There is Hope in the Third World

This is what we observed in our last blog.

We started with Philip Rieff and his understanding of our time as the third world. Rieff describes our current society as one which has lost any sense of authority from above. We live according to no divine law and care nothing for inherited religious beliefs and traditions.

We then heard Charles Taylor describe this secular age as an age in which the sacred is not even considered as a part of our cultures plausibility structure. Whereas being an atheist in the first understanding of sacred/secular would have never been considered, and being an atheist in the second understanding of the sacred/secular was an option, being an atheist in our secular age is assumed; it is the foundation for our society. It is our fundamental sitz im leben.

Taylor writes,

This shift in secularity in this sense consists, among other things, of a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently, not the easiest to embrace.

Along with this change, Taylor continues, comes a focus on the immanent frame (a world without consideration of the transcendent) with the result being the expressive individual (we define ourselves only by what we think/feel about ourselves and desire for ourselves).

Though using different language, Taylor and Rieff describe the same thing -- a post-Christian society which has shut out transcendent authority and replaced it with a full-blown subjectivism.

I want to stick with Charles Taylor to find some hope in this dark situation. This will be a very short look at Chs 15-16 of A Secular Age viewed from a Christian perspective.

The immanent frame is the world in which we live. It is a social order which is defined by self-sufficiency and a commitment to naturalism which shuts out any thought of transcendence (divinity of any kind). This immanent frame, then, operates under its own principles and values. It determines for itself what is true, real, possible, and ethical. It is possible in this immanent frame to live as a closed individual, a buffered self which considers meaning, feeling, purpose, morality, etc as existing solely inside our selves. This person is convinced that this world is all there is and that there is no possibility of anything beyond the natural world. But it is also possible, however, for a person to be porous as they were in the pre-modern world, These porous selves are open, at some level, to the possibility that there is something out there beyond the immanent frame.

But, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to live as an absolute naturalist. The prospect of our own mortality and inevitable death, for example, are threats to a purely natural perspective. Equally, the problems of universal morality, suffering, and the ever present issue of aesthetics are other issues for those desiring to live purely according to the immanent frame. In other words, it is very difficult for a person to live fully as an immanentist. This leads to cross-pressure for the vast majority of individuals. There is too much stuff out there (transcendent type stuff) that puts pressure on the one who claims fully immanent commitments. There is too much of life that makes their immanentist commitment feel isolated from the world, cold, and morally problematic. This results in what Taylor calls the Nova Effect, “a spiritual super-nova” which causes people to look beyond the immanent frame for meaning and creates all sorts of both religious and non-religious outlooks which take people beyond the immanent frame but not necessarily back to traditional Christianity.

It is this Nova Effect that creates hope and opportunity. As believers we don’t need Taylor to inform us of the emptiness of the immanent frame and the cross-pressure our desire to live as immanentists puts on people. The Book of Ecclesiastes makes this point abundantly clear. This kind of thing is also what Paul speaks about in Romans 1 and 2. People can try to live as though God does not exist, they can try to be the madman of Nietzsche’s parable, unfortunately, as created beings we can’t. We have eternity in our hearts, after all. We know that God exists, because that knowledge is part of our image bearing and because the world witnesses, pours forth speech, regarding his existence. Further, we know there is a moral structure to the universe which we cannot explain if we simply keep our eyes focused on the immanent frame. All of these things are true and put pressure on every single person because of the reality of the transcendent.

These truths mean that this world will never satisfy. We know there are universal demands and realities about our person and living in a society placed upon us that cannot be explained by us. Even more fundamentally we know that what grounds all of these thoughts and feelings is the reality that God exists and that we are created to worship him. This is the Christian hope for the world. That no matter how third world our society becomes (or fourth world or whatever) and no matter how secular (by whatever definition we use) our culture claims to be, there is always God standing in the background -- and often in the foreground -- making us uncomfortable with his presence.

The hope lies in Augustine’s statement made more than 1500 years ago -- “You have made us for yourself, hearts are restless till they find rest in you.”

So this is the hope in our secular world. But how do we communicate this hope to a cross-pressured world? The answer awaits.

Soli Deo Gloria