Zen isn't the only form of meditation. Other brandsTM are available.
As I understand it, meditation within Christian traditions isn't about emptying your mind either.
I'm no expert on Buddhism, Zen or otherwise but most Buddhists I've met seem pretty smart and certainly not anti-intellectual.
There may well be a certain amount of anti-intellectualism in some Christian contemplative circles and practices but I think it's going too far to tar all with that brush.
In the same way, I'd suggest that highly conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists aren't so much anti-intellectual - some are fiercely intelligent - but rather are somewhat brittle in their thinking, trying to squeeze everything into some kind of neat formula.
Meditative and contemplative practices aren't about zoning out by means of mantras, although some can certainly head that way.
... I think intellectuality plays a role in closing down transcendence, certainly in long-term meditation you find that people cling to ideas, even while transcendence or whatever one calls it, comes knocking. It's scary to "go beyond", yet most religions have it at the core, with varying degrees of "ego-erosion". But in the West, this seemed unsustainable for a long time. Of course, today such ideas have gone out into the marketplace.
In the same way, I'd suggest that highly conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists aren't so much anti-intellectual - some are fiercely intelligent - but rather are somewhat brittle in their thinking, trying to squeeze everything into some kind of neat formula.
In my experience, it's more that they (and their thinking) are highly compartmentalised.
Which isn't a million miles from what I said. 'Trying to squeeze everything into some kind of neat formula' = 'it's more that they (and their thinking) are highly compartmentalised.'
Zen isn't the only form of meditation. Other brandsTM are available.
As I understand it, meditation within Christian traditions isn't about emptying your mind either.
I'm no expert on Buddhism, Zen or otherwise but most Buddhists I've met seem pretty smart and certainly not anti-intellectual.
There may well be a certain amount of anti-intellectualism in some Christian contemplative circles and practices but I think it's going too far to tar all with that brush.
In the same way, I'd suggest that highly conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists aren't so much anti-intellectual - some are fiercely intelligent - but rather are somewhat brittle in their thinking, trying to squeeze everything into some kind of neat formula.
Meditative and contemplative practices aren't about zoning out by means of mantras, although some can certainly head that way.
That all seems fair to me. I would strongly agree what fundamentalists of a certain type are often extremely intellectual. The problem is that they build mighty towers on weak axiomatic foundations.
Sadly, in matters of pure logic, there's no real gravity.
Which isn't a million miles from what I said. 'Trying to squeeze everything into some kind of neat formula' = 'it's more that they (and their thinking) are highly compartmentalised.'
Or am I missing something?
What I mean by "compartmentalised" is that their thinking varies significantly according the problem domain. For example, university graduates who apply empirical principles in their professional day jobs, but who appear to avoid the principle of evidence-based comprehension in all things to do with "church".
I'm still not sure if that's what you had in mind, but I agree that it doesn't particularly look like anti-intellectualism - the interesting question is what's going on underneath the surface. It may be brittle, but I can't see it as anything as calculating as a neat formula.
I'm wondering (many interesting tangents in this thread) about secular humanism without humanism. We could also be talking about the post-industrial West's social anomie arising from a deracinated rootlessness and loss of belief, or disenchantment. Leading to secularism but not necessarily humanism, the more so as universities and theology faculties move away from the older humanist disciplines and ethics supposedly produced by the Enlightenment. Much of the focus of the secular politics of identity has to do with a lack of social identity or questioning older certainties about social roles, institutions like marriage, gender 'norms'.
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'.
Thanks for this, @MaryLouise, and for the link to Robert Frost's poem.
Possibly more by way of a reaction than a response: it struck me that, at the beginning of the 17th century, the majority of us would have considered pacifism to be an unorthodox cultish practice. In contrast, the inhabitants of that period would be mystified by the sight now of children around the world, on camera, advocating for their childhood.
And, in the context of this thread: rather than pointing the finger at "personal relationship", I wonder how realistic is our expectation (or maybe the modern myth?) of our own agency. (This isn't to deny the gross inequities of individual agency in the world today.)
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?
Good point. I regret to say that, rather than looking forward, this led me to look back and wonder about the extent to which Luther was viewed as a prophet.
@pease, let me think a little and get back to you. The danger with any kind of generalising is that I tend to over-simplify and have to go back and build in the buts and ifs...
Likewise. Hence I am about to qualify my 'neat formula' comment.
I'm thinking rather of a kind of interpretive grid or framework such as Dispensationalism or the various rather clunky views about scriptural inerrancy.
I am aware, of course, that there are a range of views within these positions.
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.
@pease, @Gamma Gamaliel, I'm going back to the initial post by @Bullfrog here because the tangents in this thread are like myriad tempting rabbit holes. Any ecumenical conversation is like intersectional conversation in that it includes too many topics and positions all at once. Twinkling lights beguile us.
One supposed 'danger' of those strands of Protestant theology that emphasised a personal relationship with Christ as being more important than perfunctory church membership is that it opened the door to personal revelation by individuals and ecstatic or charismatic breakaway groups focusing on secret revelatory knowledge, repentance and conversion of the heart and downplayed the necessity for sacramental practice and the role of the minister or priest. At times this galvanised renewal movements (in South African Dutch Reformed and evangelical pietist circles in South Africa in the 19th century we had what is known as the Great Awakening under Andrew Murray). Quite distinct from the 19th-century split of the Anglican church in South Africa after the 'Colenso affair' which was the evolving of a liberal post-Enlightenment church breaking from the older autocratic Anglican establishment. Colenso, as a missionary, would not preach that the ancestors of newly Christianised Black Africans were condemned to eternal damnation and did not believe that Holy Communion was a condition for salvation.
Key to these debates is the issue of what 'church' meant after the Reformation and the later Romantic focus on the individual seeking personal freedom as a form of redemption. On the one hand, there was the rediscovery of Catholic truth claims by the Tractarians and a new enthusiasm for Roman Catholic traditions as reasonable, historical, immutable and enduring. The Roman Catholic church, medieval, authoritarian, centralised, seemed a bulwark in contrast to the fractured divisive Protestant churches unable to present any kind of united front against unjust wars, rising secularism and pluralism. The power of that totalising morality and sacramental system was evident; no salvation possible outside of the Catholic church. Of course this IMO was not really the case, but it was the dominant perception of a definitively Roman church until Vatican II.
Because it presented as a closed system, Roman Catholicism could stand back from the battles between the State and Protestant churches: it was a theocratic state in itself and a worldview that opposed modern or secular forces. The RCC could present Just War Theory as established by Augustine to be a cohesive moral doctrine taught in seminaries and applied to argue for proportionality, military necessity and the fair treatment of prisoners of war; even to day most Protestant theologians arguing for or against just war use Catholic ethical criteria. @pease, yes of course there were always renegade pacifist movements but for differing reasons. Today, the emphasis (not just in the West) has to do with global suffering and theodicy, the problem of evil and inhumanity in times of genocide, nuclear destruction and ecological devastation. Evil, sinfulness, is not 'out there' in the Devil's work or a barbaric irrational enemy but within, our complicity, collective culpability and unwillingness to effect change.
So I'd argue ecumenically that all our traditions are fragmentary, partial and vestigial regardless of whether churches are more populous or not. Which isn't to say that secular humanism is the end point -- intentional faith communities and sacraments remain significant in breaking with Western totality systems. For some, the relationship with the Divine as experienced in the shrinking vulnerable community or sacraments may be more negative or apophatic than a transcendent experience of the ecstatic or holiness. The Divine enters into relationship with us to shatter human complacency or certainties. Going back to @Gamma Gamaliel's mention of Luther, I keep thinking about how much Luther's writings on the Hidden God have meant to me, the paradox of taking pride in scandal (that shameful death on the Cross), strength found only in weakness, power only in the service of the broken servant and ignored prophet. I don't think humanism, secular or not, has the last word, there is a horizon beyond humanism to which we will always return.
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.
@pease, @Gamma Gamaliel, I'm going back to the initial post by @Bullfrog here because the tangents in this thread are like myriad tempting rabbit holes.
Good idea. The more I looked at my post, the less-answerable it appeared. (I suspect there's an argument about revisionism in there.)
Any ecumenical conversation is like intersectional conversation in that it includes too many topics and positions all at once. Twinkling lights beguile us.
Little stars.
Picking it up from...
@pease, yes of course there were always renegade pacifist movements but for differing reasons.
True.
Today, the emphasis (not just in the West) has to do with global suffering and theodicy, the problem of evil and inhumanity in times of genocide, nuclear destruction and ecological devastation. Evil, sinfulness, is not 'out there' in the Devil's work or a barbaric irrational enemy but within, our complicity, collective culpability and unwillingness to effect change.
Yup. I realise that "church" is part of the context, but I note that, in some parts of the world, we would have to explain what we mean by "evil". More generally, I wonder if newer generations than ours see "suffering" and "evil" as being as closely related as we do.
So I'd argue ecumenically that all our traditions are fragmentary, partial and vestigial regardless of whether churches are more populous or not. Which isn't to say that secular humanism is the end point -- intentional faith communities and sacraments remain significant in breaking with Western totality systems. For some, the relationship with the Divine as experienced in the shrinking vulnerable community or sacraments may be more negative or apophatic than a transcendent experience of the ecstatic or holiness. The Divine enters into relationship with us to shatter human complacency or certainties. Going back to @Gamma Gamaliel's mention of Luther, I keep thinking about how much Luther's writings on the Hidden God have meant to me, the paradox of taking pride in scandal (that shameful death on the Cross), strength found only in weakness, power only in the service of the broken servant and ignored prophet. I don't think humanism, secular or not, has the last word, there is a horizon beyond humanism to which we will always return.
Nicely put.
I suspect that humanism is, fundamentally, an idea that doesn't sustain. The question then being whether there'll be enough "church" remaining to point the way back.
I find the paradoxes you mention and the shattering of our complacency and certainties the most compelling aspects of faith.
Lest I seem an apologist, I do think one weakness of humanism is that it ends up becoming narcissistic, putting ourselves at the center of the existential universe, as it were. And I think, especially when times get harder, it's important to push out against the circle of "our tribe" as much as one can. It's so easy to let it contract.
Lest I seem an apologist, I do think one weakness of humanism is that it ends up becoming narcissistic, putting ourselves at the center of the existential universe, as it were. And I think, especially when times get harder, it's important to push out against the circle of "our tribe" as much as one can. It's so easy to let it contract.
@pease, the can of worms we open when we try to talk about concepts like 'sin', 'evil' or even 'suffering' is really messy. Some time ago there was a Ship thread on how different church traditions understand 'sin' and that was like plunging into Dante's nine circles of hell without a guide. When we were studying Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter as a Puritan classic, our lecturer tried to clarify New England Puritan beliefs as opposed to Calvinist beliefs or the original English Puritans of the 16th and 17th centuries and how Puritanism continues to shape the American psyche. I went on to immerse myself in the writings of Jonathan Edwards (the First Great Awakening) and part of me is probably still in love with his Puritan ideals.
The point though was the turn-around in how 'sin' and personal guilt and evil were understood and that was a decisive break with older understandings. Perry Miller, the most gifted but dark historian of the Puritan phenomenon, put it this way: "the Puritans liberated believers from the treadmill of indulgences and penances, but cast them on the iron couch of introspection." While Western humanism is essentially optimistic about human nature and 'progress' in scientific or rational terms, the corrective offered by certain strands within Christian traditions offers a necessary corrective. Again, shorthand, but one might say the Puritan utopian settlement of the chosen elect in New England's wilderness ends with the Salem witch trials, and the realisation of how denial and projection of evil onto an enemy out there conceals inward brokenness and a flawed nature.
War and the experience of profound helplessness in the face of inhumanity or atrocity alters more naive understandings of what evil means. It may be accurate to some extent, and easier, to ascribe crimes against humanity to forces out there (militant Islam or terrorists or capitalism) but at some point, there is an imperative to interrogate oneself, those whom Thomas Merton called the 'guilty bystander'.
Ah. @MaryLouise, the context being "not just in the West", I was just noting that not all cultures have the concept of a dualistic good/evil dichotomy.
I was further speculating whether newer generations within Western cultures are picking up some of these non-Western (non-dualistic) ideas and incorporating them into their cultural understanding of things that are "undesirable". (Maybe which are even supplanting traditional Western cultural understandings.)
Having said that, I'm processing your post (including understanding what you mean by "dark" historian). And it seems reasonable that different communities would develop their understandings of "evil" in adapting to significantly-changing external (and then internal) circumstances.
While Western humanism is essentially optimistic about human nature and 'progress' in scientific or rational terms, the corrective offered by certain strands within Christian traditions offers a necessary corrective.
Makes me wonder if *only* the church can offer a corrective. Is humanism itself waiting for a reforming prophet?
Quickly -- @pease yes, thinking about the influence across the now-pluralist West of Buddhist notions of impermanence and emptiness or 'radical impersonality', along with nature-based faiths showing a shamanic urgency for eco-awareness and new inter-species connections -- well, I could go on and on, fragmented and singular events or moments. And I'm not always talking about 'church' when I talk about new or emerging faith imperatives, especially with new virtual collectives or 'hive minds' online. Thinking about micro-histories (Puritan New England or missionaries in southern Africa) is often a way to negotiate a path through vast conceptual frames.
Isn't Protestantism too varied a reality to say that it has a logical conclusion? Is Luther encouraging German princes to crack down on the radicals not part of Protestantism? What about the Calvinists burning Servetus at the stake? What about Erastianism? Generally speaking, once the dust of upheaval settled, did Protestants not tend to enforce their doctrines with about the same demand for public assent as Roman Catholics did?
I wonder if secular humanism finds its roots not so much in any principle inherent to Protestantism, such as the personal relationship of the believer with Christ, as in the fact of the Reformation in itself, both because it generated a religious pluralism which made difference of belief a relatively close reality and because it carried within it the idea that dogma can be subject to change, even if for instance Luther did try very quickly to put an end to any further doctrinal changes once he had carried out what he considered to be the core reforms that the Church needed.
I think it was in A. G. Dickens's English Reformation that I read that the constant religious changes in 16th-century England sowed the seeds for a sort of religious scepticism, not yet of course in the sense of doubting the fundamentals of orthodox Christianity let alone the existence of God, but certainly of apprehending the Church's teachings and practices with some measure of detachment given that they were so liable to change from one monarch to the next. (There must have been a good many "vicars of Bray".) Don't quote me on that — I may have read it elsewhere —, but the thought it as an interesting one. How historically accurate it's judged to be after 60 more years of scholarship, I'm not sure; but perhaps it's food for thought with respect to the later development of more liberal and pluralistic approaches to public discourse. (To some extent, it parallels an explanation I've seen for the mass apostasy from the Catholic Church in the 1960s, viz., that the very fact that seemingly everything in the Church's "immutable" teachings and practices was suddenly up for grabs was enough to discredit what the Church had to say, aside from any result of the actual pastoral and liturgical changes themselves.)
Sed contra, I've sometimes seen the Western individualism and scepticism that underlie secular humanism being traced back to Descartes and Cartesian doubt. Certainly it is interesting that the first major outbreak of secular humanism occurred in Catholic France rather than any Protestant country. In this scenario, where Protestantism perhaps does come in is that its diversity, in the context of loosened speech restrictions that had been exported by revolutionary France to much of the rest of Europe, allowed for the development of liberal Protestantism which ultimately acted as a gateway to secular humanism for a lot of Protestants, whereas the Roman Catholic Church's central authority, as it had at Trent, doubled down on its core principles (acting, as @MaryLouise said, as an attractive bulwark in its apparent immutability).
In relation to Buddhist ideas of emptiness, it can be tied to Christian self-abnegation, after all, I am a mere straw in the hurricane. (Yet I am also the hurricane). See Thomas Merton, and others.
Lest I seem an apologist, I do think one weakness of humanism is that it ends up becoming narcissistic, putting ourselves at the center of the existential universe, as it were. And I think, especially when times get harder, it's important to push out against the circle of "our tribe" as much as one can. It's so easy to let it contract.
Our tribe is humanity.
Trouble is that "humanity" is an abstraction from "humans."
Reminds me of a joke a friend quipped in high school about loving persons while hating people.
Lest I seem an apologist, I do think one weakness of humanism is that it ends up becoming narcissistic, putting ourselves at the center of the existential universe, as it were. And I think, especially when times get harder, it's important to push out against the circle of "our tribe" as much as one can. It's so easy to let it contract.
Our tribe is humanity.
Trouble is that "humanity" is an abstraction from "humans."
Reminds me of a joke a friend quipped in high school about loving persons while hating people.
Aye, theory and practice, general and particular, abstract and concrete, where the rubber hits the road. Pious too. And a lie in retrospect. The piety is born of rejection of my 'former' selves. A layer of self-revulsion. It's me I can't stand. And yes, I need to have compassion on myself too, I've known that for years, in theory, but only recently was it said by my clinical psychologist, which gobsmacked me. Religion had not helped.
Misanthropic suspicions are fairly prevalent at this time of year!
Going back to what @thomas posted, I was thinking about the post-Reformation problem of religious pluralism as rendering dogma or dogmas relative, and situational ethics as replacing older absolutist moralities safeguarded by the Magisterium.
A friend of mine was saying recently how when he studied scholastic Thomism at university, there was endless quibbling about 'which Thomism?' since if there were 25 students in a seminar, you would have 25 Thomisms. The great systematic theologies of the early 20th century (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich or Karl Rahner for example) could not stand up against the challenges that came from so many new directions: feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonialist, post-structuralist etc.
Looking back, it is evident that the later twentieth century was largely defined not by humanism but by extreme historical situations of radical evil (inhumanity) that ruptured not only progressive optimism but also a Western faith in political solutions. The old histories written by the victors have given way IMO to a retrieval of marginalised or forgotten, even repressed, memories of the suffering of the victims of history.
Looking back, it is evident that the later twentieth century was largely defined not by humanism but by extreme historical situations of radical evil (inhumanity) that ruptured not only progressive optimism but also a Western faith in political solutions. The old histories written by the victors have given way IMO to a retrieval of marginalised or forgotten, even repressed, memories of the suffering of the victims of history.
I'm thinking of the role that media (means of communication) have played, and continue to play in this. In the period you identify, as communication media - book, film, radio, television and then digital technologies - became increasingly available and affordable, an ever-increasing number of independent (or non-establishment) producers and broadcasters have been willing and able to tell the stories of the victims of history, as established governments and institutions have increasingly lost control of the narratives.
I'm thinking of the role that media (means of communication) have played, and continue to play in this. In the period you identify, as communication media - book, film, radio, television and then digital technologies - became increasingly available and affordable, an ever-increasing number of independent (or non-establishment) producers and broadcasters have been willing and able to tell the stories of the victims of history, as established governments and institutions have increasingly lost control of the narratives.
And the church, established religion, sidelined and excluded from the public sphere as well as the academy. One minute you'd have TV watchers in their living rooms staring at Billy Graham crusades and then in 1968, they're looking at the real live war happening in Vietnam and outraged by what they see. The confidence of the West about Christianising and civilising its colonies falters when the Empire starts talking back. When it comes to the digital technologies, we're still hardly able to figure out how this transforms global communications, the vulnerability to disinformation, the sheer exhaustion of a neverending cascade of spectacle, online entertainment, moral panics, war-related horror after horror. And at times all the 'church' may have to offer is prayer, silence or a brief respite from the chaos.
Sad to say, Jesus’ prayer (John 17) that we might all be one seems to have a long way to go before fulfilment. It requires an abandonment of fear and hate of others who are different.
The real irony is that the visible church, far from embracing Jesus’ prayer has, far too often, been seen, correctly, as acting in ways opposed to the prayer.
The bookend to the prayer is embracing Jesus’ command to love enemies and pray for them. I think the church might become rather more of an agent for good in the world if its teachers and members gave first priority to that particular prayer and teaching. Lip service really isn’t enough in a world imcreasingly dominated by fear and hate.
[...]A friend of mine was saying recently how when he studied scholastic Thomism at university, there was endless quibbling about 'which Thomism?' since if there were 25 students in a seminar, you would have 25 Thomisms. The great systematic theologies of the early 20th century (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich or Karl Rahner for example) could not stand up against the challenges that came from so many new directions: feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonialist, post-structuralist etc.[...]
For one, I'm kinda happy this thread is still rolling.
And I think this is the rub I've seen. You can have, as musician Eugen Hutz put it flippantly, your "Super-theory of Super-everything," but in the end it will always be subject to as many interpretations as you have strong-minded interpreters. And there's certainly a valid range of interpretation, and there are, I think, things safely outside of that range. But at the end, the freedom to interpret always wins. I think it was what won when Jesus lived, and it was what wins as Jesus lives still. We are freed to be free and to free others. If we take on chains, they must be entirely voluntary.
Tillich always comes to mind as someone who tried to make a sufficiently flexible universalism by reducing theology to general philosophical categories in the most open sense possible, but it just doesn't stick. Humans are still just gonna human all over whatever you give them. The sacred must be able to survive the process of profanation. Maybe that's what the cross represents, among other things?
Comments
As I understand it, meditation within Christian traditions isn't about emptying your mind either.
I'm no expert on Buddhism, Zen or otherwise but most Buddhists I've met seem pretty smart and certainly not anti-intellectual.
There may well be a certain amount of anti-intellectualism in some Christian contemplative circles and practices but I think it's going too far to tar all with that brush.
In the same way, I'd suggest that highly conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists aren't so much anti-intellectual - some are fiercely intelligent - but rather are somewhat brittle in their thinking, trying to squeeze everything into some kind of neat formula.
Meditative and contemplative practices aren't about zoning out by means of mantras, although some can certainly head that way.
Philosophy does an important job of informing (health) ethics, for example.
In my experience, it's more that they (and their thinking) are highly compartmentalised.
Or am I missing something?
That all seems fair to me. I would strongly agree what fundamentalists of a certain type are often extremely intellectual. The problem is that they build mighty towers on weak axiomatic foundations.
Sadly, in matters of pure logic, there's no real gravity.
I'm still not sure if that's what you had in mind, but I agree that it doesn't particularly look like anti-intellectualism - the interesting question is what's going on underneath the surface. It may be brittle, but I can't see it as anything as calculating as a neat formula.
Possibly more by way of a reaction than a response: it struck me that, at the beginning of the 17th century, the majority of us would have considered pacifism to be an unorthodox cultish practice. In contrast, the inhabitants of that period would be mystified by the sight now of children around the world, on camera, advocating for their childhood.
And, in the context of this thread: rather than pointing the finger at "personal relationship", I wonder how realistic is our expectation (or maybe the modern myth?) of our own agency. (This isn't to deny the gross inequities of individual agency in the world today.)
Good point. I regret to say that, rather than looking forward, this led me to look back and wonder about the extent to which Luther was viewed as a prophet.
I'm thinking rather of a kind of interpretive grid or framework such as Dispensationalism or the various rather clunky views about scriptural inerrancy.
I am aware, of course, that there are a range of views within these positions.
@pease, @Gamma Gamaliel, I'm going back to the initial post by @Bullfrog here because the tangents in this thread are like myriad tempting rabbit holes. Any ecumenical conversation is like intersectional conversation in that it includes too many topics and positions all at once. Twinkling lights beguile us.
One supposed 'danger' of those strands of Protestant theology that emphasised a personal relationship with Christ as being more important than perfunctory church membership is that it opened the door to personal revelation by individuals and ecstatic or charismatic breakaway groups focusing on secret revelatory knowledge, repentance and conversion of the heart and downplayed the necessity for sacramental practice and the role of the minister or priest. At times this galvanised renewal movements (in South African Dutch Reformed and evangelical pietist circles in South Africa in the 19th century we had what is known as the Great Awakening under Andrew Murray). Quite distinct from the 19th-century split of the Anglican church in South Africa after the 'Colenso affair' which was the evolving of a liberal post-Enlightenment church breaking from the older autocratic Anglican establishment. Colenso, as a missionary, would not preach that the ancestors of newly Christianised Black Africans were condemned to eternal damnation and did not believe that Holy Communion was a condition for salvation.
Key to these debates is the issue of what 'church' meant after the Reformation and the later Romantic focus on the individual seeking personal freedom as a form of redemption. On the one hand, there was the rediscovery of Catholic truth claims by the Tractarians and a new enthusiasm for Roman Catholic traditions as reasonable, historical, immutable and enduring. The Roman Catholic church, medieval, authoritarian, centralised, seemed a bulwark in contrast to the fractured divisive Protestant churches unable to present any kind of united front against unjust wars, rising secularism and pluralism. The power of that totalising morality and sacramental system was evident; no salvation possible outside of the Catholic church. Of course this IMO was not really the case, but it was the dominant perception of a definitively Roman church until Vatican II.
Because it presented as a closed system, Roman Catholicism could stand back from the battles between the State and Protestant churches: it was a theocratic state in itself and a worldview that opposed modern or secular forces. The RCC could present Just War Theory as established by Augustine to be a cohesive moral doctrine taught in seminaries and applied to argue for proportionality, military necessity and the fair treatment of prisoners of war; even to day most Protestant theologians arguing for or against just war use Catholic ethical criteria. @pease, yes of course there were always renegade pacifist movements but for differing reasons. Today, the emphasis (not just in the West) has to do with global suffering and theodicy, the problem of evil and inhumanity in times of genocide, nuclear destruction and ecological devastation. Evil, sinfulness, is not 'out there' in the Devil's work or a barbaric irrational enemy but within, our complicity, collective culpability and unwillingness to effect change.
So I'd argue ecumenically that all our traditions are fragmentary, partial and vestigial regardless of whether churches are more populous or not. Which isn't to say that secular humanism is the end point -- intentional faith communities and sacraments remain significant in breaking with Western totality systems. For some, the relationship with the Divine as experienced in the shrinking vulnerable community or sacraments may be more negative or apophatic than a transcendent experience of the ecstatic or holiness. The Divine enters into relationship with us to shatter human complacency or certainties. Going back to @Gamma Gamaliel's mention of Luther, I keep thinking about how much Luther's writings on the Hidden God have meant to me, the paradox of taking pride in scandal (that shameful death on the Cross), strength found only in weakness, power only in the service of the broken servant and ignored prophet. I don't think humanism, secular or not, has the last word, there is a horizon beyond humanism to which we will always return.
I've heard a bit about the 'Colenso Affair' and understand he was opposed to the Zulu War.
I don't know much about Andrew Murray but he was admired in the evangelical charismatic circles I moved in.
Little stars.
Picking it up from... True.
Yup. I realise that "church" is part of the context, but I note that, in some parts of the world, we would have to explain what we mean by "evil". More generally, I wonder if newer generations than ours see "suffering" and "evil" as being as closely related as we do.
Nicely put.
I suspect that humanism is, fundamentally, an idea that doesn't sustain. The question then being whether there'll be enough "church" remaining to point the way back.
I find the paradoxes you mention and the shattering of our complacency and certainties the most compelling aspects of faith.
Our tribe is humanity.
The point though was the turn-around in how 'sin' and personal guilt and evil were understood and that was a decisive break with older understandings. Perry Miller, the most gifted but dark historian of the Puritan phenomenon, put it this way: "the Puritans liberated believers from the treadmill of indulgences and penances, but cast them on the iron couch of introspection." While Western humanism is essentially optimistic about human nature and 'progress' in scientific or rational terms, the corrective offered by certain strands within Christian traditions offers a necessary corrective. Again, shorthand, but one might say the Puritan utopian settlement of the chosen elect in New England's wilderness ends with the Salem witch trials, and the realisation of how denial and projection of evil onto an enemy out there conceals inward brokenness and a flawed nature.
War and the experience of profound helplessness in the face of inhumanity or atrocity alters more naive understandings of what evil means. It may be accurate to some extent, and easier, to ascribe crimes against humanity to forces out there (militant Islam or terrorists or capitalism) but at some point, there is an imperative to interrogate oneself, those whom Thomas Merton called the 'guilty bystander'.
I was further speculating whether newer generations within Western cultures are picking up some of these non-Western (non-dualistic) ideas and incorporating them into their cultural understanding of things that are "undesirable". (Maybe which are even supplanting traditional Western cultural understandings.)
Having said that, I'm processing your post (including understanding what you mean by "dark" historian). And it seems reasonable that different communities would develop their understandings of "evil" in adapting to significantly-changing external (and then internal) circumstances.
Makes me wonder if *only* the church can offer a corrective. Is humanism itself waiting for a reforming prophet?
I wonder if secular humanism finds its roots not so much in any principle inherent to Protestantism, such as the personal relationship of the believer with Christ, as in the fact of the Reformation in itself, both because it generated a religious pluralism which made difference of belief a relatively close reality and because it carried within it the idea that dogma can be subject to change, even if for instance Luther did try very quickly to put an end to any further doctrinal changes once he had carried out what he considered to be the core reforms that the Church needed.
I think it was in A. G. Dickens's English Reformation that I read that the constant religious changes in 16th-century England sowed the seeds for a sort of religious scepticism, not yet of course in the sense of doubting the fundamentals of orthodox Christianity let alone the existence of God, but certainly of apprehending the Church's teachings and practices with some measure of detachment given that they were so liable to change from one monarch to the next. (There must have been a good many "vicars of Bray".) Don't quote me on that — I may have read it elsewhere —, but the thought it as an interesting one. How historically accurate it's judged to be after 60 more years of scholarship, I'm not sure; but perhaps it's food for thought with respect to the later development of more liberal and pluralistic approaches to public discourse. (To some extent, it parallels an explanation I've seen for the mass apostasy from the Catholic Church in the 1960s, viz., that the very fact that seemingly everything in the Church's "immutable" teachings and practices was suddenly up for grabs was enough to discredit what the Church had to say, aside from any result of the actual pastoral and liturgical changes themselves.)
Sed contra, I've sometimes seen the Western individualism and scepticism that underlie secular humanism being traced back to Descartes and Cartesian doubt. Certainly it is interesting that the first major outbreak of secular humanism occurred in Catholic France rather than any Protestant country. In this scenario, where Protestantism perhaps does come in is that its diversity, in the context of loosened speech restrictions that had been exported by revolutionary France to much of the rest of Europe, allowed for the development of liberal Protestantism which ultimately acted as a gateway to secular humanism for a lot of Protestants, whereas the Roman Catholic Church's central authority, as it had at Trent, doubled down on its core principles (acting, as @MaryLouise said, as an attractive bulwark in its apparent immutability).
Trouble is that "humanity" is an abstraction from "humans."
Reminds me of a joke a friend quipped in high school about loving persons while hating people.
Going back to what @thomas posted, I was thinking about the post-Reformation problem of religious pluralism as rendering dogma or dogmas relative, and situational ethics as replacing older absolutist moralities safeguarded by the Magisterium.
A friend of mine was saying recently how when he studied scholastic Thomism at university, there was endless quibbling about 'which Thomism?' since if there were 25 students in a seminar, you would have 25 Thomisms. The great systematic theologies of the early 20th century (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich or Karl Rahner for example) could not stand up against the challenges that came from so many new directions: feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonialist, post-structuralist etc.
Looking back, it is evident that the later twentieth century was largely defined not by humanism but by extreme historical situations of radical evil (inhumanity) that ruptured not only progressive optimism but also a Western faith in political solutions. The old histories written by the victors have given way IMO to a retrieval of marginalised or forgotten, even repressed, memories of the suffering of the victims of history.
And the church, established religion, sidelined and excluded from the public sphere as well as the academy. One minute you'd have TV watchers in their living rooms staring at Billy Graham crusades and then in 1968, they're looking at the real live war happening in Vietnam and outraged by what they see. The confidence of the West about Christianising and civilising its colonies falters when the Empire starts talking back. When it comes to the digital technologies, we're still hardly able to figure out how this transforms global communications, the vulnerability to disinformation, the sheer exhaustion of a neverending cascade of spectacle, online entertainment, moral panics, war-related horror after horror. And at times all the 'church' may have to offer is prayer, silence or a brief respite from the chaos.
The real irony is that the visible church, far from embracing Jesus’ prayer has, far too often, been seen, correctly, as acting in ways opposed to the prayer.
The bookend to the prayer is embracing Jesus’ command to love enemies and pray for them. I think the church might become rather more of an agent for good in the world if its teachers and members gave first priority to that particular prayer and teaching. Lip service really isn’t enough in a world imcreasingly dominated by fear and hate.
And I think this is the rub I've seen. You can have, as musician Eugen Hutz put it flippantly, your "Super-theory of Super-everything," but in the end it will always be subject to as many interpretations as you have strong-minded interpreters. And there's certainly a valid range of interpretation, and there are, I think, things safely outside of that range. But at the end, the freedom to interpret always wins. I think it was what won when Jesus lived, and it was what wins as Jesus lives still. We are freed to be free and to free others. If we take on chains, they must be entirely voluntary.
Tillich always comes to mind as someone who tried to make a sufficiently flexible universalism by reducing theology to general philosophical categories in the most open sense possible, but it just doesn't stick. Humans are still just gonna human all over whatever you give them. The sacred must be able to survive the process of profanation. Maybe that's what the cross represents, among other things?
By the way, here's the song I'm referencing, acoustic.