Jesus and Socrates

I was reading Charles Taylor's A Secular Age this morning and came across an interesting comment on the difference between Jesus and Socrates:

In the Christian case, the very point of renunciation requires that the ordinary flourishing forgone be confirmed as valid. Unless living the full span were a good, Christ's giving of himself to death couldn't have the meaning it does. In this it is utterly different from Socrates' death, which the latter portrays as leaving this condition for a better one. Here we see the unbridgeable gulf between Christianity and Greek philosophy. God wills ordinary human flourishing, and a great part of what is reported in the Gospels consists in Christ making this possible for the people whose affliction he heals. The call to renounce doesn't negate the value of flourishing; it is rather a call to centre everything on God, even if it be at the cost of forgoing this unsubstitutable good; and the fruit of this forgoing is that it become on one level the source of flourishing to others, and on another level, a collaboration with the restoration of a fuller flourishing by God. It is a mode of healing wounds and "repairing the world" (Pg. 17 from the Introduction).

It's interesting because it raises the suspicion of many secular people that what Christians mean by a good life, or human flourishing, is not what they mean. Here, Taylor puts his finger on one of the chief points of contention amidst the multicultural religious plurality so prized in western societies. Consider the endless loop of Baywatch and KFC chicken wings that has ensued in the secular Utopia at the end of history. Despite the brilliant satirical evidence cartooned in the Simpsons, most people are aware of the fact that God is not pandering the Colonel about his secret recipe on a shared cloud in heaven somewhere.

Whatever the differences between secular and Christian perspectives on the good life (and they are nearly impossible to pin down given the diversity of positions within both groupings) Taylor very helpfully sidelines the tendency of secularists to simply sideline Christianity as anti-materialist. As he rightly points out, the meaning of Jesus's death loses its significance if it is simply a renunciation of this world in a Socratic sense. Rather, the paradoxical meaning of Christian flourishing comes to light as we accept the coinherence between Christ's death and his love for the world. There is much to disagree on as we practically go about our lives as a society together (buying bananas is simply one of them), but something we must all inevitably face is that the the basic resources we need to survive (water, food, land, etc.) are not endless and that it is precisely insofar as we are willing to renounce our excesses that a good life for all may become a real possibility. The stakes are high, but this is precisely why a number of Christian philosophers and theologians are so insistent upon fostering a public sphere which allows for authentic disagreement to take place, as was discussed on a recent Australian radio program on political theology.