Month: March 2014

Damon Linker continues the debate the Dish featured the past two weekends about the nature of religious experience in a secular age, arguing that “[r]eligious experience — in modernity no less than in premodern contexts — transcends intellect and reason”:

God can call at any time, at any place, overturning a lifetime of thinking and acting and living — including a lifetime of thinking and acting and living within established, settled religious traditions. The call requires and demands an act of surrender to an externally issued, absolute, unrelativizable command.

Read in the light of [philosopher Leo] Strauss’ description of primal religious experience, [David] Sessions’ insistence that the potential convert not abandon “intellectual rigor” appears to be an example of how one can foreclose the possibility of religious experience by refusing it pre-emptively. Accepting the authority of critical biblical scholarship and academic theology (among other modern intellectual pursuits) may guarantee that the authoritative call of God will never be heard, rendering genuine religious experience impossible.

Dreher nods:

How can you hear the voice of the authentic prophet if you have decided in advance that a prophet must fit certain narrow criteria to be listened to. Who wants to pay attention to a wild man of the desert who ears animal skins and eats locusts and honey? That rural carpenter of Nazareth claims to be the Messiah of Israel, but everybody knows when moshiach comes, he will be a warrior king, so pay that loon no mind. If you rule out ahead of time the possibility of theophany (God breaking into the natural world and showing Himself), you won’t see it when it happens. Linker says that we are responsible for our own disenchantment.

James K.A. Smith, author of a forthcoming book on the philosopher Charles Taylor, the figure whose work spurred much of this debate, tries to clarify the terms involved:

I think this conversation has over-identified “the secular” with the phenomenon of “disenchantment”—the sense that we live in a world unhooked from transcendence, devoid of the divine, no longer enchanted by spirits or the Spirit. If a “secular” age is a disenchanted age, then it raises the sorts of questions Linker and Sessions are asking: Can one still experience enchantment in a secular age?  Indeed, if disenchantment is just synonymous with modernity, then it would seem like religious belief is precluded: To live in a secular age is a matter of growing up and refusing to believe in sprites and fairies and gods and God. Get over it. Wake up and smell the disenchantment. …

But that notion of “secularization” is precisely what Taylor is calling into question. So it’s odd to see people railing against Taylor as if his account of disenchantment rules out religious experience. Taylor has his own account of disenchantment, but disenchantment is not what he sees as the kernel of secularization.  Instead, for Taylor, ours is a “secular” age because it is an age in which all of our beliefs are contestable. It is a shift, not in what we can believe (or “experience”), but in what is believable. Ours is a “secular” age, not because we’re all doomed to inhabit the world as disenchanted, but because even those who experience it as enchanted have to realize that not everyone does. Taylor never suggests that belief, conversion, and religious experience are impossible in a secular age. Instead he emphasizes that they are “fragilized”—undertaken and experienced with a sense that our neighbors don’t share our convictions.

In an interview, the philosopher John Caputo draws on the work of Jacques Derrida to explain what it means to approach religion through “deconstruction” – a way of thinking that “involves questioning and undermining the sorts of sharp distinctions traditionally so important for philosophy,” including the distinctions between atheists, agnostics, and believers:

Maybe [the suggestion that God’s promises might not be reliable] disturbs what “most people” think religion is — assuming they are thinking about it — but maybe a lot of these people wake up in the middle of the night feeling the same disturbance, disturbed by a more religionless religion going on in the religion meant to give them comfort. Even for people who are content with the contents of the traditions they inherit, deconstruction is a life-giving force, forcing them to reinvent what has been inherited and to give it a future. But religion for Derrida is not a way to link up with saving supernatural powers; it is a mode of being-in-the-world, of being faithful to the promise of the world.

The comparison with Augustine is telling.

Unlike Augustine, he does not think a thing has to last forever to be worthy of our unconditional love. Still, he says he has been asking himself all his life Augustine’s question, “What do I love when I love my God?” But where Augustine thinks that there is a supernaturally revealed answer to this question, Derrida does not. He describes himself as a man of prayer, but where Augustine thinks he knows to whom he is praying, Derrida does not. When I asked him this question once he responded, “If I knew that, I would know everything” — he would be omniscient, God!

This not-knowing does not defeat his religion or his prayer. It is constitutive of them, constituting a faith that cannot be kept safe from doubt, a hope that cannot be kept safe from despair. We live in the distance between these pairs.

For more, check out Caputo’s book on the matter, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion.

A reader writes:

Choral music is a rich source of deeply expressed faith, as Giles Fraser notes, and music based on Lent offers particularly striking examples. The most famous such piece may be the Allegri Miserere [seen above]. Backstory here. The score of the piece was a closely guarded Vatican secret for more than a century, until the church made the mistake of inviting a 12-year-old boy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to hear it. He listened twice and transcribed it from memory, and the score was published shortly thereafter.

Update from a reader:

“Choral music is a rich source of deeply expressed faith” – while this is undoubtedly true, I’m convinced there is another aspect that is being missed in this discussion.

I am from a Scottish Presbyterian background and started singing in my secondary school choir. At a Scottish university I auditioned with two choirs in freshers week and much to my surprise was invited to join one of them. I was exposed to the English choral (Anglican) tradition: with one of many highlights being learning psalm singing reading pointing at choral evensong services. Now based in Silicon Valley, I’m again a long-term member of a choir singing broadly sacred music, this time specializing in late mediaeval and renaissance times. Our repertoire spans 400 years: the diversity of styles is immense. Rehearsing, learning and performing roughly 10 news pieces for each concert is a great diversion from everyday life in high-tech.

Now to my point: I don’t believe in God, despite regularly singing some of the most exquisite sacred music you could ever hear. Which prompts me to think about how many of the composers of the music were believers? The bulk of surviving manuscripts of music from renaissance times are sacred – not a huge surprise as the church in those times was the seat of learning. If you were a talented singer or composer in those times, what were your options if your talents (like mine) are consonant with sacred music? Which gets me thinking, how many of the giants of the sacred music were atheists: Byrd, Tallis, Palestrina, Victoria, Josquin, Dufay?

Adedamola Osinulu argues that dramatic growth of African Pentecostal churches in the US “demands a change in how we, in both secular and religious America, understand our relationship to African Christians and Christianity as a whole”:

Africans’ interest in Pentecostalism was fueled by literature emanating from North America in the 1970s and ’80s. But, as one example of how they re-shaped Pentecostal theology to be more responsive to local practitioners’ material conditions, they presented a God who is deeply invested in believers’ fiscal and physical well-being in the present, not just the fate of their souls in the after-life. Amidst the swirling political and economic crises of the postcolonial state, this was an immensely attractive proposition.

Conceiving themselves as part of a global religious community, they began to export their brand of Christianity around the globe. As a result, we find that the largest single congregation in Europe, the 25,000-member Embassy of God, is a Pentecostal church founded by a Nigerian man. Today the largest African Pentecostal organizations are sending so-called “reverse-missionaries” to North America and Europe. One of those groups, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), founded in Nigeria, has 15,000 parishes around the globe including at least one in every major North American city.

Last month, Jason Margolis reported on the RCCG’s efforts in America. Keating’s take-away from the piece:

American missionaries played an important part of spreading the faith around the world, but one question posed by researchers is whether the transmission would reverse: Would any of the hundreds of new denominations sprouting up in Africa cross the Atlantic and gain adherents in the United States? The decentralized structure of Pentecostalism leads to new branches and churches being created more quickly than in other forms of Christianity.

Margolis’ reporting on the Redeemed Christian Church of God seems to indicate we haven’t hit that point yet. The church’s members are nearly all Nigerian or African immigrants, and it has had a hard time expanding beyond those communities. But the Catholic Church certainly isn’t the only Christian denomination whose geographical center of gravity is shifting.

Previous Dish on the rise of African Pentecostalism here.