Lay on the pressure!

In some sense, the challenge is actually intensified for exclusive humanism, precisely because it can only admit the immanent: if the maximal demand is going to be met, it has to be met by us and in “the here and now” (or at least within “secular” time). And if we don’t reach it, we have only ourselves to blame. Christianity, on the other hand, can be ambivalent, or even a tad pessimistic about the maximal demand being realized by us in the here and now because the transformationist perspective is also eschatological. For Christianity, “this is a transformation which cannot be completed in history” (p. 643). This is why “Christians don’t really ‘have the solution’ to the dilemma” either: because “the direction they point to cannot be demonstrated as right; it must be taken on faith”; and because “we can't exhibit fully what it means, lay it out in a code or a fully-specified life-form, but only point to the exemplary lives of certain trail-blazing people and communities” (p. 643, emphasis added). You might say Christian eschatology buys time to meet the maximal demand — time exclusive humanism doesn't (can’t) have.—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 112–13 (all emphasis by Smith)