The Theologian

Faith in a Secular Age

Being a Christian in the modern era is definitely not without it's hardships. We always fail to give God the proper authority, and we see that everyday.

Self-Authoring: In the modern world, we are often told to "invent our own meaning." This sound liberating, but actually, it can ruin us. By trying to reconstruct ourselves, we give up the support God gives us. Secularism promnises freedom, but instead you end up with burnout.

Buffered vs. Porous Self: Ancient people had what many call a "Porous" self. Modern people have a "Buffered" self. The ancient people were open to be influenced by God and supernatural forces. Now, we have this invisible shield of reason, thinking nothing can touch us except for what we detect with our 5 senses. This makes it harder to think about divine concepts, and is one of the reasons I think we dont have the stereotypical theologians and philosophers, who think like Origen, Martin Luther, and Tertullian.

The Fragility of Everything: Charles Taylor wrote: "At that time, non-belief in God was close to unthinkable for the vast majority; whereas today this is not at all the case. One might be tempted to say that in certain milieux, the reverse has become true, that belief is unthinkable. But this exaggeration already shows up the lack of symmetry. It is truer to say that in our world, a whole gamut of positions, from the most militant atheism to the most orthodox traditional theisms, passing through every possible position on the way, are represented and defended somewhere in our society. Something like the unthinkability of some of these positions can be experienced in certain milieux, but what is ruled out will vary from context to context. An atheist in the Bible belt has trouble being understood, as often (in a rather different way) do believing Christians in certain reaches of the academy. But, of course, people in each of these contexts are aware that the others exist, and that the option they can’t really credit is the default option elsewhere in the same society whether they regard this with hostility or just perplexity. The existence of an alternative fragilizes each context, that is, makes its sense of the thinkable/unthinkable uncertain and wavering. This fragilization is then increased by the fact that great numbers of people are not firmly embedded in any such context, but are puzzled, cross-pressured, or have constituted by bricolage a sort of median position. The existence of these people raises sometimes even more acute doubts within the more assured milieux. The polar opposites can be written off as just mad or bad, as we see with the present American culture wars between “liberals” and “fundamentalists”; but the intermediate positions can sometimes not be so easily dismissed." Now thats a long quote, but what it is basically saying is that atheism is more than ever now, and it was practically unheard of before. Doubt is the default for believers and non-believers, but it used to be faith. Faith today is harder, but i'd say its more authentic to have true faith.

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