The Stunting of the Imagination and its Renewal

But the human possibility of knowing is not exhausted by the ability to perceive and comprehend. Imagination, too, belongs no less legitimately in its way to the human possibility of knowing. A man without imagination is more of an invalid than one who lacks a leg. Karl Barth[1]

The sharp contrast between the early church and late modern western Christianity centers on the different sensibility surrounding the body and the world. The meaning of bodily resurrection and the kingdom of God is obscured by western notions of a body/soul dualism and the rational autonomous subject. Theology is often focused on interiority (upon propositions, and rational foundations), which has led to a split between doctrine and ethics, faith and works, and ultimately, I would claim, to a loss of theological imagination. The tendency toward a disincarnate form of the faith shows itself in failed practices of discipleship and a failure to develop or even talk about the virtues. The world, the body, the virtues, but perhaps most profoundly, a speculative and imaginative theology are left no place in this atomistic, interiorized faith.

Meanwhile, in a mostly eastern Christianity, there has been a preservation and development of the implications of incarnation, bodily resurrection, and a participatory ontology (theosis, apocatastasis) which might be described as a continuation of incarnation (the Church). A key thinker in the preservation (of Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, and a Johannine theology) and development of this embodied Christianity is Maximus the Confessor. Maximus’ Christocentrism is cosmic, as he thinks the entire world must be conceived in relation to the Trinity. God’s purpose is to unite the world to Himself and this unity is not in some disembodied bliss: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[2] As Maximus explains: “it was with a view to this end that God created the essences of beings.”[3] Maximus’ starting premises light up every aspect of the God, human, cosmic relationship.

For Maximus, the Word is present and revealed in the Christian in a manner analogous to the hypostatic union. The situatedness of this Word in the body of Christ, the body of the Christian, and the cosmic body, equates embodiment with truth. The embodiment of the Word in the incarnation and in the Christian is truth incarnate – the meaning, the communication, the realization of this truth in and through the body.

For Maximus this is the truth about God. As Torstein Tollefsen puts it, “When Maximus says that God ‘always’ has this will to embody Himself, it means that God willed His embodiment from eternity. Even the historical Incarnation, according to Maximus, has its origin in the super-infinite plan that infinitely pre-exists the ages of time.”[4] Creation and incarnation are God’s eternal plan as Creator and Father are who God is. As Maximus writes, “God will be wholly participated (in) by whole human beings, so that He will be to the soul, as it were, what the soul is to the body, and through the soul He will likewise be present in the body (in a manner that He knows), so that the soul will receive immutability and the body immortality.”[5] This embodiment includes pursuit of virtue, squelching of the passions, or a life of ethics as part of being in Christ. “The aim is that what God is to the soul, the soul might become to the body.’”[6] Or as he says to Thalassios, the Word first creates faith within us, and then, becomes the son of that faith, from which he is embodied through the practice of the virtues.”[7]

While the body, in Maximus, is the means to participation in the person and work of Christ, in the west the body has often been made an obstacle. Body/soul dualism is the background to much western Christianity, and unless contrasted with the view of the body in the early church and in the east, this may not be obvious.

Fergus Kerr, in his discussion of the of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, has written the classic work detailing the pursuit of certainty in modernity, beginning with the Cartesian turn toward interiority. In Descartes’, The Meditations, the proof of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul is part of an interlocking argument which only needs thought or soul to arrive at God. Descartes, in his first Meditation, wipes away the embodied world: “I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he (the devil) has devised to ensnare my judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.”[8] Descartes concludes that he can doubt everything other than his doubting, even if the devil is deceiving him, which leads to his famous conclusion:

“In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”

At last I have discovered it — thought; this alone is inseparable from me…I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks; that is, I am a mind, or  intelligence, or intellect, or reason … a thinking thing.”[9]

Descartes thinks away not only his embodiment but his humanity, he no longer thinks of himself as a man or even a rational animal, as he is a “thinking thing.”

Immanuel Kant, a devout Lutheran, will incorporate Cartesian rationalism into the heart of his Christianity, presuming he must attend to reason even before he looks to Christ. The problem with Kant and Descartes and pure thought, is that there is no content to this thought other than an imagined self-presence, but this presence is ephemeral, impossible to grasp, and always on the point of disappearing. It is upon this sandy foundation that modern theology would build. Kerr provides multiple examples of the continuing impact of Cartesian dualism and why Wittgenstein’s questioning of the view of language is key for future western theological developments.

Wittgenstein begins his Philosophical Investigations with Augustine’s view of language. Augustine’s understanding of how he learned to speak “secretes the myth that the infant arrives like an immigrant in a strange land, already able to speak but completely ignorant of the alien language” which his parents and those around him speak.[10] “Gradually I realized where I was, and I decided to display my wishes to those who might fulfil them, and I could not, because my wishes were inside and they were outside, and powerless to get inside my mind by any of their senses.”[11] The little guy would shake his hands and try to gesture so as to make his wishes known, and this would end in a fit of rage. It is as if he has landed in a far country, arriving with a Platonic like power of thought preexisting within himself. At some point he is able to make himself understood in his parents language, and looking back, he realizes how he acquired language: “I was no longer a speechless infant, I was a talking boy. I remember this, and I afterwards saw how I learned to speak. For the grown-ups did not teach me, by offering me words, according to a standard method of teaching, as they were soon to do with the alphabet. With the mind that you gave me, my God, I decided to exhibit the thoughts of my heart so that my will might be obeyed. . .”[12] The capacity was already present in his heart it was simply a matter of translation:

When my elders named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.[13]

Thought and desire precede language, such that one’s primary mental state is a worldless wordless pinpoint. The infant arrives knowing what he thinks and wants, yet his primal conceptuality is devoid of words.

Wittgenstein starts here, with perhaps the most important of western theologians, as it provides an insight into the reigning understanding of the time. As Kerr explains, “For this picture of how an infant learns to speak, and hence the idea of language and communication, and so of how one human being is related to another, seems very much tied up with the idea of the self-transparent and autonomous subject. . . .”[14] Throughout, Wittgenstein clearly has the Cartesian ego in his sights, and as he notes he could have started with any number of philosophers (perhaps even his Tractatus) but Kerr thinks there is special significance in his choice of Augustine. “To probe the epistemological predicament of the soul in the Confessions was to open up a seam in the theological anthropology that has shaped Christian self-understanding since the fifth century. It is difficult to believe that Wittgenstein did not know what he was doing.”[15]

The story of Wittgenstein’s untangling of this understanding is well-known, with his picture of language as embodied, communal, and inseparable from thought and all that it means to be human, but this is only slowly appreciated. By starting with Augustine and ending with his own philosophical contemporaries, Wittgenstein challenges the form of thought which has thoroughly saturated the west. He concludes, “Nothing is more wrong-headed than calling meaning a mental activity.”[16] Meaning is not some occult state inside the head, anymore than a person or an ego is concealed inside the body. He sees the problem as arising around the concept of the “I.”[17] “From the first-person perspective it is very easy to generate a sense of oneself as a thinking thing which shows obvious kinship with the portrait of the infant Augustine’s travails.”[18] The problem is a failure to understand relationship to language, and the relationship of language to the body:

This simile of ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the mind is pernicious. It is derived from ‘in the head’ when we think of ourselves as looking out from our heads and of thinking as something going on ‘in our head’. But then we forget the picture and go on using language derived from it. Similarly, man’s spirit was pictured as his breath, then the picture was forgotten but the language derived from it retained. We can only safely use such language if we consciously remember the picture when we use it.[19]

Kerr thinks the problem arises with ancient notions of the myth of the soul (the Apostle Paul locates the problem in an even more ancient and primal understanding of the relation between the individual and the law). The longing to escape the body, to free the self of constraint from what Plato called the prison house of the body, is the most ancient and instinctive drive. The desire to pass directly into impassable transcendence, to establish the self, is the desire to shed the body, escape the confines of language, and to know without the mediation of the world. As Kerr describes, in this understanding “the face becomes a veil, a mask that needs to be manipulated from behind, while the production of meaning retreats from the materiality of signs into the recesses of the invisible mind. In effect, a metaphysically generated concept of the human body, derived from the thought of the immateriality and invisibility of the soul, displaces our experience of the whole living man or woman.”[20] The desire is ultimately the desire for death, which Wittgenstein slowly and painfully uncovers, as he privately confides to his diaries his dawning belief in Christ.[21]

Nonetheless, in popular understanding and in the predominant forms of theological understanding the Cartesian ego remains. “As recently as 1967, for example, Karl Rahner reaffirmed that there must be no going back on ‘the transcendental—anthropological turn in philosophy since Descartes.’”[22] As he says, “The original self presence of the subject in the actual realization of his existence strives to translate itself more and more into the conceptual, into the objectified, into language, into communication with another.”[23] Rahner describes an ”original knowledge” and its concept which works its way toward language, as if the original thinking occurs outside of language. As Kerr summarizes, “Rahner’s natural assumption — that communication comes after language, and language comes after having concepts — is precisely what the Cartesian tradition has reinforced. His example suggests that, when I am in pain, I first have the thought that I am in pain, I then put it into words and finally I find someone to whom to communicate it.”[24] In some way we have an original non-linguistic experience, which we then translate into words.

In every order of knowing, Rahner pictures layers of “knowing”: there is the original act of knowledge, the self that is “co-known” with the object of knowledge – one’s self presence (all pre-linguistic), and all of this has to occur so that an object can make itself manifest to the mind of the knower. Kerr concludes (after more extensive examples) that “there surely is a prima facie case for suggesting that Rahner’s most characteristic theological profundities are embedded in an extremely mentalist—individualist epistemology of unmistakably Cartesian provenance. Central to his whole theology, that is to say, is the possibility for the individual to occupy a standpoint beyond his immersion in the bodily, the historical and the institutional.”[25]

Hans Kung, who may be more widely read than Rahner, likewise concludes that “The history of modern epistemology from Descartes, Hume and Kant to Popper and Lorenz has — it seems to me — made clear that the fact of any reality at all independent of our consciousness can be accepted only in an act of trust.”[26] We must doubt everything, following Descartes, so as to arrive at the nugget of knowing which is the inward “thinking thing.” He concludes, “Every human being decides for himself his fundamental attitude to reality: that basic approach which embraces, colours, characterizes his whole experience, behaviour, action. Innocent of all anti-Cartesian suspicions, he goes for individual decisions as establishing the foundations for belief in the reality of anything outside one’s mind: It is up to me to choose the basic attitude I adopt towards this radically dubious reality with which I am surrounded. I simply decide to trust the reality of other people and all the rest of the rich tapestry of life.”[27] There is no logical proof for a reality outside the body or for the reality of God. Belief in either is a decision sunk deep within the recesses of the Kantian will. It is not that belief in God is any more irrational than belief in anything else outside of the mind; all of it depends on interior decision.

Don Cupitt, another widely read theologian argues, “the principles of spirituality cannot be imposed on us from without and cannot depend at all upon any external circumstances. On the contrary, the principles of spirituality must be fully internalized a priori principles, freely adopted and self-imposed. A modern person must not any more surrender the apex of his self-consciousness to a god. It must remain his own.”[28] Certainly one can agree religion should not be imposed, but Cupitt argues the world, or all external circumstance, should not be imposed, as if one can check out and resort to his inward Cartesian realm.

Likewise, Schubert Ogden pictures the world of bodies, acts and deeds, as preceded by private purposes and decisions. Indeed, it is only because the self first acts to constitute itself, to respond to its world, and to decide its own inner being, that it ‘acts’ at all in the more ordinary meaning of the word; all its outer acts of word and deed are but ways of expressing and implementing — the inner decisions whereby it constitutes itself as a self.”[29] Ogden is not speaking metaphorically, but imagines the thinking thing and his world is prior to the world, and necessary for constituting the world.

As Timothy O’Connell has put it, in his attempt to reconstruct a moral theology (through a Cartesian ego): “In an appropriate if homely image, then, people might be compared to onions … At the outermost layer, as it were, we find their environment, their world, the things they own. Moving inward we find their actions, their behaviour, the things they do. And then the body, that which is the ‘belonging’ of a person and yet also is the person. Going deeper we discover moods, emotions, feelings. Deeper still are the convictions by which they define themselves. And at the very centre, in that dimensionless pinpoint around which everything else revolves, is the person himself or herself — the I.”[30] As Kerr notes, at least Descartes had his “thinking thing” but O’Connell is not only apophatic about God but about his own dimensionless inward self. His need to reconstruct a moral theology may itself be a sign of the sickness.

As Stanley Hauerwas notes, “To assume that a ‘relation’ between doctrine and ethics needs to be explicated unjustifiably presumes that something called ‘ethics’ exists prior to or independent from ‘doctrine’.”[31] Hauerwas argues, “Once there was no Christian ethics simply because Christians could not distinguish between their beliefs and their behaviour. They assumed that their lives exemplified (or at least should exemplify) their doctrines in a manner that made a division between life and doctrine impossible.”[32] As he points out, this correlate between ethics and doctrine is the premise of the faith: Paul’s formulation in Romans 12:1-2 encapsulates the New Testament vision: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and well-pleasing to God. And do not be conformed to this age; but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”

Theology often presumes a rational, disembodied foundation as it did in my theological education and that of my generation, which was an understanding I was not aware of. The stark contrast between modern western theology and Maximus and the early church, accentuates the strangeness of modern presuppositions and the need to pursue an imaginative reengagement with the body and the world. The exciting developments in western theology and philosophy, such as Karl Barth’s Christocentrism, Stanley Hauerwas and friends’ development of narrative theology, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s slow discovery that language is an embodied capacity, and Bernard Lonergan’s focus on embodied conversion, parallel and are often an unwitting rediscovery of Maximus’ form of thought. Maximus has played a direct role in the renaissance in Russian Orthodoxy (e.g., George Florovsky and Sergius Bulgakov) and in the ressourcement of the Nouvelle théologie movement. Hans Urs von Balthasar sees him as a bridge figure for east/west or ecumenical dialogue. Maximus is both a corrective and indicator of the need for further development of an embodied faith and recovery of an embodied imagination.


[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. Ill, part 1, p. 81.

[2] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7.22.

[3] On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios (abbreviated as QThal.) 60.3.

[4] Torstein Theodore Tollefsen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St Maximus the Confessor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) 58.

[5] Ambigua 7.26.

[6] Ambigua 7.31.

[7] QThal. 40.8.

[8] Rene Descartes, Philosophical Writings, vol. ll, p. 15. Quotations are from Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1986) 4.

[9] Descartes, 18.

[10] Kerr, 39

[11] Augustine, Confessions, Book I, chapter 6. Cited in Kerr, 39.

[12] Confessions, Book I, chapter 8. Cited in Kerr, 41.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Kerr, 42.

[15] Kerr, 42.

[16] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953) 693. Cited in Kerr, 42.

[17] He could very well have pursued the problem back to Paul’s entanglement with the “I” and the law, as this is the most ancient and universal of problems.

[18] Kerr, 43.

[19] Wittgenstein’s Lectures Cambridge 1930-1932, ed. Desmond Lee, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980) 25.

[20] Kerr, 46.

[21] The Japanese translator of Wittgenstein’s diaries, Akio Kikai, characterizes his philosophical quest, given the spiritual journey detailed in his diaries, as more of a theological quest to rid himself of pride and to become a humble follower of Jesus. The diaries reveal his continual struggle both at Cambridge and then alone in the cabin in Norway to rid himself of his arrogant tendencies and it is in his philosophy that he puts forth his greatest effort in this regard, finally admitting in his diaries, only recently found, his belief in the resurrection.

[22] Kerr, 7.

[23] Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 16. Cited in Kerr, 10.

[24] Kerr, 11.

[25] Kerr, 14.

[26] Hans Kung, Eternal Life? p. 275. Cited in Kerr, 14-15.

[27] Hans Kung, Does God Exist?, p. 432. Cited in Kerr, 15.

[28] Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God, p. 9. Cited in Kerr, 16.

[29] Schubert Ogden, The Reality of God, p. 177. Cited in Kerr, 18.

[30] Timothy O’Connell, Principles for a Catholic Morality, p. 59. Cited in Kerr, 20.

[31] Stanley Hauerwas, On Doctrine and Ethics, in the Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, ed. Colin Gunton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 22.

[32] Ibid.

Is The Secular Another Form of the Symbolic?: Charles Taylor and Paul’s Gospel

Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, provides three possible meanings for secularity: (1.) a divorce between religion and politics, as public spaces have mostly been emptied of God. (2.) religious belief and practice are no longer the norm. (3.) belief in God is one option among many, and may not be the easiest option.[1] While his is the most authoritative work on the secular, and at some level is an irrefutable recounting of the emergence of the peculiarities of modernity, nonetheless each of these meanings have been challenged. As Jon Butler bluntly states it, “All three of Taylor’s “secularities” are problematic and probably wrong.”[2]

In regard to thesis (1.), Butler argues that in most of the world, including the United States, many if not all parts of Europe, most of the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Latin America, it is hard to discern the divorce between religion and politics. In regard to thesis (2.) he argues, it is not at all clear that decline in belief typifies the United States, Latin America, the Middle East, or South Asia. Butler acknowledges there have been shifts with such things as the rise of conservative Protestantism, Pentecostalism (in Latin America) and decline in mainline denominations and “irritation” of traditional Catholicism.

Butler’s main argument is in regard to thesis (3.). He argues that Taylor has not made it clear for whom “conditions of belief” have changed, not accounting for the experience of ordinary people. In Butler’s critique, Taylor tends to slide unnoticeably between the realm of ideas (the realm of intellectuals) and experience (a shared imagination), blurring the difference. He suggests a category between or beyond belief and unbelief, namely “religious indifference.” At a time when public disbelief might result in punishment or death, of course, most everyone is going to profess belief, but this may hide indifference. “After the formal Christianization of the Roman Empire and well into the early modern period, unbelief and behaviors seemingly supportive of unbelief became criminal. Paganism and heresy; not just atheism, brought gruesome punishment and death. Long before Luther or Calvin, Church and government tortured, burned, and executed critics and reformers.”[3] The Church and its political backers had to resort to force and authority to sustain Christian belief long before the 1500’s, as belief did not seem to be nearly as irresistible as Taylor imagines. Apparently, it was not “virtually impossible not to believe.”  

A wide variety of literature demonstrates, in Butler’s account, that “the Church needed the support of secular authorities to sustain even a tentative, if also powerful, hold on the religious commitment of ordinary people before 1500. Rather than belief being axiomatic, as Taylor argues, it was contingent and threatened from inside as well as outside.”[4] Belief, however, was not primarily challenged by unbelief, according to Butler, as unbelief speaks of actually caring about religion. Isn’t it as Max Weber argued, that just as some are not musically inclined most may not be religiously inclined, one way or another? “In highly different ways, Taylor misses something important about ordinary religious practice—that indifference, born of many different causes, may be more important to difficulties faced by religion in many ages, including the ages Taylor insists were axiomatic for religion in the West, than unbelief and the formal expressions of irreligion that attract great thinkers.”[5]

Taylor’s project may accurately trace the history of ideas and the thoughts of intellectuals and those working within a philosophical tradition, but this does not necessarily capture the experience of the majority.

Of course, belief; unbelief; and skepticism have been the stuff of philosophical argument for centuries. But at best, indifference receives little attention and even less analysis. It shows up mainly in accounts of ordinary beliefs, attitudes, and behavior and usually in brief discussions of lay absence from religious observance, whether formal, as in church or synagogue or mosque services, or informal, as in discussion of popular leisure or otherwise ‘secular’ culture. Typically, absence, and certainly indifference, are noted, often with some alarm, but little dissected.[6]

Part of what is at stake in the reading of secularity, is what to make of the supposed post-secular. If the secular was equated with a detached rationalism, mind/body dualism, individualism, the privatization of religion (connected to individualism), and these modern categories are now collapsing in the post-modern age, does this mean there is an opening for religion and God? Or in fact, is the indication (with Butler and others) that there was always something else, perhaps something deeper at work, which secularism and its critique only touch upon? If this is the case, then the emergence of the religious in this post-secular age, raises questions about what this might mean.

In a Pauline critique of the human predicament, the shared human problem is not irreligion, levels of religious belief, or the possibility of believing otherwise (Taylor’s secularization thesis). In spite of the Protestant notion that belief or unbelief is fundamental, which in turn has given rise to conceptions of the secular (with its notions of various dualisms and private religion), Paul does not locate the fundamental human problem with religion/irreligion or belief and unbelief. For Paul the fundamental human problem is bondage to deception due to the orientation to the law. Whether the law is from God, from nature, or from the angels, is not Paul’s concern, but the problem is this symbolic order, taken as primary, creates a gap, alienating humans from God and enslaving them to a lie. The law is not itself the problem, but the primacy given to the law. This law, or symbolic order, might be connected to the Jewish law, though Paul is specifically arguing this is not simply a Jewish problem but the human problem. In turn, the divisions and dualisms that mark every human (Jew/Gentile, slave/free, male/female) due to their entanglement with various symbolic orders, are addressed by Jesus Christ.

Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan are among those who recognize that Paul is engaging a universal and fundamental predicament, in which the human Subject is structured by this orientation. Lacanian theory is committed to the “reality” of Paul’s description of the problem, eschewing Paul’s picture of the solution in Jesus Christ. The result of this orientation, in Paul’s description, is not unlike the isolated individualism, the evacuation of the reality of God, and the creation of a polity (the city of man, this dark world, the principalities and powers) described in Taylor’s version of the secular. None of which is to deny the value of Taylor’s project, and is even an affirmation of several of the fundamental trues he has hit upon. It is simply to qualify and set this understanding in a larger frame, along with Butler, to suggest that the impetus behind the modern shares a genealogy that is universal.

The danger is that to isolate the secular as a peculiar epoch in human history, is to pit the secular against the religious in a dialectic that is not only factually wrong, but misses the manner in which the symbolic, be it sacred or secular, displaces the divine reality. That is, the conception of secularism may be the peculiar thing about the secular, and not the underlying reality called secularism. This concept is lent a force that characterizes the human tendency to assign primacy to the law or the symbolic. The danger is in reifying the secular as if it has the power claimed on its behalf, as if it is the law ordering human reality.

This shows itself in the slowly evolving undermining of Paul’s radical gospel. Where Paul pictured the Christian believer as entering a new society in the church, where the old reigning socio-cultural order does not pertain, the rise of the “secular” is simultaneous with a caving in to the primacy of this order. For the first Christians, Christ was Lord, and it was understood that professing and acting on this faith may mean death at the hands of the state. Then in a Constantinian Christianity there was a divide, with “the religious” referring to monks, friars and nuns, devoted full time to the religious life, as opposed to the “secular clergy,” who would have to occupy two distinct realms. [7]

Skipping forward 1000 years, Henry VIII becomes head of the state church “with the power of the national state embodied in the king (the state-church). It was to the King’s ‘laws and decrees’ that the subjects made absolute submission, not to the Bishop of Rome.” This in turn led to a direct contradiction of Paul’s picture of freedom from the law. Obedience to the king was equated with obedience to God, and was thus an acting out of holiness. No longer is there a departure from the reigning social order but subsumption of the church into this order. “Obedience of a servant to a master, of a wife to a husband, of a pupil to a teacher, of a subject to a prince, of lower degree to higher degree, was analogous to the obedience of a Christian to God. The whole deferential social order was wrapped in divinity and teleologically determined by God’s scheme of redemption.”[8] This church/state order is, after all, “ordained by God” (in this understanding).

The American experiment attempted to separate what Henry and history had welded together, but this separation was based on the dualism between body and soul, the same dualism which had coopted Paul’s gospel. William Penn formulated the difference in his separation of church and state:

Religion and Policy, or Christianity and Magistracy, are two distinct things, have two different ends, and may be fully prosecuted without respect one to the other; the one is for purifying, and cleaning the soul, and fitting it for a future state; the other is for Maintenance and Preserving of Civil Society, in order to the outward conveniency and accommodation of men in this World. A Magistrate is a true and real Magistrate, though not a Christian; as well as a man is a true and real Christian, without being a Magistrate.[9]

Serving God is an inward affair, and obeying the magistrate or being a magistrate in no way impinges on this inward reality. According to John Locke, “The care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate because his power consists only in outward force: But true and saving Religion consists in the inward persuasion of the Mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.”[10]

Thus in the American experiment the state controlled the body, and religion was concerned with the inward self, and the two realms do not overlap. What this meant in practice is that the church was consigned to a “spiritual realm” which was thought not to pertain to the political. “People make an ‘inward judgement’ about truth and salvation, and on such matters one cannot be compelled to believe by outward force. There is this assumption of the inner mind as distinct from the outer body, religion being aligned with the inner working of the mind, and civil society with the outer, with the body. The magistrate has nothing to do with religion in this sense, because it is harmless to the state.”[11] It works in a way similar to State Shinto in Japan, in which one Christian described being forcibly convinced that Shintoism and honoring the Emperor were non-religious, and then he says, we were all forced to bow to the Emperor as part of Christian worship. So too in a Christianity which concedes the realm of the body to the state, obeying the laws of the state is at once non-religious and bodily, and a means of coercing obedience to “God’s ordained order.”

Though the Americans attempted to throw off the domination of the state over religion, they did so in part, by conceding to the state the bodily, outward, and coercive (violent) realms. Certainly, there was a focus on the centrality of the individual, her rights, and access to the natural law of rationality, and this along with the role of religion is a continuing tension. This might be a peculiarity of the secular, but it is a peculiarity based upon the lie of absolute individualism (an isolated, self-determined autonomy), accompanied by notions that inward and outward, body and soul, mind and body, church and state, inhabit separate realms. It is the lie the gospel would expose, but more than that it is the unreality from which it delivers.  


[1] My summary of the list from Jon Butler, “Disquieted History in A Secular Age” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Craig Calhoun, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) 195.

[2] Butler, 195.

[3] Butler, 200.

[4] Butler, 204.

[5] Butler, 209.

[6] Butler, 209.

[7] Timothy Fitzgerald, “Encompassing Religion, privatized religions and the invention of modern politics” in Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formation, Timothy Fitzgerald ed.  (London: Equinox Publishing, 2007) 220.

[8] Fitzgerald, 224.

[9] Penn, William. 1680. The Great Question to be Considered by the King, and this approaching Parliament, briefly proposed. and modestly discussed: (to wit) How far Religion is concerned in Policy or Civil Government, and Policy in Religion? With an Essay rightly to distinguish these great interests, upon the Disquisition of which a sufficient Basis is proposed for the firm Settlement of these Nations, to the Most probable satisfaction of the Several Interests and Parties therein. (By one who desires to give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. and to God the things that are God’s.] (microfiche). Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. Quoted in Fitzgerald, 211.

[10] John Locke, 1689. A Letter Concerning Toleration, (2nd edn. London) 11. Quoted in Fitzgerald, 214.

[11] Fitzgerald, 214.