The growing secularization of the first world also challenged religious thought in the latter half of the 20th century. The “death of God” movement responded to secular suspicions of religious other-worldliness by embracing secularization. A major influence on these theologies was the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s call for a “religionless Christianity.” A second set of influences, particularly on the secular theologies of contemporary thinkers, such as Mark C. Taylor and Gianni Vattimo, is found in the “postmodern” reception of such philosophers as Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida. Taylor and Vattimo view secularization not as a threat to religion but as the end to the otherworldly “metaphysics” that characterizes traditional religion and modern philosophy. Echoing Hegel, they read the incarnation of Christ as marking the end of such otherworldliness and divine transcendence as the emptying of divine love into the world.
Outline
I. The term “secular theology” sounds like an oxymoron but has in fact been a significant movement in European and North American Christian theological circles since the middle of the 20th century.
A. Secular means “worldly,” and many see the process called secularization -- a process in which, in one way or another, religion ceases to play as crucial a role in a society as it did previously-as central to what we have been calling modernity.
B. This transformation has occurred in one or more of the following ways:
1. In the early modern period, we see the separation of church and state.
2. We see a significant decrease in the number of people who consider themselves religious or who regularly worship, especially in European societies.
3. We see the privatization and individualization of religion such that it exerts less influence on public life.
4. Today, the apparent resurgence of religion has led some to argue that the secularization thesis has been shown to be false. Others suggest that secularization is the context for a new kind of religion.
II. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theologian and pastor who was arrested and executed by the Nazis for participating in plots against Hitler.
A. Although his work owed much to Barth, he thought Barth put too much emphasis on the distance between God and the human.
B. His writings in prison reflect a turn to what he called “religionless Christianity.” He wrote about a “world come of age,” in which “before God and with God we live without God.
God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.”
C. Bonhoeffer’s work was taken up in the 1960s by the “death of God” theologians, who also affirmed the secular.
D. More recently, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo has described his book Belief as an effort to treat “‘secularization’ as the constitutive trait of an authentic religious experience
III. Vattimo and many other contemporary theologians have been influenced by philosophical postmodernism, particularly by Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
A. Postmodernism is not a rejection of modernity but refers to a complex and ambivalent attitude toward modernity grounded in a hermeneutics of suspicion directed at some of modernity’s foundational ideas.
B. For Vattimo and many others, Nietzsche and Heidegger are crucial thinkers for postmodernists.
1. Nietzsche’s death of God and his claim that as a result, we must embrace a certain kind of nihilism is one way to understand this influence.
2. Heidegger argued that Nietzsche’s death of God should be understood as the death of a certain way of thinking and doing philosophy.
C. Vattimo appropriates the postmodernism that comes out of Nietzsche and Heidegger by describing secularization as a “purification” of Christianity.
1. God’s revelation, according to Vattimo, is a revelation of love that we are to embody in the world, but there is no final end to this process, no guarantee that we will ever perfect or embody this love.
2. Thus, nihilism means that we have to give up, empty ourselves oi our human dreams for and pretensions to such power.
IV. Let’s now turn to what we might call postmodern traditionalism and the work of the Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas.
A. A common criticism of postmodernism is that it is a destructive relativism that only takes things apart.
B. In contemporary theological circles, we see an interesting convergence of` postmodern criticisms of metaphysics with theologies of divine transcendence that find resources for an affirmative postmodernism in engagement with religious traditions.
1. These can be called “traditionalist postmodernism.”
2. This phrase should open us to the possibility that religious traditions themselves are forms of reasoning.
C. We can see how this combination of postmodernism, transcendence, and tradition is at work in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish philosopher who was born in Lithuania and spent most of his life teaching in Paris.
1. He was influenced by Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and took from it the idea that ethics should not be subordinated to metaphysics or epistemology.
2. Levinas begins his thinking from the experience of obligation, which he considers to be grounded in a transcendent imperative that is at the core of all human relationship and that is something simply given to us.
Suggested Reading:
Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison.
Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche: ‘God is Dead”’ in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays.
Marion, God without Being.
Vattimo, Belief.
Levinas, Otherwise than Being.
Questions to Consider:
1. How does Vattimo understand the relation of secularization and Christianity?
2. What does Marion mean by “icon”‘?
Lecture Thirty -- Transcript
Secular and Postmodern Theologies
Over the past seven lectures, I’ve been telling a story of 20th-century theology that begins with Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans. Barth grounded his attack on liberal theology in the infinite qualitative distinction between God and human, and he stressed what some have described as the objectivity of God’s revelation over against the always sinful attempts of human beings to know and follow God. Barth, as I have made clear, was enormously influential, but it is also the case that the religious thinkers we’ve discussed in the last few lectures were critical of the enormous distance Barth’s view of revelation opened up between the human and the divine. They, by contrast, sought a point of contact between the divine and the human.
They sought to specify those ways in which human life, human selfhood, and human faith open themselves to God’s grace.
We saw in the last lecture that liberation theologians directed suspicion at the Church. They were especially critical of the Church’s support of an otherworldly view of religion that separated the religious task of sacraments and salvation from the worldly task of addressing human suffering. They argued that the Church should immerse itself in the world -- should seek the point of contact between God and human in the suffering of the poor, the oppressed, or the marginalized. This idea of immersion in the world also characterizes two closely related theological trajectories that will be the subject of this lecture and the next, and I’ll describe these in terms of “secular” and “postmodern” theology.
The term “secular theology” sounds like an oxymoron, but it has, in fact, been a significant movement in European and North American Christian theological circles since the middle of the 20th century. The word “secular” simply means “worldly,” and in the modern period it has frequently been used to indicate a non-religious way of life or way of thinking. Of course, this contrast then suggests that to be religious is to be un-worldly or otherworldly. The term “secular” also is an important category for sociologists and historians who examine the place of religion in the modern world. As I noted back in our first lecture, many intellectuals have put forth a version of the “secularization thesis” to argue that modernity is characterized by a process in which religion ceases to play a central role in Western society.
Secularization can be understood as the gradual elimination of religion, or as the transformation of religion in one or more of the following ways. We can talk about the separation of Church and state, where religion is separated from the political realm. We can talk about the significant decrease in the number of people who consider themselves religious or who regularly worship, and this has been especially true in European societies-or we can think about the privatization and individualization of religion, such that it exerts less influence on public life, and I’ll be returning to this conception of the secular in later lectures. Today, however, the apparent resurgence of religion around the world has led some to argue that the Secularization thesis has been shown to be false.
Still others question whether we should oppose the secular to the religious at all-that the process of Secularization is not a threat to religion, but is the context for a new kind of religion. Included here are the secular theologians who are the subject of this lecture:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who wrote in the 1930s and 1940s; and the contemporary Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo. In the first part of the lecture, I’ll consider the work of these two thinkers.
I then want to draw some connections between secular theology and the cultural and intellectual movement of the last quarter of the 20th century, still very strong today, that we call “postmodernism.” In both cases I’ll suggest there is a strong emphasis on the immersion of religion in the world. Finally, at the end of the lecture, I’ll tummy attention to the way in which certain postmodern ideas have inspired some religious thinkers to look not to the secular, but to actually premodern traditions of Judaism and Christianity as resources for rethinking and criticizing modernist forms of theology.
So, I’ll begin with Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was born in l90o to a privileged German family. He spent much of his youth in Berlin and was leading a fairly typical academic career until 1936, when his criticisms of the Nazi regime-present in both his teaching and his preaching -- led authorities first to ban him from teaching, and then to expel him from Berlin. In 193 8, he became involved in a conspiracy to unseat Hitler from power, which resulted in two assassination attempts in 1943. By the time of those attempts, though, Bonhoeffer had already been arrested. He spent the remainder of the war in prison until he was executed by the Nazis at the Flossenburg concentration camp only days before it was liberated by the Allies.
There is much to say about Bonhoeffer's writings before his imprisonment, but here I'll simply note that although his work owed much to Barth he -- like many others -- thought that Barth put too much emphasis on the distance between God and the human. The category of revelation remained central to Bonhoeffer, but where Barth viewed revelation primarily in terms of the Jesus Christ revealed in the Bible, Bonhoeffer stressed the unity of God and humanity, through Jesus Christ, in the church. This idea took a significant turn in the writings Bonhoeffer produced shortly before and during his time in prison -- most importantly in the book entitled Letters and Papers from Prison, in which Bonhoeffer reflected on what he called a "religionless Christianity." In these writings, we find Bonhoeffer focussing less on the church as the site of the union of God and human and more on how this union is to be found in the secular world. Bonhoeffer writes:
I feel the resistance growing in me against all religiosity, sometimes reaching the level of a instinctive horror ... I am not a religious nature at all. But all the time I am forced to think of God, or Christ, of genuineness, life, freedom, charity. ... What causes me uneasiness is just the religious clothing.
Essentially, Bonhoeffer argued that to withdraw from the world in seeking God or to understand the unity between God and human as only happening in and through the Church were both "religious" ways of avoiding Jesus' call to discipleship. As he bean to think more and more about the worldliness of a life in Christ, he began to write of what he described as "the world come of age" -- a world in which the achievements of the Enlightenment and modernity should not be seen as threatening our unity with God, but as a new, more mature stage of this unity. In this sense, like Barth, Bonhoeffer believed that the kinds of criticisms of religion found in Feuerbach, and Nietzsche, and Freud had to be taken seriously -- not as blanket condemnations of Christianity, but as ways of understanding that religion represents a kind of immature stage of the relationship between God and human.
What became crucial for Bonhoeffer was not the religious form of faith in God and Christ, but faith as discipleship -- as following Christ in his work in the world. From this perspective, the point is not to develop theories of God or cultivate an inner spirituality, but to engage others and the world in a Christ-0like way -- and, at least in one sense, these meant that, for Bonhoeffer, we should live without God. Again, Bonhoeffer: "God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him … Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the Cross." So, for Bonhoeffer, if we're to think about God at all, it will be to think about God on the cross -- which is to say, that we are to relate to, and thus know, God in the form of the vulnerable and suffering other.
With this, it's no surprise that Bonhoeffer has ha a strong influence on liberation theology. But his work also has been taken in other directions -- most notably in the "death of God" theologies that were popular in the 1960s and today in the secular theology of Gianni Vattimo and others. The most prominent "death of God" theologian, Thomas Altizer, argued that because in Christ, God had emptied himself into the world, the divine is no longer transcendent (outside, beyond), but immanent (here, within). The most important concept for understanding God in this way, for Altizer, is kenosis, which is a Greek Term that simply means "emptying" -- and in Christian theology it goes back to a passage in the Letter to the Philippians, in the New Testament, that states that in Jesus, God made himself "nothing" or "emptied himself" in assuming the attributes of humanity.
Vattimo takes up the idea of kenosis in his approach to secular theology in his 1999 book entitled Belief. For Vattimo, what is most crucial about kenosis is that is is God's act of love -- or, to be more precise, what he calls agape, or "charity." Agape is one of the number of Greek words that we translate as "love," but it's to be distinguished from the Greek, "philia, which is "love as friendship"; the Greek eros, which is "passionate, sexual love." Agape is self-surrendering love in which one empties one's self of one's own will in compassion and care for another. In the Latin tradition of the Church, agape was translated as caritas, which in English gets translated as "charity," and this is the word that we find most often in Vattimo.
For Vattimo, what was revolutionary about Christ was the way that he showed us a life and a principle of communal existence based not in violence and power over others, but in charity. Thus, Christ manifests the difference between the domineering, transcendent God of the Hebrew Bible and the God of the New Testament. We should note here that if we take as examples Jewish thinkers such as Buber or Rosenzweig, we would want to ask whether Vattimo here is not falling back into some old Christian stereotypes of Judaism. But his main point is to stress the God of kenosis, the God of Christ who gives up power and transcendence to enter the world in love and friendship with humanity.
On Vattimo’s reading, even though God’s kenosis takes place in the incarnation and then the crucifixion of Christ, Christians and others have still not fully grasped this divine revolution-and so they haven’t grasped that, as Vattimo puts it, “‘secularization’ as the constitutive trait of an authentic religious experience.” The secularization is a process through which we wean ourselves away from the God of transcendence and power and come to recognize God as the God of love. This means that we should also understand secularization as a kind of kenosis of the human, a process by which we surrender our own drives for power and our own drives for perfection. It also becomes a process, for Vattimo, and here it’s worth noting that he’s a Catholic, in which the Church comes gradually-or perhaps we should say comes very lately-to give up its temporal authority.
Before we go further in this exploration of Vattimo’s secular theology, we need to take a slight detour to consider what I’ve called “postmodernism,” because Vattimo’s vision of kenosis, of God and the human, relies heavily on two of the philosophers most often credited with opening the way to contemporary postmodernism: Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. I use the term “postmodernism” here with some hesitation because it has come to mean so many different things, and because so many people use it as a term of abuse to point to some kind of irresponsible, incoherent relativism. For them, the worst thing you can say about a thinker or an idea is that it’s postmodern. But when I use it here, postmodernism is not a rejection of modernity -- nor does it entail the claim that we have entered a new historical stage after modernity; rather, it refers to a complex and ambivalent attitude towards modernity. This ambivalent attitude is grounded, first of all, in a hermeneutics of suspicion directed at some of modernity’s foundational ideas.
So, I’ve suggested, for example, that one of the crucial starting points of modernity was Descartes’ effort to find, in consciousness, a clear and distinct foundation for our knowledge of the world. In this sense, Descartes initiates the modern effort to ground reason on firm, self-evident foundations. But postmodern thinkers question this project -- not only by questioning Cartesian certainty and transparency, but, more radically, by pointing to the ways in which our efforts to represent and know the world always presuppose some kind of forgetting, or repressing, or ignoring of complicating factors.
Let’s think for a minute about writing or telling a story about one’s own life -- or of anyone’s life, for that matter. To construct such a narrative always involves a process of selection-of emphasizing some things rather than others, of leaving some details out. Are we falsifying a life in doing this? Is the answer to try to be more comprehensive, to include everything? But can we include everything and still tell a story? Must we not acknowledge that all narrative depends on selectivity -- on ways of organizing, categorizing, mapping reality that, inevitably, in order to make any sense at all, leaves some things out and distorts others?
Postmodernism proceeds from the idea that all our representations of the world -- whether in narrative form or not -- do this in one way or another. For them, it’s inevitable that our constructions of systems of thought, of institutions, of identities, are only made possible-are constituted -- by forms of exclusion. But they argue that the way to deal with this fact is not to chase the illusion of the neutral, comprehensive, perfect point of view, but to acknowledge the perspectival character of our knowledge of the world. Further, it’s to acknowledge the necessity of a vigilant self-criticism that attends carefully to the patterns and effects of the simplifications and exclusions that we depend on for making sense of the world-though there’s this constant self-criticism involved. We can’t get by without some exclusions and simplifications, but we always have to try to be self-conscious of what those entail and what their effects are.
For Vattimo and many others, Nietzsche and Heidegger were crucial for developing the ideas that allowed thinkers in the late 20th century to begin to articulate the contours of postmodernism. Nietzsche’s “death of God” and his claim that as a result of this death we must embrace a certain kind of nihilism is one way to understand this influence. As Vattimo puts it:
The Nietzschean notions of nihilism and [the] “will to power” announce an interpretation of modernity as the final consummation of the belief that Being and reality are “objective” data which thinking ought to contemplate in order to bring itself into conformity with their laws.
In other words, the “death of God” is the death of the effort to find a God’s eye view of the World and to have a perfect match between our representations of the world and reality itself. Note also the link between Being and thought in this passage from Vattimo. The 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger elaborated this interpretation of the “death of God” by arguing that we should understand it as the death of a particular conception of God --
namely, the God of what he called “metaphysics”
As we’ve seen, Nietzsche argued that all Western thought since Plato has been driven by the will to truth. For Heidegger, this will to truth takes the form of what he calls “metaphysics,” a way of thinking that identifies Being with what is thinkable. But this, for Heidegger, is to confuse particular beings -- the being that I am, the being of this podium, which we can think, when we can know things about these beings; from Being itself which is something very different -- and that the result of such a confusion, for Heidegger, and that we see more and more in the modern period, is the effort to grasp in thought the ultimate ground of all that is: this Being and the correlative human effort to master all that is, to reduce everything to an instrumental value. So, we can see here Heidegger’s influence on Tillich, Heidegger’s influence on existentialists -- such as Buber, and Bultmann, and Ricoeur. Heidegger’s own project, especially in his late work, was to develop a mode of thinking that was more receptive and contemplative than mastering, controlling, and instrumental -- a thinking focused on how Being gives the world to us.
So, how does Vattimo appropriate the postmodernism that comes out of Nietzsche and Heidegger? Vattimo describes secularization as a “purification” of Christianity, and this purification, he goes on to say, “undermines the wisdom of the world, the metaphysical dreams of natural reason which conceive God as absolute, omnipotent and transcendent.” So, for Vattimo, the undermining of the metaphysical is the meaning of nihilism -- which, unlike Nietzsche, at least Nietzsche in some sense, Vattimo sees as a positive development in Western religion. For Vattimo, nihilism is a positive thing. We can think about this by noting that Vattimo’s story of kenosis and secularization follows a plot that owes much to Hegel’s story of Protestantism as the consummate religion.
But, unlike Hegel, Vattimo does not seek to ground his story in any kind of metaphysical logic that would support the claim that this is a necessary trajectory of history-and that secularized religion is any sort of consummation of history. So, rather than consummation, Vattimo talks about what he calls the “drift of nihilism.” What he means by this is simply that in his kenosis, God gives up dominion -- gives up omnipotence -- and comes to rely on the power of love, which is a power without guarantee or finality. So, Vattimo refuses to construct an eschatological vision, a vision of the end times-that is, he writes about nihilism as an “infinite history” with no real direction and no real end beyond the increasing expansion of the principles of love and charity. God’s revelation is a revelation of love that we are to embody in the world, but there’s no final end to this process -- no guarantee that we will ever perfect or fully embody this love. So, finally, nihilism also means that we have to give up, we have to empty ourselves of our human dreams for, and pretensions to, such power -- the kind of power that is given to us through an imagination of the end times, where we know where everything is going and leading.
A common criticism of postmodernism, as I’ve indicated, is that it is a destructive relativism that only takes things apart -- it, to use the classic postmodern terms, deconstructs them. From this perspective, it appears as a runaway hermeneutics of suspicion that can’t really offer us a constructive or stable vision of human life. This criticism isn’t wholly misguided-that is, this insistence on a constant self-criticism, a kind of vigilant self-consciousness, does introduce a certain instability into postmodern thought, and this is one of the postmodern criticisms of modernity -- that there was too much stability, too much emphasis on foundation, clear and distinct ideas in modernity, and we have to embrace the fact that human life is less stable than that. But, as we see in Vattimo, at least in certain theological appropriations of postmodern thought, we do find something that goes beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion -- that is, we find an insistence on moving from critique to affirmative modes of reasoning and valuing. We can point, again, to Paul Ricoeur’s efforts to recover a new faith after the hermeneutics of suspicion, as a model for this kind of thinking.
So, we see Vattimo moving from Nietzsche and Heidegger to what we might describe as a nihilistic faith in the God of love. Vattimo’s story of Christianity is a story of secularization as a divine process -- of a God who gives up his transcendence as he empties himself makes himself immanent to the world. But in contemporary theological circles we also see an interesting convergence of postmodern criticisms of metaphysics with theologies of divine transcendence that find resources for an affirmative postmodernism not in the drift of nihilism, not in secularism-but, rather, in a new kind of engagement with religious traditions
We might recall that one of the things about modernity was the suspicion of tradition-that is, the idea that in the turn to reason we would find a new intellectual authority. We would not need to rely on tradition in the same way, but what we’re seeing in some postmodern theologians is this new return to tradition -- so we might call these thinkers, to use an odd-sounding phrase, “postmodern traditionalists.” But, rather than suggesting paradox to us, I think this phrase should impress upon us that the suspicion of modernist claims for universal reason -- this suspicion that defines postmodernism -- rather than paralyzing us, should lead us to more modest views of rationality, and to be open to the possibility that religious traditions themselves are forms of reasoning.
So, in the remainder of this lecture I want to begin to move from the secular theologies of Bonhoeffer and Vattimo, to talk about how this combination of postmodernism, transcendence, and tradition is at work in the work of the Jewish thinker Emmanuel Levinas -- and, in the next lecture, in the work of the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams. Levinas was a Jewish philosopher who was born in Lithuania and spent most of his life teaching in Paris. He spent World War II as a French prisoner of war and became a well-known French intellectual in the ’50s and ’60s, and by the late ’70s was solidifying his reputation as one of the most interesting and creative philosophers in the world, known particularly for his radical ethics.
Socrates once said that “to do the good, one must know the good,”and this way of thinking about ethics has been dominant in Western philosophical traditions -- where ethics has depended, for the most part, on articulating a philosophical theory of the good. Recall Kant, who derived his ethics, his practical reason, from an account of reason. Levinas’s originality and that which, perhaps more than anything, justifies our calling him a posmodem philosopher is his insistence on the priority of ethics-what he describes as “ethics as first philosophy.”
Levinas was influenced by Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics and took from it the lesson that ethics should not be subordinated to metaphysics or epistemology. Ethics, for Levinas, is summed up in the idea that each human being is radically obligated to -- responsible for -- the other, This responsibility is not something we derive as a conclusion at the end of a process of reasoning -- nor is it, as Nietzsche would have it, a mask for the will to power of the weak.
Rather, Levinas begins his thinking from the experience of obligation, which he considers to be grounded in a transcendent imperative that is at the core of all human relationship and that is something that is simply given to us. So, this means there’s no answer to the question: Why should I give myself over to the other? There is simply the commandment that is revealed to us, as Levinas puts it, “in the face of the other.” By “face,” Levinas does not mean that we recognize the other person or that we can see their anguish or their neediness in their expression. Rather, he invokes the “face” to refer to the bare fact of the person’s otherness-an otherness that shocks us out of ourselves, out of our very human tendency to either think that we know what the other person is feeling or, of course, to ignore their feelings altogether.
For Levinas, and this is one of the defining marks of postmodernity, the face confronts us with a radical otherness, or we often hear the term “radical alterity,” that we cannot pretend to understand or know this radical otherness. So, one of the things about postmodernism is this idea that we too quickly, given our Enlightenment inheritance, claim to know things in the world-or particularly, claim to know other people. This emphasis in postmodern thought on radical otherness, or radical alterity, is to suggest that that need to, and that claim to, know is often a way of assimilating other things to ourselves. So, what Levinas is suggesting with this idea of the face of the other and the command that it brings to us is that we cannot assimilate our own experience and cannot approach the other by empathy or calculation, but we can only submit ourselves to the command to respond to the other. What this also means -- and here we can begin to get a sense of how radical Levinas’s conception of ethics really is -- is not that one has a general obligation toward other human beings, but that one must respond to this other here and now. It’s not even to say that one should love the other as one’s self, which implies a reciprocal relation, as in Buber’s I-Thou relationship -- it’s, instead, to say that when one encounters a particular other, especially a suffering other, it is as if one is commanded to give one’s self over to that other-regardless of whether they can, or do, or will reciprocate.
One must subject one’s self to the other-indeed, Levinas will sometimes say that one is held hostage by the other. So, confronted with the face of the other, one is gripped by the imperative to respond and give one’s self up for the other. Of course, though, this is not to say that we don’t all have myriad ways of ignoring or making ourselves deaf to this imperative, or blind to the face of the other. But according to Levinas, the imperative is still there, whether we acknowledge it or not -- and in the same way that, for the religious thinker, God is always there, whether we believe it or not. This comparison is not accidental, for as I’ll relate in the next lecture, Levinas argues that we find God-or more exactly what he calls “a trace of God”-in the face of the other.
We’ve covered a lot of ground in this lecture -- from the secular theologies of Bonhoeffer and Vattimo, to the postmodernism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, to the postmodern traditionalism of Levinas. We’ll continue this discussion in the next lecture, but can pause here, by way of concluding, that by noting that in this trajectory-from Bonhoeffer to Levinas -- we find an increasing emphasis on a faith freed from the demand to conform to the modem distinction between the secular and the religious -- a faith freed from metaphysics, and we’ll continue to pursue this idea in the next lecture.
