{"id":25422,"date":"2020-01-16T19:18:24","date_gmt":"2020-01-17T03:18:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=25422"},"modified":"2020-01-16T19:18:43","modified_gmt":"2020-01-17T03:18:43","slug":"lowering-or-eliminating-the-bar-on-spirituality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/lowering-or-eliminating-the-bar-on-spirituality\/","title":{"rendered":"Lowering (or Eliminating) the Bar"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Secular Age <\/i>is a book I did not know I needed. I am indebted to James K. A. Smith for making it accessible through\u00a0How (Not) to Be Secular<\/em>, especially given the time constraints of this assignment. As Dr. Clark hinted at, I did find myself in the secularism story and have garnered more thoughts and questions than word count available.<\/p>\n

The sweep of Taylor’s work is tremendous. I chuckled when Smith noted that roughly three-hundred pages into Taylor had only gotten us to the seventeenth century![1]<\/a>\u00a0 Taylor\u2019s brilliance and humility are a fascinating combination. His response to critiques of his tome show a rare humility and is surely a key to his brilliance. He concludes \u201cthat the misunderstandings have been largely of my own doing. Crucial points should have been made more carefully. But I\u2019m learning from this and other discussions\u2026\u201d[2]<\/a> This is genius, I believe, to have written what he has and to still be growing.<\/p>\n

While I found many rabbit trails to take, I will endeavor to stay on the path of my personal research interest. Taylor describes a tension preceding the Reformation that is of relevance. In last semester\u2019s writing and research, I began to notice the pendulum swinging throughout church history between the vita contemplative <\/em>and the vita activa<\/em>[3]<\/a>. <\/em>I had observed that the Patristic period appears to hold these two ways of living life with the least amount of angst. Perhaps their nearness to Christ\u2019s perfect embodiment and that Christianity was not yet a state religion were contributing factors. But going forward, I notice a value shift from the active life to the contemplative life and back and forth.<\/p>\n

But Taylor provides different language. He speaks not of a pendulum swinging back and forth as I used but of the tensions lived and held together. The pulls of a prayerful, spiritual life and the very real demands of work were tensions that the Church (at least pre-Protestant Reformation) was not trying to resolve. It was not a problem they were attempting to fix. That \u201cthe demands of the total transformation which the faith calls to\u201d and \u201cthe requirements of ordinary ongoing human life\u201d were inherent tensions that had to be lived.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

But something has been lost. Smith expounds: \u201cWhat changes in modernity is that, instead of inhabiting this tension and trying to maintain an equilibrium between the demands of creaturely life and the expectations for eternal life, the modern age generates different strategies for resolving (i.e., eliminating) the tension.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

Taylor sees this shift as a way of ultimately (though not intentionally) \u201clowering the bar\u201d on what it means to flourish. To fix it, the options become either setting the bar higher spiritually or lowering the expectations that eternity impresses upon us. \u201cThat is, you can stop being burdened by what eternity\/ salvation demands and simply frame ultimate flourishing within this world.\u201d[6]<\/a><\/p>\n

I see my own struggle to live out and hold the tension of contemplation (God-ward attention) and action (both mundane and missional). I guess it is comforting that I am not alone in this; this has been a struggle for centuries. I, like others before me, am tempted to shrug off the call of transcendence and live for the here and now. Modernity calls us down to immanence and pulls us down to finding our meaning only in this world. Do and achieve and make meaning for yourselves while you can.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is a certain heaviness in considering eternity and what a perfect triune God might expect from us. But is there not also a deep heaviness in considering immanence, His total absence and the pressure on us to construct meaning ourselves?<\/p>\n

Taylor has given me much to contemplate indeed.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

[1]<\/a> James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor<\/em> (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), 58.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Charles Taylor, \u201cChallenging Issues About The Secular Age,\u201d Modern Theology<\/i> 26, no. 3 (August 2010): pp. 404-416, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/j.1468-0025.2010.01615.x., 416.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> These terms are often attributed earliest to Augustine of Hippo and a great resource for Augstine\u2019s explanation can be found in the following: Paul A. Lombardo, \u201cVita Activa versus Vita Contemplativa in Petrarch and Salutati,\u201d\u00a0Italica<\/em> 59, no. 2 (1982): p. 83-7, https:\/\/doi.org\/10.2307\/479134.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Charles Taylor, A Secular Age<\/em>, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 44.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular,<\/em>\u00a033.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a>\u00a0Ibid., 33.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Taylor, A Secular Age,<\/em>\u00a059.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Secular Age is a book I did not know I needed. I am indebted to James K. A. Smith for making it accessible through\u00a0How (Not) to Be Secular, especially given the time constraints of this assignment. As Dr. Clark hinted at, I did find myself in the secularism story and have garnered more thoughts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1109,835,1100,833],"class_list":["post-25422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-a-secular-age","tag-charles-taylor","tag-how-not-to-be-secular","tag-james-k-a-smith","cohort-lgp9"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/118"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25422"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25426,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25422\/revisions\/25426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}