Sacred and Secular

I’m a slow reader these days. I’m just now at about the 2/3 point in The Twilight of Atheism, and I’ve been reading it for a couple of months. In chp 8 McGrath talks about how the Protestant Reformation contributed to the rise of atheism, and he says some things that surprised me. I’m use to thinking of the Reformation as uniting the secular and sacred. That is, formerly there was a big distinction between the laity and the clergy, between people who had devoted their lives to God by becoming monks or nuns and ordinary folks who lived in less spiritual, ordinary ways. The Reformation came along and did away with the monastic life and affirmed the priesthood of all believers. It said that everything we do, we do to the glory of God, whether it’s overtly spiritual or just a “secular” occupation. It removed or refused to acknowledge the barrier between the secular and sacred.

What McGrath says is that actually it imposed that barrier. He doesn’t contradict what I just said, because the barrier is in a different place. Medieval Catholicism saw the natural world as being infused with the spiritual, according to him. This was true in everyday life, where everyday events were perceived to be directly connected to spiritual reality, and also in the sacraments, where God was believed to be really present. Protestants came along and began to divorce the material world from God by saying that God is accessible through the rational, preached word and not through mystical direct experience. Nature was no longer enchanted, God was no longer an immediate part of the imagination. In that sense they separated the spiritual and secular and opened the door for the natural sciences and for atheism.

(At the same time, I shouldn’t have been totally surprised by this. I’ve observed here on my OD that Protestants by and large have no imagination. I’ve read before that The Lord of the Rings could have come only from a Catholic imagination because it is so “sacramental”. There is a close connection between the material and spiritual.)

Anyway, I have pretty mixed feelings about that. I think a problem we have these days is seeing God as distant and nature as a mechanism. One of the things I like (and that has been an area of growth for me) at All Saints is coming to appreciate thinking about God not just systematically, but also in a literary or historical way. At the same time, I am suspicious of mysticism and I think the only place where God fully reveals what we need to know about him is the bible. I don’t think Protestantism in its essence necessarily leads to all these negative things, any more than medieval Catholicism necessarily leads to paganism or mysticism. So maybe the moral of the story is not that we have a choice between being Protestant rationalists or Catholic mystics, but that we need to be careful. The natural world (including our innate, subjective sense of the divine) does reveal God, who acts in history and sustains his creation. But we might liken this sense to our sense of temperature. When we come in out of the cold, a house at 68 degrees feels nice and warm. In the summer, it feels cool. Barton Springs, which is that temperature year round, always feels frigid when I first get in. Our senses don’t mean nothing, but they don’t “objectively” report the temperature as a thermometer does. The bible is our thermometer and our canon. It normalizes our perceptions of the spiritual instead of rendering them irrelevant.