Marginal Christianity

Charles Taylor posits three forms of the Secular in the West. Secular 1: Sacred/Secular Planes Secular 2: Religious versus A-religious Spaces Secular 3: The Negating of Transcendence In Secular 1 the eternal existed with the temporal (the Medieval world). “Above” it, as it were. The transcendent regularly impinged on and intersected the temporal. People lived in expectation of commerce with the transcendent plane (for good or ill). In Secular 2 the zone for the transcendent was reduced to spatial locales (beginning with the Modern era). Transcendence is ruled out though some people still believe and are allowed religious spaces (which jockey to expand those places). In terms of my interest here attention was diverted in other directions than transcendence by the additions of the primacy of reason, the growing interest in history and the fulfilment of human dreams and hopes within history. Attention to God was still tolerated as an idiosyncratic choice some peopl...

7: Faith and Its Formation in a Secular Age Subtraction We think of our world in terms of subtraction. For example, we taken prayer out of school, lost our moral guidelines, church attendance has declined.   More liberal folks think if we could just get rid of religion we be more rational and peaceful. Our faith formation, then, becomes a plugging up of the holes caused by this subtraction. But these pragmatic actions don’t work because the problem is not subtraction. Charles Taylor says it this way: “Modernity is defined not just by our ‘losing’ an earlier world, but by the kind of human culture that we have constructed.” [1] It’s not the world we’ve known minus some vital components we can replace but a whole new world. “Rather than subtraction, we’ve added layers of authenticity and youthfulness, creating forms of cultural and social life where ‘the God gap,’ for many, simply isn’t there.” (2458) “The adding of the mass society and its need for consumer want bro...

  Posted on 15 July 2015 by Fr Aidan Kimel In his recent article “ Rethinking Transcendence ,” Greg Boyd invites us to reconsider our understanding of divinity in light of God’s self-revelation in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ: Consider, would it ever occur to anyone to think that God is “above” experiencing things sequentially, or that God is “above” experiencing any kind of change, if they anchored all their reflections about God in the Word who became flesh (Jn 1:14) and who then offered himself up on our behalf? And would it ever occur to anyone to imagine that God is “above” being affected by others and “above” experiencing passionate emotions or suffering if their thinking about God was consistently oriented around the one who suffered humiliation and death at the hands of wicked humans and fallen powers? I, for one, do not see how. The revelation of God on the cross runs directly counter to the divine attributes of the classical philoso...