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What is the place of Christian faith in the modern (and postmodern) world? Particularly what is the place of the Christian mind in the modern world? These questions are the centerpiece of the Marianist Award Lecture delivered by renowned philosopher Charles Taylor at the University of Dayton and published with a set of provocative responses and a final reply by Taylor.
Modernity, Taylor tells us, must be seen to include the espousal of universal and unconditional human rights and the affirmation of life, universal justice, benevolence, freedom, and the ethic of authenticity. Modernity certainly has its dark side as well, including the overweening claims of reason and the drive toward control of every facet of life. Taylor distinguishes between the fact of modernity and various theories of modernity. The fact of modernity is the cultural shift that has been taking place over the last 200 years; theories of modernity offer contending explanations of that shift.
Taylor considers four such rival explanations, as offered by (1) exclusive humanists, whose understanding of the good is strictly limited to our worldly life; (2) neo-Nietzschean antihumanists; (3) those who both acknowledge good beyond this life and oppose the primacy of life as defined by exclusive humanism—"knockers" of modernity, as Taylor calls them; and (4) those "boosters" who, while acknowledging good beyond this life, nevertheless regard modernity's emphasis on the practical primacy of life as a great gain and find legitimate values in modern culture more generally. Taylor contends for the fourth approach.
Modernity for Taylor cannot be limited to the ever-more restrictive pursuit of a set of value-neutral facts and the consequent replacement of traditional beliefs with "scientific" ones. Those are aspects of this great shift, yes, and yet he contends that modernity originated in a shift in our horizons of understanding—of humanity, the cosmos, society, and God—and constitutes an unarticulated background against which changes, as well as continuities, of practice and beliefs stand out and must be understood. It is in light of this concept of modernity that Taylor argues that Christians can participate constructively in it. At the very least, he maintains that modernity does not imply the end of Christianity, whether Catholic or Reformed.
The real obstacle to religious belief in the modern world, Taylor argues, is not the triumph of the scientific worldview. Instead, the obstacles are moral and spiritual, having to do with the historical failures of religious institutions. He is not necessarily calling for a Catholic modernism, but for serious reflection on how Catholics and other Christians can participate fully in this culture without drowning in it intellectually and spiritually. He wants to explore how we can be Christian in a culture that seems antireligious, whose life forms and practices undercut the forms and practices of the historical Church. Taylor is not naÏve about the dangers posed to religious insight and freedom by the multiple perversities of modern culture. Yet, since he does not think all aspects of modernity are against the Church, he proposes a model of "whoever is not against us is for us" (Mark 9:40).
Among the respondents to Taylor's lecture, William Shea carefully offers a case for modernity in "A Vote of Thanks to Voltaire," while Jean Bethke Elshtain makes a nuanced case against in "Augustine and Diversity." Mediating positions are suggested by Rosemary Luling Haughton's "Transcendence and the Bewilderment of Being Modern" (more "booster" than "knocker") and by George Marsden's discussion of "Prodigal Culture" (more "knocker" than "booster"). Important questions and multiple tension-filled issues are suggested by each of the participants, but Taylor, in his conclusion, maintains that the "big question" is the one raised by Marsden concerning "the place of Christians in contemporary academic and intellectual life."
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