Idle musings by a once again bookseller, always bibliophile, current copyeditor and proofreader. Complete with ramblings about biblical studies, the ancient Near East, bicycling, gardening, or anything else I am reading (or experiencing). All more or less live from Red Wing, MN
Monday, October 14, 2024
Two roads—not what you think
This version of Reform “levels” two—tiered religion by actually expecting everyone to live up to the high expectations of disciplined, monastlc life. But Taylor hints that another sort of leveling is possible: you could also solve the two-tiered problem by lifting the weight of virtue, disburdening a society of the expectations of transcendence, and thus lop off the upper tier or the eternal horizon. In fact, he seems to suggest that it was the first strategy of higher expectations that might have driven some to the latter strategy of lowered expectations. By railing against vice and “crank[ing] up the terrifying visions of damnation,” Protestant preachers effectively prepared “the desertion of a goodly part of their flock to humanism” (p. 75). One strategy of leveling the two-tier problem might occasion a very different strategy that would ultimately become exclusive humanism.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 38
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