Walking with God through Pain and Suffering

by Timothy J. Keller

Taylor coins a number of unique terms to describe contemporary secularity. He says that today we live inside an “immanent frame,” the view that the world is a completely natural order without any supernatural. It is a completely “‘immanent’ world, over against a possible ‘transcendent’ one.”109 Another phrase he uses is the “buffered self.” In older times, the concept of the self was “open and porous.” It included a soul, for example, which connected us to God and the spiritual world, and therefore much of our inner nature, feelings, intuitions, and attitudes were under the influence of forces outside of us, forces that we could not control. It was often assumed that one was required to look outside of the self—to nature and to God—to learn the right way to live. Modern people, however, have a “buffered self,” a self that is bounded and self-contained. Because there is no transcendent, supernatural order outside of me, it is I who determine what I am and who I will be.