Contemplating Culture: A Missionary Walk Through A Secular Age

11. The Ascent and Anxiety of Reform

Contemplating Culture: A Missionary Walk Through A Secular Age

Show Notes

The new Christian transport is taking off: disenchantment and humanism start find movement in Christianity through inner personal devotion, uneasiness with sacramentals, and anxiety of judgment. We find Christianity swept up in the movements of reform, rejecting the old and charging on towards forging something new. Finding its peak in a Puritan Calvin society, it seems that remade, well-ordered society can become a human achievement. What we find however is that underneath is a deep anxiety, a society that we must constantly be at work to sustain, for God has been done away with as the sustainer.

Is this anxiety one of the inheritances bequeathed to the Western world by history? What role does control play in all of this?

With this episode we reach the end of Chapter 1: Bulwarks of Belief

References:

Pages of A Secular Age, Charles Taylor: (75-88)

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/contemplatingculture

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