Review of Andrew Root's "Formation of Faith in a Secular Age Vol.1 (Part 1)
Faith Formation in a Secular Age Vol.1
Andrew Root[1]
Preface
We live in a secular world. But
the nature of that secularity is widely misunderstood. When Charles Taylor,
author of the magnificent A Secular Age,
says “secular,” he does not mean a world without any religion but rather a time
in which it is as possible to believe as not and every form of belief is
contestable or questionable. (114)
We live he claims in the “age of
authenticity.” This is the world since the 1960s in which each person is
believed to have their right to define what it means to be human. (124)
Many, including the church, have taken this shift to portend
only bad. Self-indulgence and self-absorption run amok. This this kind of
trivializing has often happened. Yet Taylor claims at least two positive gains
from this shift: “But I want to affirm two features here: the change represents
no passing fad, and second, it does have a serious ethical dimension.”[2]
Andrew Root, building off Taylor’s work believes that “it is
only through authenticity (and its ethic) that we can reimagine ways of
speaking about divine action as ministry . . . I’m opposed to how the trivial
elements of the age of authenticity have produced a glorification of the spirit
of youthfulness—the ways the church has been tempted to desire this spirit of
youthfulness more than the Spirit of Christ. (135) He believes this
glorification of youthfulness has snookered the church into buying into
this trivial aspect of the age of authenticity (youthfulness) in youth and, for
reasons we will soon see, and adult ministry.
“Ultimately,” though, he writes, “I’ll seek a way through
our lived experience (authenticity) to encounter divine action.” (144) But this
way is not straightforward and requires a fair amount of teasing out. But it is
so worth it!
Introduction: Bonhoeffer Thinks We’re Drunk
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism
(MTD) is the name sociologist Christian Smith gave to the faith of American
teenagers he discovered as a result of a massive several-year survey and
follow-up interviews. MTD means
“moralistic” (God wants me to be a good person and not a
jerk);
“therapeutic” (God or religion should help me
feel good); and
“deism” (God is a concept to decorate our lives with but not an agent who
really does anything).
It is, Root says, “a kind of
individualized, consumer spirituality.” (197)
How could it be that such concept
of faith as MTD could become the default position for America’s teenagers. Root
turns to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his essay on youth ministry[3]:
“Since the days of the youth movement, church youth work has often lacked that
element of Christian sobriety that alone might enable it to recognize that the
spirit of youth is not the Holy Spirit and that the future of the church is not
youth itself but rather the Lord Jesus Christ.”
To put Bonhoeffer’s claim in
contemporary lingo: you’ve bought into to the cultural benefits of an age group
(youthfulness) over concern for the work of the Holy Spirit, who is the one you
need. This fascination with youthfulness goes like this: “’If we could only get
the young here,” we assert over and over again, “then we’ll be OK.’ ‘OK;
usually refers to something like being vibrant enough to be institutionally
stable.” (253) We’ve all heard, or thought. that at some point, haven’t we?
But Bonhoeffer forces us to ask
ourselves: Do we want the Spirit or a batch of pragmatic strategies designed to
try and keep young people in the church. This attraction to youthfulness as the
answer to the church’s need Root sees as the soil in which MTD grows. Root
writes: “We are erroneously acting as though youth can save us, allowing our
conceptions of faith to be seen as brand loyalty to the church over experiences
of the living Christ, who comes to us through cross and resurrection, giving us
his very self as the gift of faith.” (263)
How did it happen they we
embraced youthfulness rather than a genuine experience of God as the cure for
what ails the church? The flow of our culture holds the answer. We have moved
into an age of authenticity (as mentioned earlier) - on “a journey to make
meaning, seeking to be loyal (often only) to what speaks to us, to what engages
us, to what moves us.” (280) Authenticity has many good things about it but it
also carries some debits: one is youthfulness.
“’Youthfulness’ is a kind of cultural
idolatry that believes that those who take on a ‘youthful frame of mind’ are
best positioned to glean the rewards of authenticity itself. Youthfulness,
then, is not necessarily the lived and concrete experience of young people, but
a disposition or frame of mind that best delivers authenticity.” (280)
In addition to
youthfulness, this turn to the age of authenticity also brought with it a
denial of the plausibility of divine action which unwittingly turns over our
understanding of faith to sociology. In this historical context, even our
sincerest desires to be led by the Spirit are hamstrung by the flattening of
faith it promotes. We are focused on building up the profile of the
institutional church by retaining youth and becoming youthful rather than
trusting the Spirit because such “realities” have been rendered suspect by the secularity
in which we live.
More on all this
in upcoming chapters.
[1] Andrew Root, Faith
Formation in a Secular Age : Volume 1 (Ministry in a Secular Age): Responding
to the Church's Obsession with Youthfulness (Baker Publishing Group. Kindle
Edition). Numerals in parentheses are the Kindle locations where material is
found.
[2] Charles Taylor, “The Church Speaks—to Whom?,” in
Church and People: Disjunctions in a Secular Age, ed. Charles Taylor, José
Casanova, George F. McLean, Christian Philosophical Studies 1
(Washington, DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2012),
17–18.
[3]
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin: 1932–1933, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer Works 12 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), 515–17.
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