Charles Taylor has posted on his use of the term "buffered" self. I think it is quite related to my earlier meditation on the nature of doing theology as a form of prayer – an activity in which we seek pleasure by knowing God. Here, Taylor discusses the "enchanted" pre-modern worldview and the trouble that moderns and after have with understanding this worldview.
Indeed, “enchantment” is something that we have special trouble understanding. Latin Christendom has tended more and more to privilege belief, as against unthinking practice. And “secular” people have inherited this emphasis, and often propound an “ethics of belief,” where it can be seen as a sin against science or epistemic decency to believe in God. So we tend to think of our differences from our remote forbears in terms of different beliefs, whereas there is something much more puzzling involved here. It is clear that for our forbears, and many people in the world today who live in a similar religious world, the presence of spirits, and of different forms of possession, is no more a matter of (optional, voluntarily embraced) belief than is for me the presence of this computer and its keyboard at the tips of my fingers.
The Immanent Frame » Blog Archive » Buffered and porous selves
Quite in keeping with many animistic religions in the world not the least of which is vou dou where demon possession is not only commonplace, but admired. We can also say the same for various Christian charismatic practices not the least of which is the "baptism in the Holy Spirit" as a sign of salvation.
It is also indicative of a unique understanding of space and time that concordantly changed with this understanding of self. Carlos Eire’s lectures on eternity discuss the very impact of the Reformation on time. By segmenting space between a heavenly realm and and earthly one, time was also segmented or “buffered” into the temporal nature of human living and the eternal space-time, if you will, of God.
Thus, it seems that the proposal that the human self is buffered in this way is inextricably regulated by the understanding of how the human self exists and is conditioned within space and time. God is "out there" in a place we cannot access and we are in a space and time that is wholly other. If God mixes with this place we call space and time and in which we live, it is subversive and even grotesque. This is a far cry, as Taylor argues, from previous epochs in which that neat and tidy division simply did not exist.
The role of the pastor, the theologian, the biblical scholar, etc. is therefore an interesting one. In a very real sense, people in these positions are to make that boundary discursive and bridge it for others (the literal role of the Catholic priest for one). For most non-Catholics, the entire body of believers is to perform this function on behalf of the world, e.g. build a bridge that connects the temporal nature of human experience with the eternal presence of God.
So how sturdy is your bridge to eternity?
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