E1 Who is Christ in today's secular world?

Show Notes

In our first episode, Philosophy and Theology professor and former Catholic monk Sean J McGrath lays the foundation for our search for Christ in the secular world. Questions we will address in this podcast: 

* What’s the value of individuation and Christian faith in a socio-political order which is apparently falling apart? 
* How are we to understand the emptying of the western churches, while the waiting lines to therapy rooms are growing longer and longer?
* How can a cultural phenomenon such as Jordan B. Peterson best be understood today and what does it have to do with secular christ. 
*Lastly, Sean also will share insights from contemplative Christianity and his years as a Catholic monk in establishing a practice that can be integrated into our secular lives of today. 

McGrath discusses these themes together with Berlin based psychoanalyst Jakob Lusensky.

Music in this episode is licensed under creativecommons.org: 'Xylo-Ziko - Dark Water', 'Xylo-Ziko - First light.'

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What is Secular Christ with Sean J. McGrath?

Canadian Philosophy and Theology professor and former Catholic Monk Dr. Sean J. McGrath examines how to practice contemplative Christianity in the secular age.

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(0:06) Sean McGrath: Who is Christ in today’s late secular world? We’ve already said that the church of Christ doesn’t look anything like it did in 1948. What does it look like now? Where is it? Where are the signs?

(0:59) So, I want to thank you, Jakob, for giving me that title, The Secular Christ. At first, I didn’t—I wasn’t enthusiastic about it because it sounded like a different Christ. And I want to talk about the only Christ, the Christ that was revealed and declared to be Christ two thousand years ago. But then I warmed up to the idea because, of course, Christ is essentially secular. He appears as such as a secular figure. And the point I want to make today is that not only does he survive the secular age, but he ought to thrive in it; he is thriving in it. And we need to start to recognize that Christ is not dependent upon our institutions. He’s not even dependent upon religion. And so the secular age is not a place in which the Christ should be thought to have expired or disappeared.


(2:14) But first, I think we need to recognize the uncertain place of Christ in the privatized consumer-driven world of secular religion. We first have to realize that there is for many a problem here, certainly for secular people who think that this is some kind of mythology from the past or something their parents believed in which they are no longer bound to. Or even for those who are practicing Christians who feel that they are somehow embattled or confined into some kind of ghetto by their religious observance of Christianity, by the surrounding secular world. So there is an issue here.


But I think the first thing that we need to be clear on, and this is surprisingly still a problem: a problematic point is that Christ is not the same as Jesus. Christ is not the same as Jesus. Particularly in the evangelical community of the United States, this is not always recognized, and you get a kind of Jesus fixation. Now, this is not to say that Jesus is not the Christ. It’s rather to say that the Christ is not exhausted by the individual of Jesus. This point shouldn’t be—it should not be controversial. 

In fact, if one reads the New Testament, one sees clearly that this is the case. Christ is a cosmic being. He is revealed as the divine principle through whom all things are created, or, more accurately, the divine person who is the image of God, the only image of God, and who preexists in all things: who preexists all things and preexists in all things. Now, this Christ is—and again, this is strictly the New Testament—is incarnated in Jesus, and only in Jesus. Another important point: he’s not popping up everywhere. There’s a singularity, what theologians call a scandal of particularity, to Christianity. It speaks of a single site of incarnation, which is in the historical individual Jesus, who we know lived in the area of Palestine, around the Sea of Galilee, and died outside of Jerusalem on a Roman cross. This is not a hypothesis. This is a historical fact. And in this man, the Christ is incarnate, but the Christ exceeds this human individual.

(5:02) Jesus is a human being, and at the same time, the incarnation, the site of the intervention of the Christ principle into creation. You know, in everything we say about Christ, we have to keep these two things in mind: the eternal divine being, the logos—who is, if he was to be compared to something, he should be compared to the Tao, with the dharma in Buddhism—and the man Jesus, who died on the Roman Cross two thousand years ago. We have to keep both in mind. Christianity is a religion full of paradoxes. And it’s paradoxical in its teaching. And it’s paradoxical in its practice as well. And to hold the paradox is to hold together two things that seem to be incompatible with each other, maybe even contradictory to one another, and yet one maintains them both as true. So the Christian, the genuine Christian, is one who maintains precisely this paradox: that who he worships is the Christ, the eternal cosmic image of the invisible God through whom all things are created, and the man who dies on a Roman cross.
Now, when we speak about secularism and Christianity, we are speaking about the anxiety that grips the churches today. And the churches, the Christian churches, we’ll refer to them collectively as the church, with all of the various mainline denominations: Protestantism, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and so on. There is an anxiety everywhere about the withering of Christianity. The withering of Christendom, really. And this anxiety has important roots in a fundamental transformation that has occurred in our society in the last fifty years, since I was born. That is the secularization of our Western European, North American societies. That is, the de-Christianization of our colleges, of our schools, of our hospitals, of our governments. They have all been secularized in the last fifty years. And now we mean by secularized [that] they have been divested of any trace of their Christian origins. 

And sometimes this leads to peculiar things, like in my hometown of St. John’s, students go to a secular school called Holy Heart of Mary. But in that school, they will learn nothing about Mary or her holy heart. You know, so we can’t exactly erase the Christian origins of our institutions, because the institutions that have founded at least the Western modern world are by and large Christian in origin, the extraordinary work that was done by Christian organizations. It’s important to remember it, because we’re so often reminded of some of the terrible things that were done, you know, some of the abuses, and the residential school scandal, and so on. But let’s not forget the extraordinary work of founding institutions that occurred in early modernity, right up until the middle of the twentieth century, as colleges, schools, and hospitals were founded as institutions promoting Christian society and Christian values. And they were all secularized in the last fifty years. And this leads to this anxiety that perhaps it’s gone, perhaps it’s over. And this anxiety is not completely misplaced.

(9:04) Think of how different the world was when Thomas Merton, who I’m sure you’ve heard of, published The Seven Storey Mountain, the story of his conversion from being a kind of aimless writer, lover of jazz, womanizer and drinker, to becoming a Cistercian monk. He entered the Cistercian order, which at the time was one of the strictest orders in the church. They weren’t even allowed to speak to each other. And the book became an instant bestseller when it was published in 1948. An instant bestseller, much to his shock and to the shock of his community. He was in fact ordered by his abbot to write the book. He didn’t want to be. He was done with all that, worldly fame and writing and career and so on. But the abbot under obedience said, “You must write the book of your conversion.” He did and to everybody’s amazement the book became a bestseller and he became, you know, a public figure. That would never happen today. Because the world in 1948 was a completely different world in many ways. The monasteries were bursting at the seams, the churches were full.
The seminaries were full of armies of young men entering the priesthood. And all of these, all of these Christians were modern people. So it’s important to remember this, because another misconception that people have is that Christianity is something that belongs in the premodern world. And we’ll talk a little bit about this—what I call naïve—understanding of secularism, which assumes that with modernization, development, and education, religion disappears. Well, turns out to be not the case. And certainly with regard to Christianity—because Christianity is not only fully compatible with modern life—I will argue, in the course of these podcasts, that Christianity is the architect of modern life, that modernity really cannot be understood without its Christian origins. Its values are, in their origin and in their persistence, Christian. But, as I said, the secularization of the world occurred. And all of these institutions collapsed, and the churches are certainly not bursting at the seams, and the seminaries are closing down. And many of the parishes in my part of the world have to bring in priests from South America and Africa because there are no priests in their local community. So this is what causes Christians to fear that the whole thing is over.
(11:51): And one of the first responses to this withering of Christendom was the “death of God” theology in the sixties. I don’t know if that’s well remembered. But in 1966, a theologian named Thomas Altizer, who was a friend of mine who died only a couple years ago, he made the cover of Time magazine with his declaration that God was dead. Of course, he wasn’t the first to say that. It’s a phrase from Nietzsche. But now it was being taken up by theologians. In other words, it was not a phrase in the mouth of an unbeliever. But it was a phrase, it was something that was being said, by professors of theology—that God was dead. It was over. And I think that a lot has changed since then. I think that Altizer’s declaration of the death of God would not get on the cover of Time magazine today. I don’t even think it would make it onto Oprah. And I think that this is the situation we need to think about today, which is why I was up to the challenge, to the task, to speaking about the secular Christ, to thinking about who is Christ in the contemporary secular world. Secularism as well has changed. It’s not—it’s not what it was in its first instances. And I think we should distinguish early secularism, which I would call naive secularism, from mature secularism, which is where we are now.
(13:23) I sometimes say this to my theology students, you know, the trickle of people who come to get trained as pastors in the Anglican community, which is where I teach, in an Anglican seminary. I sometimes say this to them, because they’re full of this anxiety, that the thing is withering, it’s disappearing, right? What I say is this: If the church is gone, then it is not what it said it was. What it said it was was the persisting presence of Christ on earth after the resurrection. That is what Paul means by church, ecclesia, and if it is gone, then it is certainly not that, and it should die. It should die. It was a lie if it is gone, and we should say good riddance. So, in other words, there’s nothing to be lamented if the church has gone. If the church has gone, by its disappearance it has demonstrated that it was alive. But if it is what it said it was, which is what many Christians still believe it is—if the church is in its essence the persisting presence of Christ on earth, which Christ says shall persist until the end of time—then it is not gone, plainly. The institutions are gone. But the church persists. We might not know where it is; we might not even recognize it. We might not understand its new forms. But we have no right as Christians to despair of its existence. Despairing at the existence of the church, or despairing at its future persistence, is like despairing at the survival of humanity on the earth. It is for a Christian, strictly speaking, unbelief. Only unbelief is entitled to that despair. So, I’m not saying that it’s unreasonable to say that the church is gone and the whole thing was a lie. Just like I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that humanity will extinguish itself. Maybe even in this century. It might be eminently reasonable. But as I said before, Christianity is a religion of paradoxes. It’s not that it is unreasonable to say so; it’s rather that it is to give expression to unbelief.
(15:51) Jakob Lusensky: But is the church important? You say, still for the secular Christ, you cannot imagine a secular Christ without the church?
(16:01) Sean McGrath: Yes, there is no secular Christ without the church. And this is a point that I’ve come to over a period, a long period of soul searching myself, because for a while, I used to call myself a post-ecclesial Christian, because I was so ill at home in all of the denominations. I didn’t want any parish, or any churchy life. I didn’t like any of it. But I continued my theological research and remained intensely involved on an interior level with Christianity. And then I realized that there was something completely wrong about this phrase, post-ecclesial Christianity. There is no such thing. The church and Christ are coterminous. In the same way that Christ is the incarnate Jesus, so too the Christ is his church—which isn’t to say that he’s exhausted in his church. He’s beyond the church. But if we believe that he was incarnated in Jesus, then we believe that he persists in his church. But the question is, what is this church? Right? And that’s the thing I wanted to get at with the secular Christ and the secular church. What do we mean by church?
(17:18) Jakob Lusensky: Yeah.
(17:19) Sean McGrath: And here I think we have lessons to learn, again from the New Testament. So Paul roams around the Greco-Roman world tirelessly for some twenty years, doing what we would now call church planting, that is, setting up churches in Thessalonica, Corinthia, Corinth, in Rome. And then he writes letters back to these churches. And we read these letters today. And that forms that corpus that we call the letters of St. Paul, about a hundred pages. Without these hundred pages, I don’t think there would be any Christianity. Paul is the first theologian. And Paul uses this word ekklesia when he speaks about these communities that he founds, ekklesia, from which we get to ecclesial and its Latin, Greek, which is translated into the Anglo-Saxon word cyr(i)ce, church. These ecclesiae, the ecclesiae that he has founded, it is not a building, obviously. But a community, right? It’s a community. So its communities like to have buildings to gather in, and it’s a good thing. But the community should not be confused with the building. That would be a terrible mistake, wouldn’t it? You know, it’d be like confusing the McGrath family with the house that they live in. That would be stupid. So it is a community, a special kind of community, the community of those who have responded positively to the Christ, because the Christ places everyone in the position of decision. You cannot be indifferent. You either say yes or no. And this is the community of those who said yes.
So, history has shown us that the church is compatible with many different institutional forms. And even with no institutions whatsoever. Here’s just a brief survey. So these communities that Paul founded, in fact, didn’t have any houses and buildings in which they could worship, because they were outlawed. They were an illegal group. And so what they did is—they met in houses that would meet in the house of a patrician, probably a wealthy landowner in the Greco-Roman world. And when he would convert his home, which would be a palatial building with space for extended family and servants, slaves and everything, and his home would become a church, and they would meet there on Sunday for the eucharist. So that’s the very first form of churches and there are still ruins of house churches that one can see and visit in Rome.
And then you move forward into the Middle Ages and the great flowering of Christendom, when we built the fantastic cathedrals, those magnificent buildings that still stand in every major European capital. Those cathedrals were a very different form of church, where a highly structured hierarchical institution was busy organizing the whole society around it, in the very same way that the geography of those medieval European capitals is organized around the cathedral, you know, like spokes around the hub of a wheel. The whole society would be organized around this form of church. It would be the center of education. It kept the—it held the torch of civilization throughout the Dark Ages. It was the center of literacy. It was the place where the law was practiced. People were trained in the law. It was a place that in every way the whole society depended upon.
And then move forward a few hundred years into early modernity, with the advent of Protestantism. You have very different form of church, then again. You have the rise of national churches, you know, the Lutheran churches, the church of the Germans, the Calvinist church, the Reformed churches, the church of the French and the Swiss. And in these—the Anglican churches, the church of the English—and in these churches, you’ll see flags. No, in the Anglican church, the queen or the king of England is the head of the church. That stands in the place of the pope, a totally different kind of structure. So all of these structures are church, and none of them are essential to the existence of the church.
The church has to have some kind of form. But there’s no particular form that’s essential to it. If you think, if we go back to the New Testament, to this word ecclesia, which Paul uses to describe these little communities that he sets up, little subversive communities of people who refuse to obey. They’re very interesting communities. So I’ll just say, there’s a little aside, because I love the history of early Christianity. But, you know, Paul says, you should obey the rulers, you should pay your taxes, you shouldn’t cause a ruckus. And you should be a moral example for all the people around you. You know, what’s to dislike about that? Why would the Romans have trouble with that? That wasn’t the part that bothered the Romans. What bothered the Romans is that the Christians refuse to abide by the social stratification of society, which Rome, like every ancient society, was deeply attached to. And according to that kind of stratification, you had a strict hierarchy, with women, you know, on the bottom of it, just above slaves, and poor people at a lower rung than, you know, than the landowners. What was going on in these little house churches is that everybody was being treated equally. And that, I think—this is my pet theory—is why Rome found it so disgusting. Everybody was being treated equally. It was a rejection of the hierarchical structure of the ancient world that was being practiced in these house churches, these ekklesias.
(23:18) So, what’s this word mean? Well, it’s like every other word that Paul uses. He doesn’t invent the word. He doesn’t coin it. He draws from his rich knowledge of Greek, and uses a word that was in use. Ekklesia, in a pre-Christian context, is a social political gathering of concerned citizens who are gathered together to attend to the concerns of their city. Here’s a fabulous definition of church, I think, which we could carry forward directly into our period of secular Christ. Church as a social political gathering of concerned people. Now, of course, we’ll have to think a little further, about what exactly is the concern around which this community gathers. But what I particularly love about this is the qualifier sociopolitical, because church as some kind of apolitical, private activity—you know, something you do on Sunday, which really doesn’t touch your life as a citizen—this, I think, is a false idea of church. If this is what secularism has destroyed, then, good riddance. But this social political gathering of concern people—micro-communities, if need be, since we are obviously in an era when church and Christianity is becoming marginalized—micro-communities gathering and bonding around a shared set of values and a core commitment to enacting the Christ, to discipleship, which means becoming—becoming Christ in the world in which you live. You know, Christianity is an uncompromising dedication to perfection, on the assumption that the power to be Christ for your community comes entirely from Christ and not from you. And therefore, any old slob is a candidate. Right? Intelligence and virtue and self-control are not needed. What is needed is faith and with this faith—now, this is pure Paul, of course—with this faith, you can become a Christ for your community. And when you do so, your community gathers around you, the community of Christs, you could say—strange phrase, but why not—will be social political gathering. They will make a difference. It will be a gathering of people who are making a difference, who are concerned with the fate of things, the direction of things: concerned with the world.
(26:16) This community is not institution-dependent, but it is Spirit-dependent. That is, it’s where the Spirit moves. And the Spirit is as present in the New Testament as the Christ, so much so that the Church Fathers realized that there wasn’t just two divine persons, the Father and the Son, but there were three: the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. So where the Spirit moves, the church will be. The church is primarily the work of the Spirit. So when Christ departs from the disciples at the ascension, the Spirit descends. He says, “If I don’t leave, you will not—the Spirit will not come. And if the Spirit does not come, you will not be church. So his departure is the condition for the Spirit descending. So the Spirit is what makes the church and what animates the church, what makes it actual, what makes it real. And the Spirit is even more elusive than the Christ. In the Christ incarnate and the person of Jesus, we know what Jesus taught, we know how he lived, you know, how he died. There’s an example there. But the Spirit, what are we talking about there? The Spirit is invisible. It goes where it likes, and pops up in the most unusual places.
And the church is Spirit-dependent. It needs the Spirit. It follows the Spirit. The Spirit does not respect boundaries. This is the first point. And this is also scriptural. You know, think of Christ, who is driven by the Spirit, first into the desert, and then into his missionary work, into his work as a preacher and healer, and miracle worker, and Messiah. It’s the Spirit that leads him. And he violates the religious expectations of who the Messiah should be. He says, “I am he.” Make no mistake. But what they saw—now to the Jewish community at the time—was not the Messiah. He was—the Messiah should be a zealot, should be somebody who’s fervently attached to the law. And Christ seems to be somewhat indifferent to it, in fact, seems to go out of his way to show that some of these laws are really not so important. The Sabbath is made for the man, for example, and not man for the Sabbath.
The Christ, the Messiah, should be a military leader, or at least a political leader—preferably a military leader, to get rid of the Romans. But at least a political leader who was somebody who would restore the kingdom of David, who would sit on the throne and bring the debased Jewish people back into a position of power. That’s what they expected. And what they got was a carpenter who was poor. Although, he was obviously astonishing, you know, make no doubt, there’s no doubt about it, that he was deeply attractive, charismatic, and attractive, and, you know, a sensation, whether it was because of the wonders, the miracles, or because of his preaching, or just the aura around the man.
So, you know, he wasn’t a man without that kind of attraction, but he refused power. That is, he did not take power, power in the sense that the world understood it. And he was crucified for it, hung on a cross by the Romans, at the request of the Jewish leaders. And to die on a cross was basically to be manifest as scum of the earth. That was the whole point of crucifixion. That’s why Roman citizens were exempt from it. It was against the law of the emperor to crucify a Roman citizen. That’s why Paul was executed by a sword. It was—crucifixion was not just execution, it was humiliation, it was a declaration to the world that this guy is garbage. He’s so outside the pale of what humans should regard as worthy of protecting and supporting that he’s not even allowed to be executed in the city: outside the city, on a cross. So, that’s what they got. But the Spirit, it was the Spirit that drove Jesus to that cross, and the Spirit is continually violating our expectations.
(31:01) So, the Spirit moves, and where the Spirit moves, it gathers this community. And this community is a social political gathering of those who have been galvanized around the Christ. They want to live the Christ. They want to embody the Christ in their life. But then the question is, that we started with, we bring it back to this: Who is the Christ in today’s late secular world? We’ve already said that the church of Christ doesn’t look anything like it did in 1948. What does it look like now? Where is it? Where are the signs?