A Pilgrimage Of Faith, J.B. Toews, 1993

orld with no windows, the "here and now" has become all. For secular men and women the supernatural is less real. This is true for a number of reasons. In part it is due to refusal to acknowledge God, but it is also because the image of humankind as "the creator" makes God more distant. Human planning, progress, technological ad- vance, and achievement give people a sense of power and of being in control. Secularism removes the super- natural dimension from life in general and from Christiani- ty in particular.14 Pluralization emerges from an environment of many op- tions and choices. Diverse lifestyles, cultural values, fashions and occupations in the urban setting call for continuous choices of all kinds. In an industrial and relativistic environ- ment with an untold variety of jobs, rapid transportation and mass communication, there is decreasingly a common sense of values and a common world view. Former bonds of shared experience are lost. Each individual forms his or her own world. The impact of pluralism on religion is evident. Relativism has undermined, or destroyed entirely, any regard for ab- solutes. The Christian faith becomes one of many options in the marketplace of religions-Islam, Scientology, Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism. The choices of religious response be- come personal and utilitarian. Secularization in the context of pluralism results in the pri- vatization of the individual. People live in multiple worlds-business, civic, home, church, school and neighbor- 209 A PILGRIMAGE OF FATTH hood. The difficulty of relating to so many spheres destroys the personal ethos, and privatization becomes an escape mechanism for survival. People lose focus and cease to inte- grate the various spheres of influence. The private sphere becomes a world of diversions aimed at personal fulfillment. People cease to be responsible to a community, selecting in- stead from a multiplicity of involvements on the basis of utili- tarian benefit. Religion and the church become just another option, and a completely private one, at that. Secularization, pluralization and privatization speed the process of paganizing culture. Modernity strips humanity of certainty and it miniaturizes faith. It shifts the focus from the absolutes and the content of faith to the subjective and expe- riential dimension of faith. "Marketing the gospel" trivializes the message as glitz supplants impelling power of truth. The gospel is truncated as the demand for repentance, newness of life and self-denying discipleship is omitted. The supernatural authority of religion is eroded and the