Post Critical Contemplation and Do It Yourself Religion

Extract

No description quite captures the fragmentation through which our culture is passing. Post modem, new age, deconstruction, immanentism, emotivism, all are usefully employed — none quite turns the key. In general we may say not that there are no narratives, but that the received narrative, the foundational cosmology, the consensus about ultimate reality upon which our societies formerly concurred have receded. Moreover, at least in affluent cultures, the mourning about dwindling consensus is past. Rather than writhe in anxiety before religious fragmentation, people simply accept as the one “luminously self evident reality” that they are alone in the universe making their own meaning. Confusion exists as to what theology is, and what real theologians are. Walter Kasper writes, “It is unfortunately not a redundancy to say that, especially today, a theological theology is the need of the hour.”

Do It Yourself Culture

Perhaps our present phase can be fairly described as a spiritual do it yourself culture in which God, faith, morality and the future are for each and every person what each decides they are. Appreciation of expertise, theological training, the religious wisdom of the centuries, is suspended. Religion, says Cambridge’s Don Cupitt, is “wholly of the world, wholly human, wholly our own responsibility”. Eclecticism, picking and choosing from traditional religions and from new constructs, is increasingly common. The “spiritual” remains important. But the wholly transcendent is questioned. Far from being without spiritual narratives, ours is an age in which there are almost as many stories as there are tellers.