<\/p>\n
There are few polemical tactics more annoying than that of trying to demonstrate that one\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cchurch age\u201d or \u201cage of grace\u201d 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.\u00a0 But this Christian fundamentalism in the narrower sense is based, as George Marsden demonstrated in his 1980 study, Fundamentalism in American Culture<\/em>, on an empiricist theory of knowledge which regards all\u00a0 knowledge as the product of sensation \u2013and 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n By secularism I mean the claim that the sacred is found and realized in and only<\/em> in \u201cthis\u201d world, i.e. that enlightenment or salvation, or whatever our spiritual aim, unfolds and finds its realization in cosmohistory.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Humanistic secularism seeks to create a collective political subject \u2013the people, the democratic state, or the communist party\u2014which makes humanity the master of its own destiny, \u201cthe unique subject-object\u201d of the cosmohistorical evolutionary process, to adapt Lukacs\u2019 phrase, and thus to transcend the limits of contingency and become<\/em> (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<\/em>) and religions (institutionalized patterns of action by means of which spiritual ends are pursued).<\/p>\n My argument turns on an extension of Marsden\u2019s insight from the epistemological to the metaphysical arena. Fundamentalism, I would like to argue, not only insists that knowledge consists exclusively of \u201cfacts\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cmodernity.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201caren\u2019t true\u201d and don\u2019t matter.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 At one level this is a reflection of the empiricist epistemology which they share. Only facts<\/em> 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 \u201cfacts\u201d and others do not.\u00a0 But at a deeper level it reflects a flat, univocal metaphysics. Neither side has access to the realm of \u201cnecessary Being\u201d on which the sacred is actually<\/em> located and in which, I would argue, we (and the entire secular world) participate, but into which we never fully enter. \u00a0The \u201cspace\u201d in which the sacred is located simply doesn\u2019t exist for them.\u00a0 All meaningful events must be played out in the phenomenal world of \u201cfacts,\u201d whether as miracles and apocalyptic wars or triumphs of technological progress \u2013or not at all.<\/p>\n To demonstrate rigorously that such a worldview is mistaken would take far more space than we have here.\u00a0 Let me note, simply, that the most rigorous attempts to describe \u201cthis world\u201d \u2013those of mathematical physics\u2014have ended up positing \u201cother worlds\u201d 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<\/em> 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 \u201csomething far greater\u201d is best characterized as an 11 or 26 dimensional manifold is another question entirely.<\/p>\n I began by claiming that fundamentalism <\/em>is a secularism. But in the process I have come very <\/em>close to demonstrating that Protestantism<\/em> itself is a secularism. After all, Protestantism in general<\/em> shares the univocal metaphysics on which fundamentalism (like humanism and technicist) are based. The same is true of much nonfundamentalist conservative Islam.\u00a0 But I hesitate to draw this conclusion.\u00a0 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 \u201clocating\u201d metaphysically the deeper truth they continue to uphold. \u00a0This 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0Only the much richer metaphysical resources of the Shia traditions allow a real solution to this problem.<\/p>\n The struggle for a postsecular society is the struggle against a univocal metaphysics. It is the struggle to recover access to the \u201chigher\u201d and \u201cdeeper\u201d 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 \u2013without the \u201cexcess\u201d beyond this that has made the past 500 years such a time of terror. \u00a0Subsequent essays in this series will explore how to do this, drawing on multiple traditions, as well as the dangers facing us along the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are few polemical tactics more annoying than that of trying to demonstrate that one\u2019s 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 … Continue reading