Baker again, telling me something I didn’t know, the part about the older/est profession of the goddess.
Poster children for the early beginnings of secularization theory might include Diderot, who rejoices at the though of “strangling the last priest with the guts of the last king,” the French revolutionaries who enthroned a young woman (actually a prostitute) as the goddess of Reason in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and Comte, who envisioned the death of traditional religion to be replaced by a new order based on reverence toward the powers of human rationality.
Before secular meant something done without reference to God, it simply meant something done in the world. Hunter Baker in The End of Secularism notes
The priests with parish duties were known a secular clergy. . . The idea of “secular” clergy going about their work administering the sacraments, giving aid to the poor, and yes, even collecting tithes, burial fees and other church revenues without reference to God is ludicrous. In the world we are discussing, secular simply referred to activities conducted in the world as opposed to those directed toward a purely supernatural plane. State and ecclesiastical authorities wrestled, but they wrestled within the context of Christian right and wrong.
It might be better stated that secular clergy worked outside of a strictly liturgical setting since all of life consists in Christ, the creational Word spoken. But secularism developed from this earlier understanding.
Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), former Dutch prime minister and Calvinist exemplar, would later imply that the Roman church created secularism by wrongly dividing life into consecrated and profane sectors.
This is exactly the project of Reformed two kingdoms types. They want realms of life and society that are free of Christian dominion, not that such a schizophrenic position can be consistently defined or maintained. Ironically, these folks often insist, to the exclusion of all others, that they are guardians of the reformed confessions when in reality they are towing a Roman Catholic line of sacred/secular. Not the earlier view of a divided sacred/secular clergy serving in two places, but the later view that embraces a false neutrality where a secular realm of “common grace” somehow enables us not to name to giver of that grace at all.
If you saw the documentary Expelled, the one that concludes with Richard Dawkins saying he’s 95% certain that intelligent design by a god is impossible but quite open to the idea that extra terrestrials planted biological life on earth, then you might remember an interview with author and mathematician David Berlinski. He lives in Paris and works, if memory serves, in the oldest building there. Though a member of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Berlinksi admits he has a warm but distant affection for intelligent design, the same he displays for his ex-wives in public, as he told Slate.
What he doesn’t have any affection for is shrill Darwinian atheists who attack religion. His new book, The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, shows the risibility of the new atheists’ (Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins among them) claim to scientifically disprove God. He doesn’t limit his arguments to science, but points out all sorts of bogus assertions. Among the most striking is the idea that evolution is making us kinder and gentler. He quotes psychologist Steven Pinker. (more…)
