There are few polemical tactics more annoying than that of trying to demonstrate that one’s adversary in fact upholds the position which s/he most abhors. I would therefore like to begin this essay with a disclaimer. My aim in advancing the thesis indicated in the title is not polemical. It represents, rather, a serious theological and philosophical judgment expressed out of concern for what I believe to be a grave error which so many, with the sincere aim of advancing and defending what they understand to be true religion, are making.
Let me begin with some definitions. By fundamentalism I refer first and foremost to Christian fundamentalism in the narrower sense of dispensational premillenialism. This is the claim that we are currently living in the “church age” or “age of grace” during which the obviously social-revolutionary teachings of Jesus are in abeyance, and justification is by faith alone, until Jesus returns and ushers in the millennium. But this Christian fundamentalism in the narrower sense is based, as George Marsden demonstrated in his 1980 study, Fundamentalism in American Culture, on an empiricist theory of knowledge which regards all knowledge as the product of sensation –and which insists, therefore that the events recounted in the sacred scriptures are literally true. The alternative, from the vantage point of such an epistemology, is that they never happened at all in any sense and that the scriptures are without value. Dispensational premillenialism is based on a hermeneutic, or approach to interpretation, which says that the Bible is a book of facts and then asks what would have to be true for the apparently contradictory claims it contains to all be literally true. What I have to say, therefore, also applies in large measure to other fundamentalisms in other religious traditions, Christian and non-Christian, which insist on the literal inerrancy of their scriptures.
By secularism I mean the claim that the sacred is found and realized in and only in “this” world, i.e. that enlightenment or salvation, or whatever our spiritual aim, unfolds and finds its realization in cosmohistory. In my previous writings I have identified two principal forms of what I call the secular ideal. Technicist secularism seeks divinization by using scientific and technological progress to push back the boundaries of finitude to the point that humanity becomes, in effect, divine. Humanistic secularism seeks to create a collective political subject –the people, the democratic state, or the communist party—which makes humanity the master of its own destiny, “the unique subject-object” of the cosmohistorical evolutionary process, to adapt Lukacs’ phrase, and thus to transcend the limits of contingency and become (as though that were possible) Being as such. Perhaps my fundamentalist sisters and brothers can take some comfort in the fact that I largely accept their claim that these secularisms not only represent grave spiritual errors but also that they are, for all intents and purposes both spiritualities (ways of seeking Being) and religions (institutionalized patterns of action by means of which spiritual ends are pursued).
My argument turns on an extension of Marsden’s insight from the epistemological to the metaphysical arena. Fundamentalism, I would like to argue, not only insists that knowledge consists exclusively of “facts” accessible to the senses, but also that reality has, as it were, only one plane or dimension. To use technical metaphysical language, fundamentalism is the logical consequence of a univocal metaphysics, a metaphysics which says (following Anselm, Scotus, Occam, and the Reformers, as well as most empiricist and rationalist philosophers, atheistic or theistic) that everything exists in the same way we do. If God exists, the divine distinctive is simply Its infinity.
Following John Milbank (who in turn follows Gillian Rose in this insight) I have argued elsewhere that it is the turn from an analogical to a univocal metaphysics which ushers in “modernity.” It is what is behind the Asharite, Franciscan, and Protestant reduction of spirituality to a zero sum game in which human development comes at the cost of divine sovereignty and thus constitutes radical sin, making the Reformed doctrine of radical depravity inescapable. It is what is behind the technicist secularism which imagines that the infinite extension of human power would, in effect, build God.
I have been fascinated for some time by the fact that the reaction of my beginning students when presented with alternatives to a literal interpretation of the scriptures has been nearly uniform, with little difference between those who are fundamentalists and those who are scientifically formed nonbelievers. They uniformly take such a reading (whether they accept it or not) to imply that the scriptures “aren’t true” and don’t matter. I have also found that both fundamentalists and scientifically formed nonbelievers react with profound skepticism to most philosophical arguments for the sacred and to most forms of contemplative practice. At one level this is a reflection of the empiricist epistemology which they share. Only facts are true. Facts are what can be proven by observation or experiment. It is just that some accept the scriptures as reliable witness to such “facts” and others do not. But at a deeper level it reflects a flat, univocal metaphysics. Neither side has access to the realm of “necessary Being” on which the sacred is actually located and in which, I would argue, we (and the entire secular world) participate, but into which we never fully enter. The “space” in which the sacred is located simply doesn’t exist for them. All meaningful events must be played out in the phenomenal world of “facts,” whether as miracles and apocalyptic wars or triumphs of technological progress –or not at all.
To demonstrate rigorously that such a worldview is mistaken would take far more space than we have here. Let me note, simply, that the most rigorous attempts to describe “this world” –those of mathematical physics—have ended up positing “other worlds” to which we have no empirical access as the condition of possibility of the world that we experience. This alone suggests a reduction ad absurdum of all forms of secularism and the need to acknowledge that what we experience is just a participation in something far greater and far more profound. Whether or not that “something far greater” is best characterized as an 11 or 26 dimensional manifold is another question entirely.
I began by claiming that fundamentalism is a secularism. But in the process I have come very close to demonstrating that Protestantism itself is a secularism. After all, Protestantism in general shares the univocal metaphysics on which fundamentalism (like humanism and technicist) are based. The same is true of much nonfundamentalist conservative Islam. But I hesitate to draw this conclusion. Instead I will merely suggest that secularism is a danger for these doctrines, even when they are not fundamentalist. This is why modernizing Protestant theologies when they reject literal interpretations of the Christian story have difficulty “locating” metaphysically the deeper truth they continue to uphold. This is why so many have found the work of theologians such as Tillich ultimately unsatisfying (and more so that than of say Rahner, who shares many of the same sources and influences but whose still fundamentally Catholic theology does not pull so hard in the direction of a univocal metaphysics). It is also why there has been such a powerfully antimetaphysical turn in theology in the past few decades. If the only metaphysics one can imagine is univocal then it is indeed best to avoid metaphysics entirely.
Islam faces much the same difficulty, especially the Sunni tradition. The distinction between an Islam which is fundamentalist and one which is merely conservative is very difficult to make and when it is made it is almost always on political rather than theological grounds. Only the much richer metaphysical resources of the Shia traditions allow a real solution to this problem.
The struggle for a postsecular society is the struggle against a univocal metaphysics. It is the struggle to recover access to the “higher” and “deeper” reality in which the sacred is actually located, not in order to abandon the phenomenal world and its struggles, but so that we can understand them properly as participation and as sacrament and invest them with the full meaning they deserve –without the “excess” beyond this that has made the past 500 years such a time of terror. Subsequent essays in this series will explore how to do this, drawing on multiple traditions, as well as the dangers facing us along the way.
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