Thework of Charlestaylor and the Future of Pentecostalism

PNEUMA 40 (2018) 5–16 brill.com/pneu The Work of Charles Taylor and the Future of Pentecostalism L. William Oliverio, Jr. The School of Urban Missions Bible College and Theological [email protected] Abstract Charles Taylor has been one of the most significant philosophers in the Western world for the past four decades, and his work on secularism and religion in the late modern world has been a major contribution to contemporary philosophy and religious studies. Taylor’s visit to the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society for Pentecostal Studies in St. Louis has led to responses to his work in relationship to Pentecostal studies. Taylor’s narration of the secular, culminating in his major work A Secular Age, in relationship to his wider philosophical works has led to the responses in this issue of Pneuma. This introductory article frames Taylor’s work in relationship to these responses to his work from leading and emerging scholars of Pentecostal studies. Keywords Charles Taylor – Pentecostalism – secularism – late modern A century into modern pentecostal history, and less than a half century into that of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, one of Western civilization’s great- est living philosophers attended the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society, which took place March 9–11 at the Marriott Airport Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. At the invitation of Dale Coulter, the Society’s President and at the time First Vice President and Program Chair, Charles Taylor participated in two sessions and kindly engaged in conversations and meals with Society members, especially taking time with graduate students, over the course of two days. Not only a leading philosopher on the role of religion in the modern world but also a practicing Catholic, Taylor—whose work has seemed quite attached to religious interests © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/15700747-04001006Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 04:24:30AM via free access 6 oliverio by the standards of secular philosophers, and quite philosophical among many in the theological and religious studies guilds—crossed himself and prayed with others over meals, and listened attentively to others during his two-day stay. Taylor participated in and was the focus of two of the Society’s sessions. The Friday evening, March 10 plenary session was a ninety-minute panel discussion, “Our Secular Age: A Conversation with Charles Taylor,” in which Coulter, Michael Wilkinson, and I discussed Taylor’s landmark volume, A Secular Age, followed by an open microphone for questions and further discussion with Society members.1 In the Saturday morning session, sponsored by the Philos- ophy Interest Group of the Society, papers from Wolfgang Vondey, Michael McClymond, and Michael Wilkinson provided formal responses to Taylor’s work. Merely the most noted work of the career of a major philosopher, which includes authorship or coauthorship of thirty-three books and hundreds of chapters and articles, Taylor’s winding historical story of the becoming of our secular age has itself gained traction since its 2007 publication by Harvard’s Belknap Press.2 In 776 pages, ASecularAge provides a recalibration of the emer- gence of secularity in three senses in Western or, as Taylor sometimes puts it, North Atlantic culture: in the first sense, where public life and government have been secularized, with public rationalizations supposedly drawing on rational- ities only internal to their domains, without reference to God or religion; in the second sense, in the falling off of religious belief and practice in Western culture; yet, A Secular Age especially takes aim at a third sense, in the deep sociocultural conditions of belief. This third sense of the secular is the primary focus of this work. He puts it this way: The change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others. I may find it inconceivable that I would abandon my faith, but 1 A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press, 2007). A more succinct version of Taylor’s thick description of the development of the secular and religious in the modern West can be found in his “The Future of the Religious Past,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 178–244. 2 The University of Notre Dame keeps an updated bibliography of Taylor’s works and works on Taylor, managed by Dr. Bradley Thames, which can be found at https://www3.nd.edu/ ~rabbey1/index.htm (accessed February 20, 2018). DownloadedPNEUMA from Brill.com10/03/2021 40 (2018) 5–16 04:24:30AM via free access the work of charles taylor and the future of pentecostalism 7 there are others, including possibly some very close to me, whose way of living I cannot in all honesty dismiss as depraved, or blind, or unworthy, who have no faith (at least not in God, or the transcendent). Belief in God is no longer axiomatic. There are alternatives.3 A key purpose of the dialogue, then at the Annual Meeting and now in this issue of Pneuma, is to bring together Taylor’s accounting for our secular age and the religious revival of Christianity that has seen charismatic-pentecostal Christianity soar to over a half billion adherents in just over a century in this same age. In fact, Charles Taylor and the many forms of Pentecostalism have had something quite notable in common here. Both have been narrating differ- ent stories from those told by predominant strands of modernity, and, in doing so, both have sought to testify to a richer fabric, even nature, to certain reali- ties than those stories have told, and whose proponents have often expected almost everyone else to live accordingly. Both Taylor and Pentecostalisms have attracted others to their alternative narratives. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) is a native of Montreal, Canada. He earned his B.A. in history at McGill University (1952) and was subsequently awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, earning a second B.A. from Oxford University in philosophy, poli- tics, and economics (1955) and then an M.A. (1960) and D.Phil. (1961), working under Isaiah Berlin. In 1961 he returned to teach at McGill University, and in his early teaching years he unsuccessfully ran for parliament. In 1974 he moved to teach political science at the University of California-Berkeley. His work Hegel was published in 1975 and has been acknowledged by many as the leading work on the philosopher since.4 In 1976 he became the Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford, a post that he held until 1981. His Hegel and Modern Society was published in 1979.5 In the 1980s, he held appointments at Queen’s University, Ontario; the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India; the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton; again at Berkeley; then Frankfurt; and then Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1985, two volumes of his philosophical writings, predominantly on human agency, language, and the social sciences were published as Philosophical Papers 1 and 2.6 In 1989, 3 Taylor, A Secular Age, 3. 4 Hegel (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 5 Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 6 Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985). PNEUMA 40 (2018) 5–16 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 04:24:30AM via free access 8 oliverio he published his major work on the self in Western culture, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, which has become widely regarded as a modern philosophical classic.7 While some scholars in the fields associated with religious studies have sim- ply assumed that A Secular Age is his magnum opus, Taylor’s work on philosophical anthropology and philosophy of language as well as ontology has also been monumental, and his major works on these—respectively, Sources of the Self, The Language Animal, and (with Herbert Dreyfus) Retrieving Realism— will long compete with one another for that honor.8 Such recognition of other areas of Taylor’s work is found here in this issue of Pneuma, for example, in Caroline Redick’s development of Taylor’s anthropology in relation to a pentecostal theology of Spirit baptism and agape, and in Michael McClymond’s recognition and critique of the Hegelian side of Taylor. Still, there are far too many themes in Taylor’s work to account sufficiently for the breadth and depth of his philosophical work in this relatively short series of responses to it in this issue. Among other themes, Taylor’s resourcing of Romanticism for contemporary philosophy, his development of the understanding of the expressive- constitutive nature of human language, and the retrieval and furtherance of an embodied and pluralistic realism, all major aspects of his overall philosophical project, are largely left unaddressed by the work here. During the 1990s, Taylor had teaching appointments at Stanford, McGill, Oxford, Frankfurt, and Yale. He published The Malaise of Modernity, also published as The Ethics of Authenticity, and a major essay on multiculturalism appeared in a 1992 coauthored volume centering aroundTaylor’s essay.9 In 1995, another volume of essays entitled Philosophical Arguments was published by Harvard.10 In 1999, he delivered the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh entitled “Liv- ing in a Secular Age,” which marked the beginning of a sustained period of inquiry that led to his major work in this area, which this issue of Pneuma pri- marily addresses.

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