation by such as "Milosevic, and the BJP." (p. 515)

Assuming that "the human aspiration to religion will [not] flag" (p. 515), spiritual practice will extend beyond ordinary church practice to involve meditation, charitable work, study groups, pilgrimage, special prayer, etc. It will be "unhooked" from the paleo-Durkheimian sacralized society, the neo-Durkheimian national identity, or center of "civilizational order", but still collective. "One develops a religious life." (p. 518)

While religious life continues, many people retain a nominal tie with the church, particularly in Western Europe. This "penumbra" seems to have diminished since 1960. More people stand outside belief, and no longer participate in rites of passage like church baptism and marriage. Yet people respond to, e.g. in France the 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, or in Sweden the loss of a trans-Baltic ferry. Religion "remains powerful in memory; but also as a kind of reserve fund of spiritual force or consolation." (p. 522)

This distancing is not experienced in the United States. This may be (1) because immigrants used church membership as a way to establish themselves: "Go to the church of your choice, but go." (p. 524) Or (2) it may be the difficulty that the secular elite has in imposing its "social imaginary" on the rest of society vis-a-vis hierarchical Europe. Also (3) the U.S. never had an ancien régime, so there has never been a reaction against the state church. Next (4) the groups in the U.S. have reacted strongly against the post-1960s culture, unlike Europe. A majority of Americans remain happy in "one Nation under God". There are fewer skeletons in the family closet, and "it is easier to be unreservedly confident in your own rightness when you are the hegemonic power." (p. 528) Finally (5) the U.S. has provided experimental models of post-Durkheimian religion at least for a century.

After summarizing his argument, Taylor looks to the future, which might follow the slow reemergence of religion in Russia in people raised in the "wasteland" of militant atheism, but suddenly grabbed by God, or it might follow the "spiritual but not religious" phenomenon in the West. "In any case, we are just at the beginning of a new age of religious searching, whose outcome no one can foresee."

Part V: Conditions of Belief

We live in an immanent frame. That is the consequence of the story Taylor has told, in disenchantment and the creation of the buffered self and the inner self, the invention of privacy and intimacy, the disciplined self, individualism. Then Reform, the breakup of the cosmic order and higher time in secular, making the best of clock time as a limited resource. The immanent frame can be open, allowing for the possibility of the transcendent, or closed. Taylor argues that both arguments are "spin" and "involve a step beyond available reasons into the realm of anticipatory confidence" (p. 551) or faith.

There are several Closed World Structures that assume the immanent frame. One is the idea of the rational agent of modern epistemology. Another is the idea that religion is childish, so "An unbeliever has the courage to take up an adult stance and face reality." (p. 562) Taylor argues that the Closed World Structures do not really argue their worldviews, they "function as unchallenged axioms" (p. 590) and it just becomes very hard to understand why anyone would believe in God.

Living in the immanent frame, "The whole culture experiences cross pressures, between the draw of the narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other." (p. 595) Materialists respond to the aesthetic experience of poetry. Theists agree with the Modern Moral Order and its agenda of universal human rights and welfare. Romantics "react against the disciplined, buffered self" (p. 609) that seems to sacrifice something essential with regard to feelings and bodily existence.

To resolve the modern cross pressures and dilemmas, Taylor proposes a "maximal demand" that we define our moral aspirations in terms that do not "crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity". (p. 640) It aspires to wholeness and transcendence yet also tries to "fully respect ordinary human flourishing." (p. 641)

Taylor imagines a two-dimensional moral space. The horizontal gives you a "point of resolution, the fair award." (p. 706) The vertical hopes to rise higher, to reestablish trust, "to overcome fear by offering oneself to it; responding with love and forgiveness, thereby tapping a source of goodness, and healing" (p. 708) and forgoing the satisfaction of moral victory over evil in sacred violence, religious or secular.

Taylor examines the Unquiet Frontiers of Modernity, how we follow the Romantic search for fullness, yet seem to respond still to our religious heritage. We replace the old "higher time" with autobiography, history, and commemoration. Many moderns are uncomfortable with death, "the giving up of everything." (p. 725)

"Our age is very far from settling into a comfortable unbelief." (p. 727) "The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressured." (p. 727) Against unbelief, Taylor presents a selection of recent spiritual conversions or "epiphanic" experiences in Catholic artists and writers, including Václav Havel, Ivan Illich, Charles Péguy, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. The path to the future is a rich variety of paths to God in a unity of the church and a new approach to the question of the sexual/sensual. The disciplined, disengaged secular world is challenged by a return to the body in Pentecostalism. There is a "profound interpenetration of eros and the spiritual life." (p. 767) "[I]n our religious lives we are responding to a transcendent reality." (p. 768) Our seeking for "fullness" is our response to it.

Secular belief is a shutting out. "The door is barred against further discovery." (p. 769) But in the secular "'waste land'… young people will begin again to explore beyond the boundaries." (p. 770) It will, Taylor believes, involve a move away from "excarnation", the disembodying of spiritual life, and from homogenization in a single principle, to celebrate the "integrity of different ways of life." (p. 772)

Epilogue: The Many Stories

In a brief afterword, Taylor links his narrative to similar efforts by e.g., John Milbank and the Radical Orthodoxy movement, while also elucidating the distinctiveness of his own approach. He calls the tale told by Radical Orthodoxy thinkers the "Intellectual Deviation" story, which focuses on "changes in theoretical understanding, mainly among learned and related élites," (p. 774) whereas the story he relates, which he names the "Reform Master Narrative," is more concerned with how secularity "emerges as a mass phenomenon." (p. 775) Both these stories are complementary, "exploring different sides of the same mountain." (p. 775) In his review of the book, Milbank agreed that Taylor's thesis "…is more fundamental… because the most determining processes are fusions of ideas and practices, not ideas in isolation.^[6]

Criticism

Charles Larmore was critical of A Secular Age in its approach, especially with it having too many references to Catholic theologians and a noticeable absence of Protestant figures (see section I paragraph 7 within the cited article).^[7] Larmore also sees A Secular Age offering nothing new and is simply an extension of Max Weber's work on secularization theory (Section II, paragraph 1) with Weber and Taylor having differences that may be attributable to Weber being "a lapsed Protestant" and Taylor being "an ardent Catholic" (section II, paragraph 2). Larmore feels Taylor, in his book, may have "an adequate basis for jumping to metaphysical or religious conclusions" concerning the understanding of a secular view of the world, but to do so is "precisely what we ought not to do" (Section II, paragraph 5). Larmore disagrees with Taylor's insistence that people, having adequate information, should take a stance on God's presence throughout the world (Section II, paragraph 7). In Larmore's opinion, Taylor is wrong in not recognizing that "We have never been, and we will never be, at one with ourselves" and, therefore, should not jump to conclusions that are based on faith - which Larmore believes Taylor did in his book (Section II, paragraph 12).

Reviews

A Secular Age has been reviewed in newspapers such as The New York Times^[8] and The Guardian,^[9] magazines such as The New Republic^[7] and The American Prospect,^[10] and professional journals such as Intellectual History Review,^[11] Political Theory,^[12] Implicit Religion,^[13] and European Journal of Sociology.^[14]

References

1. ^ "2000 National Humanities Medal Winners". National Endowment for the Humanities. Archived from the original on 23 January 2015. Retrieved 23 January 2015.
2. ^ "Secularism of a new kind", The Immanent Frame (blog), SSRC, 19 October 2017
3. ^ p 221
4. ^ p 20
5. ^ Meaney, Thomas and Mounk, Yascha. Spititual Gains Archived2010-10-04 at the Wayback Machine, the Utopian, December 7, 2010
6. ^ Milbank, John (2009). "Review Article: A Closer walk on the Wild Side: Some Comments on Charles Taylor's a Secular Age". Studies in Christian Ethics. 22 (1): 100. doi:10.1177/0953946808100228. S2CID 143046007.
7. ^ 
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   ^a b Charles Larmore (April 9, 2008). "How Much Can We Stand? [review of A Secular Age by Charles Taylor]". The New Republic. Chris Hughes. ISSN 0028-6583. Retrieved 2 Jan 2013.
8. ^ John Patrick Diggins (16 December 2007). "The Godless Delusion"
9. ^ Stuart Jeffries (7 December 2007). "Is that all there is?"
10. ^ Aziz Huq (October 2, 2007). "Keeping God Out of It [review of A Secular Age by Charles Taylor]". The American Prospect. Jay Harris. ISSN 1049-7285. Retrieved 2 January 2013.
11. ^ Bill Cooke (2009). "Charles Taylor and the return of theology-as-history". Intellectual History Review. Routledge. 19 (1): 133–139. doi:10.1080/17496970902722999. ISSN 1749-6977. S2CID 170254091.
12. ^ Elizabeth Shakman Hurd (2008). "Books in review: A secular age, by Charles Taylor". Political Theory. 36 (3): 486. doi:10.1177/0090591708315144. ISSN 0090-5917.
13. ^ Vaughan S. Roberts (2009). "A Secular Age by Charles Taylor". Implicit Religion. 12 (1): 121. doi:10.1558/imre.v12i1.121. ISSN 1743-1697.
14. ^ Craig Calhoun (2008). "A Secular Age [review of book by Charles Taylor]". European Journal of Sociology. Cambridge Journals Online. 49(3): 455–461. doi:10.1017/S0003975609000186. ISSN 0003-9756