Autor: Gregory, Brad S.

Buch: The Unintended Reformation

Titel: The Unintended Reformation

Stichwort: Versagen d. Moderne; soziale Fragmentation; Natralismus, Säkularismus: Aufhebung der Voraussetzungen für politischen Diskurs; Philosophie (wie sola scriptura): unzureichend für Konsens in Lebensfragen -> Ausweg: Hyperpluralismus; Konsumerismus

Kurzinhalt: ... the same institutional arrangements that solved the central problem posed by the failure of confessional Europe created the conditions for the failure of Western modernity itself ... The hegemonic cultural glue comes especially from all-pervasive ...

Textausschnitt: 375a Yet the same institutional arrangements that solved the central problem posed by the failure of confessional Europe created the conditions for the failure of Western modernity itself, which is now well under way in different respects. In order to see this, we have not only to consider simply and narrowly the problems that modern liberalism solved, but also what its institutional arrangements have facilitated in combination with other historical developments. A centrally important, paradoxical characteristic of modern liberalism is that it does not prescribe what citizens should believe, how they should live, or what they should care about, but it nonetheless depends for the social cohesion and political vitality of the regimes it informs on the voluntary acceptance of widely shared beliefs, values, and priorities that motivate people’s actions. Otherwise liberal states have to become more legalistic and coercive in order to insure stability and security. In the West, many of those basic beliefs, values, and priorities—including self-discipline, self-denial, self-sacrifice, ethical responsibility for others, duty to one’s community, commitment to one’s spouse and children—derive most influentially in the modern Western world from Christianity and were shared across confessional lines in early modern Europe. Advanced secularization, precipitated partly by the capitalism and consumerism encouraged by liberal states, has considerably eroded them in the past several decades and thus placed increasing pressures on public life through the social fragmentation and political apathy of increasing numbers of citizens who exercise their rights to live for themselves and to ignore politics. This is one way in which modernity’s failure is under way, a symptom of which is the constant stream of (thus far, ineffectual) proposals about how to reinvigorate democracy, restore public civility, get citizens to care about politics, and so forth. More abstractly but important in different ways, the ideological secularism of the public sphere and the naturalist metaphysical assumptions of academic life, combined with the state of philosophy and the explanatory successes of the natural sciences, prevent the articulation of any intellectually persuasive warrant for believing in the realities presupposed by liberal political discourse and the institutional arrangements of modernity: that there are such things as persons, and that they have such things as rights. Secularization and scientism are thus subverting modernity’s most fundamental assumptions from within, developments that are facilitated by the same institutional arrangements of liberalism that solved early modern Europe’s problem of religious coexistence. (Fs) (notabene)

376a Despite the political, military, and socio-moral failures of confessional Europe, neither Roman Catholicism nor Protestantism went away, whether in the eighteenth century or at any point since. Instead, they have persisted alongside and in complex interactions with secular ideologies, social realities, and economic developments up to the present within the institutional protection afforded (and the control exercised) by modern liberal states. At the same time, the literally endless, back-and-forth non-dialogue of theological controversialists in the Reformation era was the springboard for the secularization of public discourse. Enduring doctrinal disagreements also problematized the epistemological status of theology compared to other sorts of knowledge, notwithstanding its privileged status in Reformation-era universities, academies, and seminaries. Thus were the seeds also sown, with the failures of confessional rulers to achieve their goals, for the eventual marginalization of theology, secularization of knowledge, and relativization of religious truth claims as such in public life. If any solutions to the issues about which Christians disagreed were going to be found, whether intellectually or institutionally, it seemed that they would have to be built on bases other than the ones in dispute among Christians. Otherwise one would still be caught in the maelstrom of doctrinal controversy, arguing about the sacraments, the nature of the church, the interpretation of scripture, and so forth. Ironically, even the many beliefs about which Catholics and the large majority of Protestants agreed—the trinitarian nature of the transcendent creator-God, the natural world as creation, the divinity of Jesus, his bodily resurrection, the reality of the Holy Spirit, original sin, the necessity of faith for salvation, eternal judgment by God, scripture as the revealed word of God, and many aspects of Christian morality—were thereby set up for an exclusion from public discourse and a segregation from the realm of knowledge-making. A major reason for this secularizing exclusion was the tendency of early modern Protestants and Catholics to emphasize their points of difference rather than of commonality, precisely the opposite of what has characterized ecumenical efforts in the past half-century. Early modern doctrinal controversy seemed to dictate that reason alone, not scripture or the Holy Spirit or ecclesiastical authority, not God’s actions in history however understood, would have to provide answers to the Life Questions, in an intellectual parallel to the ways in which Christianity was being disembedded from political and economic life beginning in the Dutch Republic. What other plausible options were there? Ever since the later seventeenth century, and seeking to transcend the problems of the Reformation era, Western modernity has banked intellectually on reason to deliver the goods. (Fs) (notabene)

377a The two most influential expressions of modern Western rationality have been foundationalist philosophy and the natural sciences, which were more closely related in the seventeenth century than they subsequently became. Modernity is failing partly because reason alone in modern philosophy has proven no more capable than scripture alone of discerning or devising consensually persuasive answers to the Life Questions. The natural sciences, on the other hand, have been an extraordinary success; but because of the self-imposed limitations that have made them so successful, by definition they can offer no answers to any of the Life Questions. (Fs) (notabene)

377b What remains in the absence of shared answers to the Life Questions is a hyperpluralism of divergent secular and religious truth claims in contemporary Western states, and of individuals pursuing their desires whatever they happen to be. The world in which all Europeans and North Americans are living today is a combination of hegemonic and hyperpluralistic realities, the former safeguarding and permitting the latter. Highly bureaucratized sovereign states wield a monopoly of public power in enforcing laws. The hegemonic cultural glue comes especially from all-pervasive capitalism and consumerism: scientific findings are applied in manufacturing technologies to make the stuff consumers want, whatever they want, heirs to the early modern Christians who made the industrious revolution that preceded and prepared the way for the Industrial Revolution. There is no shared, substantive common good, nor are there any realistic prospects for devising one (at least in the immediately foreseeable future). Nor does secular discourse offer any realistic prospects for rationally resolving any of the many contested moral or political issues that emerge from the increasingly wide range of ways in which individuals self-determine the good for themselves within liberalism’s politically protected formal ethics of rights. Appeals to a Rawlsian “overlapping consensus” are akin to reminders of the fact that antagonistic Christians nevertheless continued to share many beliefs in common in the sixteenth century. Indeed they did. But it hardly conduced to their moral agreement or political cooperation. (Fs)