Charles Taylor: Imagining a New (But Real) World
Theology is pointless. It doesn’t do anything useful. Practical ministry is what really matters. Why waste time teaching future Christian leaders about theology when they could instead feast on the latest theories of church growth, congregational management and counselling skills?
As I know from many conversations, these views are widespread in denominational bureaucracies. I think they are understandable, though I can’t help feeling that they’ve not been properly thought through. Nobody wants to devote time and resources to doing something pointless. But what if theology sustains the vision that lies at the heart of the Christian faith? What if theology has a unique and necessary role to play in keeping this vision alive and thus energizing and sustaining the life, worship and outreach of the Church?
Such questions are relevant not only to Christianity but also to any group, institution or organization with a strong sense of identity and mission. How can we maintain continuity with the past while making sure that we connect up with today’s issues? Some organizations die because what initially inspired them has become irrelevant. But more often, they fade away because they have lost sight of their founding vision and can’t work out how to recover and refresh it.
Churches that fail to take theology seriously risk turning their backs on a rich and invaluable heritage and diminishing their capacity to engage the hearts and captivate the imaginations of a new generation. I’ll be exploring these themes throughout this book, drawing on leading theologians from the past and present to argue that theology is essential to the life, ministry and witness of the Christian churches, and to their engagement with wider culture.
Let’s focus here on why theology matters for individuals and for churches. I’ve suggested that it sets out the vision which lies at the heart of the Christian faith and underlies the worship and life of Christian communities. Theology unpacks the core themes of faith. It tells us how these were developed, illustrates how they may be explained and preached and shows us the difference they make to real life. Above all, theology sets out the Christian understanding of how we can achieve wisdom, enjoy wellbeing and nurture a sense of wonder.
The Christian gospel is like a watering hole in the midst of a desert that attracts people because it offers something Christians believe is both liberating and essential. Christ’s words to the Samaritan woman when they met at Jacob’s well illustrate this point perfectly:
Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life. (John 4.13–14)
Theology sustains and expresses this understanding of what a fulfilled life looks like and how it comes about through the person and work of Christ.
Theology thus captures and puts into words the moral, intellectual and spiritual vision that is the heartbeat of the Christian faith – a way of seeing things that delights and overwhelms us and leads to worship and adoration rather than mere understanding. It wrestles with the question of how Christians can hope to express this defining and compelling vision in words. It helps us to explain what Christianity is fundamentally about and enables us to convey the difference that such an understanding makes to the way in which we comprehend our world and live within it. Theology helps preachers to open up the riches of the Christian faith and apologists to explain and defend its leading themes to a wider culture.
It’s important that people outside the Christian community get a sense of theology’s driving and empowering vision even if they don’t share it. I used to be a Marxist. While I’ve left Marxism behind, I still have a good appreciation of its world view and implications. I no longer think that it’s right, but I can see why it’s important. You don’t need to agree with something to understand it, and understanding it will mean that you’re more clued up about how people try to make sense of our complicated world.
Institutions, including churches, must continually ask themselves these questions: why are we here? What sparked us into existence and empowers us today? In his important study of how institutional visions are developed, articulated and put into practice, Daniel Pekarsky emphasizes the importance of a ‘well-conceived vision’, which he defines as ‘an informing idea that is shared, clear and compelling.’ Such visions can easily go out of date due to social and cultural change. Christianity, however, rests on a theological vision statement focusing on God and humanity: on the one hand, we have a loving and personal God who journeys with us through life; on the other, a broken, wounded and damaged humanity in need of love, restoration and hope.
These themes must be articulated in a meaningful way for each new generation. We do not need to make Christianity relevant, but the task of both theologian and preacher is to unpack and unfold the riches of this vision of faith using language, images, stories and concepts that connect with our audience.
There is always a hermeneutical (interpretative) element to a vision statement, simply because its application will vary from one historical period and cultural location to another. We shall explore this long theological tradition of interpreting the gospel – without compromising its identity – to help us meet new challenges and situations. The Swiss Protestant theologian Emil Brunner (1889–1966) sums things up neatly: ‘The gospel remains the same, but our understanding of the gospel must ever be won anew.’ Theology both preserves an identity-giving and life-enhancing vision and provides a toolkit for ensuring that churches can engage with the new challenges they face.
For Christians, I would argue, theology is like a treasure chest: it holds the riches of our faith and invites us to reflect on faith’s value and purpose. Without theology, Christian churches are simply custodians of memories and habits that might once have been meaningful, but now seem outdated and pointless to outsiders – and to some insiders. Theology allows these memories and habits to be revitalized. It provides a bridge between past and present, allowing the riches of the past to connect with the present and transform it. The Christian gospel may be the same for all times and places but theology, while being rooted in the wisdom of the past, must free itself from the particularities of a bygone age and articulate the good news in new situations.
So where shall we start? Let’s begin by thinking about how Christianity enables us to see ourselves, Christ and the world as they truly are. Helpfully, we’ll leave behind deficient and inadequate understandings of reality as we embrace a rich, satisfying and transformative vision.
When I was a teenager, I enjoyed reading the American writer Henry Miller (1891–1980), largely because many of his works explore how the process of travelling changes people by opening their eyes to new realities. A particular line from his colourful depiction of Big Sur on the Californian coastline caught my attention: ‘One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.’
Miller’s neat one-liner came to mean a lot more to me as I began to study the New Testament closely in the original Greek in January 1972, beginning with the Gospel of Mark. I had only just discovered Christianity and wanted to immerse myself in a text that would help me to understand more about it. I was intrigued by the first words spoken by Christ in Mark’s narrative: ‘“The time has come,” he said. “the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”’ (Mark 1.15). The Greek word metanoia (usually translated as ‘repentance’) actually has a much deeper range of meaning that includes, but is not limited to, this single idea. Metanoia concerns a change in our mindset leading to a transformed vision.
The world did not change when I moved from atheism to Christianity. Yet I changed. Christianity gave me a lens through which everything came into sharper focus and, as a result, I saw the world in a new and very different light. The way I viewed it altered. I then had to work out how I fitted into this new world and how I ought to live on the basis of my new insights. No longer did I see the world as ‘nature’; I saw it as God’s creation. No longer did I see people as socioeconomic units; I saw them as individuals bearing the image of God.
A good example of viewing things differently is the way in which Christians read the Old Testament. Many of my Jewish colleagues at Oxford see the Hebrew Bible as complete in itself, whereas Christians regard it as preparatory and anticipatory. It points beyond itself for its fulfilment. This is why so many New Testament passages pick up on the way in which the history of Jesus Christ can be said to fulfil Old Testament prophecy, developing its storyline in new ways.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430) summed up this idea thus: ‘In the Old Testament the New is concealed, in the New, the Old is revealed.’ The point he’s making is that the great themes of the New Testament are already there in the Old Testament, but this early text needs to be interpreted or seen in a certain way for these connections and continuities to be appreciated. The New Testament thus provides a Christian lens through which to read the Old Testament, which differs significantly from the lens used by Jewish readers of the same text.
Many theologians have highlighted the capacity of Christian theology to enable us to see things in a new way. A good example is the English poet-theologian George Herbert (1593–1633), who is noted for his ability to express theological ideas in poetic language. Herbert was an academic who served as Orator at the University of Cambridge before spending the final few years of his short life as a country parson in the village of Bemerton, close to the cathedral city of Salisbury.
I often find myself reflecting on the rich theological vision found in Herbert’s writings, especially in his poem ‘The Elixir’. In its third verse, Herbert offers us two quite distinct ways of doing theology: looking at theological ideas and looking through them to discover the landscape they disclose:
A man that looks on glasse,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav’n espie.
Herbert’s point is easy to grasp. You can look at Christian doctrines (for example, the doctrine of creation). That’s what I’ve done throughout my career as an academic theologian. I look at this idea, explaining its biblical roots, how it was expressed in the creeds, and how it has been understood by various theologians to my students. Herbert, however, is inviting us to do something additional and rather more interesting. He asks us to look through Christian doctrines, to allow Christian theology to become a window to viewing ourselves and the world. He wants us to use theology so that we can develop a deeper and richer engagement with our world and see it afresh.
Therefore, instead of merely looking at the doctrine of creation, we ought also to look at our world through the lens provided by this doctrine. Marilynne Robinson (b. 1943), one of the world’s most theologically informed contemporary novelists, knows the importance of seeing the natural world properly, for what it really is, through a theological lens: ‘Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.’ We’ll return to explore the importance of this theological attentiveness towards the natural order later in the book.
For now, let’s work the angles of Herbert’s approach to theology. Imagine you are sitting in a room with a single window. You could look at the window, noticing only some irritating and distracting specks of dust or smears on the glass. Or you could look through the window and take delight in the beautiful garden that lies beyond. Or imagine you are looking at a microscope in a medical laboratory. It’s an interesting piece of equipment, but what really matters is that this instrument allows us to examine details of the living world that are completely invisible to the unaided human eye. It extends our vision of reality.
Theology helps us to see things in a new way. However, a habit of engagement is something we need to work at developing. The theologian and psychologist Robert C. Roberts (b. 1942) emphasizes the importance of seeing the world and our experiences in a Christian manner. We must, he suggests, ‘practice seeing things this way. How does one practice seeing? By looking. Looking is active seeing, and as we succeed in seeing what we are looking for, we train our seeing into conforming with our looking.’ A theologian is someone who cultivates the habit of discernment: seeing things rightly, properly and fully.
I’ve often suggested to my students that it is helpful to think about the Christian faith as a landscape to be explored. How do we find this world? And then enter and explore it? What does it look like? How does it feel to be there?
The answers to these questions are framed in terms of ‘faith’. Yet this is not the ‘blind faith’ so poorly understood – and crudely parodied – by Richard Dawkins. Where Dawkins thinks of faith as a perverse tendency to believe anything we like, Christians see faith as intellectual and relational trust. It involves embracing an expanded vision of reality that enfolds God and enables a transforming relationship. I can’t prove that this way of looking at the world is right (although I believe it is), which is a problem I share with Dawkins, who belatedly seems to have realized his atheism is not something that can be proved either. It’s a belief, a judgement, a decision to live in a certain way on the basis of what is thought to be true. Dawkins seems to imagine that the Enlightenment marks the watershed when faith was replaced by scientific reason. Yet this new rational outlook was also rooted in faith – a faith that humans were capable of acting rationally and morally without guidance from beyond. As the subsequent fragmentation of rationalism – so deftly depicted by Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929) and others – makes clear, the Enlightenment was basically a new ethnocentric faith tradition that tried hard to present itself as standing above history, geography and culture.
Faith is about trusting the Christian view of things and acting appropriately within the new world that it enables us to see and enter. The great social theorist Max Weber (1864–1920) once remarked that rationalism was like an ‘iron cage’, which imprisons the human spirit. Theology helps us to see that our common-sense rationalism blinds us to what really matters, blocking off certain pathways of exploration that can – and are meant to – lead us to new habits of thinking, experiencing, imagining and living.
The English novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) is best known for his deeply nostalgic novel Brideshead Revisited (1945). After his sudden conversion to Catholicism in 1930, Waugh wrote to a friend describing how his new faith allowed him to see things clearly for the first time. Conversion, he wrote, was about stepping out ‘into the real world God made; and then begins the delicious process of exploring it limitlessly.’ Brideshead Revisited was part of Waugh’s ‘delicious process’ of reflection, focusing on the mysterious way in which divine grace shapes and directs individual lives.
In my own case, I abandoned the sinking ship of my teenage atheism and discovered a different way of thinking about things, imagining the world and pursuing the good life – namely, Christianity. It was like being shipwrecked and finding sanctuary on the shoreline of a strange island that gradually disclosed its mysteries and wonder.
It’s helpful to think of theology as an intellectual mapping of this world of faith, making connections between its basic themes and exploring how these shape the ways we see things. Paradoxically, Christian theology is a thoroughly practical discipline, aiming for a right understanding that leads naturally into a right lifestyle marked by finding hope in a seemingly hopeless world.
In addition, and very importantly, theology offers a key to unlocking the full significance of some of the greatest works of Western literature – such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, the novels of Graham Greene or Marilynne Robinson, or the poetry of George Herbert or T. S. Eliot. Yet while theology is certainly helpful for gaining a better understanding of the past and enriching our appreciation of cultural history, it is essential in other ways too.
I’ve concentrated so far on reassuring individual Christians and churches about the merits of theology. But I need to say more to readers who don’t share those convictions. I’m often asked to explain what theology is about to secular audiences and have found C. S. Lewis’s idea of a ‘supposal’ helpful in doing this. Lewis invites his readers to conduct a mental experiment. Suppose Christianity is true: what sort of world does it disclose?
This mental experiment involves weaving the basic themes of Christian theology into a ‘big picture’ and then imagining what it would be like to inhabit such a world. The experiment doesn’t require anyone to believe that these ideas are right; it simply invites an act of imaginative empathy – an exercise in exploring perspectives. Aim to think yourself into this world view, explore it from within and try to work out what it feels like to live in this world.
In Lewis’s case, this ‘supposal’ or mental experiment involves telling a story. Suppose that there is a world like Narnia. In the case of our own world, God entered as Jesus Christ. What would happen if God entered into Narnia as a lion? How would that work out? Lewis takes seven volumes to tell us, but his imagination and narrative pace keep us reading, thinking and imagining.
My approach in the second part of this book is to reflect on how a Christian ‘big picture’ helps us to think about three core themes that are central to meaningful human life: wisdom, wellbeing and wonder. Christian theology has long been concerned with these questions, and we will explore how it is able to stimulate our thinking and what a distinctively Christian understanding of wisdom, wellbeing and wonder might look like.
I hope that this will help readers who are less familiar with Christian beliefs to get a sense of how theology works and the difference that it makes to people. Through an act of imaginative empathy, we can step inside this ‘big picture’ and try to understand how things look and feel within its framework.
As we seek to imagine the world in a Christian way, it’s worth pointing out that theology often makes use of philosophy to help express its ideas and make them accessible to a wider audience. Early Christian theologians, for example, drew on the forms of Platonism that were widespread in late classical antiquity and this allowed them to take part in wider cultural discussions. There were risks in doing this. Some scholars suggest that, in trying to use Platonism to promote Christianity, theologians actually ended up using Christianity to promote Platonism.
However, most theologians consider a dialogue with philosophy to be important and worthwhile. For example, I regularly engage with the British public philosopher Mary Midgley (1919–2018). Why? Because I find her criticism of reductionism and her emphasis on respecting complexity helpful critically, in responding to writers such as Richard Dawkins, and constructively, in explaining the richness of the Christian faith. I’ll return to this point in the following chapter when we look at Midgley’s idea of ‘mapping’ our complicated world.
Theologians have always jostled with philosophers, sometimes critically and sometimes collaboratively. During the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) developed a theological approach that drew appreciatively yet critically on Aristotle’s philosophy. This allowed him to enter into discussion with Muslims and pagans who would not accept the authority of the Christian Bible (but who liked Aristotle), and also allowed him to develop a philosophically rigorous approach to theology that remains influential in the twenty-first century. This is a good example of a theological engagement with philosophy that enables a wider cultural discussion.
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) has been widely referenced by modern theologians on account of the rigour of his intellectual vision and the quality of his engagement with cultural history. Taylor, who studied philosophy at Oxford during the 1950s, reacted against the inadequacies of the ‘logical positivism’ of that period, and set out to develop more satisfactory approaches. He came up with the idea of a ‘social imaginary’, which offers theologians ways of imagining our world, placing ourselves within a ‘vision of the larger order’ and acting in accordance with this way of seeing things.
For Taylor, a ‘social imaginary’ is the way in which people ‘imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’. Many theologians find this idea helpful in giving added intellectual substance to their reflections, allowing them to tease out the idea that Christianity offers a new, distinct and trustworthy mode of embracing our world and our lives.
Not everyone, of course, believes that there is such a big picture or grand story to be entered into in this way. Taylor uses the phrase ‘neutral self’ to describe the detached position of people who do not recognize the existence or authority of any such big pictures. He suggests that those who are unanchored and unattached to any larger vision of reality are ‘at sea’ when it comes to issues of moral values – questions concerning ‘what is good, or worthwhile, or admirable, or of value’. The point Taylor makes is theologically important: we need a ‘frame or horizon within which things can take on a stable significance’, allowing us to decide what is ‘good and meaningful,’ or ‘bad or trivial’. And for Taylor, theology offers us this kind of ‘imaginary’: a ‘frame or horizon’ that helps us make sense of things and live accordingly.
Some would concede the intellectual merits of Taylor’s argument, but would argue that living without any fixed reference points or big pictures has the advantage of offering people complete freedom. Some sections of Western culture now believe that personal freedom allows us to override intellectual integrity, holding that we must be at liberty to choose our beliefs and values without being controlled or influenced by any external constraints. Something can be true for us without being true in itself.
Yet there’s a real problem with this position. Our views become nothing more than personal constructions if they are not grounded in anything beyond our desires or our loyalties to our in-groups or influencers. As the German poet Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) pointed out, this was the problem that developed during the period of the Weimar Republic, when culture was rooted in little more than the ‘intellectual fashions’ and the ‘transitory values of the day’.
Perhaps more importantly, humans are prone to invent worlds that fit with their own tastes and vested interests. We allow our desires to determine the reality in which we believe instead of allowing what we believe to shape our desires. Although many argue that religion is the classic example of this process of inventing our own illusory worlds – what Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) famously styled ‘wish-fulfilment’ – the same applies to atheism, which for many people reflects a desire that there should be no God.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel (b. 1937) was quite clear that this desire lay at the heart of his own atheism: ‘It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God, and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.’ Nagel’s atheism is really a rationalization of his more fundamental desire for a godless universe.
There is a sense in which Christianity can be seen as a ‘counter-narrative’ that challenges certain ways of thinking once prevalent in classic Jewish, Greek and Roman culture, as well as many that are influential today. During the 1930s, the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner argued that theology had what he called an ‘eristic’ task. What he meant by this was that theology did not simply set out its own positive ideas and values; it challenged their alternatives such as Nazism and Marxism-Leninism, the two great secular ideologies of that period. Yet Brunner’s approach can easily be applied to rival views of God. For example, the Christian doctrine of justification rejects any idea of a God who is indifferent to our suffering and anguish, or who demands that we achieve moral and spiritual excellence before we can be loved and accepted by God.
We’ll consider these points further, particularly in the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters of this book. But we need to move on and think about the rich vision of faith that Christianity articulates before using this as a lens through which we can see ourselves and our world in a new light.