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Ecclesiology in a Secular Age Ecclesiology in A Secular Age: Ecclesiological Implications of the Work of Charles Taylor and Bernard Lonergan Thesis Submitted to The College of Arts and Sciences of the UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in Theological Studies by Robert J. Brodrick UNIVERSITY OF DAYTON Dayton, Ohio December, 2010 ECCLESIOLOGY IN A SECULAR AGE: ECCLESIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE WORK OF CHARLES TAYLOR AND BERNARD LONERGAN NAME: Brodrick, Robert APPROVED BY: _________________________________________ Dennis Doyle, Ph.D. Faculty Advisor _________________________________________ Anthony Godzieba, Ph.D. Faculty Reader _________________________________________ Cyril Orji, Ph.D. Faculty Reader _________________________________________ Sandra A. Yocum, Ph.D. Chairperson ii ABSTRACT ECCLESIOLOGY IN A SECULAR AGE: ECCLESIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE WORK OF CHARLES TAYLOR AND BERNARD LONERGAN Name: Brodrick, Robert J. University of Dayton Advisor: Dr. Dennis Doyle The contemporary condition of secularity poses a unique environment in which the Church becomes incarnate in the world. The subject of secularity itself has been the focus of serious academic study, and two broad sources of this phenomenon can be drawn from the lifetime work of Charles Taylor: the rise of foundational epistemology and particular changes within the modern social imaginary. These two paradigm shifts have created a latent moral and religious skepticism within contemporary secular society in which it is generally accepted that complex moral and religious issues cannot be arbitrated by reason and must ultimately be decided on the basis of an individual’s personal feeling. In this thesis, the author draws on an integration of studies by Charles Taylor and Bernard Lonergan to establish that intellectual, moral, and religious conversion form the basis for the act of knowing and therefore provide an adequate theological response to the problem of skepticism. Furthermore, the author examines the social imaginary particular to contemporary secular society in order to develop a means by which the Church is able draw on sacramentality, communion, catholicity, the liturgy, and cosmology to embody an incarnational spirituality in a secular age. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my family and friends who have encouraged and prodded me along with this thesis. Without their backing, I would never have made it through. Moreover, I would like to thank the Religious Studies department at the University of Dayton, especially all of the faculty and fellow students who have worked with me and provided tremendous support and guidance throughout my entire Master’s work. Additionally, I would like to thank my readers, Dr. Cyril Orji, Ph.D. and Dr. Anthony Godzieba, Ph.D. of Villanova University who were instrumental in bringing this project forth. And last but not least, I would like to express my most sincere gratitude to my thesis advisor Dr. Dennis Doyle, Ph.D. for his vast wisdom, gentile guidance, and great patience. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….iii Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………iv Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1 .………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….5 Secularity According to Taylor ……………………………………………………………………………………………………5 Foundational Epistemology and Skepticism ……………………………………………………………………………..13 The Best Account Principle and Framing Epiphanies …………………………………………………………………20 Chapter 2 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………34 The Best Account Principle and Intentionality Analysis …………………………………………………………….35 A Secular Age and Conversions …………………………………………………………………………………………………47 Ecclesiology ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………62 Conversion and Ecclesiology …………………………………………………………………………………………………….65 v Chapter 3 …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………76 Disenchantment and Sacramentality ……………………………………………………………………………………….85 The Removal of God from Society and The Church as Communion of Communions ……………….93 The Loss of Profound Tensions and Catholicity …………………………………………………………………………99 Flattened Time and the Liturgy ………………………………………………………………………………………………108 Cosmology ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..115 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..124 Bibliography and Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………………………………..125 vi Introduction In every age, the Church has continually developed and adapted itself to represent and become the Body of Christ in each particular time and place. At every instance, this Church has constituted and been constituted by particular people – people who have been transformed by the living Word of God and inspired to bring that Word to the world in which they lived. At the forefront of this transformation have no doubt been the constant questions: “Who is the person of Jesus Christ?” and “What does it take to be a disciple of Christ?” But besides the personal (or perhaps ‘existential’) questions, this concern has also been raised socially in the form of “What does it mean to be Church?” In this thesis, however, I will not be asking the general question “What does it mean to be Church?” but rather the more specific question “What does it mean to be Church today?” This contemporary question is difficult because we are aware, perhaps more than any other time in history, that the world of ‘today’ is experienced in drastically different ways depending on where one in standing. Culture, economics, politics, gender roles, attitudes towards race and class, nationalism, militarism, modernity, religious pluralism, religious intolerance, relationships between clergy and laity, globalization and more each play a role in answering this question. While each of these deserve attention, I want to ask this question in light of one particular condition of the contemporary world: secularity. Over the past decades, a wide range of academics have each attempted to put a finger on the sources and meanings of secularity. Other than a few brief mentions, I will not have the 1 space to address those efforts in this thesis. Rather, I will be primarily using the works of Charles Taylor who offers a new perspective on secularity which views it not as a condition of who or how many people believe in God nor as a condition of whether such belief is held ‘publically’ or ‘privately’, but rather as a particular development in the background conditions for belief in God. In this thesis, I will explore two directions in this development: epistemological methodology and the social imaginary. Regarding the first, Taylor has clearly illustrated in some of his earlier works the way in which foundational epistemology has come to function in our grasp of what it means to know something and how we come to that knowledge. The result of this seizure has been the development of moral and religious skepticism in which it is now commonly assumed – by religious believers and non-believers alike – that belief in God is not to be determined by reason but rather by something like one’s personal gut feeling. The second direction here, the social imaginary, is taken up by Taylor in his recent book, A Secular Age, in which Taylor takes us away from discussing the theories that people hold and their actions in the world, although both are still relevant and related. Rather, Taylor’s work provides a narrative in which the essential change between pre-secular and secular society is located in what he calls the social imaginary – that is, the way people “imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations.”1 As Taylor has put forth in his body of work and as I am about to do here, the rise of secularism cannot be seen as either fully good or bad, as a movement that has saved us from the errors of pre-modern society or as a development that has left religion in the dust. For all the difficulty of religious skepticism, secularity has in a way actually paved a new way for 1 ASA, 171. 2 authentic religious belief. In the first case, we will see that developing modes of moral and religious reasoning have not only stripped religion of a worldview that one simply must believe in God or face immanent peril, but by showing that all worldviews are, in fact, inculturated these modes of reasoning also work against the notion that skepticism is the fundamental stance towards the world. This leaves the table open for philosophical and theological methods that point towards authentic intellectual, moral, and religious conversion as a grounds for the act of knowing. In the second place, it is also not the case that the developments within the contemporary social imaginary are purely hostile towards religion. Rather, I will frame these developments in this thesis as movements from a commonsense worldview to a theory based worldview which are to be advanced further into a worldview of interiority which can distinguish between commonsense and theory and move fluently between the two. Furthermore, I will draw on elements from the Catholic social imaginary which are on the level of interiority, can make sense of the secular worldview, and finally move beyond it towards authentic religious belief. Based on these elements from the Catholic social imaginary, I will then advance the ecclesiological
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