Several years ago I attended a conference in Seattle, Washington that focused on Christian conversations with \u201cthe lost.\u201d One segment of the conference included interviewing people who Christians consider \u201clost.\u201d When it was time to interview one of the \u201clost\u201d guests the organizer asked her, \u201cHow do you feel when you are referred to as lost?\u201d She responded, \u201cThis is a very interesting concept to me because I don\u2019t consider myself being lost.\u201d Then she asked the interviewer, \u201cDo you know what I do for a living?\u201d He responded, \u201cNo, I don\u2019t.\u201d She replied, \u201cI am a cartographer—a mapmaker. I make maps for a living, so you see, I\u2019m never lost!\u201d Needless to say, her comment created a loud roar of laughter in the audience. After all, she was right!<\/p>\n
As I was reading \u201cA Secular Age,\u201d<\/em> by Charles Taylor I was reminded of this young woman\u2019s response. This book is written by a cartographer! Taylor has provided us with a map in our secular age that attempts to help us locate ourselves and give some kind of sense of where we are. So where exactly are we?<\/p>\n How did we move from a condition where in Christendom, people lived naively within a theistic construal, to one in which we all shunt between two stances, in which everyone\u2019s construal shows up as such; and in which moreover, unbelief has become for many the major default option?[1]<\/a> And \u201cwhy was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many find this not only easy, but even inescapable?\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n So what does this mean? Does our society no longer believe in God? Are we becoming more or less religious? Although these are questions that perhaps make us scratch our heads and wonder, Taylor is not necessarily focusing on these questions. Taylor is more concerned with the condition of belief.\u00a0 It is not about what people believe but about how people believe.<\/p>\n Taylor states that what was seen as an unfailing mark of Godliness, something that was worth pursuing, somehow comes to infiltrate the very essence of Godliness, which gradually becomes indistinguishable from it.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 For some, being Christian is reduced to being good, following the Ten Commandments, and doing the \u201cright thing.\u201d It becomes more about \u201chuman flourishing\u201d as Taylor states, which can easily take God out of the picture. As God becomes less of a reality, the \u201cbelief or unbelief\u201d options to choose from increase. The secular age has offered many more alternatives as a result, and Christianity is no longer the default option. \u00a0Secularism is not about disproving the existence of God, but it is about putting God into a \u201ctranscendent\u201d realm, that society would consider as supernatural and therefore not believable. Secularism is about putting God into a realm outside the objective knowable scientific world, making it tough for belief in God to have the total claim on our lives.<\/p>\n \u201cThe mark of a secular society is that believers can no longer enjoy a \u201csimple\u201d or \u201cna\u00efve\u201d faith. The \u201cconditions of belief\u201d have changed such that Western Christians are now unable to believe without reservations, without uneasily looking over their shoulders. The honest believer must concede, \u201cI am never, or only rarely, really sure, free of all doubt, untroubled by some objection\u2014by some experience which won\u2019t fit.\u201d In sum: Secularism means that our Christian experience is now shaped by a lurking uncertainty.\u201d [4]<\/a><\/p>\n It seems to me that in a secular age we have all become \u201ccartographers.\u201d We have created our own directions, routes and roadways.\u00a0 What map have you created? What map do you use to direct your life? \u00a0Is your map leading you to a dead end?<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Charles Taylor, \u201cA Secular Age,\u201d<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press, 2007), 14.<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Ibid., 25.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Ibid., 244.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> http:\/\/www.firstthings.com\/article\/2014\/12\/tayloring-christianity<\/a> (accessed 2\/19\/15)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Several years ago I attended a conference in Seattle, Washington that focused on Christian conversations with \u201cthe lost.\u201d One segment of the conference included interviewing people who Christians consider \u201clost.\u201d When it was time to interview one of the \u201clost\u201d guests the organizer asked her, \u201cHow do you feel when you are referred to as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"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":[481,186],"class_list":["post-4139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-lgp4-2","tag-taylor","cohort-lgp4"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4139","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\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4140,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4139\/revisions\/4140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}