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- Herausgeber: IVP
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- 15th Annual Outreach Magazine Resource of the Year - Inspirational - Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Top Shelf Book Cover Award 2017When we're young, it's easy to believe in the supernatural, the mysterious, the enchanted. But as we grow older, we learn to be more "rational" and more confident that reality is merely what we can see. Even as Christians who believe in the resurrection, we live as if miracles and magic have been drained from the world.As Mike Cosper wrestled with his own disillusionment, he found writers, thinkers, and artists like Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith, and David Foster Wallace whose words and ideas reassured him that he was not alone. And he discovered ancient and modern disciplines that shape a Christian way of life and awaken the possibility of living again in an enchanted world. Exquisitely written with thoughtful practices woven throughout, this book will feed your soul and help you recapture the wonder of your Christian walk.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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RECAPTURING THEWONDER
TRANSCENDENT FAITH IN A DISENCHANTED WORLD
For Dorothy and Maggie:Here’s hoping this book helps youmake sense of this strange world.For Mike Frazier and Rich Plass,who helped make senseof this world for me.
Contents
Introduction
When I was a kid, I had a semi-feral tomcat that was fond of leaving animal carcasses on our front step. He was huge and grey and had long, matted fur. I’d be on my way to school and open the door to find him waiting, a bird or a squirrel or a small rabbit—often headless, by this time—in his mouth or at his feet, a look of self-satisfied pride in his eyes.
One morning, I found him with the carcass of a raccoon not much smaller than he was. The cat didn’t look much better than the raccoon. His ear was torn and bleeding, and patches of fur were missing from all over his body, which was punctuated by scratches and tooth marks. I vaguely remember him missing a tooth, too. But that same dark look of pride was in his eyes.
I imagined what led to that scene, something akin to a bar fight gone horribly wrong, leading him to come to his friend in the early dawn and ask for help burying the body. I got a shovel and we got rid of the raccoon together.
I feel like that cat looking over the pages of this manuscript. I set out to write a book about spiritual disciplines—practices like Scripture reading and prayer and fasting—and found myself in the midst of a fight that, like the cat, I was unprepared for. I knew I wanted to account for what makes those habits so difficult to cultivate, so elusive. I didn’t know how much I’d have to reckon with a world that conditions us for doubt. Most of all, I didn’t know how much I’d have to reckon with my own doubts.
At the same time, the disciplines became more important to me than ever. In the two-and-a-half years that passed between writing a proposal for this book and actually finishing it, life has been chaotic. I witnessed the meltdown of several close friends’ marriages, the church where I served as a pastor went through several difficult transitions, and my family went through bouts of severe illness. Everything seemed to ratchet up the pressure, and at times, my only lifeline and grip on sanity was these disciplines. I write about them not as a master of the many methods and techniques that have been employed throughout church history but as someone who has found that they can be an anchor for faith, hope, and love in the midst of a life that feels like it’s crumbling.
But the disciplines didn’t just provide the strength to endure the troubles that this world threw at me; they opened up the possibility of living in another world.
In Susanna Clarke’s wonderful fairytale Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, she tells a story about the rediscovery of magic in England in the nineteenth century. In the beginning of the tale, magic has vanished from England. It remains part of English folklore, like the story of King Arthur, but no one has actually practiced it in many years. Nonetheless, there were men who called themselves magicians. They did so in spite of the fact that “not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon any one’s head. But with this one minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest and most magical gentlemen in Yorkshire.”1
These magicians spent their days in lengthy arguments about theoretical magic, debating the use of this spell over that, nitpicking the details of magic’s history in England, meeting once a month and reading “long, dull papers” to one another. The idea of actually practicing magic was vulgar.
Then Mr. Norrell showed up. He cast a spell that made all of the statues in Yorkshire’s cathedral come to life: shouting, singing, and telling stories about the deaths of the men and women whose images they bore. The magicians of Yorkshire were speechless. The world was far different than they’d believed.
I couldn’t help but feel a certain sadness reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I found myself identifying with the magicians of Yorkshire. My life as a Christian had left me with a certain amount of fluency with faith: I could keep up in conversations about theology, the history of the Bible, the world of the first century, and the history of the church. I could talk a bit about apologetics and worldview. And I could talk a good bit about worship and liturgy in the church. But as I read Clarke’s book, I couldn’t help but feel the gap between knowing and know-how, between what I knew I could say about my faith and what I could do with it. At times, my faith felt like a boxed-in corner of my life, separate and distinct from the rest of it.
Strangely, this isn’t because of a lack of events in my life that could be called miraculous. In fact, I’ve seen more than a few things that I can’t explain rationally, and I’ve had spiritual experiences that felt no less than spectacular. But these, too, felt somehow boxed-in, an island I occasionally took a ferry to, rather than the mainland of my everyday experience. Even the little things that make up a “Christian” life—going to church, reading the Bible, and so on—felt tacked on and disconnected from the rest of my life. My ordinary life felt strangely irreligious.
Much of this book is an attempt to understand why such a gap exists and what we might do about it. It’s an attempt to sketch out the spiritual landscape of an age that has been called a “secular age,” an “age of anxiety,” and a “culture of narcissism,”2 and an effort at finding a path into a different way of life.
Transformation is a before-and-after story, and to know what the after looks like (and how to get there), it’s necessary to have a sense of the before. For most Christians, our before picture is shaped by decades of immersion in this strange world and strange culture that surrounds us. It’s had a deep and powerful formative effect on us.
This is an age where our sense of spiritual possibility, transcendence, and the presence of God has been drained out. What’s left is a spiritual desert, and Christians face the temptation to accept the dryness of that desert as the only possible world. We have enough conviction and faith to be able to call ourselves believers, but we’re compelled to look for ways to live out a Christian life without transcendence and without the active presence of God, practicing what Dallas Willard once called “biblical deism”—a strange bastardization of Christianity that acts as though, once the Bible was written, God left us to sort things out for ourselves.
In such a world, the Bible feels like a dead text and our prayers seem to bounce answerless off the drywall. Practicing our faith feels more fruitless than talking about it, and we end up very much like the magicians of Yorkshire, able to talk fluently about magic and almost certain that it doesn’t exist. The practical magic that’s missing isn’t just the dramatic—healing the sick or raising the dead. Rather, it’s the more quiet and invisible magic of how anxious souls find wholeness and how broken people find healing. We might be fluent in the language of faith but unable to pray, overwhelmed by fear and anxiety, and victim to the compulsive, distracting habits that fill our age. We might be able to articulate the doctrine and dogma of the gospel but feel as though we’re doing so from the outside looking in.
I want to better understand how we got here, the reasons we feel this resistance, and the ways we’ve intentionally and unintentionally cultivated it. Most of all, I want to try to describe how we might live differently.
Much of what’s ahead is an extended conversation with writers, thinkers, and artists who have also tried to reckon with this strange world. People like Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, James K. A. Smith, Helen Macdonald, and David Foster Wallace have described this world (and how we got here) in ways that make sense of my own experience. Hearing them, I felt a little less crazy and a little less lonely. In a few places, this book is also a reckoning with my own story.
Each chapter explores how we’ve been shaped by this strange world and what options are available for another way of living and seeing. After each chapter is a Pathway section—an attempt to describe specific practices that reshape how we live and experience the world. My hope is to gain a clearer understanding of both the challenges and the opportunities we have for a transformed way of life. If you happen to be reading this with a friend or in a group, you might want to read both a chapter and a Pathway for each discussion.
Last, on any one of the topics ahead, I want to acknowledge that I’m just scratching the surface. What’s ahead is almost like a walking tour of a city—a casual stroll where I’ll point some things out and tell an interesting story or two along the way. My goal was not to be comprehensive (and not to be boring) but to provoke some different ways of seeing.
So, here it is. Like my cat on the front porch, I feel a little worse for the wear now that it’s done, but most of all, I feel excited to share. I believe the world isn’t quite what we’ve been led to think it is. Like Susanna Clarke’s England, I think there’s some magic yet to be discovered. Here’s hoping I can convince you.
ONE
Discovering OurDisenchantment
I stumbled upon my disenchantment a few years ago after attending a dedication service at my parents’ church. The new, eighty-million-dollar facility was roughly the size of the Death Star, with a parking lot that rivaled Six Flags in pure concrete acreage. There were more volunteers directing traffic and opening doors than most churches have for attendees.
During the service, a “special music” number was sung by an unironically mustachioed man in a suit, a contemporary Christian power ballad with swooning strings and multiple key changes. About midway through the song, a large cross on the back wall began to glow.
To be clear: when I say large, I mean large. The eight-thousand-seat auditorium has two balconies, and the distance from the stage to the catwalk above it is probably four stories. The cross spanned most of that height, a simple brown cross on a beige wall.
At first, the glow was subtle—a pale fluorescence around the edges that one might have dismissed as a weird reflection. But it soon became clear that there was some serious wattage behind it. As the mustachioed man stairstepped keys from the bridge to the final chorus, the light grew brighter and brighter—like, migraine-inducing bright—casting long, stark shadows on the stage.
The song ended and the crowd roared with applause, many wiping tears on their arms as they leapt to their feet and clapped. Eventually, the glow diminished and the house lights came up and the service moved along. All the lights retained a standard, this-worldly brightness for the remainder of the service.
At lunch afterward, between bites of chain-restaurant lasagna, my dad asked, “What did you think?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“The cross . . . what did you think? It was pretty bright, right?”
I nodded.
“Do you think,” he hesitated, and then said in a lower voice, “Do you think it was real?”
I pushed a forkful of overcooked noodles through a grey puddle of alfredo sauce that I regretted ordering. Then I searched his face. “What do you mean?” I repeated.
“The light,” Dad said. “It was awfully bright.”
“Do you mean, like, was it a miracle?” I asked.
Dad leaned back. “I mean, it probably wasn’t,” he said. He scooped up a slab of lasagna, grinned, and said, “Right?”
My dad’s a civil engineer. When I was a kid, he designed airport runways. He could bore you senseless talking about the different load-bearing capacities of concrete, their response to heat and pressure, which one you’d want to pour in your basement and which is good for dropping a 747 out of the sky onto.
He’s highly rational, and though he takes his faith seriously, he’s not the type of person who would send cash to televangelists for prayer towels or get in line to be slain by the Spirit. I have seen him tear up once or twice in a church service, but to be fair, I’d guess he’s also cried at more than one Pixar movie. He definitely got misty during the last episode of ALF. There’s a big difference between being sentimental and superstitious, and yet, here he was, raising the possibility that the glow behind a cross in a multi-million-dollar facility with state-of-the-art audio, video, and lighting was some kind of miracle.
At the time, dad’s question seemed so odd, so out of character. But this isn’t my dad’s story; it’s mine. It’s the story of how I stumbled upon my own disenchantment. Because what surprised me in retrospect was not that Dad raised the possibility of a miracle in a modern, industrial megachurch service; it was the utter impossibility of such a thing in my mind. Is it stranger to want to read a miracle into a stage effect, or to be a Christian whose gut-level reaction is “That’s ridiculous”?
I am programmed to expect that the world is what I can see, touch, and measure.
My guess is that most would react as I did: surprised and cynical. There are rational reasons for being cynical about this particular miracle, but it didn’t take any thought or reasoning for me (or, in all likelihood, for you) to be skeptical. It was my instinct, my gut reaction. I didn’t have to think first and stitch together my reasons for believing the light was ordinary. I felt that it was impossible for it to be supernatural and then found evidence to support my suspicions.
What I stumbled upon, then, was a deeply ingrained posture, a fully-formed attitude toward the world that is suspicious not only of well-timed miracles in the middle of a big production number, but is actually suspicious of any kind of religious experience.
I react to the suggestion of a miracle—or for that matter, any thoughts about God, the spiritual, or the transcendent—with skepticism and cynicism. It is my default setting.1 I am programmed to expect that the world is what I can see, touch, and measure, and any thought or idea that runs against that expectation is met with resistance. Programming is actually a great way to think about it. I have learned to see the world this way, and I don’t have to think about it anymore.
I don’t think I’m alone. I believe that most people experience something similar—a subtle-but-strong resistance to faith and a skepticism toward anything that veers toward the supernatural.
This way of seeing the world is what Charles Taylor calls disenchantment.2 A disenchanted world has been drained of magic, of any supernatural presences, of spirits and God and transcendence. A disenchanted world is a material world, where what you see is what you get.
It’s not a world entirely without God or a world without religion. Rather, it’s a world where God and religion are superfluous. You can believe whatever you want so long as you don’t expect it to affect your everyday experience. Believe whatever you want about God or the afterlife, but trust in science and technology to explain everything about the real world.
We didn’t choose to think and feel this way. It’s simply the world of ideas we inhabit, a thousand stories told and repeated about how the world works. Christians and non-Christians alike are disenchanted because we’re all immersed in a world that presents a material understanding of reality as the plausible and grown-up way of thinking. Even people from faith traditions more open to mystery or miraculous works of the Spirit will experience this to some degree or another. It’s the way the Western world frames its ideas.
Perhaps to best understand disenchantment, we can look at its opposite, the “enchanted” world of a few centuries ago. In that world, men and women saw themselves as spiritual creatures, vulnerable to blessings and curses, to angels and demons, and subject to the god or gods who made and oversaw the world. This enchanted world was part of a Cosmos,3 an orderly creation full of meaning, a place with a purposeful origin and a clear destination, guaranteed by the god or gods who made it and rule over it. At the same time, this Cosmos is full of mystery, a place where our knowledge has its limits and an unseen spiritual realm is constantly at work, shaping our everyday experience.
In disenchantment, we no longer live in a Cosmos; we live in a universe, a cold, hostile place whose existence is a big accident, where humanity is temporarily animated “stuff” that’s ultimately meaningless and destined for the trash heap.
Bravery in this disenchanted world means facing the emptiness head-on. Comedian Louis CK described this on Conan O’Brien’s late night talk show. Louis was talking about why he wouldn’t let his kids have cell phones, which led him to talk about his own sense of emptiness:
What the phones are taking away is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person. Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty, forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there.
And sometimes when things clear away, you’re not watching anything, you’re in your car, and you start going, “Oh no, here it comes. That I’m alone.” It starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it. . . .
That’s why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they’re killing, everybody’s murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.4
In a disenchanted world, solitude is terrifying. We are alone. The universe is “empty, forever empty.” Louis and others like him argue that facing that emptiness is the right thing to do. Accept the cold, harsh reality of the real world.
Louis makes explicit a vision of the world that shapes us whether we know it or not. Our culture rehearses stories, ideas, and dialogues that shame us away from any kind of belief in transcendence. Charles Taylor calls these “disciplines of disenchantment.” “We regularly . . . accuse each other of ‘magical’ thinking, of indulging in ‘myth,’ of giving way to ‘fantasy’; we say that X isn’t living in our century, that Y has ‘mediaeval’ mind, while Z, whom we admire, is way ahead of her time.”5
These disciplines prime us to respond to the world much like Pavlov primed his dog to salivate at the sound of a ringing bell. When we are regularly shamed away from thoughts that venture near spirituality and transcendence, we learn to avoid it altogether, even in our thoughts. We develop a resistance to thoughts that would carry us outside of the world of the visible, measurable, or scientifically verifiable.
Philosopher and social theorist Hannah Arendt says this way of seeing the universe began with Galileo, who revealed that the Earth (and humanity) wasn’t the center of the universe.6 His discovery called into question the story we’d been telling about who we were and what kind of world we lived in. If the earth wasn’t at the center of the universe, did it still make sense to imagine all of history as a divine drama, unfolded by God for his glory and our good? Were we actually just one story of many, one planet of many, adrift in a meaningless cosmic sea?
At the same time, the universe revealed itself to be more vast, more hostile, and more empty than we’d previously imagined. It also revealed itself to be more knowable than we’d imagined, yielding its secrets as we developed the technology to unlock them—the telescope, the microscope, the atomic bomb, the Hadron collider. Technology has given us the sense that everything within the universe can be made to appear to our senses and harnessed for our purposes.7 It may be meaningless, but it can be comprehended and mastered.
This mastery, though, is a bit of an illusion as well. The accumulated body of scientific knowledge can tell us all about the canvas, oils, and minerals that combine to make a work of art, but they cannot tell us why it takes our breath away.
Modern knowledge involves breaking things down into component parts. As philosopher Michel Foucault argues in The Birth of the Clinic, nowhere is this more disturbingly clear than in modern medicine, which came not out of the development of knowledge about the health and thriving of human bodies but out of the study of dead bodies, exhumed, dissected, and evaluated.
It is undeniable that this kind of knowledge has value. But Arendt’s point—and many others have joined her—is to call into question whether this kind of knowledge is the only way of knowing something and, moreover, whether it’s the best way of knowing something.
Dallas Willard once wrote that while you will not find him apart from his body, the surest way to never find him would be to tear his body open looking for him. There is a mysterious wholeness about a person. Whatever you might know about their biochemistry, anatomy, psychology, and biography cannot account for who they are and what being with them feels like. Likewise, the total knowledge of how fusion makes stars burn, how light travels through the solar system, and how the gases in our atmosphere refract and bend that light is less wonderful than beholding a sunset. A food chemist who can tell you all about what a strawberry is—how it grows, what its chemical makeup is, why the tongue tells the brain it’s sweet—somehow knows less than a child who has actually tasted one. And wouldn’t we all agree that the child’s knowledge is superior? More useful? Or at the very least, more conducive to a good life?
The average grandma can’t tell you much about amino acids and protein chains, but hours at the stove have taught her not to salt the tomato sauce until it’s reduced. She can tell by the way a pork chop resists pressure from a spatula whether or not it’s done, and she knows that the acidity of limes can cut the heat in a curry. Do you want her or the chemist making your dinner?
What we’re talking about is the difference between knowing—a category we might use to describe abstracted knowledge like the kind that leads to success on tests and money on Jeopardy!—and know-how—a kind of knowing that’s more integrated with life, or better put, more integrated with the body. It is a lived-in knowing and an experienced knowing.
The Bible is treated like any other object in a disenchanted world. Our common approach is to study it, and by study we mean something akin to the study of science or the study of language. The Bible is anatomized, broken into its component parts. To really understand it, we must understand first-century Judaism, the original languages, and the systematic theologies, which are the frame across which we can spread it.
This ends up polarizing the church’s approach to the Bible. On the one hand, some feel no need to preserve the Bible as inerrant or infallible, and so the Bible is picked apart, what’s true sorted from what’s false according to the currents of cultural whim. This approach, taken by everyone from Thomas Jefferson to the Jesus Seminar to the current revisionism around sexuality, tells us that Scripture comes from an ignorant social context, which allows critics to separate socially acceptable Biblical ideas—humanism, pacifism, benevolence, and mercy—from those that are now unacceptable, such as belief in the supernatural or sexual ethics.
On the other hand, some try to squeeze the Bible through the lenses of disenchantment in another way. Here, the authority of the Bible is maintained, but the Bible must act like any other modern text—like a textbook or the instruction book that comes with a cordless drill. This demands a rigid literalism and leads to attitudes like 30 Rock’s Kenneth Parcel, who said his favorite subject in school was science, where they studied the Old Testament. Kenneth is a good fundamentalist, and as James K. A. Smith puts it, “No one is more modern than a fundamentalist.”8
The important thing to note is that the approach of liberals and fundamentalists is much the same. The text has no life of its own. It isn’t a living whole—a breathing, fiery creature full of mystery, something to be approached with care and humility; it’s a subject to be mastered, a corpse to be dissected. It’s placed on a steel table and subjected to a thousand acts of violence. It is split into its component parts, footnoted for historicity, and commented on from every angle. In effect, it becomes hedged behind high walls of specialized knowledge, and most Christians—unless they’ve spent many hours in classes or in inductive Bible studies—are as frightened to talk about what a text might mean as they are to answer a question in a math or science class. Better to save it for the experts and leave it untouched.
If by chance they have applied themselves to many hours of study, they become (as Professor Snape once described Hermione Granger in Harry Potter) an “insufferable know-it-all.” They have a frightening certainty. The text has been mastered, the questions all answered. Their Bible has no mysteries; it is all knowable now.
What remains after this treatment is an abstraction. For disenchanted Christians, the Bible is the source of knowledge about God, the gospel, and the spiritual life. Nothing is sacred but the Bible, but of course, by that we don’t mean this Bible or that Bible. We don’t mean any actual Bible in existence—because what was sacred and God-breathed was the Bible in its original manuscripts, and we don’t possess any of those.
What remains is not the Word of God but the idea of the Bible: an abstract, theoretical Bible that is perfect and perfectly out-of-reach for any and all of us. As a result, we are necessarily thrown into a posture of suspicion about everything we encounter in the spiritual life—every text, every sermon, every person’s testimony. We must ask, “Does it fit?” Does it fit into the schema we’ve adopted that frames our thinking about the Bible? Are we certain that we’re right?
This way of knowing breeds fear in two ways. On the one hand, we fear attacks from the outside, from unbelievers, on the Bible’s reliability. On the other, we’re afraid of ourselves, worried that we might not know enough or worse, that we might believe the wrong idea. This fear causes us to double-down on our disenchanted approach to the Bible, coming back with a scalpel to dissect it again and to look for the evidence that supports the Bible’s historicity and our beliefs about it. This is a quest for certainty.
To be sure, these things matter immensely. We need to know we can trust the Bible, and we need to feel confident that we believe the right things about it. But in many ways, I fear that many Christians are stuck there and that the Bible is never more than an object for analysis for them, as opposed to it being the voice of the Beloved. We can master it like the periodic table of elements or the statistics of the New York Yankees while keeping it divorced from real life.
If the Bible is the voice of the Beloved, then there must be a way of reading it that connects with us as whole people, just as knowing and being known in a relationship is a whole-person enterprise. There must be ways of reading and engaging Scripture that strike us at the level of our emotions, our imagination, and our bodies.
To return to the food and cooking metaphor, there’s a way of talking about food that leaves us ignorant of its flavors. With Scripture, we need to find pathways that enable us to taste and see that the Lord is good, to borrow a phrase.
We hunger for that kind of know-how, for a relationship with Scripture that leads to something deeper than head knowledge. We long for wonder, and we long for communion with God, but we’re so terrified of getting something wrong that we either avoid Scripture altogether or treat it as a cold, dead abstraction, unable to connect it to real life.
In Hunting the Divine Fox, Robert Farrar Capon—a writer and Episcopal priest—argued that this kind of dry, scholarly abstraction is a great way to miss the point of a text. Describing Genesis 1, he wrote:
In the old days, when theologians were less uptight about their respectability in the eyes of biblical critics, the odd, majestic plural of that fateful “Let us make” [in Genesis 1:26] was always taken as one of the Old Testament evidences for the doctrine of the Trinity. Nowadays you lose your union card if you do things like that, but I still think it’s nice. . . . What’s nice about that “us” is precisely its oddness. It’s the kind of mysteriously gratuitous detail that’s so much fun to come across in the work of a master craftsman. . . .
See? You need to play with Scripture or else you get it all wrong. Deriving the doctrine of the Trinity from the “us” is nothing more than a little bit of baroque ornamentation: it’s legitimate as long as you keep things in balance. . . . You may not know exactly why it’s there, but you feel it’s trying to tell you something, trying to elicit some kind of response from you.
He invites us to an approach that is
