Deism + Nova (More on A Secular Age)
Continuing our series exploring this book!
Welcome back to our series on the book A Secular Age by philosopher Charles Taylor. 1
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we―in the West, at least―largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean―of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others. (From the publisher)
Our friend and colleague, Jim Aldrich, has been reading and thinking carefully about this book for a long while. We asked him to distill down what he felt are Taylor’s most important ideas and share them with us here, in the hopes that a better understanding of the society in which we live will better equip our churches to show up well. Our world is like a text that must be interpreted; Charles Taylor’s insights might help us do so.
First, a reminder:
You are invited to join us here at Englewood Christian Church in Indianapolis, where our friends at The Ekklesia Project are hosting their annual gathering! Together, we’ll explore the theme of “faithful resistance in troubled times.” Learn more about the gathering and find a link to register.
We hope you’ll join us!
And now, here’s Jim with this week’s reflection on A Secular Age…
A New Vantage Point
So far in this series, we’ve noted many different transitions: the “Rage to Order” and Reform, disenchantment, humanism, the new valuation of human flourishing, and a new modern moral order. Social imaginaries could generate these transitions, but all along, God has not been removed from a place of preeminence. All the shifts in perspective are done to bring all of life in line with God’s goals and intents for us. But all the shifts give humans a different vantage point from which to view God.
“A crucial feature of God’s order…is that it is directed to the good of the creatures which make it up, and especially ourselves.” Thinking of God as having designed the world for our benefit, with an order that can be understood, comes to reduce the purposes of God. “God’s goals for us shrink to the single end of our encompassing this order of mutual benefit he has designed for us.” What Taylor calls an anthropocentric shift takes place, the various forms of which serve to reduce “the role and place of the transcendent.” He notes four aspects of this shift:
An eclipse of the sense of any further purpose beyond embracing God’s goal of human flourishing.
The eclipse of grace; reason and discipline are what we depend on to live this life of mutual benefit, where previously this life depended on God’s grace to accomplish.
The sense of mystery fades. “God’s purposes for us … can be read from the design of our nature, then no further mystery can hide here.”
The eclipse of the idea that God was planning a transformation “which would take them beyond the limitations which inhere in their present condition.”
Imagine then a “social imaginary” in which humanity is at the center of the moral order. Humans are coming to be seen as agents for the benefit of whom God has acted. God becomes the great Designer who put all this in motion for our sake, and so a deism—a Providential deism—came to be.
A New Moral Order
For many of the faithful, who were concerned with a fall-off of religious fervor, the task became one of apologetics, which itself had the effect of narrowing the focus of faith. What God has done in Christ—God’s offers of grace and transformation—lose centrality, while increasingly issues of morality become central. “What is significant is that the plan for a holy life came to be reductively seen as a call to centre on morality, and morality in turn as a matter of conduct”. But still, this morality, this order, was seen as having been the intent and goal of God, for our benefit.
In the ensuing years, this modern moral order and the deist understanding of God it generated continued to be developed in the social, theological, and intellectual environments of 17th and 18th century life. Taylor tracks many of these developments: the civilizing efforts of the social elite, who disciplined themselves to this order of mutual benefit, and promoted it into the general population; the rehabilitation of human desire, from a view that our desires can be destructive if followed to a view that our desires are elements of God’s intent and therefore benign; and the notion that society can be organized such that even our “private vices conduce to public benefit.” Enter Adam Smith and the invisible hand.
Though, at the outset of this way of thinking, God still has standing as Creator and benefactor, God’s role in human activity is severely curtailed. “Particular providences and miracles are out.” An afterlife is still in the works, but that puts any personal act of God in the future, to either reward or punish people for the way they adhered to the constraints of the moral order. But the lived experience of society-at-large is one of increasing confidence in our human ability to understand the natural order and organize society for the benefit of all. And this is understood “in the new, harmonious, economic-centred order, [in which] neither grace nor the nurture of God’s power is seen as all that indispensable.” And, “the points at which God had seemed an indispensable source…began to fade and become invisible. The hitherto unthought became thinkable.” An exclusive humanism could begin to take hold.
Through the multiple settings in which the new “disciplined, instrumentally rational order of mutual benefit” were debated and modified, the conversation kept shifting, generating new and different experiences and views of our human condition.
“Multiple critiques (were) levelled at orthodox religion, Deism, the new humanism, and their cross-polemics…generating a number of new positions…It’s as though the original duality, the positing of a viable humanist alternative, set in train a dynamic, something like a nova effect, spawning an ever-widening variety of moral/spiritual options, across the span of the thinkable, and perhaps even beyond.”
The Nova Effect
Taylor goes on to describe this nova effect. It was, first of all, a shift among the elite of society. (Later on, much later, it will come to be embraced fully in entire societies.) The elite were able to incorporate both the objective and subjective sides of the phenomenon, while the non-elite could “suffer the first without being inducted into the second.” The objective side, Taylor says, is “to have closed the porous boundary between inside (thought) and outside (nature, the physical).” This happypartly as a result of living in a disenchanted world. But also, subjectively, Taylor cites “ …shifts in identity, like the rise of disengaged reason, and the transformations wrought by disciplined self-remaking, including the narrowing and intensifying of intimacy…”
The nova effect exhibited a number of positive effects, all familiar and attractive to very contemporary moderns. These features include:
“A sense of power, of capacity, in being able to order our world and ourselves. To the extent that this power was connected with reason and science, a sense of having made great gains in knowledge and understanding.”
“...a sense of invulnerability. Living in a disenchanted world, the self is no longer open, vulnerable to a world of spirits and forces which cross the boundary of the mind…This sense of self-possession, of a secure inner mental realm, if…we have taken the anthropocentric turn, and no longer even draw on the power of God.”
A kind of distancing from certain previous age-old fears, of history, the unenlightened masses, the resonances of childhood. Such distancing comes with its own sense of satisfaction.
“Above all, there is a certain pride, and sense of one’s own worth…” as one is aware of the achievement this is, in freeing oneself from those unreasonable fears. This achievement is the result “of having won through to this invulnerability out of an earlier state of captivity in an enchanted world.”
But of course, there is also a negative side. Being located now in this rational, disciplined, ordered world, “...can also be lived as a limit, even a prison. Making us blind or insensitive to whatever lies beyond this ordered human world and its instrumental-rational project. The sense can easily arise that we are missing something, cut off from something, that we are living behind a screen.” The disenchanted world has no real substitute for the meaning lost when transcendence is sidelined.
Taylor writes of the “Malaises of Modernity,”—the pressures and cross-pressures to find other options besides orthodoxy and unbelief. Between the authoritarianism and guilt and damnation of orthodox Christianity, and the emptiness and meaninglessness of the disengaged stance, the tensions mounted (and still do) to find a third way. More and more third ways have been created, continuing to the present. The whole situation—Western society—becomes unstable, as the pulls and pushes of the modern moral order generate more critiques and voids that it seems to fill.
But nova isn’t the final word. Taylor says things finally go to super-nova, and produce the now we’ve come to inhabit.
Did you miss the previous post in this series?
Introducing the Social Imaginary
We are back again with Jim Aldrich to talk more about Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age. Jim and some colleagues here have been reading though the book together very s-l-o-w-l-y over time, and we think some of Taylor’s thinking and observations about our ever-shifting societies are important for people of faith to consider.
A Resource for our Current Moment:
Over at The Englewood Review of Books, Lindsey Cornett compiled a list of ten essential picture books about girls using their voice in the church and beyond.
Given the recent news out of the Southern Baptist Convention, it felt like an important time to highlight these titles!
Click here to read the post!
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