Here vs. There, Now vs. Then

Thoughts on transcendence and immanence

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

(A ten-minute read.)

I recently heard a story from a friend that is incredibly tragic. It broke my heart.

My friend was telling me about a friend of his who’s gay. The son of an evangelical pastor, this young man had been committed to living a life of celibacy but had decided he could no longer put up the fight. He was just too lonely.

When one day he explained this to his dad, his dad responded, “Well what’s worse? Being lonely in this life or burning in hell forever?”

My heart sank when my friend relayed this story on to me. No matter what one thinks about the question of sexuality, I hope we can all agree that such a framing of the issue not only demonstrates a serious lack of empathy and grace, but it probably isn’t even the best way to achieve one’s ends (if one’s goal is to encourage another to remain committed to a certain view of sexuality).

The risk of sharing this story is that it might distract from the larger point I’d like to make in this piece. I’m not writing about sexuality, per se, but I use this story as an illustration of an incredibly important underlying dichotomy that we rarely acknowledge or talk about—or are perhaps even aware of.

But yet this underlying dichotomy often frames our discussions on a whole host of issues—politically, spiritually, religiously, socially, relationally—in ways we probably don’t even recognize.

What is that dichotomy?

Transcendence versus immanence.

Now or then, here or there?

Fifteen years ago, philosopher Charles Taylor wrote A Secular Age, which was his magnum opus that wrestled with the question of how Western society went from being largely comprised of religious believers to a society that largely assumes a secular outlook (even among believers). Covering nearly 900 pages, Taylor tells a very important story.

The particular point from Taylor’s work I want to focus on is the important distinction between transcendence and immanence he talks about. Essentially, according to Taylor, Western society, for much of Christian history, was especially concerned with questions of transcendence. That is, most people oriented themselves around questions of eternity, questions of the “hereafter,” questions about how to please a transcendent God.

They were, in short, concerned with questions about future, other-worldly goods. Life was not primarily focused on trying to attain happiness in this life; it was focused on what one had to do to attain and prepare themselves for the life to come.

Since the Enlightenment, however, questions about transcendence have taken a backseat to questions of immanence. No longer is the focus on the next life but on this life. Attaining this-worldly goods became the priority. Experiencing optimal human flourishing in this life became the focus.

Even religiously, Christians mostly adopted this posture. As James Turner points out in his book, Without God, Without Creed, which largely plots the same storyline as Taylor’s, though from a historical perspective, Christianity transitioned from being concerned chiefly with questions about how to serve a transcendent God to being chiefly concerned with how that transcendent God could serve us and pursue our ultimate flourishing and happiness.

In short, over the last 500 years or so, Western society has become primarily focused on attaining this-worldly goods and the happiness those goods are supposed to deliver.

The question of God’s existence, which so many people think is ground-zero for the atheistic/religious divide, has become largely moot. Even religious people, who assume God’s existence, live as though attaining this-worldly happiness is life’s primary purpose.

The sort of middle-class vision, replete with a nice house with a white picket-fence, has not only become the “American Dream” but the Western Christian’s dream. Sure, we may give a passing nod to a future life, and to a transcendent God, but such concerns take a backseat to more immanent concerns and priorities.

We certainly see this explicitly articulated in various brands of Christianity today, which would have been unthinkable 600 years ago. The so-called “Prosperity Gospel,” which promises material health and wealth in this life, is the easiest example. But this plays out in many other versions of Christianity as well, from the Christian Nationalism I wrote about last week, to the so-called “Social Gospel” that more progressive branches of Christianity promote.

Of course, such immanent concerns are nowhere expressed and pursued with more vigor than among those who explicitly subscribe to and promote a secular humanist vision. By and large this life is all there is, or all that practically matters, so we must do whatever it takes to achieve optimal human flourishing—and fulfillment—now. As Taylor puts it, such an outlook is in constant pursuit of the “good life.”

And yet this is where the rub lies. Much of our disagreement, I do believe, revolves around the dichotomy between the pursuit of transcendent, other-worldly goods versus the pursuit of immanent, this-worldly goods.

Returning to the question of sexuality, which is a very sticky topic that I always want to discuss with great sensitivity, my friend David Hamstra has pointed out how the transcendent/immanent binary goes a long way in explaining why there is a divide on this issue. Simply put, for those who see the world simply through the “immanent frame,” where experiencing this-worldly fulfillment is all that can be imagined, the idea of sacrificing this-worldly fulfillment for the sake of ­other-worldly ends is wholly unimaginable and unintelligible.

In fact, the idea of this-worldly sacrifice for the sake of other-worldly ends, no matter the issue, is essentially a non-starter for those who work within the immanent frame. It just doesn’t compute or make sense. And anyone who talks about giving up something in this life for the sake of gaining something in the future life—whatever that may or may not be—is basically looked at as a religious nut or fanatic.

I can see this in my own approach to life and ministry at times.

Ever since I started intentionally spending more time with people outside my religious tribe, I’ve found myself increasingly framing my own religious outlook within this immanent context. I’ve noticed that I largely frame the primary concerns of the Christian message as being focused on pursuing “optimal human flourishing,” for example, and loving one’s neighbor as one’s self—of embracing postures and actions that are “life-giving” rather than “life-denying.”

Even the way I speak of the benefits of keeping the Sabbath focuses largely on immanent concerns. I’m not so much focused on the importance of aligning one’s actions with a transcendent God by keeping the Sabbath, but how keeping the Sabbath can benefit the practitioner—providing more peace, less stress, better health, greater opportunity for relational connection, and so forth. I’ve even talked about how keeping the Sabbath can be an act of “social justice,” which is a this-worldly concern.

I think these expressions are fine as far as they go, but they only tell one side of the story.

In many ways, the transcendent versus immanent binary can be seen in the two “great commandments” Jesus spoke of in the Gospels. He explained that the “greatest commandment” was to love God with one’s whole heart, mind, body, and soul (the transcendent), and the second was to love one’s neighbor as one’s self (the immanent).

It seems that many of us, myself especially included, jump right over the first commandment in determined pursuit of the second one. But we do so to our own peril.

So what’s the answer?

It may not surprise you to learn that I think the “sweet spot” comes in somehow finding the balance between the transcendent and the immanent. We can’t be only concerned with other-worldly goods. Such a religion is practically useless—leaving people so heavenly-minded that they are no earthly good, to borrow a common expression.

There have been plenty of religions throughout history, and many still in existence now, which essentially deny all earthly concerns. It’s called asceticism—which can find expression in various religious forms, be it Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and monastic types of Christianity.

The danger with such approaches is that they can easily lend themselves to religious communities that are legalistic, shame-based, controlling, and fanatical. They can also turn God into a tyrant who is overly focused on matters of arbitrary personal piety but who apparently isn’t too concerned about the temporal well-being of his creatures.

On the other hand, being only concerned with this-worldly goods runs the risk of denying what seems to lie at the heart of every human being: a hunger for the transcendent—a hunger for something beyond and outside what this world can offer.

I do believe that, at the end of the day, people do have a yearning that can’t be fully satisfied by this-worldly goods—they have a desire for transcendent purpose and meaning (precisely because, I’d submit, a transcendent God truly does exist). And a failure to offer that leaves people susceptible to embracing various forms of transcendence—be that through psychedelics or cultish religious communities that are overly focused on transcendence.

At the same time, the irony is that sacrificing and denying this-worldly goods can actually be one of the greatest sources of this-worldly fulfillment. History has repeatedly demonstrated that some of the happiest people in this life are those who chiefly prioritize the next life (to play off a C. S. Lewis idea). To be a part of something outside of myself, and to submit myself to a transcendent being whose understanding is far greater than mine, can provide a lot of this-worldly peace, happiness, stability, purpose, and meaning.

What that means is that embracing that first commandment to love God, and pursuing the transcendent, may mean I’m asked to do things, and to make sacrifices, I don’t fully understand. And that’s OK.

While I don’t think it’s healthy to pursue a religious life where we don’t understand any or even most of what we’re asked to do, neither do I think it’s healthy to pursue a religious life where there’s nothing we don’t understand. The latter leaves room for humility and the acknowledgement that I am a finite being who doesn’t possess omniscience (and, yes, that there’s a God in the universe who does see and know everything, and who thus may ask of me that which I don’t fully understand).

Similarly, the challenge with an exclusively-immanent frame, especially in this day and age of advertising and mass-manipulation (and Instagram), which give us certain images of what the “good life” is, is that we can very often confuse our wants for our needs, thinking that denying our wants is essentially the same thing as denying the needs that make us human.

But time and again humans have discovered that attaining their wants has not delivered the feelings of transcendent euphoria they expected, which leads to all sorts of tragic consequences.

To return to my initial story (though, again, at the risk of distracting from my larger point), such a situation provides an interesting illustration of how this balance might express itself.

The young man’s father essentially denied any significance to the immanent. All that mattered was the transcendent (and a very awful representation of the transcendent, I might add). Loneliness in this life was therefore not a big deal in light of eternity.

But I don’t believe it was ever God’s intention for us to be lonely in this world. That is not a sacrifice he’s asked us to make for the sake of the transcendent. We were literally created to need vibrant, caring, and loving companionship now—the same way we need water and air. So we can’t completely deny a this-worldly necessity for the sake of an other-worldly end.

So how do we strike the balance in this instance? I think it’s appropriate to point to and promote a transcendent sexual ethic, even while providing the community and companionship we were designed to experience in this life. In other words, if we’re going to ask people to sacrifice this-worldly sexual fulfillment for the sake of the transcendent (which, in truth, I believe the Bible asks of all people—gay, straight, or otherwise—in some form or another), we should be committed to providing the vibrant and necessary community they need in the meantime.

Again, this is just an example of the transcendent versus immanent binary, and how it might play out in our world. But we could multiply the examples as we think about what it means to navigate our world politically, socially, and religiously.

The bottom line? I don’t think we should pursue an exclusively transcendent escapism, where God will just sort everything out when he comes, focusing only on saving souls for eternity. We should indeed pursue this-worldly concerns and the well-being of our neighbors.

But neither should we buy into the idea of some sort of earthly utopia, where God’s kingdom will be fully realized on this earth, prior to Christ’s return, where no one ever has to make sacrifices or deny immanent goods.

We should therefore pursue the well-being of our fellow creatures in this life, while recognizing that complete flourishing will only come when God makes all things new. In the meantime, there will be trade-offs and sacrifices asked of us—some of which we may not fully understand this side of transcendence.

---

Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.