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Sacred Preceds Secular
Brian Trainor
其他書名
Why the State Needs the Church
出版Mosaic Press, 2013
主題History / Europe / GeneralLiterary Criticism / Ancient & ClassicalPhilosophy / GeneralReligion / General
ISBN17432402369781743240236
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=gMFppwAACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
註釋The church today is being more widely recognised than ever before as having a proper influence upon the public realm, and as having a significant role to play in providing a solution to the crisis of legitimacy currently confronting western societies. This book argues that the 'secular' and the 'sacred' do not depict separate realms but are integral aspects of a single dynamic totality. The author maintains that the 'sacred' is the origin and end of the 'secular', while the 'secular' is only truly and fully itself when suffused with the 'sacred', that is, when the ruling authorities, organisations and social groups within the secular realm exercise their 'relative autonomy' in such a way that the 'sacred' (God, the Holy Spirit-in-us) is perfectly at home there. He claims that it is a grave misfortune that the false notion of a wholly autonomous 'sacred-free' secular realm has (i) intimidated into silence the 'faith perspective' of citizens of liberal democratic societies, (ii) stifled the vital emergence of their religiously inspired notions of the common good, and (iii) driven a divisive wedge between 'the West' and 'the Rest' (especially the 'Muslim Rest'). He recommends for universal adoption what he describes in the book as the Augustinian 'sacred reign-secular rule' conception of political authority. This alone, he argues, provides the true antidote to the conflict between an extreme, Godless, 'rights-asserting' western secularism and an extreme sacred Islamism; it does so (i) by insisting upon the importance of the sacred whilst acknowledging the proper (relative) autonomy of the secular and (ii) by insisting on a firm distinction in principle between religious law and state law. 'Church' and 'state' are properly distinguished and 'separated' when it is publicly acknowledged that what aspects, if any, of religious law are to become enshrined in state law is a matter for the secular authorities alone to determine.