The Geist Of Hegel Past And Present

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TheGeistof Hegel Past and Present Charles Taylor’sA Secular Ageand the Claims of Christian Faith

Michael J. McClymond Saint Louis University

michael.mcclymond@slu.edu

Abstract

This essay appreciates Taylor’s qualitative (rather than quantitative) approach to sec- ularization, which has revolutionized recent discussions of this topic. Taylor’s earlier work on Hegel provides a context for interpreting his proposal in A Secular Age that Western societies are secularly religious or religiously secular—neither devoid of con- cernwithtranscendence,norcommittedtotheologicallydefiniteaccountsof transcen- dence.Two major points of critique follow—first, that Hegelianism with its “immanent frame” excludes a distinctive Christian claim regarding Jesus’s incarnation; and, sec- ond, that Taylor’s hypothesis of faith “fragilized” by the “revisability” of contemporary religion needs empirical support to be fully credible. Taylor often represents religion as a lowest-common-denominator aspiration for something higher, rather than God coming to us incarnationally (John 1:14). Deism-with-transcendence is not Christian- ity. Taylor’s “fragilization” theory might mean that secularity, too, is “fragilized,” and it ought to provoke pastoral reflection on how “fragilized” faith might be stabilized.

Keywords

secularity – secularization – Charles Taylor – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (G.W.F.) Hegel – incarnation – Christology – deism – transcendence

It takes fortitude to swim against the stream, as Charles Taylor did in A Sec- ular Age (2007), a book that engendered not only a renewed discussion of secularization among sociologists, political scientists, religion scholars, and philosophers, but also a number of uncomprehending book reviews.1Intellec-

1 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age(Cambridge,MA: Belknap Press, 2007).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-04001034

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tual historian John Patrick Diggins, in theNewYorkTimesBookReviewunder the title “The Godless Delusion,” opined that Taylor’s “main purpose” was to “prove that God is still very much present in the world” and so “to salvage religion from the corrosive effects of modern secularism.”2 Interpreting Taylor’s book as a personal polemic and Christian apologetic, Diggins missed the subtleties of Taylor’s argument, focused less on the straightforward queries—“Do people profess tobelieve in God?”—than on the more elusivequestions, “What do peo- ple believe when they speak of believing in God?” and “What do they deny in denyingGod?”Thestraightforwardqueriescanbeansweredwithdatafromhis- torical demographics and contemporary surveys. Yet, the questions of interest to Taylor are more imponderable. It is to Taylor’s credit that his work enriched and complexified what had been an excessivelyquantitativeand insufficiently qualitativedebate over secularization.

For Taylor, the statement “I believe in God” carries no single, self-evident meaning, but has varying significance. Speaking broadly, A Secular Age is con- cerned with showing how the conditions of contemporary life have shaped contemporary belief and unbelief alike, to produce modern societies in which people’s beliefs are “cross-pressured” (subject to challenges from competing beliefs or disbeliefs) as well as “fragilized” (held in tentative and uncertain rather than confident and robust fashion). A collection of essays in response to Taylor, Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (2010), includes the editors’ comment: “It is this focus on the ‘background’ conditions of belief or the ‘con- text of understanding’ in which commitments are formed—articulated clearly in the book’s opening pages—that sets A Secular Ageapart from the vast body of sociological literature on secularization that precedes it.”3 Taylor carefully distinguishes multiple meanings of the term secular. He stresses the option- ability, revisability, and fragility of contemporary religious commitments as a defining feature of our secular age. The argument of A Secular Age is far too rich and many-sided to present here, even in summary fashion, but perhaps James K.A. Smith’s summary statement regarding Taylor’s “Secular-3” (the third of three senses of the term) will be helpful: “A society is secular-3 insofar as religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable.”4 In Taylor’s own words: “Faith, even for the staunchest

2 John Patrick Diggins, “The Godless Delusion,” as cited in the “Editor’s Introduction” to Michael

Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, and Craig Calhoun, eds.,Varieties of Secularism in a Secular

Age(Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 5n8.

3 Warner et al., “Editor’s Introduction,” 5.

4 James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerd-

mans, 2014), 21–22.

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believer, is one human possibility among others … belief in God is no longer axiomatic.”5 A key aspect of Taylor’s argument is his claim regarding “exclu- sive humanism,” by which he means that the idea of the meaning and value of human life is found strictly within what Taylor calls the “immanent frame.”6 On the late modern era, Taylor writes: “For the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism came to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing … Of no pre- vious society was this true.”7

My response to Taylor’s A Secular Age falls into four parts: a few histori- cal quibbles on “exclusive humanism,” an engagement with Taylor’s Hegelian- ism, some empirical questions on the “fragilization” of faith, and a concluding reflection on an ecclesial and theological application of Taylor’s ideas. The formative figure in Taylor’s thinking—that is, Hegel—sought to understand ideas in terms of their historical development. Taylor himself employs Hegel’s method in seeing secularity as not fully understandable apart from an under- standing of its emergence. Applying such a method to Taylor, one might view A Secular Age as the outcome of a decades-long development. As I hope to show, Taylor’s conceptual framework for understanding human society derives in part from his early work on Hegel, as embodied in his impressive 1975 mono- graph.8

Historical Quibbles on “Exclusive Humanism”

Is it true, as Taylor’s argument implies, that “exclusive humanism” is a dis- tinctively or perhaps even a uniquely modern phenomenon? Taylor is a good enough historian to recognize that there were ancient exceptions to the rule, such as the Epicureans (for example, Lucretius in De Rerum Natura), who understood death as extinction and denied that the gods had providential knowledge of or active involvement with mere mortals. Yet if one denies life beyond the present life, then, almost by definition of terms, one must find the meaning of one’s life within an “immanent frame.” Taylor regards the Epicure-

5 Taylor, A Secular Age, 3.

6 In 2007 the Social Science Research Council established the website “The Immanent Frame”

—inspired by Taylor’s terminology—to facilitate scholarly discussions on the theme of sec-

ularity, secularism, and secularization. The website is a veritable goldmine for researchers in

this field of inquiry: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/; accessed March 8, 2017.

7 Taylor, A Secular Age, 18.

8 Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

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ans as ancient religious outliers and so he writes that “one swallow does not make a summer.”9The point is well taken, but there is ancient evidence to indi- cate that the view of death as extinction was not confined in ancient times to a tiny elite. There are numerous Greco-Roman burial inscriptions with the words: “I was not, I was, I am not, I do not care.”10Imagine havingthatinscribed on one’s tombstone; this is “exclusive humanism” with a vengeance. The case of the Epicureans suggests that the question might not be whether God or the gods exist, but whether they act or interact with human beings. If God or the gods play no interactive role, then one may end up with “exclusive humanism” even if one has not altogether denied the existence of God or the gods.11

In premodern times, persons inclined toward “exclusive humanism” may not have openly said so. Up to quite recently, there was a distinction between what people were willing to say publicly and what they may have believed. Leo Strauss, in his book Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952), noted how premodern and early modern authors used coded language to express unpop- ular or forbidden points of view, much as authors in the old Soviet Union or in Communist China have written essays purportedly about Russian or Chinese history that, to well-trained eyes, were hidden commentaries on contemporary politics.12 If self-concealment was a common mark of ancient unbelief—as of ancient political dissent (per Strauss’s argument)—then our “secular age” might be not be an era of unprecedented unbelief, but a time of unprecedented publication and discussion of unbelief. An historical analogy might be drawn from the Licensing Order of 1643, which imposed prepublication censorship on book publishing in England. When this law lapsed about half a century later in 1694, new publications of a politically dissident, theologically heterodox,

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Taylor, A Secular Age, 19.

This Epicurean epitaph is given in Latin as: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo [or, non desidero]. Biblical scholar David Aune writes that “the formula occurs frequently in Latin epitaphs” and “occurs also on Greek epitaphs.” David E. Aune, Word Biblical Commen- tary 52C: Revelation 17–22 (Dallas, TX: Word, 1998), 939–940. Cf. Franz Cumont, ‘Non fui, fui, non sum,’Musée Belge 32 (1928): 73–85. One website states that the formula is “often used today at humanist funerals”—a sign of connection and continuity between “exclu- sive humanism” of the ancient and the twenty-first-century varieties. https://philosophy .stackexchange.com/questions/4413/i‑was‑not‑i‑was‑i‑am‑not‑i‑do‑not‑care. In the Jewish Talmud, there is no word for “atheism” as a denial of the existence of God or the gods. Yet there is a phrase that might be taken as the functional equivalent: “There is no Judge and no justice.” The one who says this is regarded as an unbeliever. In Talmudic perspective, a world without a supreme moral arbiter and judge is tantamount to a world without God.

Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing(Glencoe,IL: The Free Press, 1952).

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and sexually suggestive sort began to appear. Such views did not first emerge in 1694, but they were then free to be expressed. So too in the contemporary world, one might argue that views that many people previously held have been expressed more freely and openly than before. The rise of internet technology has made it far easier not only to express one’s views to anyone who might care to listen but to do so anonymously and without fear of discovery, criticism, or reprisal.

Taylor’s larger argument in A Secular Age might not depend on his having made a clear-cut case for “exclusive humanism” as a recent development in world history.We might be living in a “secular age,” even if our age is not, strictly speaking, the first such generation or epoch. On the other hand, a purported missional and pastoral application of Taylor’s argument to the twenty-first- century church—as, for example, in James K.A. Smith’s How (Not) to Be Sec- ular (2014)—might hinge on whether Taylor is correct on this point. New cul- tural situations require new evangelistic methods. To the extent that Taylor has established “exclusive humanism” and the “immanent frame” as twentieth- or twenty-first-century phenomena, a root-and-branch rethinking of the church’s mission to the world might well be in order. Yet, to the extent to which Taylor has not proved this point, the correlative argument for missiological rethinking would also seemingly be weakened.

Implied Hegelianism in A Secular Age

My own first encounter with Charles Taylor occurred in graduate school, where his book Hegel (1975) was regarded (and generally still is) as a definitive, one- volume, English-language account of Hegel’s thought. If Taylor had never writ- ten anything but that one book, he would be known as a great Hegel scholar.13 To understand Taylor’s later corpus of writings, we might inquire as to how the twigwasbentbeforeitbecameanoak.WhencedoesTaylorderivehisideaof the “background” conditions for faith, the “context of understanding,” or what he refers to as “the immanent frame”? To answer these questions, one might turn to Robert Sibley’s Northern Spirits (2008), which takes a hundred pages to sur- vey Taylor’s philosophical and social thought prior to A Secular Age, including Taylor’s involvement in Canadian debates on multiculturalism and the status

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Warner et al., “Editor’s Introduction,” 12, write that in A Secular Age, “Taylor’s argument is loosely Hegelian (not surprisingly, since he is one of the greatest interpreters and analysts of Hegel).”

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of Quebec.14 Sibley shows that Taylor’s socially conditioned way of thinking about belief and unbelief is grounded in his reading of and appropriation of Hegel.

Throughout Taylor’s works one finds a dominant whole-to-part mode of rea- soning, in which a given cultural ethos largely determines the character and content of beliefs held by persons living within that ethos. For there to be an “I,” there must first be a “we.”15 Taylor is thus a kind of “cultural Kantian,” who presumes that the mentality of a given age determines what sort of social and religious beliefs are plausible or even possible for individual persons to hold. In contemporary political debates between so-called liberals (stressing the individual as the repository of rights and responsibilities) and so-called communitarians (seeking to balance individual against community rights and responsibilities), Taylor has generally come down on the communitarian side. Sibley suggests that Taylor embraces not the “liberal society” but rather the “humanist society,” which is “founded on a common understanding among its individual members about the good and their shared communal enterprise.”16

In “Afterword: Apologia Pro Libro Suo,” Taylor replied to his critics by noting differences between Christians and Buddhists, and between religious believers and nonbelievers, and adding that his aspiration was “to build friendship across these boundaries based on a real mutual sense … of what moves the other per- son.”17While Taylor may be read as a Christian and Catholic humanist, seeking to understand and empathize with the cultural or religious other, his reason- ing raises the possibility that individual differences will be suppressed in the name of a group’s “shared communal enterprise.” Taylor’s 1991 essay on “Hegel’s Ambiguous Legacy for Modern Liberalism” acknowledged that “illiberal” ele- ments in Hegel’s thought might allow for individual persons to be subsumed into a collectivity. Taylor acknowledged that Hegel’s social philosophy is flawed in requiring excessive unity as the price of reconciliation between individual and community. He traced the conceptual roots of Hegel’s problem back to Fichte’s notion of the self-generating and self-determining Ich (or “I”), which, when interpreted as a communal Ich, generates some ethically dubious results

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Robert C. Sibley,Northern Spirits: JohnWatson, George Grant, and CharlesTaylor; Appropri- ations of Hegelian Political Thought (Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2008).

Sibley, Northern Spirits, 242.

Sibley, Northern Spirits, 216.

Charles Taylor, “Afterword: Apologia pro Libro Suo,” in Warner et al, eds.,Varieties of Secu- larism in a Secular Age, 319.

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for anyone concerned about individual rights.18 On the other hand, Hegel’s stress on reciprocity and identity through “mutual recognition” offers a way out of the Fichtean impasse. The “mutual recognition” motif, as Taylor presents it, suggests that selves are not properly self-generating or self-defining, but estab- lished through their proper relation to one another.

What does this German idealist philosophizing have to do with A Secular Age? Quite a bit, as it turns out, since the notion of “mutual recognition” under- girds not only Taylor’s social philosophy in general, but also his approach to relations between believers and nonbelievers. In A Secular Age there are dual exhortations for believers to recognize their commonality with nonbelievers and vice versa. Moreover, the all-embracing society comprising believers and nonbelievers alike might, in Hegelian terms, be called secularly religious or religiously secular. Following the Hegelian principle of identity-in-difference, such a community is sacred and profane, holy-worldly and worldly-holy. Sibley judges that Taylor does not acknowledge that “individuals can be, and some- times need to be, independent of the community … [and] can have values outside the social context that provide meaning to their lives and a frame- work for self-understanding. Taylor, in short, wants too much unity.” In treating Taylor, Sibley discusses an interesting passage in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel affirms the validity of Socrates’s defiance of the Athenians.19 For Hegel—as well as for the more individualistically-minded thinker Søren Kierkegaard—Socrates was a signal instance of individual-against-community. Sibley researched his book on Taylor prior to the appearance of A Secular Age, and yet one wonders if his claim thatTaylor “wants too much unity” might serve as a critique of Taylor’s idea that believers and nonbelievers both inhabit the same “immanent frame.”

The Question of “Fragilization”

In expounding Taylor’s argument, James K.A. Smith writes: “We don’t believe instead of doubting; we believe while doubting. We’re all Thomas now.”20What

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Sibley, Northern Spirits, 218–220; citing Charles Taylor, “Hegel’s Ambiguous Legacy for Modern Liberalism,” in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds., Hegel and Legal Theory(New York: Routledge, 1991), 64–77.

Sibley, Northern Spirits, 244; citing G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 164– 170 [##138–139].

James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular (Grand Rapids,MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 4.

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of the “we” in this sentence? Smith later qualifies his assertion, noting that Taylor is not describing humanity as a whole but a “globalized secular elite” and is writing about “those environs of the West where unbelief is the rule.”21 Similarly, Peter Berger wrote that “there exists an international subculture com- posed of people withWestern-style higher education, especially in the humani- ties and social sciences, that is indeed secularized.This subculture is the princi- ple ‘carrier’ of progressive, Enlightened beliefs and values.” While “its members are relatively thin on the ground,” said Berger, their cultural influence is dis- proportionate.22 If Berger is right, then what Taylor does—and does well—is to open a window into the “cross-pressured,” “fragilized,” and spiritually con- flicted mindset of an international subculture of the secularized.23

But there is an epistemic and evidential question: How does Taylor know that this “fragilization” of religious faith has happened in recent times, as a sub- jective experience or pervasive experience among large numbers of contempo- rary persons? Essentially Taylor is making a psychological claim regarding the way in which people believe, implying a mental discontinuity between those of past ages and those of the present in the way in which persons believe. In Tay- lor’s view, even a new convert to some religious faith will view her own previous belief system as nonetheless continuing to offer a plausible, alternate vision of human significance. But what of believers who might be more fully convinced than that, and who might come to see their own former belief systems (and perhaps those of other people) as implausible, if not to say preposterous? In encountering the religious or irreligious “other,” not everyone will be as genteel and self-effacing as Professor Charles Taylor.

Taylor’s argument might be seen as making a normative claim for religious tentativeness. The lack of demographic evidence in A Secular Ageon the chang- ing nature of religious faith, together with the implied argument to the effect that this is how contemporary faith simply is, makes Taylor’s argument seem normative rather than simply descriptive. His claim regarding the “fragiliza- tion” of faith cannot be a statistical claim—first, because Taylor does not seek

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Smith, How (Not) to be Secular, 19n30.

Peter Berger, “The Desecularization of the World: A Global Overview,” in Peter Berger, ed., The Desecularization of theWorld: Resurgent Religion andWorld Politics(Grand Rapids,MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 10; cited in Smith, How (Not) to be Secular, 19n30.

James K.A. Smith seems committed to Taylor’s “fragilization” idea: “A secular-3 society could undergo religious revival where vast swaths of the populace embrace religious belief. But that could never turn back the clock on secularization-3; we would always know weusedto believe something else, that there are plausible visions of meaning and signif- icance on offer.” Smith, How (Not) to be Secular, 23.

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to support his claim with statistics; second, because statistics do not really get at the underlying “conditions of belief” that are of interest to Taylor; and, third, because even a statistic showing that only small numbers endorse a cer- tain belief would not imply that the belief in question will be held tentatively rather than confidently. Persons who hold to, let us say, belief inUFOabduction may be statistically a tiny segment of the population, but such persons may be wholly convinced that they themselves are correct while everyone else is incor- rect on the subject of UFOs.

Since Christianity is the primary religion in the background of Taylor’s anal- ysis, we should recall the almost infinitesimally small number of Christian believers who flourished in the earliest period of church history, together with the gargantuan theological claims these believers made, such as that “Jesus is Lord” of heaven and earth and that Jesus as Lord deserved final loyalty and trust to the exclusion of all other powers and deities, Caesar himself included. It is simply not the case that a tiny group of believers, seeing around them the alter- nate ways in which others believe or disbelieve, will necessarily be “fragilized” by belonging to a cognitive minority or by living in a religiously pluralistic con- text.

Taylor might, of course, respond that it is only late twentieth- or twenty- first-century believers who are “fragilized” in this way and not the first-century Christians, however tiny their numbers may have been. Yet Taylor does not present evidence to back up this claim, and so one wonders how demographi- cally pervasive such “fragilization” of belief might actually be today.The univer- sity campuses of Europe and North America are one place to look for evidence of “fragilization,” while the factory workers of Guangzhou, the taxi drivers of Lima, and the pentecostal worshippers in Lagos may be another matter. In short, without some kind of empirical backing to support it, showing that Tay- lor’s depiction of contemporary religious faith describes something more than a relatively small global elite, the “fragilization” theory is itself rather fragile.

Concluding Reflections: An Ecclesial and Theological Reflection

Readers of Taylor’s A Secular Age are likely to agree that the work raises pro- found questions regarding the how as well as the what of religious belief in contemporary society. The qualitative rather than quantitative approach to the topic of religious faith is one of the most important and distinctive fea- tures of the work. Applying Taylor’s insights to a newer branch of Christian- ity, one might suggest that pentecostal-charismatic Christians in recent years may have been unduly quantitative in their outlook—celebrating and even

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trumpeting the numerical increase in their own global movement while leav- ing qualitative factors out of consideration. It is said that certain vegetables (such as eggplants) become inferior in quality and taste when they are bigger. Similar principles might apply to church growth as well.24 Taylor’s qualitative approach in A Secular Age might provoke pastoral leaders—and especially pentecostal-charismatic leaders—to pay closer attention to the qualities of faith as well as to the quantities of people professing the faith. A diachronic analysis of twentieth- and twenty-first-century believers might support the the- sis that pentecostal-charismatic Christians have not ceased to believe but may be believing differently from before.

The “fragilization” idea could have some important pastoral and missional implications, since it intimates that we live in an age in which believers doubt their faith and doubters doubt their doubts. If religious “fragilization” is the defining trait of the present era, then Christian leaders might think long and hard about identifying the factors that are conducive to “stabilization” in faith. The older evangelical model of the one-time decision for Christ made in response to an altar call makes little sense if someone’s acquisition of faith and maintenance in faith is understood as a lengthy, arduous, precarious, and reversible process. Christian faith-decisions in need of “stabilization” could be strengthened by catechesis, participation in worship and sacraments, spiritual counsel, small-group fellowship, community service—in short, by the whole panoply of pastoral practices of the “Catholic” sort that are well known from church history.25 In an age of “fragilized” faith, Christian leaders and layper- sons ought not to rely on verbal professions of faith as indicators of stable and enduring Christian identity, if such professions have been disconnected from embodied practices of faith in a communal setting. In response to the widely reported decline of religious belief and affiliation among teens and twenty-

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One web essay argues that bigger vegetables may actually be tastier, but only when then are grown organically: “Heavy inputs of water and fertilizer produce big vegetables in the same way that steroid injections produce big muscles. And pumped-up produce that grew big and fast because it had lots of irrigation and fertilizer is, quite literally, watered down.” http://epicurious.com/expert‑advice/bigger‑vegetables‑better‑than ‑small‑article; accessed 8 March 2017.

If Taylor’s argument is correct, then religious unbelief is “fragilized” today no less than religious belief, and so leaders in organized unbelief might need to think about how to gather together and encourage their own faithful (unfaithful?) not to give up their unbe- lief.C.S.Lewisinhisautobiographywrotethat“ayoungmanwhowishestoremainasound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere.” C.S. Lewis, Sur- prised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1955), 191.

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somethings in the USA, the Fuller Seminary Youth Institute has launched a project on “sticky faith,” seeking “to understand the dynamics of youth group graduates’ transition to college and to identify the relationships and best prac- tices in youth ministries, churches, and families that can help set students on a trajectory of lifelong faith and service.” Their research underscores some key ingredients in “sticky faith,” including “intergenerational relationships,” stress on “the whole gospel,” young persons’ “partnership with families,” and “a safe place for doubt.”26Taylor’s analysis in A Secular Agemight suggest that a better understanding of “sticky faith” is needed across the board, in older age cohorts, as well as in various gender, ethnic, or vocational subgroups.

Though A Secular Age is not a work of Christian theology, the argument touches on theology rather frequently, as defenders and critics have noted. One of the sharpest reviews of the book, Matthew Rose’s “Tayloring Christianity” (2014) in First Things, comments: “Taylor has been both celebrated and faulted for authoring an apology for Christianity. I regret to say he has done nothing of the sort. Although the advocacy is indirect and the theology implied, Taylor instead encourages readers to embrace a modern mode of faith that accom- modates itself to contemporary culture.”27 In Taylor’s presentation of modern faith, Rose sees a shift away from cognitive or truth claims on behalf of Chris- tianity and toward a call for a love-based and “kenotic” ethic of self-sacrifice. Rose comments that “Taylor effectively denies that human perfection is found in knowledge of God. He instead claims that we are drawn to communion with God through transformative experiences of value and beauty.” In valorizing such Catholic figures as Paul Claudel, Thérèse of Lisieux, Ivan Illich, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Charles Péguy, Taylor promotes “an ecstatic spirituality open to radical transcendence and hostile to reducing faith to conventional morality.” At the same time, Taylor’s “Christology hovers vaguely on the mar- gins of the book.” Rose concludes by saying that “like all Hegelians, Taylor is an apologist for the present, a theologian of the secular status quo.”

When Taylor supplies concrete instances of contemporary religious experi- ence, they are generally encounters with earthly beauty or goodness that some- how open upward or point away from themselves. They are “transcendent” or “numinous” or “God” experiences, but not “Christ” experiences as such. If, as Taylor tells us, believers and nonbelievers both live together in the “immanent frame,” then both alike may have unusual experiences that provoke them to

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See https://fulleryouthinstitute.org/stickyfaith, a website with links to further resources and printed works.

Matthew Rose, “Tayloring Christianity,”First Things(December 2014); https://www .firstthings.com/article/2014/12/tayloring‑christianity; accessed 12/24/17.

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gaze toward the skylights that seal off the heavens above but allow some light to pass through. Our feet may remain fixed on terra firma, but sometimes we can see a bit of light streaming downward and wonder what might be on the other side of the skylights. Taylor’s expositor, James K.A. Smith, comments on Taylor’s discussion of the “modern Christian consciousness”: “It’s hard to see how this isn’t—or isn’t on the way to—a new deism.”WhenTaylor treats partic- ular doctrines that he rejects (such as hell, divine judgment, juridical doctrines of atonement, and so forth), Smith notes that “we seem to be getting Taylor’s [theological] tastes and preferences, with little warrant beyond that.”28

A Secular Age uses the terms incarnate and incarnation some twenty-five to thirty times in total. Read in context, these occurrences show that Taylor views historic Christianity as a religion of “incarnation,” based on a highly spe- cific notion of divine action in history in the person of Jesus Christ. On several occasions he employs the wordinterventionto refer to faith-based affirmations of Jesus’s incarnation, atonement, resurrection, and ascension, generating the notion that “God enters into drama in time.”29 Moreover, Taylor differentiates such an incarnation-centered religion from ancient Platonism and modern Deism, both of which view the world as “a self contained impersonal order which God in his wisdom has set up, both in nature and for human society.”30

Yet when Taylor moves in A Secular Age from historical exposition to anal- ysis of contemporary religion, the words incarnation and incarnate shift their meanings to denote a spirituality that is affective and body-involving rather than purely cognitive, so that “the spiritual is always incarnate.”31Taylor intro- duces a neologism—excarnation—to denote “a transfer out of embodied, ‘enfleshed’ forms of religious life, to those which are more ‘in the head.’”32Tra- ditional theology recognized the dangers of “excarnation”—most obvious in

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Smith, How (Not) to be Secular, 116; commenting on Taylor, A Secular Age, 655–656. Taylor, A Secular Age, 56, cf. 365. On God’s action as “intervention,” see A Secular Age, 278, 362, 386.

Taylor, A Secular Age, 291, cf. 275–279.

Taylor, A Secular Age, 751.

Taylor, A Secular Age, 554. As a result of modern “excarnation,” writes Taylor, “embodied feeling” no longer gives “an aura of the higher” (288). Yet “Pentecostal movements, which integrate ecstatic prayer and miraculous healing,” are an infringement of Taylor’s modern principle of “excarnation” and so represent a “strange dialectical reversal” (554). Taylor’s argument advances by “leaving these … counter-movements aside,” and yet one wonders how, in terms of his own argument, he can bracket out hundreds of millions of Pente- costals, who, taken singly, might outnumber the total count of secular persons in the world today?

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various forms of Platonism and Gnosticism—yet held that the decisive argu- ment for an embodied human spirituality was God’s own embodiment in the person of Jesus. This theological linkage of embodied spirituality with Christ’s own person gets lost in the later, programmatic sections of A Secular Age. In finishing one’s reading of the book, one is left with the impression that the modern religion of greatest interest to Taylor might be termed a deism-with- transcendence.

From a Christian theological standpoint, A Secular Agemay be problematic in leaving little or no room for what is arguably the single most important Chris- tian assertion: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). If this claim is true, then the “immanent frame” is not immanent any longer. The sky- lights above us, whether transparent or merely translucent, no longer cut us off from what lies above. If “the Word became flesh,” then it is as though a brick came crashing through the skylights and landed inside the “immanent frame.” The twentieth century’s best-known popular Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, championed the doctrine of the Incarnation and understood it as thearticulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae—“the article of faith by which the church stands or falls.” One certainly cannot blame Taylor in A Secular Age for not having played the theologian or having expounded his fuller views regarding Christ. Yet, a Christian believer might legitimately ask whether Taylor’s deism-with- transcendence describes her faith at all. To the extent that Taylor has redefined religious faith in terms of a lowest common denominator (among Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so forth), his arguments regarding belief versus unbelief fail to engage the sort of faith that orthodox Christians actually hold. While readers can learn much from Taylor’s historical and cul- tural analysis of religion and irreligion, they should bear in mind that the pos- sible endorsement of religious faith in A Secular Age is not a vindication of Christian faith as such. And perhaps this illustrates Taylor’s own argument: In a “cross-pressured” context, Christian faith may become “fragilized” and so may redefine itself in religiously eclectic rather than theologically particular ways.

PNEUMA 40 (2018) 58–70

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