Faith for the Health of Secularism
Without a robust public square which includes, rather than excludes explicitly religious convictions, "the liberal ideal becomes deeply anti-humanist. And, like it or not, we need a theology to arrest this degeneration" (36). Last night, I read through the remaining five chapters of the first section in Rowan Williams' book, Faith in the Public Square. Though these chapters address a diverse array of topics, a theme emerges that religious faith is a needed component for a healthy secular society.
If I had to summarize the thrust of these chapters, I would say that Williams is arguing that the role of religion is to function as the conscience of the secular state, as religion's allegiance extends beyond the state and is therefore equipped with a view to question the ultimate motives of the state. Without religion, pure secularism lacks the moral resources to sustain itself, to prevent itself from becoming the unquestionable tyrant it fears. However, this claim of function for religion requires that religion be more than just doctrines, but a source of identity, challenge, transformation, and journey.
One area from which Williams makes these claims on the basis that the idea of the secular state finds its roots in Christianity. This finds expression early on, as the early Christian Church defined itself as a community defined by a law (the law of Christ) whose purpose was to make a certain way of life manifest and invite others into it. The common life that was professed was dependent on the Spirit of God, and not subject to the whims or fates of other political arrangements or realities. "So Christian identity is irreducibly political in the sense that it defines a politeia, a kind of citizenship (Philippians 3.20); yet its existence and integrity are not bound to a successful realization of this citizenship within history" (29). Christians, therefore, participated in parallel citizenships: in the political structures that were present in the world and in the Kingdom of God.
Such a stance continues to be held and developed through Saint Augustine (see his City of God) and the early Medieval period. It allowed Christians to agree to live by many of the laws and claims of the Roman state (they would still pay taxes) but it also denied the state its claims to ultimacy. This frustrated and astonished Roman authorities, who so often turned to martyrdom as their weapon, which in turn functioned as a powerful witness to the Christian stance.
We can see here the early seeds of the secular concept of the state, one which is not invested with divine power (despite the claims of Rome), but serves other functions related to 'this age,' (Latin: saeculum).
Trouble arises in the Medieval period when Rome has fallen, and the Church is left as, for a time, the only centralized power to provide stability. In this environment, the Church began to take on functions that looked very much like a secular state, which led to innumerable debates and conflicts. All too frequently the Church acted as if it was the dispenser of divine law, the omni-competent authority as opposed to the temporal power of the state. However, the fact that there remained conflict between the Church and secular powers highlights the main point: the acknowledgment that "what the state could properly demand of the citizen was limited by relationships and obligations beyond the state's reach" (30). Thus the tension between a local citizenship and a trans-national one was continually felt through the Middle Ages.
At the Reformation, the political landscape shifted, as emerging nation-states asserted themselves more fiercely, and leaders were all too ready to take advantage of new demands for local independence. However, when they did assert themselves, they "produced what might be called a 'papal' model of royal authority, a view of the monarch's status as source of legal validity which reinforced the sense of the 'sovereign' state in an unprecedented way" (77). Models of authority (or anything at that rate) do not come out of nowhere. Princes and would-be kings, looking for a structure for authority, readily found one in the papacy. "At the Reformation, what happened all too often was that the all-powerful Pope was simply replaced by national sovereignty, and later by nationalism, the idea that this mysterious entity, 'the nation,' was a God-given, unquestionable unity whose freedom to do what is collectively wanted had to be secured at all costs" (52). History bears witness to the atrocities that are possible when 'the nation' demands its sacrifices. However, a concept of a non-sacred state power is not enough to create the kind of atmosphere that we know as 'secular' in the 21st century. Something needed to change about humanity. And just as political secularism has its roots in Christianity, so too does the psychological secularism.
The individual Christian's story is one of conversion, "and that means that it has always proposed to human beings that what has been taken for granted about their identity, their possibilities or their relationships isn't necessarily fixed and final" (66). Such a stance produced in Christianity a double vision between the world as it was and the Kingdom of God which stood in judgment of the current order. Within the Christian this produced an unsettledness, an unceasing sense that what the world had to offer, even within the confines of the Christian community, could not ultimately satisfy the deepest desires of the soul for God's love and justice. Personal double-vision is the parallel to the concept of dual citizenship discussed above; it creates an uneasy tension and puts a question mark to the prevailing structures of my life and the world. Double-vision has waxed and waned in the life of the church, but one could certainly cast the Reformation as a clearing of the lenses to once again put the question mark to structures and self.
As Williams tells the story, though, this resurgence of double-vision coincided with a great loss of nerve. The conversion paradigm had always held the Kingdom of God as certain and known, that against which I am judged and with which I judge my culture. But what if skepticism spilled back over into the Kingdom of God? "A double vision in which both aspects are equally questionable leaves the human spirit homeless in a far more radical and threatening sense" (68). And this is exactly what transpired. Unmoored from its Christian context, restlessness became incessant wandering and uncertainty about my nature, my needs, my resources (or lack thereof). The spirit of skepticism then spills back into the political sphere, as we draw the boundaries of public square ever narrower to allow only that which is 'publicly accessible,' over against any evidence or position based on revelation or tradition.
The role of Christian faith in this environment is two-fold: to reassert its role as the questioner of all totalitarian claims, and to offer an alternative vision of human life.
To the first role, Williams repeatedly returns to the field of negative theology (as he did in his first chapter, see previous post). Negative theology affirms "that no form of words, however true as far as it goes, is going to be fully adequate; there is always more to say (even in heaven). This is a theology that is helpful because of the conviction that there is always more, and that this 'more' is always more compelling and wonderful" (73-74, emphasis original). This applies to the political sphere by denying any claims of sacred 'given-ness' of current political structures. Unfortunately, despite liberalism's aspirations to free humanity from tyrannical authoritarianism, once it depends on one unchangeable form of administration it has become the monster it fears. In these moments, the Church is called to raise the questions and to invite the secular state to inspects its own foundations. And, truth be told, to play this role requires the supra-national allegiance which religious faith engenders. Confined to its own limits, i.e., the state and its secular content, liberalism lacks the moral resources to fuel such a healthy skepticism.
However, skepticism unchecked can also produced an unhealthy state. "The long-term fruit of a purely postmodern climate is a world of imitation, endless self-reflection which doesn't do much to take forward the creative project. It is tempting to react to this by looking for a style or a set of convictions that will liberate us from the maze of uncertainties and reinstate a clear view of how sacred or unchallengeable authority is present in history" (72). The malaise of modernity is a reflection of a vagrant soul, a truly tiring state which, as Williams asserts, leads to a desire for stability. As with the political desire to settle for an eschaton here and now, so to the personal desire to settle for things in this world, the Christian faith says "no." But this must not be heard as the "no" of dry doctrine. The role of the church is not simply lobbying for already settled positions, but to create spaces for the telling of an alternative story, a story which challenges the self-evidence of secularism. It is a story which Williams tells beautifully: "God 'abandons' the life of an isolated heaven to work out and define what divine life might mean in the conditions of a compromised and tragic world; and this definition leads to the utter failure and darkness of crucifixion, leaving only the bare fact of indestructible love; and that indestructible reality recreates the whole world in its refusal to be enclosed by death. It is a story that insists that God is not to be found in the world except where human beings are ready to lose all that is less than God so that the indestructible may take root in them" (70). The primary space for this story to be told is in the activity of the Assembly, which bears witness to "a new set of human relations, a new horizon for what human beings are capable of, a new understanding of the material world and its capacities" (92). Somewhere along the line comes doctrinal statements, but the dominant mode of expression here is worship, "the corporately experienced reality of the Kingdom" (93). The continue to quote Williams at length, "Standing in this place [of worship], I am made aware of what is fundamental and indestructible in my human identity: that I am the object of divine intention and commitment, a being freely created and never abandoned. Standing in this place, I am also challenged to examine every action or policy in my life in the light of what I am; and I am, through the common life of the 'Assembly,' made able to change and to be healed, to feed and be fed in relations with others in the human city" (93).
Secularism needs faith in the public square, this has been the drum beat of Williams' first section. However, what is yet to be clear to me is who hears these arguments? And what is the role of the will? Why would someone committed to the secular vision, who Williams argues lacks the moral resources to argue for something greater than the liberal state and a positivist vision, adopt or change their views to include religion? My hope is that this will become clearer as the book progresses.
**All quotations taken from Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.
If I had to summarize the thrust of these chapters, I would say that Williams is arguing that the role of religion is to function as the conscience of the secular state, as religion's allegiance extends beyond the state and is therefore equipped with a view to question the ultimate motives of the state. Without religion, pure secularism lacks the moral resources to sustain itself, to prevent itself from becoming the unquestionable tyrant it fears. However, this claim of function for religion requires that religion be more than just doctrines, but a source of identity, challenge, transformation, and journey.
One area from which Williams makes these claims on the basis that the idea of the secular state finds its roots in Christianity. This finds expression early on, as the early Christian Church defined itself as a community defined by a law (the law of Christ) whose purpose was to make a certain way of life manifest and invite others into it. The common life that was professed was dependent on the Spirit of God, and not subject to the whims or fates of other political arrangements or realities. "So Christian identity is irreducibly political in the sense that it defines a politeia, a kind of citizenship (Philippians 3.20); yet its existence and integrity are not bound to a successful realization of this citizenship within history" (29). Christians, therefore, participated in parallel citizenships: in the political structures that were present in the world and in the Kingdom of God.
Such a stance continues to be held and developed through Saint Augustine (see his City of God) and the early Medieval period. It allowed Christians to agree to live by many of the laws and claims of the Roman state (they would still pay taxes) but it also denied the state its claims to ultimacy. This frustrated and astonished Roman authorities, who so often turned to martyrdom as their weapon, which in turn functioned as a powerful witness to the Christian stance.
We can see here the early seeds of the secular concept of the state, one which is not invested with divine power (despite the claims of Rome), but serves other functions related to 'this age,' (Latin: saeculum).
Trouble arises in the Medieval period when Rome has fallen, and the Church is left as, for a time, the only centralized power to provide stability. In this environment, the Church began to take on functions that looked very much like a secular state, which led to innumerable debates and conflicts. All too frequently the Church acted as if it was the dispenser of divine law, the omni-competent authority as opposed to the temporal power of the state. However, the fact that there remained conflict between the Church and secular powers highlights the main point: the acknowledgment that "what the state could properly demand of the citizen was limited by relationships and obligations beyond the state's reach" (30). Thus the tension between a local citizenship and a trans-national one was continually felt through the Middle Ages.
At the Reformation, the political landscape shifted, as emerging nation-states asserted themselves more fiercely, and leaders were all too ready to take advantage of new demands for local independence. However, when they did assert themselves, they "produced what might be called a 'papal' model of royal authority, a view of the monarch's status as source of legal validity which reinforced the sense of the 'sovereign' state in an unprecedented way" (77). Models of authority (or anything at that rate) do not come out of nowhere. Princes and would-be kings, looking for a structure for authority, readily found one in the papacy. "At the Reformation, what happened all too often was that the all-powerful Pope was simply replaced by national sovereignty, and later by nationalism, the idea that this mysterious entity, 'the nation,' was a God-given, unquestionable unity whose freedom to do what is collectively wanted had to be secured at all costs" (52). History bears witness to the atrocities that are possible when 'the nation' demands its sacrifices. However, a concept of a non-sacred state power is not enough to create the kind of atmosphere that we know as 'secular' in the 21st century. Something needed to change about humanity. And just as political secularism has its roots in Christianity, so too does the psychological secularism.
The individual Christian's story is one of conversion, "and that means that it has always proposed to human beings that what has been taken for granted about their identity, their possibilities or their relationships isn't necessarily fixed and final" (66). Such a stance produced in Christianity a double vision between the world as it was and the Kingdom of God which stood in judgment of the current order. Within the Christian this produced an unsettledness, an unceasing sense that what the world had to offer, even within the confines of the Christian community, could not ultimately satisfy the deepest desires of the soul for God's love and justice. Personal double-vision is the parallel to the concept of dual citizenship discussed above; it creates an uneasy tension and puts a question mark to the prevailing structures of my life and the world. Double-vision has waxed and waned in the life of the church, but one could certainly cast the Reformation as a clearing of the lenses to once again put the question mark to structures and self.
As Williams tells the story, though, this resurgence of double-vision coincided with a great loss of nerve. The conversion paradigm had always held the Kingdom of God as certain and known, that against which I am judged and with which I judge my culture. But what if skepticism spilled back over into the Kingdom of God? "A double vision in which both aspects are equally questionable leaves the human spirit homeless in a far more radical and threatening sense" (68). And this is exactly what transpired. Unmoored from its Christian context, restlessness became incessant wandering and uncertainty about my nature, my needs, my resources (or lack thereof). The spirit of skepticism then spills back into the political sphere, as we draw the boundaries of public square ever narrower to allow only that which is 'publicly accessible,' over against any evidence or position based on revelation or tradition.
The role of Christian faith in this environment is two-fold: to reassert its role as the questioner of all totalitarian claims, and to offer an alternative vision of human life.
To the first role, Williams repeatedly returns to the field of negative theology (as he did in his first chapter, see previous post). Negative theology affirms "that no form of words, however true as far as it goes, is going to be fully adequate; there is always more to say (even in heaven). This is a theology that is helpful because of the conviction that there is always more, and that this 'more' is always more compelling and wonderful" (73-74, emphasis original). This applies to the political sphere by denying any claims of sacred 'given-ness' of current political structures. Unfortunately, despite liberalism's aspirations to free humanity from tyrannical authoritarianism, once it depends on one unchangeable form of administration it has become the monster it fears. In these moments, the Church is called to raise the questions and to invite the secular state to inspects its own foundations. And, truth be told, to play this role requires the supra-national allegiance which religious faith engenders. Confined to its own limits, i.e., the state and its secular content, liberalism lacks the moral resources to fuel such a healthy skepticism.
However, skepticism unchecked can also produced an unhealthy state. "The long-term fruit of a purely postmodern climate is a world of imitation, endless self-reflection which doesn't do much to take forward the creative project. It is tempting to react to this by looking for a style or a set of convictions that will liberate us from the maze of uncertainties and reinstate a clear view of how sacred or unchallengeable authority is present in history" (72). The malaise of modernity is a reflection of a vagrant soul, a truly tiring state which, as Williams asserts, leads to a desire for stability. As with the political desire to settle for an eschaton here and now, so to the personal desire to settle for things in this world, the Christian faith says "no." But this must not be heard as the "no" of dry doctrine. The role of the church is not simply lobbying for already settled positions, but to create spaces for the telling of an alternative story, a story which challenges the self-evidence of secularism. It is a story which Williams tells beautifully: "God 'abandons' the life of an isolated heaven to work out and define what divine life might mean in the conditions of a compromised and tragic world; and this definition leads to the utter failure and darkness of crucifixion, leaving only the bare fact of indestructible love; and that indestructible reality recreates the whole world in its refusal to be enclosed by death. It is a story that insists that God is not to be found in the world except where human beings are ready to lose all that is less than God so that the indestructible may take root in them" (70). The primary space for this story to be told is in the activity of the Assembly, which bears witness to "a new set of human relations, a new horizon for what human beings are capable of, a new understanding of the material world and its capacities" (92). Somewhere along the line comes doctrinal statements, but the dominant mode of expression here is worship, "the corporately experienced reality of the Kingdom" (93). The continue to quote Williams at length, "Standing in this place [of worship], I am made aware of what is fundamental and indestructible in my human identity: that I am the object of divine intention and commitment, a being freely created and never abandoned. Standing in this place, I am also challenged to examine every action or policy in my life in the light of what I am; and I am, through the common life of the 'Assembly,' made able to change and to be healed, to feed and be fed in relations with others in the human city" (93).
Secularism needs faith in the public square, this has been the drum beat of Williams' first section. However, what is yet to be clear to me is who hears these arguments? And what is the role of the will? Why would someone committed to the secular vision, who Williams argues lacks the moral resources to argue for something greater than the liberal state and a positivist vision, adopt or change their views to include religion? My hope is that this will become clearer as the book progresses.
**All quotations taken from Rowan Williams, Faith in the Public Square. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.
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