| Between sacred, secular
and gospel
Religion asserts a role for the sacred within the world by demarcating aspects of life—sacred by contrast to common and spiritual by contrast to secular. Such demarcation is not new. Its ancient expression concerns ritual mediations and sacred distinctions. Its contemporary expression occurs in focus on “the sacred”—locating places, times and customs in which the divine is more present than elsewhere or another time. Christian testimony to the incarnation qualifies our engagement with the world as the full arena of Christian vocation without sacred distinctions. Evangelical identity assumes a different perception of God’s relationship to humanity than any mediated by religion. The relationship between Christian faith and the world assumes greater personal responsibility for each before God—without the incursions of any hierarchical mediation or sacred segregation. The secularising impetus is attributed to scientific investigation of the world as independent from any patina or gloss of enchantment, whether by magic, superstition or religion. Yet many preconditions for this shift of focus were developed within an evangelical impetus that gave radical expression to a growing desire for human dignity within personal freedom. There is a significant change in theological perceptions of God, humanity, society and the world generated from within evangelical perspectives of sixteenth century reformation as a precursor to Enlightenment in general and the secularising impetus in particular. Scripture’s testimony to the gospel is the primary resource of evangelical reformation and its contribution to any secularising process. Scripture’s testimony surpasses this particular era to be present as a call to grace in the midst of humanity today. v In Christian faith, trust in God displaces any focus on enchanted things and forces. If God is sovereign, creation is dis-enchanted, with no aspect offering a religious advantage or posing a spiritual threat. People have to do with God not with sacred phenomena under the auspices of sacred persons, rituals and traditions. In evangelical identity, faith is directly concerned with God, bypassing intermediaries and notably, material artefacts, places or images that are invested with sacred significance. By faith, God becomes an ally against any encroachment on personal liberty that might be conjured from “sacred” phenomena. Faith is enhanced because everything around faith is dis-enchanted as gift. In Christian testimony, creation is not sacred but is given to humans as a tangible gift to be enjoyed; the downside of this freedom is also its potential abuse. With no sacred designations of the material, except by convention, care for creation is an issue of responsible stewardship. In the gospel’s articulation of intimacy with God by whose sovereignty life is given for people to enjoy, engagement with creation is neutral, without any presumed spirits, benign or hostile, lurking within the “sacredness of nature”—a vestige of paganism. If God is creator with whom humans ultimately relate, nothing in creation is intrinsically sacred by distinction from anything else. The material aspects of creation are given their integral function, such as consistent natural forces that remain reliable within human engagement; they are not manipulable by religion or magic. Humans can engage nature on its own terms and not through a religious patina or sheen in which nature becomes something other than what it is. Creation is not contrary to God either; it has its own dignity without sacred investments for selected religious ends. Sunshine and rain are given to the godly and ungodly alike. Creation has dignity as a gift that gives testimony to God’s generosity toward human delight and nourishment—exceeding for human possibilities, anything contrary the impartial recurrences and chance variations of nature might generate. If creation is not sacred, God, not some other spiritual entity is central and daily life within the particularity of the world is a primary focus, which is given definitive theological legitimacy in the Word becoming flesh. Incarnation gives significance to all human life without desiccation into sacred and profane categories. The gospel depicts the reality of triune involvement with human life in its mundane, compromised, joyous and hopeful context among others in the world—foods are declared clean; the Sabbath is for humans. The gospel does not shoe-horn human dignity into prescribed religious or sacred codes and modes of expression. God is encountered in the midst of life or not at all. Thanksgiving to God for all gifts of creation is the means by which these are truly valued. v God’s relationship with a called people gives a consistent historical and therefore eventful, volitional and relational focus in Scripture. Idolatry, in its elevation of selected phenomena to sacred or even divine status, is always resisted. God alone declares what is holy. Creation, humanity and God are juxtaposed in eventful and therefore historical decisions and relationships, giving testimony to righteousness instead of confusing God with nature’s consistent but blind and deaf recurrences. By identifying ultimate values with inanimate things as sacred, idolatry gives no possibility for volition decisions, relationships and therefore love. A major source of secular possibility is Paul’s scandal and folly of Christ crucified, which is reiterated in Luther’s theologia crucis. The cross highlights the complete identification of God with human experience in death. God is not segregated from the reality of death, which is the extremity of human experience and anxiety. Christian gospel offers the possibility of distinguishing between society and faith; faith cannot be hitched to any particular and invariably contested view of society. The Enlightenment glimpsed a perspective of human life that the gospel has always proclaimed in distinguishing human dignity from traditions and institutions. In evangelical testimony, traditions and social systems are not to be confused with the gospel’s endorsement of unique identity. In the nakedness of faith, each of us is ultimately distinguished from institutions with their potential for totalitarianism; each of us is for humanity, yet not of the world. This is the essence of faith in God as the source of a word otherwise for life lived distinctively within the call of God. Evangelical faith is orientated away from sacred demarcations and toward vocation in all life. This is crucial in resistance to the mediating power of hierarchical authority through any clerical system constructed within religion. Biblical testimony to the gospel of God enhances human freedom for decisions, relationships, responsibilities and accountability before God in grace, in the midst of creation that is given as a gift. Without sacred demarcations, we are exposed wholly to a singular distinction between God and human, while within this distinction we are before God as loved in the midst of creation given as gift. Personal faith has to do with God without phenomena interposing as sacred mediations pock-marking the goodness of creation with values that are alien to freedom in grace. Without faith, the world is “secular”—after the distorted expressions of secular within atheism. Yet atheism is humanity in need of grace not religion. The gospel announces such grace for all, even as it resists religion for the sake of the “irreligious.” Within faith, secular implies that creation is not religiously enchanted or divine but is a gift from God before whom we can engage all human life through grace and truth in Jesus Christ.
Sources: Brunner Philosophy of Religion; Chadwick Secularization of the European Mind; Ebeling Word and Faith; Jenson American’s Theologian: A recommendation of Jonathan Edwards; Essays in Theology and Culture; Luther “Temporal Authority”; McGrath Christianity’s Dangerous Idea; Niebuhr The Self and the Dramas of History; Taylor Secular Age. |
