This week I am reviewing the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity. The perspective on which I approach this book is with reference to the question of understanding the doctrine of justification by faith in the context of the modern cultural milieu, which Taylor draws here. 1. In the introduction, I briefly point out what is missing in the current discussions/debates on the doctrine. 2. Afterwards, I roughly sketch the main thrust of Taylor’s book. 3. I argue that Tim Keller’s book the Prodigal God might be a good example of understanding and communicating the doctrine in light of the cultural reflections on the culture of authenticity, alongside which I make a case to locate the doctrine of justification by faith in the theology of vocation. Since this is a space for reviewing a book, I am restrained by my own purpose of sticking to reviewing a book, not going into subtle details and nit-picky arguments of Taylor’s. I would be pleased to share with my readers what my concern is when it comes to understanding the doctrine of justification by faith.
- I begin rather provocatively here. I am keenly aware that I cannot make myself sufficiently understood in these limited spaces, but since I make it a habit of bringing up a point before making a case for it, I hope that you join me in this journey of thinking through the doctrine and what it means in modern culture. As far as I know, the ongoing debate on the doctrine is not to be regarded as an interpretation of the doctrine in the true sense of the word. (In the same vein, I don’t think most discussions of Christian doctrine are interpreting them either.) 1) The advocates of the Old Perspective, 2) the New Perspective, or 3) the New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Luther’s understanding of justification is not all-out forensic, but significantly union with Christ also, centering the Finnish theologian Tuomo Mannermaa) (1, 2, 3 are not mutually exclusive to one another.), and all other scholarly debates, unfortunately, putting an undue emphasis on rediscovering the historical context of where the doctrine emerged or originated, perhaps inadvertently neglecting the modern context with which such historical rediscovery should be communicated. It is a commonsensical truth that interpretation always involves the two pillars of the traditional texts and its interpretation on the one hand, and the contemporary situations and its interpretation on the other. What disappoints me most in this regard is that the consideration of modern context is more often than not considered as something not weighty and scholarly enough among theological scholars in the understanding of doctrine, which in the case of understanding and communicating such a branch of doctrine as justification by faith should never be the case, if they ever wish to make themselves understood to moderns. Therefore, reading this book plays the role of understanding the contemporary context in which the doctrine of justification is to be played out among believers and non-believers of the gospel alike.
- The main thesis of the book is simple (the book is a little over 100 pages.), but the process by which Taylor unfolds his arguments is not simple. The main thrust of the arguments is 1) modern culture cannot be understood without understanding first the theme of authenticity; 2) while the knockers and the boosters of authenticity are both forming their own sides, Taylor doesn’t side with either; 3) Instead, Taylor takes for granted the social fact of authenticity, giving a really really brief contour of what he means by the ethics of authenticity (this is why I have been doubtful of whether the title of the book does justice to the contents of it.)
The book anchors into Taylor’s three malaises of modernity, the first of which is the collapse of the common moral and metaphysical horizons, as well as individualism. (By the way, there is nothing peculiarly unique about Taylor’s analysis.) Traditional metaphysical worldview and morality (such as God’s will, respect for tradition and community) are replaced by individualism, which also fills in what such individualistic tendency entails. (This is often called among philosophers ‘disenchantment.’) Second, alongside this disenchantment is the primary of instrumental reason (the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most economical application of means to a given end.) Such primary of instrumental reason constitutes the background in which individualism is placed, as well as working as its accelerator. The third malaise is a natural outworking of the first and the second, which is that in a society run by these ideals individuals are gradually losing their freedom. For as we all know, the rule of technological progress brings about what Taylor calls a soft despotism, forcing everyone to desire to conform to the rule of technology. Of these three malaises, Taylor clarifies in the beginning that he will focus on the first one only, which I think is warrants an appropriate treatment of the topic. (While Taylor does mention the second and the third malaises, he nevertheless makes such mentioning quite terse.)
The authenticity which Taylor refers to here originates from Romantics such as Rousseau. The initial manifestation of authenticity is that each individual will be in touch with the nature (morality, communal obligations, and etc) only by looking into the interior world of each person. As my readers know by now, modern society no longer recognizes such ‘touch with nature,’ for the metaphysical milieu connecting the two has been long gone, replaced by the instrumental reason. Thus, each person’s becoming herself is only up to each person, the contents of which is also only up to each person. What is very intriguing is that Taylor puts this desire of people to pursue to become ‘who they are authentically’ in terms of being ‘called.’ I am quoting verbatim in the following.
It is not just that people sacrifice their love relationships, and the care of their children, to pursue their careers. Something like this has perhaps always existed. The point is that today many people feel called to do this, feel they ought to do this, feel their lives would be somehow wasted or unfulfilled if they didn’t do it. (17)
According to Taylor, there are twofold implications of such pursuit of becoming authentic selves. 1) The proposition that everyone has to discover who she is becomes now one of the driving forces of modernity; 2) if pushed its logical conclusion, becoming authentic selves will harm the social well-being, which Taylor points out to be the weakness of the culture of authenticity. Again I am quoting verbatim what Taylor says in the book.
Briefly, we can say that authenticity (A) involves (i) creation and construction as well as discovery, (ii) originality, and frequently (iii) opposition to the rules of society and even potentially to what we recognize as morality. But it is also true, as we saw, that it (B) requires (i) openness to horizons of significance (for otherwise the creation loses the background that can save it from insigifnicance.) and (ii) a self-definition in dialogue. (66-67)
If I were to add further explanations to (B)-(i), it would be impossible for each individual to be truly herself without first recognizing the horizons of significance. For no one (given that she is normal) would go against the horizons of social significance in order to be authentically herself. Seen in this way, we immediately recognize that there is a contradiction between (A) and (B), which is one of the fatal weaknesses of the culture of authenticity. For all its good insights, this book has little space for providing an alternative which Taylor calls the ethics of authenticity. As I discussed already, Taylor sides with neither the knockers nor with the boosters of authenticity. Moreover, he is trying to come up with something of the dialectic between the knockers and the boosters. However, Taylor’s discussion of the ethics of authenticity is so tenuous that it is hard to figure out what he exactly means by the term. Since the book came out 25 years ago, I would guess that he came up with subsequent work.
- If so, how is it possible for us to understand and communicate the doctrine of justification by faith in the milieu of the horizons of authenticity? To begin with, I agree with his stance on authenticity as a given. Authenticity itself is neither a doomsday sign, nor a prognosis of anything rosy in the future. What I take a cue for my question of reading doctrine in the contemporary context is Taylor’s shrewd indication that people feel that they are called to be authentic to themselves. Such call has everything to do with the identity formation of each person, who she is before herself and before God. In regard to this, I think Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God exemplifies an excellent treatment of factoring justification into the context of authenticity and identity-formation. In this book, Keller argues that both the older and the younger brothers are defining, creating, reconstructing who they are in light of religious fervency (the older brother) and rebellion against his father (the younger brother), respectively. For the older brother, rather than defining who he was by the love of his father, he founded his identity on his own keeping of all his father’s commandments, thus getting angry at the father’s seemingly disrespectful act of throwing a party for his worthless younger brother. It is in this regard that Keller pictures the older brother to be a type of those adhering traditional morality and faithful to religious life in the Christian church. The younger brother defines who he is by going against the social norms and mores, thus suggesting the younger brother to be a type of those pursuing self-authenticity. Keller contends that both brothers did not truly understand their father’s love, not basing who they were on it.
Such a proposal of the Gospel message is itself something worthy of note since it weaves the theme of identity-formation into the message of God’s love for both groups. Even so, since Keller is a preacher, he had to simplify what cannot be simplified (e.g. seeing the relationship between the brothers as mutually exclusive, even though that is not true.). Moreover, Keller falls short of developing a full-blown theology of vocation, beginning with his already excellent point of turning justification by faith into a matter of Christian identity-formation. I believe that, both pastorally and theologically speaking, one of the most urgent issues which Christians most thirst for is the question of who they are before God and before their own selves, and few other platform is more effective in terms of communicating the doctrine of justification by faith than that of God’s call for them. God called Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and God calls Israel as a nation, and he called Jesus Christ, just as much as he called Paul. Paul even says in Ephesians that “having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you” (Ephe 1:18). To make a long story short, God is calling God’s own people, even now. This call is grounded on Christ’s death on the cross, resulting in the saints’ union with God, to which God calls each and every believer. It is in this regard that I argue that, in order for the doctrine of justification to move out of the scholarly debate and work out what it is truly mean to convey to the people of faith, it should be understood in the context of a theology of vocation.
Shrewd readers sense that this is the most I can discuss here. Since this is a book review, I cannot go further than this. However, I am always in the process of developing this thinking further, and I welcome your feedback in that regard, whether they are positive or negative ones. Thank you.