Local Grace

In his introduction to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, James KA Smith sums up Taylor’s argument that the Reformation hastened the “disenchantment” of the world (How (Not) To Be Secular, 38-9).

Taylor’s summary of Calvin sounds like a summary of Barth: “The Reformers ‘all see the reigning equilibrium [of transcendence and immanence] as a bad compromise’ – a Pelagian assumption of human powers and thus an inadequate appreciation for the radical grace of God and for God’s action in salvation. If anything of salvation is under our control, then God’s sovereignty and grace are compromised.”

For this reason, Calvin resisted any “localization” of “grace in things and rituals,” which shifted “the centre of gravity of the religious life.” Calvin, Taylor says, “can’t admit . . . that God could have released something of his saving efficacy out there into the world, at the mercy of human action, because that is the cost of really sanctifying creatures like us which are bodily, social, historical.”

Smith questions whether Taylor’s is “a fair reading of Calvin’s sacramental theology” (fn 10), and rightly so. Calvin’s objection was not to “localized” grace, any more than Luther’s was. He objected that the Catholic church misled people about the locations where grace was to be found – that is, not in relics and images but in the Word, Bread, Water, and Wine. We know grace is found there because God has promised to make Himself available. To visit the address that God has given us is an act of faith, confidence in the word of God.

Then there’s the question of whether “disenchantment” is an accurate way to describe the modern world. Bruno Latour thinks not, and he’s got a point.

Be that as it may, I think that the Reformation, and Reformation ritual theology in particular, does have some important relation to modernity. But I don’t think that Taylor rightly identifies the connection/