Is Secular Humanism the Logical Conclusion of Protestantism?
I started writing a terrible essay trying to back up that question, but it started getting overlong and burdened with tangents.
Protestantism is based on the premise that the organization is not the channel to God, in the end that channel is granted to any one person via "personal relationship."
So...if you think God reaches out to us without being mediated by a church, what's the church?
I feel like there are holes in this thinking, but I'm kind of enjoying how the light twinkles through it.
Protestantism is based on the premise that the organization is not the channel to God, in the end that channel is granted to any one person via "personal relationship."
So...if you think God reaches out to us without being mediated by a church, what's the church?
I feel like there are holes in this thinking, but I'm kind of enjoying how the light twinkles through it.
Comments
I guess there are worse things, but I found it a salutary reminder about holiness and sacredness as being core to the church's mission and identity.
I remember once reading Luther considered himself a humanist, but he was actually the product of the foundations laid 200 years before his birth.
I think you need to dig deeper.
I remember that differently, Gramps. ISTM Luther and Erasmus - the leading contemporary voice of humanism - could not agree on the value of human reason. Luther, with characteristic punchiness, announced that "reason is a whore" and available to the highest bidder; therefore not necessarily on the side of righteousness.
Luther went to the University of Erfurt, which was a hotbed of the humanist movement in his day. Like the humanist, Luther went back to the original Biblical texts for his study. Luther also challenged the corruption within the Church and the arrogance that prevented the Church from using Christian humanism to strengthen the Catholic Church and let it tear its power away from it.
No, Luther would not be considered a humanist today. However, it was humanism that inspired him and taught him. It was humanism that helped direct him. It was not humanism that was the basis of his beliefs. A humanist believes in the power of man. Luther believed that “only God can improve man.” Man’s nature is seen as evil. While Luther would say in spiritual matters man suffers bondage of the will, but in civil matters, humans are free to chose their outcomes. In that regard, he is humanistic.
The point I was trying to make to Bullfrog, though, is that Humanism is much deeper than the Reformation. If anything, Humanism unlocked the Reformation movement, not the other way around.
Although these are practically fairly complex ideas to get over, because they contain a few intricacies that balance each other out, and at least historically have proved to be somewhat unstable - within all three movements.
So while I wouldn't necessarily say secularism is a 'logical' conclusion to Protestantism, it certainly seems to be one of many paths of lesser resistance.
The Enlightenment as the bastard child of the Reformation and all that.
I think that's a rather reductionist 'take' on a very complex issue. There was certainly Light in the Enlightenment.
Nevertheless, I do think there is a case to answer, as it were. It all depends on whether we see non-theistic Quakers, for instance, or Anglican clergy who are effectively unitarian as a GoodThingTM or otherwise.
But I was mainly responding to the bit of the OP that I quoted, that “Protestantism is based on the premise that the organization is not the channel to God, in the end that channel is granted to any one person via ‘personal relationship.’” That’s what I was saying is, I think, an overbroad generalization, and what’ve my subsequent paragraph, which you quoted, was intended to relate to.
Yes, my response is that in practice all those other things can easily collapse down to a 'personal relationship' which is what I mean when I say they are unstable. Though point taken on the question of whether Catholicism has resisted this any better, and here it's hard to distinguish the difference material vs religious factors have made.
Mainline Protestantism, i.e. Lutheranism, Anglicism, Reformed, all talked about God working with Christians through the community.
Here is an article by a conservative Lutheran Layman which details how we look at personal salvation.
Some historians trace the 'born again' personal relationship emphasis to late 17th century New England as well as to Anabaptism. Second and third generation Puritans were often very concerned about the eternal destiny of their kids and so looked for evidence of their Election. So indications of some kind of change or perseverance in godly practices became an expectation and goal.
Of course, this wasn't couched in the language of later revivalism but there were echoes, parallels and foretastes of all that.
Nobody's mentioned Orthodox countries yet. My impression is that these aren't as secularised as Western European nations but there's also a heck of a lot of nominalism and superstition.
You still get coachloads of people going on family outings to monasteries for instance but I'm told that religious observance in these countries doesn't necessarily equate to societal difference or particularly discernible differences in the way people live.
That's always hard to measure.
In my simple way of thinking, while God reaches out to us in all kinds of ways - through nature, scripture, loving relationships, thought, kindness, the numinous, etc as well as through organised religions, and we worship God in all kinds of ways -through gratitude, recognition, prayer, invitation, etc as well as through music and song, ‘The Christian Church’ happens whenever people come together to be nourished spiritually by God and to take that nourished spirit out to share it with the world.
If secular humanism does not recognise God - and in fact is hostile to the very suggestion of God’s existence - and is about human relationships alone, it is surely more of a distraction from Protestantism than a result of it, a leading away from the truth.
Those who think that their ‘church’ is the only true one are in error. Each offers something, but all are lacking. As with theological thinkers. As with all human beings. God alone is complete.
I don't think it had a single origin, there are multiple similar movements across the centuries. I'd argue that perhaps Lutheranism may have been less susceptible to it because of its emphasis on baptism as an objective sign, but on the other hand Pietism was a Lutheran movement and look at the how the various national churches in Scandinavia fared. Similarly the Puritan tradition easily gave way to endless self-examination to discover whether one was elect or not (c.f Jonathan Edwards and Gamaliel's post above), and Anglicanism didn't have a robust tradition of catchesis, so was always going to be more susceptible to outside influence for better or worse.
Why would church mediating between the Mediator and the the Christian prevent secular humanism? Can you demonstrate that it doesn't?
Jesus had it.
I can't answer for @Bullfrog but FWIW I think the general argument would be that a 'Christendom' system would embed Christian values in society in a pervasive way such as in medieval Europe say, or in the Byzantine Empire or Tsarist Russia perhaps.
Putin's got a rather warped version of this in his thinking.
My own view is that this is a simplistic approach and would rely on very Erastian and often authoritarian structures in order for it to work - and I'm Orthodox not Protestant (although I was Protestant for most of my Christian life).
I'm tempted to be mischievous and suggest that small c church Protestants have their churches play a more mediating role than they'd like to think. We all interpret the scriptures through the lens of our particular tribe of tradition.
😉
But for all that I remain unconvinced that having a Big C Church or Big T Tradition in and of itself acts as a bulwark against secular humanism. Many Bolshevik activists were the sons or daughters of priests, for instance.
There were also Greek humanists as well as Western European ones.
Sadly, there's a kind of right-wing populist tendency in some quarters of both the RC and Orthodox Churches which have a rosy-tinted view of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Byzantium or Tsarist Russia or monarchies in general.
There are some whackoes who'd even like to see a theocratic monarchy imposed on the USA. Unlike some UK Shopmates I'm not against constitutional monarchies and I wouldn't want to do away with ours, but then I wouldn't want to impose one on anyone else either, particularly not somewhere which became a republic a few hundred years ago.
Up until recent decades the USA wasn't any less religious than those countries with state churches, quie the opposite in fact.
Western Europe is far more secularised than the USA, although there's certainly a shift away from organised religion there too.
That's one of the reasons I don't buy the argument that Protestantism per se inevitably leads to infidelity and secularism. I think there are factors and features within Protestantism than can certainly lead that way but up to press I wouldn't say it was an inevitability.
I think things are more complicated than that.
@Nick Tamen : Yes, it is. I think I'm thinking somewhat of center-left mainline protestants, which is the kind of church I grew up in. Though I think that if it's down to "a club the interprets the Bible to make their decisions," that can get pretty dry. Might be my own realization that biblical interpretation itself is a dangerously subjective process, akin to a ouija board where people see what they want to see based on which passages they choose to emphasize. If God is reduced to the text, that makes me skeptical.
@Leaf : Good point. Honestly, I think I'd rather support a glorified social welfare agency than a fundamentalist cult. And sometimes it feels like those are the consistent options.
@Gramps49 : Yeah, I could've gone into more detail but it was getting overwhelming to put it all down. And it might be a fallacy that secular humanism is considered separate from Christianity. It's just a logical outgrowth of certain strands. And per your other post, maybe humanism is Protestantism finding its existential roots, from which grew modern secular humanism. Might even think that God is something we're either self conscious about or something we take for granted as background noise, especially if She doesn't threaten us on a regular basis.
And (being a present Episcopalian) I appreciate the role of community. It just feels a bit squishy sometimes, and it can only exist (per Bonhoeffer) in tension with individuality. The community isn't God, and doesn't have the authority to dictate God to me. Maybe that leads to a kind of process theology. Hm.
@Gamma Gamaliel : I'm trinitarian, but I think that's mostly because seminary gave me a good frame for being one. I can recite the Nicene Creed with a straight face because I understand its role as an historic document about Christian identity and the importance of the incarnation and the holy spirit for what it says about our reality. That said, I don't really find much to fuss about with Unitarians. They're moving on to a different thing, I guess, but I don't think I'd call them an EvilThing. Just a SomewhatIgnorantThing in a trinitarian church. If God sends people to hell for being unitarian, then God is a monster.
@Raptor Eye : I don't think secular humanists have managed a "church," per se, though some of then have certainly tried. In my experience, folks' revulsion at God isn't driven as much by philosophy as it is by the horrifying abuses committed by God's self-appointed spokespersons, collectively or individually. The question of God itself is a bit of philosophy that doesn't carry much relevance per the Flying Spaghetti Monster jokes of yore.
I think, once someone accepts it, it creates an objective sense of "this is what you do." Lacking that, church becomes anarchic. There's no place you can point to and say "God is here, God does this." It's either a politically loaded "well, this is what we think..." or "God is everything" which dissolves into "God is nothing." Or you say God, as a songwriter put it, "made the world in seven days and ever since he's been a-walking away" (Josh Ritter.)
It's like denying the present incarnation. If God isn't present here, what's the point? There is no authority save that which we can discern, and if we cannot discern God, and if the Bible itself is riddled with subjectivity in both its authors and its readers...what's there to do but make it up as best you can? Which is kind of what we all do anyway.
If anyone is wondering. no I'm not having a faith crisis. I'm pretty cozy existentially. It was just a question that shoved itself into my head while I was reflecting on contemporary politics.
Ironically, I think I picked up my take on that concept from Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is possible I misread him, but in Discipleship he made a big deal out of the fact that God is the mediator in all human relationships.
Before I read him, phrasing like "personal relationship with Jesus" would give me existential hives.
The point being that someone is only really a heretic if they are consciously and deliberately so.
I was intrigued by this as some Orthodox bandy the 'h' word around rather too freely IMHO.
At any rate, it's not up to any of us to determine whether non-Trinitarians go to heaven, or even Trinitarians for that matter. The Orthodox don't tend to pontificate about who will or won't be 'saved' and from what I can gather the RCs don't either.
Not any more any way.
Whatever the case, FWIW I think I can see where you are coming from and I'm intrigued by some of your answers as they're making me think - which is always a good thing.
I had an orthodox friend tell me, for him, the Trinity is not static. Rather, it is three persons in a dance. I cannot say this is orthodox, but it is the way he views the Trinity.
Here is a video, that has helped me understand Trinity.
A lot of ink has been spilt and hot air expended on the difference between Eastern and Western Christian views of the Trinity, but I tend to look for complementarities rather than differences, overlaps and convergence rather than divergence.
That's assuming I even understand those differences in the first place ...
But yes, the Orthodox understanding is that the Trinity is not 'static' as it were. Diagrams and analogies are helpful but they don't sum up or exhaust the Mystery.
St Spyridon used a potsherd as an analogy - clay, fire and water. St Patrick famously used the shamrock. Neither analogy is claimed to be exhaustive.
Coming back to the question @Kendel had and which @Bullfrog tried to answer, I liked Bullfrog's thing about 'this is what we do.'
That would have infuriated me in my hot-Prot days but I'm increasingly feeling comfortable with that.
Leetle Masha, an Orthodox Shipmate of blessed memory, once told me that her priest used to say, 'We don't need no steenking High Church ...' riffing on the line from 'The Treasure of The Sierra Madre.'
By that he meant that the Orthodox don't get hung up on 'high' church and 'low' church and 48.622 degrees church. Things are just done the way they are done. End of.
Ha ha ha.
The elder Gamaliette worked as an au pair in Italy. One set of relatives of the family she worked for lived way up in the mountains and they sometimes went there at weekends. On one occasion their visit coincided with a festival and procession where an elaborate Madonna figure was carried by a strangely circuitous route over the fields and into the church.
When she asked why it went such a long way round the villagers shrugged. Nobody knew. It had always been done that way.
I would phrase this somewhat differently, and in partial response to Lamb Chopped; whatever the (Magisterial) Reformers may have intended on the one side of the Reformation doctrine was ultimately settled by the Church, and on the other side the door had opened up to an individual opting out based on an appeal to reason.
The 'personal relationship' aspect is just the tail end of individualism.
She's worth the price.
My understanding was that the Trinity was essentially dynamic and could not be otherwise.
There's a lot of revisionist thinking going on about the Enlightenment: what Foucault claimed about excessive emphasis on the rational, pragmatic or calculable leading to the rise of the panoptic surveillance state, the white triumphalist histories masking conquest and slavery, the mass displacements of people through the last century, apocalyptic fears bound up with climate change. That former optimism about secular atheist thinking producing a more rational, humane and compassionate society hasn't happened, and instead of looking back to the French Revolution as ending the 'divine right of kings,' many historians now look at the Terror of 1792 as an unstoppable cycle of violence following armed conflict, the dangers of liberation warfare or conventional wars. Another truism might be the claim that the Protestant work ethic resulted in alienation from labour during industrialisation, so that we live within that alienation and the failure of political change to provide solutions. The absence of belief is different from believing in a secular logic leading to 'right thinking'.
It's one thing to accept that a certain older, more naive faith and perception of social stability has gone. I'm inclined to think of the still popular and active faith communities and churches across certain African states as not offering any guarantees for a faith-filled future in the developing world; all one can say is that they are there for now, that secularism may replace Christianity in time. Is Christianity able to reinvent itself or adapt to meet the needs of very different societies? Is the prophetic element there waiting to be rediscovered?
Earlier, thinking about traditional 'truths' we return to again and again, I was looking at a few lines from a poem by Robert Frost and was struck by this:
...why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favour.
But then I don't think that truth is necessarily a matter of fashion. God does not wink out of existence if people stop believing in him, nor come into existence if they do.
If Frost is onto anything, it cannot be objective things like the reality or otherwise of God.
Truths or 'truths' are relative or culturally determined statements for some of us, what holds true for certain people at a certain time, given our partial understanding within a specific discourse or 'reality'. It's like querying what a 'personal relationship with God' might have meant to Luther, as opposed to Paul on the road to Damascus, or Bonhoeffer talking about Christ as the 'man for others' in a religionless or godless future society. Truth stated in human terms is context-dependent, no matter how valid or enduring we may want that 'truth' to be.
The distance from the earth to the moon has a particular value (well, range of values). That value is not context-dependent in any way.
Or do you think it is? If people believe it's three miles away then that's how far away it is?
There really are such things as objective truths. Not every thing is one, but some things are. And whether there's a God or not has to be one of them. As is whether there was a person called Jesus, whether Jesus was in fact also God and whether he rose from the dead. These are not subjective, true one day and false the next.
Talking about belief in the historical Jesus, the Resurrection or the continuing presence of the Risen Christ is a credal statement of faith not a proven fact. Different discourse. And many of us have learned to distrust notions of objectivity without resorting to a fixed binary between subjective vs objective.
I know it's not a proven fact, but whether it occurred or not is not subjective; it's something we can be right or wrong about even if we can't prove who's right and who's wrong.
It doesn’t become true because people believe in it, or false because they don't.
If there aren't objective truths that we can discover, why bother with science? With history? With archaeology? With palaeontology? With astronomy? Let's just decide what our truths are and go with that.
This is where the problem comes in I think. I don't call those significances "truth". I reserve the word for statements of external objective realities.
Some people believe ghosts exist. Some don't. It's unproven. I don't apply the word "truth" to either parties' beliefs.
And some people know they don't, belief doesn't enter in to it.
It could be argued that Pentecostalism and the later more middle class charismatic movement were reactions to earlier Protestant manoeuvres away from the transcendent.
I don't think there was any lack of emphasis on transcendence within early Methodism or German Pietism, say.
Nor would I say it's entirely absent from the Reformed tradition, simply expressed differently.
Where it is conspicuous by its absence, I'd suggest, are in certain forms of post-1800s liberal Protestantism. But I'd suggest it's come back there too through the wide interest in contemplative prayer and meditative practices once associated solely with strands within Roman Catholicism.
Everyone seems to like the great Mystics these days.
Is that a great (unintended) Freudian slip? Or an intended double entendre?
So, the great "I am" is a blasphemious reference to someone considered somewhat grandiose. A narcissist.
So.
GG: Everyone seems to like the great Mystics these days.
Q: I think eventually the great "I am" asserts itself.
I infer from this that liking the the great Mystics is an assertion of narcissism by God, the source I Am, breaking through to us, or by us projecting ourselves narcissistically if not solipsistically in to our unknowing.
Yeah. That reminds me of something I remember from seminary, and I'm kind of riffing on the observation:
It was joked, I think, that Protestants had finally caught up with modernism somewhere in the 20th century, which has the goal of eliminating transcendence. Sola scriptura is somewhat an expression of this, if we could just read the Bible logically, we could have the correct interpretation and work it all out!
And then postmodernism shows up, and all they're all thrown off again, just when they figured they had it all sorted out and had made a sort of existential peace.
Lots of biblical conservatives I've encountered really want this to be a logical thing, even the dispensationalists, or especially the dispensationalists. There is a straightforward. logical read of the Bible that trims off all the nonsense and makes it simple: Do this and be saved. It may not be entirely rational, grounded in reality, but it is eminently logical, built on floating axioms.
And the crisis hits when you realize that the axioms are floating, and then the system collapses. But you still want the world to be logical, so a secular empiricism takes over, hopefully with a lingering humanist affection.
To be any kind of non-pan-theist requires a certain willingness to be self-consciously crazy as far as the rational world is concerned, or think that there's anything going beyond the secular world. The monks must be crazy.*
* Here playing off of what I learned was the origin of the word "secular," which used to mean "non-monastic." A secular priest was one who dealt with layfolk, as opposed to a priest who spent his entire life in holy confines. I got a lot of mileage out of that understanding of the word, which is probably informing my OP here.
Which ideas have gone out of the marketplace? Intellectuality (whatever that may be) or transcendence?
Sometimes the claims are hard to keep track of.
Ah out into. My bad.
I've had good experiences, and I do think they're commercialized.
That said, I think meditation is in some sense an anti-intellectual practice. The point of meditation isn't to think, it's to discipline yourself to not-think. As the OG Zen Buddhist famously put it, "Just Sit."
Meanwhile, in my circles, most of the smart people are really invested in empiricism, which isn't generally kind of transcendence. I'm being a little stereotypical but I think it's a trend. Science gets results while philosophy just talks to itself. And that's an impression I get from society, not my personal opinion.