Social Imaginary and the Gospel

I mentioned in an earlier blog that I spent some time this summer with Canada’s finest philosopher Charles Taylor. To be fair, he was nowhere to be found, but his massive tome, A Secular Age, was in my hands a lot over the warmer months of the year.

I also mentioned in the previous blog that ‘Scripture alone should be the sole influencer of our social imaginary’ or something like that. I then said I would provide more information on this in a future blog… this is that blog.

The idea of social imaginary is both simple and complex. Essentially, it is the way ordinary people imagine the social dynamics of the world around them rather than what is the actual reality of the world around them. This is not a thought process but a way of viewing the world around them through implicit understandings, assumptions, shared pictures, etc. which shape how people imagine the world around them to be. This is not theory, but praxis. It is the air that people breathe or the water that fish swim in, believed implicitly by intuition and common sense rather than conscious philosophical or sociological thought. It is this social imaginary which allows a society to function -- as long as it is widely agreed upon by a large group of people.

Taylor makes the argument that the situation within which we find ourselves today is one in which we have a new and very unique social imaginary. Ours is not a secular age as we have come to know it before -- secular being an option as the opposite of the sacred. Instead it is a secularism with a new set of values and ideals which does not take into account the divine; not even in order to reject it. The new social imaginary which has taken over our Western world is characterized by expressive humanism, a social imaginary that is able to account for significance and meaning by appealing only to the imminent frame (roughly equivalent to the natural order).

This new social imaginary does not take for granted the claims of religion nor the existence of God. Belief in God (or gods) is not a default position for our culture any longer. We are living in an age of secularism characterized by a social imaginary where belief in God is not required, encouraged, or even allowed. Whereas a century ago belief in God was axiomatic, now non-belief in God is such. We have turned a corner, so to speak, from the age in which religion and God were central to the social imaginary, grounding it in fact, and have moved into the Age of Authenticity in which expressive individualism (each of us has our own way of living out our humanity which must be accepted by others) is the air we breathe.

Gone is the belief or even the consideration that a God who created the world. So too is the belief that the cosmos is ordered by God, the belief that we owe allegiance to the divine, and the belief that God creates a moral order in which individuals, nations, and governments must abide. Put simply, gone is the belief or even the consideration that religion, and in particular institutionalized religion, is important in any way. The divine and his religions are replaced by one singular value -- “bare choice… irrespective of what it is a choice between, or in what domain.”

[If you are interested in how we got here you can pick up Taylor’s gigantic volume or, and it would be better for you, grab Carl Trueman’s magisterial work The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution. Trueman makes use of Taylor and others to explain how expressive individualism has become the de facto social imaginary of the West.]

Given the secular age in which we live in the West it is of utmost importance that ‘Scripture alone should be the sole influencer of our social imaginary.’ It needs to be the air that we breathe or the water in which we (as fish) swim without which we die. Our world has plausibility structures that render Christianity implausible by default. In light of this we must be aware of two things.

First, the world is always calling to us. Our only defense is to drown out its call with the voice of God given to us in his word. We must be so consumed by Scripture that our social imaginary -- the way in which we view the world around us through implicit understandings, assumptions, shared pictures, etc -- is shaped solely by the truth of God’s word. We must give no quarter to the voice of the world.

Second, we cannot argue against the current brand of secularism by the means we may have used in the past. Put simply, we need a new apologetic. Evidentialism won’t work anymore, if it ever really did, because our secular age denies the possibility of the supernatural existing at all. People are now buffered selves -- free from the influence or even the thought of the transcendent. Thus, we need a different approach to defending our faith. A topic for another day, perhaps.

Third, we know this version of secularism will fall, just as the previous two versions (as Taylor sees them) have passed on. Expressive individualism leads to loneliness and fear; not to mention societal issues of all kinds (which we are seeing play out right now). Exclusive humanism will fall under the weight of what Taylor calls cross-pressure, the feeling of being caught between the immanent frame and the transcendent. People cannot live as purely immanent selves because we weren’t created to be satisfied by pure immanentization.

Fourth, Christians know a few things to be true. God has put eternity into the hearts of all of his creatures and this is enough for them to know that God exists. More than that we know that every fact, every experience, every thought, every relationship, every decision, everything that makes us human both individually and collectively make sense only in light of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Christ the world holds together, finds its meaning, and in him all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found. Outside of Christ there is no meaning, no purpose, no wisdom, no knowledge; nothing makes any sense. Outside of Christ everything collapses. Romans 1 tells us exactly where life outside of Christ, life lived in denial of the truth of God, ends up and it's not good.

Fifth, we need authenticity and truth. We need people living out the gospel of Jesus Christ; fully and unashamedly. As one author has noted, the gospel is a public truth and therefore it needs a faithful, true, authentic public witness. This means we need to live the gospel out loud. We know within secularism 3 people are searching for that which God has put in their hearts to desire and we know that their hearts will be restless until they find rest in God. So we preach and live the gospel in every place we find ourselves and we build communities (the church) around the principles of the gospel.

Sola Deo Gloria