In a recent series of mine I floated an analytic framework to describe different aspects of faith and their interrelationships.
It was a three-layered structure involving a moral layer that flows out of an existential/narrative/symbolic layer which in turn flows out of an ontological layer. Pictorially:
Moral
↑↓
Existential
↑↓
Ontological
I went on to describe how the layers beneath the moral layer have been slowly jettisoned in the increasingly post-Christian West. The Judeo-Christian moral vision, broadly espoused by liberal humanism, has been divorced from its narrative and symbolic world. This creates an existential loss. Symptoms of this loss involve our current mental health crisis, increased deaths of despair, political polarization, and what has been called our "crisis of meaning."
In addition, narrative and symbol have been separated from the Real, the ontological layer. This leads to drift of both the moral and existential layers, mostly evidenced in the political capture of the Christian ethic and story. This happens in different ways on both the political right and left. This moral and existential drift away from the Real also manifests in a consumeristic, bespoke, DIY approach to spiritual practice, where people can shop around and select stories and myths that support their lifestyle without any concern about if the myth they've selected for themselves has any correspondence to our ontological.
In my series I described some of the reasons why the ontological layer was rejected. For example, there was the rise of reductive materialism during the New Atheist moment. I also discussed the impact of post-modernism on making ontological claims in a pluralistic and liberal world. But I was recently put in mind of another reason why the ontological claims of Christianity are rejected. Specifically, if the ontological claims are true there are, we can say, implications. Implications we'd rather not face. Here is that case as made by the theologian Robert Jenson:
Yet I think there is another reason for our skittishness with the gospel's truth claims...So soon as we pose the question, "What indeed if it were true?" about an ordinary proposition of the faith, consequences begin to show themselves that go beyond anything we dare to believe, that upset our whole basket of assured convictions, and we are frightened of that. The most Sunday-school-platitudinous of Christian claims--say, "Jesus loves me"--contains cognitive explosives we fear will indeed blow our minds; it commits us to what have been called revisionary metaphysics, and on a massive scale. That, I think, is the main reason we prefer not to start [with the question "What indeed if it were true?"] and have preferred it especially in the period of modernity. For Western modernity's defining passion has been for the use of knowledge to control, and that is the very point where the knowledge of faith threatens us.
