I recently when to see Carl Trueman speak at the Centennial Institute. The lecture, titled “Man is Abolished: Now What?”, furnished us with a stimulating evening, and I commend it to your attention. (If you’d like to skip the preliminaries, you can start the video at about the 9:30 mark.) I commend it to you; it was a stimulating evening.
While his major point was elsewhere, in the process of making it, Trueman considered the idea (so much discussed of late) of disenchantment. If you’re not familiar, the concept dates back to Max Weber at least, and the basic idea is that the forces of modernity — things like institutionalization, bureaucracy, technology, instrumental reason, and McDonaldization — have removed all the mystery and wonder from the world, rendering it a comprehensible but soulless place. Depending on your orientation, you might think of this as a good thing (cf. Carl Sagan’s “demon-haunted world”), but increasingly people see the problems with it.
If disenchantment is the diagnosis, Trueman opined, then re-enchantment would be the cure…but the fuzziness of the former concept drives a fuzziness in the latter. If all we’re trying to do is re-enchant the world, does returning to a belief in Santa Claus and fairies in the garden solve the problem?
It’s a fair question, one with real pastoral import that I frequently work with. Re-enchantment is a project that regularly goes awry in exactly that way, because magic is real, and not all of it is good. In the present cultural smorgasbord laid before him, a spiritual seeker might walk into a church, but he’s just as likely to choose mediumship, Wicca, materialist demon-possession, or a resurgent Norse paganism featuring a stunning lack of anything actually Norse. Re-enchantment, Trueman argued, is just too fuzzy of a concept to be really useful.
In its place, Trueman offered a different diagnosis. What we’re facing is not just disenchantment, but desecration, the deliberate destruction of the image of God. The prescription, then, is consecration, and that is found in the creed (teaching and beliefs), cult (worship practices) and code (way of life) of faithful Christianity. I love all this, and I agree as far as it goes. But I want to circle back to disenchantment for a moment, because I don’t think we’re quite done with it.
While Trueman is right that disenchantment/re-enchantment is an unacceptably fuzzy concept on its own, it isn’t actually incorrect. It just needs further specification. And while it’s true that faithful Christians going about the creed/cult/code business of ordinary Christianity are doing better than they know, re-enchantment is often precisely the thing we’re lacking in the church. One of the keys to discipling Christians in the age 10-25 bracket where I often work is waking them up to the wildness and wonder of their own worldview.
The world is magic. Everything you see was spoken into being by a God who revels in all of it, down to the last golden leaf still clinging to the locust tree in your yard. The heavens still declare the glory of God. Your sins, the ones you commit today, were already gathered into the body of a Man who was nailed to a wooden cross 2,000 years ago on a hill outside Jerusalem. In His body on that cross, your sins died, and in His body they were buried in the earth, and when His body was raised to a new life, all your sins were left behind in the grave so that you can join Him in that new life. His Father becomes your Father; His life becomes your life. If that is not magic, what would be?
In that new life, we still lay hands on the sick and anoint with oil. We are washed by the waters of baptism and sustained by the body and blood of Jesus at His Table. We minister to one another as His image. We still listen for the voice of God, first in the Scriptures, but also in His particular leading, just as Jesus did. If these things are not magic, what are they?
We are at war, “not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12) The demonic powers continue to infest the world, preying on the weak and assaulting the strong. We should not pray, preach, or live as though these things are not happening.
Many Christians balk at using the word “magic” to describe all this; you may be among them. In the end, I care far more that we live these things than I care what we call them, but let’s talk about the language. I think “magic” is precisely the right word; it jars us out of the complacency engendered by the prevailing scientism of our day. Most North American Christians do not really believe in supernatural deliverance from anything; they believe in cell phones. They believe in getting theological propositions in order. And they would be shocked to discover that the theological propositions they ardently defend point straight to the view I’m arguing for.
