I am really interested in how Taylor describes the ways in which we see the world and act in the world that we take for granted. That is – the ways of life that we have that are not a result of conscious reflection, but are simply “givens” of our current historical and cultural situation. Taylor argues that secularism is somewhat of a “given” in North America. By this he means that belief in God is one of many possible ways of view in the world. He goes further to say that in the modern condition is one in which, “unbelieving construals seem at first blush the only plausible ones.”  He contrasts this with the western European context about 500 years ago in which atheism was almost unimaginable. Taylor  asks the question: How did we get here?

In the popular imagination the answer is simply the progress of knowledge of natural world like Darwinian evolution. Taylor finds this answer superficial. He wants to go deeper into the way that human beings view the good, themselves, their dependence or autonomy to the world around them. So the definition of secularism that Taylor is concerned with in his book is not decline in church attendance or lack of religious influence in the public square. Rather it is almost a sensibility of being in the modern world that is shared by both believers and unbelievers. My hope is that Taylor will help us understand better our own “situatedness”that affects how we (the we is to be taken in the broadest sense) talk about Religion, transcendence,  and ethics and how Christians think about things like prayer, church authority, and the sacraments.

In 2.1 Barth continues his extended essay on how we can know God because God reveals himself in Jesus. In the first thirty pages of this volume, he discusses man’s situation before God with respect to how man can know God. Those looking for some sort of approach to Christian apologetics would be disappointed because Barth does not believe that their is some sort of neutral position that people can stand from in order to have an objective discussion about who God is. Therefore, (as has been noted) Barth’s discussion is circular. As Barth sets this up, I could not help but think of Alisdair MacIntyre.  Barth states that knowledge of God cannot be discussed in the abstract. That is, knowledge of God cannot be found from some standpoint outside of the particular way that God has revealed himself in his word. Barth’s point is a Christian affirmation of MacIntyre’s critique of the “Encyclopedist” version of Moral Inquiry. There is no clean slate sort of background that is not itself informed by a particular narrative of the world. The God in the abstract that Barth was concerned about was the god who was “the world soul” or the “Supreme Value.” Barth knew that these were conceptions of God that were supposedly informed by  some universal natural knowledge or pure rational thought. Rather these conceptions of God fit within particular ways of viewing the world. The technical name Barth gives these conception of God is “idol.” Barth is confirmed on this point because god developed from the abstract very well could be a god that upholds National Socialism.

But, Barth is quick to point out that knowledge of God, in that it is indirect, is not necessarily always guaranteed to be reality with God’s people at all times. I thought his discussion on the continual need for renewal during the history of Israel was interesting. The scriptural narrative bears witness to both God’s continual patience with his people and God’s people’s propensity to get God wrong. That continual need for renewal is now fulfilled with the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. For Barth, God has provided access to Himself by revealing Himself to man. The need for renewal is transformed because God is continually reconciling himself to his people. Barth closes this section with the phrase, “God Never Ceases to make continual new beginnings with man.” (25)

So, what does this mean in the section titled “Man Before God.” It means that because Christ is our knowledge of God, it is not something we can arrive at ourselves. Confidence in knowing God is something that can be arrived at only by seeing the truth in our dependence on God’s self revelation. This dependence on God is made concrete in the act of Prayer. It is necessary for the Christian to pray for the fulfillment of the knowledge of God, “that God will give himself to be known.”

Its a nice resource especially for people like me who never attend a New or Old Testament  intro class in seminary. Check it out here.

According the Scot McKnight’s blog, Eerdmans has announced that Joel Green is taking Gordon Fee’s place as the editor of the series. Green teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary and wrote the series’ commentary on the Gospel of Luke which I used in seminary.  With Green as the new editor the NICNT series should continue to be one of the best commentary series for studying the New Testament.

“I shall argue that it is possible to see vast portions of Western philosophy, from antiquity to the present, as moving within the confines of two ontologies – two narratives of being – which are really only two poles of a single ontological vision, whereas the church’s story of being – arising from Scripture and its own understanding of what has been revealed in Christ – is simply alien to the world this vision descries. And nowhere does this difference appear more starkly delineated than in the understanding of the infinite that becomes possible (indeed necessary) within Christian thought; the Christian infinite belongs to an ontology of or final and ultimate peace, and as a consequence allows a construal of beauty and of peace inconceivable in terms of the ontology that Christian thought encountered first in various schools of pagan metaphysics, and encounters, and encounters again in the thought of Nietzsche and his heirs.” 

….this is going to be good.

            The main reason for this is that it (theism) is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. That there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority; who can convict you of a thought crime while you are asleep. He can subject you, who must indeed subject you, to a total surveillance around the clock every waking assuming minute of your life…and after death this is where the real fun begins. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desire such a ghastly fate?

Hitchens finds the idea of an all powerful God, who knows and judges, our innermost being repulsive. For Hitchens, it is better that we have our privacy. On the surface, Hitchens’ reasoning is ridiculous. He views a reality without any chance of final justice for the poor, cosmic purpose, the restoration of our own inner demons, and ultimately the final meaningless end of everything and everyone we ever loved is a better reality than one in which there is a divine creator who truly knows us.

One could fault Hitchens for desiring his own personal privacy over the redemption of cosmos as Esau traded his birthright for a bowl of soup. I know, however, that Hitches is simply expressing honestly a disposition that all of us often share with him. If we are honest, there is a part of us that is resistant to the idea that our whole self belongs to God and that we live our lives exposed to our creator. This desire for privacy, however, is not freedom but rather one cause for our loneliness. Mark Galli pointed out in a talk this weekend that our need for space keeps can keep us from forming the intimate relationships that we need.

Of course, there is always a risk involved with being exposed. The God we trust in is not the impersonal tyrant that Hitchens describes, but is revealed in the self giving love of Jesus Christ who exposed himself to the hard wood of the cross and suffered to reconcile humanity to God.  God’s revelation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ means that the reality that God knows all our thoughts is good news. God truly knows us: our discontentment, pain, struggles, irritation with others, part of ourselves we are so ashamed about that no one else knows about, parts of ourselves we do not even recognize ourselves and responds in grace and love. I am reminded of this statement by Hitchens when we pray the collect for purity every week in church.

            Almighty God, to you all hearts are open and all desires known and from you no secrets are hid. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your Holy name. 

The hope expressed by the prayer is that love of God, who knows us more intimately than we know ourselves, is a transformative love that enables us to grow in love for God and our neighbor.

Here is Brook’s article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opinion/if-it-feels-right.html?_r=2&hp

Here is Smith’s response http://forsclavigera.blogspot.com/2011/09/contradictions-of-david-brooks.html

I really like Smith’s idea that discipleship is a process of having one’s desires disciplined. The human being is not first a thinking animal, says, Smith, but a loving animal.  Moral formation or discipleship is a result of participation in a “community of practices that are pursuing a thick vision of the good.”

Two questions: (1) What is the role of “thinking” in relation to the communities “vision of the good.” (2) What is the role of the Holy Spirit in moral transformation? I am sure Smith discusses the Spirit in his book Desiring the Kingdom- He’s a pentacostal!

In the opening pages Bauckham states “As such its function, as we shall notice in more detail later, is to counter the Roman imperial view of the world, which was the dominant ideological perception of their situation that John’s readers naturally tended to share.” (p.8) One concrete way in which Roman ideology penetrated John’s communities was false teaching that legitimized eating meat sacrificed to idols (Rev 2:14,20). Some scholars suggest that believers in Asia Minor were tempted to participate in ceremonies in honor of trade deities that were a normal part of life in the Empire and an important part of maintaining  the social connections necessary for economic existence. John, however, sees that behind these practices are the demonic forces that perpetuated the evils of Rome.

This idea came to mind this morning while starting James K. A. Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom. He argues that humans are above all desiring animals shaped by practices and cultural liturgies. He argues that we are constantly formed by “cultural liturgies” that shape our perception of the “Good life.” Implicit in these liturgies “is an understanding of the world that is pretheoretical, that is on a different register than ideas.” In other words, our theories about the good are shaped by the practices in which we participate.  So, Christian worship is a part of educational and formation in the same way that a trip to mall shapes the way that we understand the world.

I think John agrees with Smith at this point. Revelation was written partially to combat the encroaching influence of pagan liturgies into the churches in Asia Minor. The act of participating in idol feasts forms a view of world in which the pagan gods were in charge of the world, even if as in Corinth, John’s readers believed theoretically that “an idol is nothing,” and needed placation in order to ensure prosperity – not simply for oneself  but also for the good of the empire. John counters these images, not only with depictions of the empire as a beast or whole of Babylon, but images and hymns probably from early Christian worship (Rev 4:6-10; 5:8-10; 7:10-12; 11:15-17; 14:1-5; 19:1-4).

What role does not theoretical aspect of life such as  imagination, desire, and worship play in forming how we view the world and than live?

I am currently enjoying Stanley Hauerwas’ Gifford Lectures With the Grain of the Universe. He provides an accounts of the thought of William James Reinhold Niebuhr, and Karl Barth. As I understand, Hauerwas argues that Niebuhr is indebted to William James during his Gifford Lecture The Nature and Destiny of Man. James, according to Hauerwas, was a modern pragmatist that “never entertained the presumption that the God of Israel might exist.” James provided a case for religion, however, because he needed to show that human existence was not “pointless.” He thought that people could be “religious without taking ‘institutionalized’ religion seriously. “

Towards the end of his discussion of William James, Hauerwas describes James’s “Democratic critique of Christianity.”  For James the particularity of Christianity is incompatible “with the way of life necessary to sustain democracy.” This is because the universal claims of the Christian faith run against the universal claims of democracy that elevated the individual over the collective as displayed in the romantic values of Ralph Waldo Emerson. An interesting passage summarizes Hauerwas’ assessment of James:

“Just to the extent that James denied the creaturely status of human beings, I suspect it is a mistake to take too seriously his arguments against natural theology as the primary objections he had to Christianity. Those arguments were primarily an expression James’s deep moral objection to Christianity. What really bothered James was not that Christianity seemed to entail false views about the world, but that Christianity challenged the moral and political arrangements necessary to sustain the human project without God.”

A few lines down he adds, “Many Christians today want the world James wanted, while assuming that they can continue to have the Christian God. But James was right to think that you cannot have both.”

To sustain democratic order the things people care about most must be privatized because “if they were given purchase in public, they would, at best, lead to what James could regard only as unfairness and, at worst, escalating conflict.” Hauerwas concludes that James could not have it both ways because democracy in itself does not have the resources to keep itself from being “a way of life legitimized by coercion and violence.”

I thought this section was brilliant and illuminated the logic of Hauerwas’ vision of Christian ethics.