Blessed are the merciful, because they shall obtain mercy, says the Scripture. Mercy is not the least of the beatitudes. Again: Blessed is he who is considerate to the needy and the poor. Once more: Generous is the man who is merciful and lends. In another place: All day the just man is merciful and lends. Let us lay hold of this blessing, let us earn the name of being considerate, let us be generous.

Not even night should interrupt you in your duty of mercy. Do not say: Come back and I will give you something tomorrow. There should be no delay between your intention and your good deed. Generosity is the one thing that cannot admit of delay.

Share your bread with the hungry, and bring the needy and the homeless into your house, with a joyful and eager heart. He who does acts of mercy should do so with cheerfulness. The grace of a good deed is doubled when it is done with promptness and speed. What is given with a bad grace or against one’s will is distasteful and far from praiseworthy.

When we perform an act of kindness we should rejoice and not be sad about it. If you undo the shackles and the thongs, says Isaiah, that is, if you do away with miserliness and counting the cost, with hesitation and grumbling, what will be the result? Something great and wonderful! What a marvelous reward there will be: Your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will rise up quickly. Who would not aspire to light and healing.

If you think that I have something to say, servants of Christ, his brethren and co-heirs, let us visit Christ whenever we may; let us care for him, feed him, clothe him, welcome him, honor him, not only at a meal, as some have done, or by anointing him, as Mary did, or only by lending him a tomb, like Joseph of Arimathaea, or by arranging for his burial, like Nicodemus, who loved Christ half-heartedly, or by giving him gold, frankincense and myrrh, like the Magi before all these others.

The Lord of all asks for mercy, not sacrifice, and mercy is greater than myriads of fattened lambs. Let us then show him mercy in the persons of the poor and those who today are lying on the ground, so that when we come to leave this world they may receive us into everlasting dwelling places, in Christ our Lord himself, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

--Saint Gregory of Nazianzen

In the last two posts I argued that recovering a vision of the immanence of God is a way we might edge ourselves back toward enchantment. This vision of immanence involves embracing a sacramental ontology where we come to experience the world, in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, as "charged with the grandeur of God."

Another way to say all this is that we edge back toward enchantment by recovering, in the words of Andrew Greeley, a "Catholic imagination."

Here's how Greeley opens his book The Catholic imagination:

Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures. Because these Catholic paraphernalia are mere hints of a deeper and more pervasive sensibility which inclines Catholics to see the Holy lurking in creation. As Catholics, we find our houses and world haunted by a sense that the objects, events, and persons of daily life are revelations of grace.

You can make a good argument that disenchantment was the unwitting outcome of Protestantism. Charles Taylor in A Secular Age makes this argument.

For example, one of the impulses of Protestantism was to shift the spiritual load onto the laity.  Holiness was no longer to be the occupation of "spiritual specialists," the clergy, monastics and saints. Everyone was expected to be holy. The domain of holiness and saintliness shifted away from monasteries, convents and cathedrals to the town, the realm of work and family life.  As we know, there are no saints in Protestantism.

These trends also effectively disenchanted the sacred spaces of Catholicism. There is no clearer example of the disenchantment wrought by Protestantism than comparing a Catholic cathedral to the auditorium where Protestants gather to worship. The cathedral is an enchanted, sacred and holy space. The Protestant auditorium is a disenchanted, utilitarian and functional space.

Beyond people and space, time was also disenchanted by Protestantism. The holy days and seasons of the liturgical calendar of the church was gradually replaced by the time-keeping of the town, the secular clocks and calendars of the marketplace and the nation state.  

Finally, the demise of a sacramental ontology was also brought about by the Protestant rejection of the "real presence" of Christ in the Eucharist. The Eucharist became symbolic rather than sacramental, pointing to rather than participating in the life of God.

Things weren't supposed to work out this way. By releasing God into the world the hope was that God would be found everywhere. But the exact opposite happened. By disenchanting people (the saints), space (the cathedral), time (the liturgical calendar) and the Eucharist, Protestantism banished the holy, the sacred and the enchanted.

Basically, when every place is holy no place is holy.

So there is a dialectic here. We need to recover an experience of the immanence of God, an experience of the whole world being charged with the grandeur of God. But in order to cultivate these experiences we must create and experience places, times, people and events as specifically and particularly holy, sacred and enchanted. This is the Catholic imagination.

Edging toward enchantment means cultivating a sacred texture in life, recovering holy time and space. When it comes to hallowing, a disenchanted life is flat and homogeneous. There is no sacred texture.

By contrast, an enchanted life involves cultivating a sacred texture to life, where moments, places and experiences are set aside for wonder, awe, mystery and transcendence.

Enchantment is hallowing, the recovery of a sacred texture to life as witnessed to in the Catholic imagination.

I'm a bit of a Bible nerd. I have all sorts of bibles in all sorts of bindings and translations. It's crazy how many bibles I own.

For study I like translations like the NRSV and the ESV. For daily devotional reading I like the King James Version.

But for the bible study out at the prison I like the New Living Translation.

The NLT is my go-to translation whenever I'm doing any public reading of the bible. Read aloud, the NLT is fresh, clear and dramatic. That was one of the goals of the NLT, it was meant to be read aloud. And from my experience, the NLT delivers on that score.

So this is a picture of my prison bible. My NLT with a blue leather cover.

As I noted in my last post, we can edge back toward enchantment by emphasizing the immanence of God.

As I pointed out in that post, when you emphasize the transcendence of God in an age of doubt the whole thing tends toward deism. That is, we believe in God existing "above creation" (transcendence) but have increasing doubts, as modern scientific people, in things like miracles. And a God existing above or outside of creation who doesn't do miracles is the God of deism.

In a sense, transcendence increases the burden of faith by upping the ante on miracles. The actions of a transcendent God in our lives, almost by definition, have to be outside intrusions--miracles. To believe, then, in the existence of God or, at the very least, the activity God, you must also believe in miracles, the very thing many modern Christians have trouble with. Basically, when we emphasize the transcendence of God--in sermons, songs and prayers--we place strain upon the weakest parts of a disenchanted faith.

So as I'm arguing it, I think we can shift all this and edge back toward enchantment by emphasizing the immanence of God--God indwelling creation.

In his book Heavenly Participation Hans Boersma describes how we can embrace the immanence God by recovering what he calls a sacramental ontology. According to Boersma, a sacramental ontology argues for the real presence of God in the world. Consequently, a sacramental ontology can also be described as a participatory ontology. The life of creation participates in the life of God.

In a sacramental ontology there is an overlap between God and creation--an intermingling of the earthly and the heavenly, the human and the divine, the mundane and the holy, the secular and the sacred, the natural and supernatural, the material and the spiritual.

With a sacramental ontology the world is "haunted" by God continuously from the inside rather than through episodic and miraculous intrusions from the outside. Creation itself, because it is "charged with the grandeur of God," is miraculous, sacred and holy. Creation is an ongoing and unfolding miracle rather than a disenchanted machine occasionally interrupted--if God answers our prayers--by an external miraculous force.

To rethink a famous metaphor, creation isn't a mechanism, a watch separate from the Watchmaker. Creation isn't a machine. Creation is alive. 

Tweaking some diagrams from Boersma (page 23), we can visualize the sacramental ontology this way:

Boersma makes the point that the sacramental, participatory link between God and creation goes beyond a relationship based solely upon covenant, as important as that is. Boersma writes,

There is, I believe, a great deal of value in highlighting this covenantal relationship. But the insistence on a sacramental link between God and the world goes well beyond the mere insistence that God has created the world and by creating it has declared it to be good. It also goes beyond positing an agreed-on (covenantal) relationship between two separate beings. A sacramental ontology insists that not only does the created world point to God as its source and "point of reference," but that it also subsists or participates in God.

Biblical texts Boersma points to that are supportive of this sacramental ontology:

Acts 17.27-28a
God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’

Colossians 1.17
He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

I think a critical piece of the puzzle in recovering enchantment is embracing the immanence of God.

To unpack that very important word, immanence describes how God indwells and permeates creation. Immanence can be contrasted with transcendence, the way God is separate from creation.

Immanence speaks to how God is in creation, transcendence to how God is outside creation.

The irony of transcendence, often celebrated in praise music as the "awesomeness" of God, is how it tends toward disenchantment. With God exalted as King ruling over and above creation, God is subtly pulled out of creation. Rather than indwelling God evacuates creation.

Transcendence also tends toward deism, furthering our disenchantment. When transcendence is emphasized, highlighting God's separateness and Otherness from creation, God's actions in the world are conceptualized as intrusions, miraculous suspensions of the daily flux of cause and effect. But as science has progressed these miraculous intrusions are harder to believe in. And when you starting doubting the miracles of the transcendent God you, by default, find yourself in deism. A God who is out there, somewhere, but a God who doesn't miraculously intrude upon creation.

Basically:

Transcendence + Doubt (mainly in miracles) = Deism

In light of all this, we edge back toward enchantment when we begin to emphasize the immanence of God, God indwelling creation. Miracles aren't the intrusions of a transcendent God but the enchantment of creation itself.  

No one described this better than the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
       It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
       It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
       And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
       And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
       There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
       Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
       World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Edging toward enchantment involves emphasizing the immanence of God, experiencing the world as charged with the grandeur of God.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

--C.S. Lewis

When you first start struggling with doubts and disenchantment you enter into a phase of deconstruction. You start sifting through and analyzing everything you believe with the goal of stripping faith down to the stuff you really, truly believe.

Trouble is, you can go so far down this path that by the time you're done there's nothing left. You keep whittling faith down until, eventually, all that is left is scraps on the floor.

But deconstruction is important. Faith must and will go through the fires. In the words of Paul, when our faith was a child it talked like a child, thought like a child and reasoned like a child. Faith has to grow up and put childish things behind it. But that can be painful. There are attractive things about a childish faith. It's simpler. It's consoling. It's certain. To grow up in faith is to step into complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty and anxiety. And there are times when we wish we could turn back the clock of faith, to go back to simpler times.

But you can't go back. I often tell my students that there is a threshold of doubt, that once you start asking certain sorts of questions there is no going back. When it comes to faith there is a class of questions that, once you get to them, just don't have any answers. When you reach these questions you'll live with them for the rest of your life.

During a season of deconstruction it makes sense to read a lot of stuff that tests and pushes your faith. Stuff that lightens the load of faith but keeps you hanging on in the face of your doubts and disenchantment. For example, there was a season of deconstruction in my life when I was attracted to death of god theology and its spin on religionless Christianity. Hey, I thought, maybe I can be a Christian without believing God!

Now, if you don't struggle with doubts you likely don't understand the attraction of that idea. A Christianity without faith in God seems ludicrous to Christians who are devout, certain and orthodox. But if you're struggling with faith the notion of a religionless Christianity seems like a gift, a way to lighten the burden of faith while keeping connected to the faith. Often the tether is behavioral, a focus on orthopraxy (the right practice of the faith) than on orthodoxy. Doing things rather than believing in things.

The thing I'm trying to point out here is that people are attracted to these strange notions because they are a form of coping with doubt and disenchantment. For the most part, Christians aren't attracted to things like death of god theology, religionless Christianity or Christian atheism because they are trying to be radical, progressive, cool, relevant or avant-garde. No, they reach these ideas because they are the final stages in the journey of deconstruction, lightening the load of faith to make it easier to carry in the face of doubts and disenchantment. This constellation of ideas--a faith without faith, a religion without God--is just about as light as faith can get before it completely evaporates.

And when you get to this point something has to happen.

In my experience, a radically deconstructed faith just isn't sustainable. It can be for a season, even a long season. This is a place where you end up after you have journeyed through the fires. Faith here is in its lightest, most insubstantial state. But over time the unbearable lightness of faith starts taking a toll.

The first place you'll start noticing the unbearable lightness of faith is in your attitude about going to church. What's the point of rolling out of bed on Sunday morning? You hardly believe in any of this stuff, so the entire experience of church is just one, massive doubt trigger. Church is too faithful--all the songs and sermons so full of conviction--to be tolerable. Our faith has become so wispy and insubstantial that we experience full-bodied expressions of faith jarring and uncomfortable. Even unseemly. A lyric of a song makes us wince. A sermon illustration slaps us in the face.

It's hard to go to church when your faith has become so light. So you stop going. Now you have a faith without God and without a church. It's just you, alone, with all the doubts in your head.

Many of us have been in or are currently in this exact spot. It's a fine, perfectly predictable spot to reach. Having been there myself hear no judgment on my part. I get it. My point is simply that I don't think you can stay in this spot forever. Perhaps some can. I do think a lot of people can be there for a very long time. I was in this spot for many years. But eventually, the unbearable lightness of faith becomes intolerable. This being betwixt and between belief an unbelief is just not sustainable.

Something has to give. If you want to maintain a hold on faith the season of deconstruction has to be followed by a season of reconstruction. But a lot of doubting and disenchanted Christians never make the decision--and it is a decision--to commence with the work of reconstruction.

In the lament psalms the season of deconstruction is followed by a season of reconstruction. A turn is made. A jarring turn, but a turn nonetheless. Lament, doubt and disillusionment is followed by doxology, praise and thanksgiving. Faith has a rhythm. At some point, doubting Christians must force themselves to read the psalms all the way to the end. We need to practice making the turn.

Same goes for the prophets. The prophets rage and despair. But a steady diet of rage and despair is not sustainable. So the prophets are also poets of grace and hope. Like the psalms, the prophets make the turn. Deconstruction is followed by reconstruction. Faith must find this biblical rhythm if it is to be vibrant and sustainable.

Edging back toward enchantment is a part of this journey toward reconstruction. Edging back toward enchantment is the intentional practice of reading the lament psalms and the prophets all the way to the end. It is the intentional commitment to let mystery, and even faith, season our diet of questions. The intentional commitment to not let our doubts and objections be the primary intellectual and emotional filter of Christian community and worship. The intentional commitment to check our doubts and cynicism at the door.

Edging back toward enchantment is practicing faith. Not practicing as faith. But just what I said: practicing faith.

I love retro things from the 1950s and 1960s.

Two summers ago, when we were visiting Rachel Held Evans and her husband Dan in Dayton, TN, Jana and I were going up and down Market Street shopping in the antique and junk shops. In one of them I found this vintage suitcase, pictured here.

I fell in love with it.

When I travel this is the suitcase I take. As people wheel their handled roller-board suitcases up and down the airport, I carry this.

And you know what? I get tons of compliments.

When the suitcase comes through the security scanners. "I like that suitcase." When I'm standing in line to board the plane. "I love that! I haven't seen a suitcase like that in years." When I'm taking it down from the overhead storage. "That suitcase is awesome."

True, some of my friends make fun of my old-school suitcase. I've enduring some teasing for my retro taste.

But I love this suitcase. When I show up at your church or speaking event, it'll be there in my hand.

Am I now
seeking human approval,
or God’s approval?

Or am I
trying to please people?

If I were still pleasing people,
I would not be
a slave of Christ.

    --Galatians 1.10

In light of the work of Brene Brown I was recently interrupted by this text.

How much am I trying to please people? Addicted to pleasing people? Obsessed with pleasing people? Terrified of not pleasing people?

How much shame-resilience is needed to be a slave of Christ?

Many Christians struggle with disenchantment, but our experience isn't wholly characterized by disenchantment. We're still haunted. Here and there we still bump into the magic. We're interrupted by beauty and ugliness. We're caught up by wonder and awe. We suspect there is more to the universe than the equations of particle physics. We revel in the mystery.

Yes, we have our doubts. But we also, from time to time, doubt our doubts. Belief nags at us, so we crave help with our unbelief.

In his book A Secular Age Charles Taylor argues that modernity isn't a wholly disenchanted space. Modernity is characterized by cross-pressures of belief and unbelief, enchantment and disenchantment, immanence and transcendence. Yes, there are the downward pressures of disenchantment, which collapse the spiritual and transcendent into the physical and the immanent. But here and there in the secular world we also experience updrafts of enchantment, a pull toward the heavens.

As Taylor writes (p. 549), the secular is "that open space where you can feel the winds pulling you, now to belief, now to unbelief."

Of course, each person experiences the cross-pressures of these countervailing winds to different degrees. Some feel the downward pressure of disenchantment more than others. Doubts are heavier, belief is harder. Still, if you're a Christian you're at least haunted by Christianity. And all of us, like I said, bump into the magic from time to time.

So I think the first thing we have to do, if we want to edge toward enchantment, is name and recognize these cross-pressures and then learn to surf the updrafts of enchantment.

Our church retreat is on the Frio River. The Frio has carved out a small canyon in the Texas hills. So when you sit by the river and look to the top of the canyon you can watch the birds circling, riding the rising warm air from the bottom of the canyon to the top. As the air warms in the Texas sun it rises. This rising air is called a thermal, and birds will ride these thermals upward. Like an elevator of air.

These thermals aren't strong winds or updrafts. They are gentle and subtle.

When I think about edging toward enchantment I think about those birds on the Frio river. I think about catching subtle updrafts of transcendence, thermals of enchantment in our day to day lives.

Boiled down to its essence, I think you keep in touch with enchantment by intentionally attending to the thermals of enchantment, subtle as they are, to rest in them and ride them upward. I think a lot of our struggles with disenchantment stem from failing to attend to the updrafts of transcendence in our lives. We binge on disenchantment, ruminating on everything that gives us doubt. But we don't give equal time to the magic and mystery.

For many of us, reconnecting with enchantment will be an intentional, attentional practice.

Enchantment is like a bird spreading its wings to feel and search for that subtle thermal updraft.

Our struggles with disenchantment is a huge theme in my recent book. It's right there in the subtitle of Reviving Old Scratch:

Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted

Last week we talked about the enchanted versus disenchanted divide that separates the Christian church, generally along educational and socioeconomic lines. Globally, yes, with the West more disenchanted than the South, but also locally.

For example, as I tell the story in Reviving Old Scratch, when I first started going out to the prison and sharing life at Freedom Fellowship (a church plant reaching out to a socioeconomically marginalized part of our town) I was taken aback about how much talk there was about demons and the devil. It was a strange experience because what drew me to the margins of my town was a progressive but disenchanted vision of Christianity that focused on social justice.

Worldviews collided.

There I was, an educated, progressive Christian surrounded by talk of angels and demons.

In my own town I had crashed into the enchanted/disenchanted divide that separates Christians.

In the prison and at Freedom this divide manifests in numerous ways, but I felt it most acutely in all the talk about demons and the devil. My progressive, disenchanted, social-justice oriented view of Christianity drew me to the the margins of my town but left me ill-equipped to handle prayer requests for angelic protection or for deliverance from demons. The language of my disenchanted prayer life was moral and therapeutic in focus--"help us be agents of grace, give us comfort and peace."--rather than supernatural.

My disenchanted prayer life lacked the theology and words to pray, with theological and intellectual integrity and conviction, for my brothers and sisters in enchanted contexts.

My disenchantment had interrupted by ability to be pastorally present, vital and effective in these more enchanted spaces.

From a autobiographical perspective, then, Reviving Old Scratch is a "Devil for Doubters" book chronicling my attempt to overcome the enchanted/disenchanted divide out at the prison and at Freedom when it comes to the subject of "spiritual warfare." In this sense, Reviving Old Scratch is a sort of narrowly focused case study showing how doubting Christians might learn to overcome disenchantment.

And more than that, it's also a story about how much we have to gain when we edge ourselves toward enchantment.

Yesterday was Pentecost, the day we celebrate the Holy Spirit being poured out upon the church.

As a part of a series being done by the Nomad Podcast--"Pentecost for Progressives"--I was invited to provide some reflections.

So head on over to the Nomad site to listen to my installment of "Pentecost for Progressives."

A few years ago I bought a cheap guitar so that I could accompany myself when I wanted to sing old hymns. Our church had stopped singing the old gospel standards, so I missed them. Learning a few guitar chords and singing along seemed a great way to keep those songs in my life.

And over the years that's the only guitar playing I did. Playing and singing at home, mostly gospel hymns and Johnny Cash songs. "I'll Fly Away" and "Folsom Prison Blues." That's how I fed my soul.

This last spring Michael, the praise band leader at Freedom Fellowship, called to ask if I'd step in at the last minute to lead worship at Freedom. Michael knew I lead hymns out at the prison on Monday nights, and while Freedom usually worships with a praise band, Michael thought that it would be a nice change of pace for me to lead a old fashioned hymn sing.

I agreed. But since I played all those hymns with my guitar I brought that along. I lead worship that night with my guitar and it went well enough that Michael asked me once more to lead worship when a lot of the praise band members couldn't make it one Wednesday night.

I really enjoyed leading worship those nights. Most old gospel hymns are easy to play. Three simple chords can get you through a ton of songs.

And then this week happened.

All the lead acoustic guitarists who play for Michael couldn't make it this week. So Michael called to see if I wanted to try to join the band. I was hesitant. I'd never played with a band. And my guitar skills are pretty limited. But Michael encouraged me and on Tuesday night I plugged in my guitar to practice with the band for the Wednesday night service.

I learned a ton that night, and Michael, Herb, Val and Lucas were so, so encouraging. That's what I love about Freedom. It's not the quality of the performance that matters, it's the spirit in which it is offered. Truly. I've never experienced anything like worship at Freedom. I've never, in all my years at Freedom, heard anyone, ever, complain or comment on the quality of the praise band. Quality of performance is simply not on anyone's radar screen. "Good" versus "bad" is just not a filter we use.

All that to say, I knew, if I was ever going to be a part of a praise band, Freedom would be, I'm guessing, one of the only churches were that could happen. A church where I could mess up and literally no--absolutely no one---one would notice, care or comment.

And so this last Wednesday I played guitar in the Freedom praise band. And because it was Freedom I wasn't nervous in the least. Yes, I messed up a few times--like starting in on a song forgetting that I needed to put the capo on--but all I got from the band and the congregation was encouragement and gratitude.

I did the best I could, served as best I could. We played our guitars, waved our flags, thumped our tambourines, clapped our hands and sang out loud.

You might be unfamiliar with how we'll be using the terms enchantment and disenchantment, as sociological and cultural adjectives.

We're borrowing these terms from Charles Taylor's book A Secular Age.

As Taylor describes early in A Secular Age (p. 29), "the enchanted world [is] the world of spirits, demons [and] moral forces our predecessors acknowledged." Sometimes the enchanted world is called "pre-modern," as in before the Enlightenment and the technological and scientific revolutions that radically remolded the world and our relationship to the cosmos.

The pre-modern, enchanted world was spooky. Filled with occult forces, spirits, spells, superstitions and things that go bump in the night. Ghosts, witches, demons, devils and monsters.

Our "modern" world, by contrast, especially in the West, is experienced as disenchanted. Due to the amazing advances in science and technology over the last 500 years, instead of a spooky, spirit-filled world we've come to view the world mechanistically. The world isn't haunted, it's a machine. In our disenchanted world it's harder to believe in spiritual, supernatural, heavenly or miraculous things. Christians struggling with disenchantment struggle to believe in heaven, hell, the soul, angels, demons, the Devil, miracles, prayer, the supernatural stories in the Bible (like the resurrection of Jesus), and God.

On this blog and in my new book Reviving Old Scratch I like to use Scooby-Doo to describe our 500 year journey in the West from enchantment to disenchantment.

A Scooby-Doo episode starts with enchantment. When Scooby and the gang first come to a town there's a spook or monster plaguing the town. But as the episode progresses the kids get suspicious. They trap the monster to unmask a human criminal. The story that began in enchantment, with a spook, ends in disenchantment, with a human moral agent.

As I described in the last post, this is the same thing that happens when Christianity becomes disenchanted. The frame shifts away from the supernatural toward the moral. Christianity is about being a good person. Conservative Christians have a vision of what this moral personal looks like. Progressive Christians have a different vision of what this moral personal looks like. Regardless, the focus is the same: Christianity is about morality.

As it should and must be. But a thoroughly moralized and disenchanted Christianity raises all sorts of questions. For example: Why do you have to do religious things, like go to church on Sundays, to be a moral person? And if you don't have to believe in God, the Devil, miracles or life after death to practice the Golden Rule then what's the point of believing in any of these things?

Lots of Christians who are struggling with disenchantment don't have any good answers to these questions, and I think that's one of the big reasons so many Christians are drifting toward agnosticism and atheism.

Which makes me think that a thoroughly disenchanted Christianity just isn't sustainable.

At some point, for Christianity to remain vital and energized it has to reconnect with enchantment.

During the winter the adult Bible class I help teach on Sunday mornings was doing a study of the Elijah and Elisha narratives in 1 and 2 Kings.

One Sunday my assignment was to teach through 2 Kings 6. The story that opens Chapter Six is another miracle story in a string of miracle stores from the preceding chapters. In 2 Kings 4 we see Elisha doing a series of miracles: Expanding a widow's store of oil (2 Kings 4.1-7), raising the son of the Shunammite woman from the dead (2 Kings 4.8-37), neutralizing some poisoned stew (2 Kings 4.38-41) and multiplying food to feed a hundred prophets (2 Kings 4.42-44). In 2 Kings 5 we have the healing of Naaman the leper. And then in 2 Kings 6 we get to this story:

2 Kings 6.1-7
The company of the prophets said to Elisha, “Look, the place where we meet with you is too small for us. Let us go to the Jordan, where each of us can get a pole; and let us build a place there for us to meet.” And he said, “Go.” Then one of them said, “Won’t you please come with your servants?” “I will,” Elisha replied. And he went with them.

They went to the Jordan and began to cut down trees. As one of them was cutting down a tree, the iron axhead fell into the water. “Oh no, my lord!” he cried out. “It was borrowed!” The man of God asked, “Where did it fall?” When he showed him the place, Elisha cut a stick and threw it there, and made the iron float. “Lift it out,” he said. Then the man reached out his hand and took it.

What do you do with a story like this in a Bible class full of educated, modern, Western Christians? Of course, from a narrative and literary perspective we can discuss how the miracle functions within the story. But what is the lesson in this story for us?

Do we think that axeheads can float in our own lives?

Do we expect miracles?

I asked this question of my Bible class because one of the things I've noticed over the years is the difference between my Sunday morning experience and my Monday and Wednesday night experiences.

On Sunday mornings I worship at the Highland Church of Christ. Highland is a mixed bag, demographically, but we are a pretty educated bunch, with lots of college professors in attendance. And by and large, the conversation about God at Highland tends toward the moral and therapeutic rather than the miraculous. God wants us to be good, moral people. Compassionate and concerned about injustice and suffering. And during times of struggle, stress, loss or tragedy we call upon God to give us peace, comfort, wisdom and strength. But we don't, by and large, expect miracles.We're much more likely to pray for comfort over the loss of an axehead than to pray for the axehead to float.

My experience on Monday and Wednesday nights is very different. As regular readers know, I teach a Bible class on Monday nights out at a prison. And on Wednesday nights I worship at Freedom Fellowship, a Highland church plant in a poor part of our town.

Out at the prison and at Freedom we expect miracles. There isn't any intellectual embarrassment about praying for axeheads to float. Shoot, people have experienced axeheads floating. Miracle stories are very common at the prison and at Freedom.

In short, my experience on Sunday mornings tends to be disenchanted while my experience on Monday and Wednesday nights tends to be enchanted.

For example, when I read the story of the axehead in Sunday morning Bible class we're all a bit embarrassed and puzzled by the story, more likely to think about the story in a literary sort of way than expecting anything like that to happen in our own lives. By contrast, if you read the story of the axehead out at the prison or at Freedom people there would say, "Totally have seen something like that happen."

This division between enchantment/disenchantment across socioeconomic and educational lines isn't anything new. Vatican elites are embarrassed by the magical and superstitious beliefs among poor Catholics worldwide. Religion is on the decline in the rich, secular West but charismatic and pentecostal spirituality is exploding in Third World contexts. And in my own town I step across the threshold when I move from worshiping with college-educated people to worshiping at Freedom or at the prison.

All this is to bring us to the point I made to my Bible class about the floating axehead story.

"Basically," I said, "our church tends toward disenchantment. Because of our education and wealth. Beyond a literary analysis, we don't know what to do with a miracle story like this. But my experience out at the prison and with Freedom is very different, much more enchanted. I don't know what to do with that disjoint. I just want to make the observation that the disjoint exists. It's my opinion that this is one of the least discussed fractures in the church, the fracture between the enchanted church and the disenchanted church, which is often correlated with education and socioeconomic status. Is it possible to overcome this divide?"

We didn't get much past me making these observations and putting this question to the class. But afterwards a few in the class encouraged me, at some point, to return to this subject. They expressed struggling with disenchantment. And they had also bumped up against the enchantment/disenchantment divide in their own lives--within a marriage, within a friendship, within the church. One person living with an enchanted Christianity where axeheads float clashing with another person whose disenchanted Christianity is discomfited by stories of floating axeheads. Did I, these class members asked, have any suggestions about how to overcome this divide? Or any thoughts about how disenchanted Christians might recover or edge toward a more enchanted Christianity?

I'd like to devote some posts to pondering these questions. While I'll be gathering these posts under the title "Edging Toward Enchantment" I won't be using "Part 1" or "Part 2" as we go. I'm not going to be building toward anything with these posts. Just collecting thoughts, ideas and impressions I have.

I want to ramble through some ideas and insights in a desultory way. Thinking out loud about enchantment and how we might recover it.

I'm back over at Luke Norsworthy's podcast, along with Jonathan Storment.

In the podcast we talk about N.T. Wright, Greg Boyd, demon possession, a theology of revolt, the problem of suffering, the privilege of doubt, concerns about talking about the devil, Jesus' political imagination, how drinking bad coffee is saving the world, and how making peanut butter sandwiches is a form of spiritual warfare, all related to my new book Reviving Old Scratch.

Incidentally, our discussion about the problem of suffering is, I think, one of the most potent insights in Reviving Old Scratch. Specifically, I make the point in the book that compassion is often the acid of faith.

How's that?

Well, compassion draws us to Jesus and deeper into the suffering of the world. But the deeper we go into that suffering the greater our doubts and the greater our theodicy concerns: Why is God allowing this?

Compassion draws us to faith in Jesus. And then compassion--or, rather, the doubts generated by our compassion--erodes faith in Jesus.

The cross-pressure between compassion and faith is, I think, the quicksand that has sunk the faith of many a progressive and liberal Christian. And the solution, in my estimation, is adopting Jesus's theology of revolt, reviving Jesus' battle with Old Scratch.

And a last programming note, Fortress Press just let me know about a promotional deal for Reviving Old Scratch.

If you use the promo code BECK30 with Fortress Press you'll get 30% off the book and free shipping. To order you can call 800-328-4648, email (salesandservice@augsburgfortress.org), or place the order online at the Fortress site entering the promo code at checkout. This discount is good through 5/31.

I was recently digging into the etymology of the word enthusiastic.

The word enthusiastic comes from the Greek root entheos (literally en “in” + theos “God”), meaning to be filled by God (or a god). An enthusiastic Christian is a Christian who has been filled by God.

Obviously, in Christian theology there would a pneumological connection here. Enthusiasm would mean being filled by the Holy Spirit.

But when I looked at the passages in the New Testament about being "filled with the Spirit" the word that is used isn't entheo but πληρόω (pléroó). For example:

Ephesians 5:18
Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled [plērousthe] with the Spirit.

The Greek word pléroó means "to fill up."

So, to keep things biblical, instead of talking about enthusiastic Christians I was wondering if we should speak of pleroostic Christians!

But then I thought, talking about pleroostic Christians--"filled Christians"--doesn't specify what, exactly, we are being filled with the way entheo does (i.e., filled by God).

So if we connect pléroó--"filled"--with pneuma--the word for Spirit--then we'd have a word similar to enthusiasm, a biblically-rooted adjective for being "Spirit filled":

 pléroó + pneuma = filled with the Spirit

So what word would that create? Pleroopneumatic? Pronounced "plea-roo-new-matic?"

Instead of enthusiastic Christians, if we have a winner here, Spirit-filled Christians would be called pleroopneumatic Christians!

PS.
Yes, this is what I do in my free time.

It's been a full week here in California. It's been a blast getting to talk about my book with people like Greg Boyd and Tom Wright. A highlight was Fortress Press taking Tom and I to dinner one night.

At dinner I made sure Jana got to sit beside Tom. Why? Because everyone loves Jana. It's not that I'm socially inept or anything. I'm affable. It's just that Jana is so warm and delightful. A few year's ago when I was at a conference with Walter Brueggemann Jana and Walter completely hit it off. They were thick as thieves by the end of the conference. I knew that would happen again with Tom. Because it always happens.

Jana and Tom talked a lot about his work as a pastor and bishop, especially about walking alongside those going through grief and loss. They also talked a lot about Jana's work as a theater teacher. They compared family photos and talked family.

Once, when I was visiting my friend Kristi at her assisted living facility, Jana was with me. One of the men living there came up and said to her, "I have to say, Miss, that you're a little bit magical."

Magical.

That's Jana.

I'm a social scientist who writes theology. What that means is that I often import the sensibilities of social science into theological conversations. An example of that can be found in my new book Reviving Old Scratch and how I handle the existence of the devil.

Before turning to Lucifer, let me illustrate something from the field of psychology. Let's start with a question:

Why do people dream?

Every semester I lecture on sleep and dreams, a unit in my Introduction to Psychology class. The lecture is packed full of descriptive details. The cycles of our circadian rhythms. The four stages of sleeps. The contrast between REM and Non-REM sleep. The distinction between nightmares and night terrors. Phenomenon like sleep paralysis.

It's really one of the most interesting lectures of the semester.

And inevitably the question comes. A hand is raised.

"Dr. Beck, why do we dream?"

And the answer is, we really don't know. There are bunch of different theories. And I review each of these, but there is no consensus about which theory is right.

And the point I make to the students is that, when it comes to dreams and a host of other phenomena, there is a difference between description and explanation.

Both description and explanation are solidly scientific. All that we know about Non-REM and REM sleep is from hard-core science. But it’s descriptive science, describing, for example, what the brain waves are doing as you move through Stage 1 sleep to Stage 4 sleep and then into REM.

But that rich, empirical scientific description isn’t explanation. We don’t know why the brain needs to do this, why we dream. We do have some theories about why we dream, but we don’t know which, if any of them, is correct.

So what we have here is a collection of different explanations for the same phenomenon. Everyone agrees with the description, but we disagree on the explanation.

Sleep isn’t the only example here. When it comes to the etiology of mental illness you’ll get competing explanations from your therapist depending upon if he or she is working from a humanistic, psychodynamic, cognitive, behavioral or some other theoretical model. These theoretical models all differ when in comes to the explanation of depression—Why is Susan depressed?—but everyone agrees on the clinical description of depression.

In short, there is a difference between description and explanation. And many times when we disagree with the explanation we can all agree with the description.

Which brings us to the devil.

Last night in my conversation with N.T. Wright and Greg Boyd, I brought up this distinction in how I handle the devil in Reviving Old Scratch. I don’t try to resolve the issue about if the devil actually exists. I leave that as an open question. What I try to do instead in Reviving Old Scratch is good, rich descriptive work.

When it comes to spiritual warfare and the devil, believers and skeptics might disagree about why, for example, we experience temptation. Maybe it's because a literal demon is sitting on your shoulder whispering into your ear. Or maybe it is due to an innate and evolved tendency of human psychology. The explanations might differ. But we all agree on the description. Here, right now, I’m finding it difficult to act the way Jesus would have acted. In a word, love is hard.

Now, why is love hard? Explanations will abound. Regardless, we all agree--descriptively speaking--that love is hard.

Some people might find this approach infuriating or coy. We'd like a straight answer, Does the devil exist? Yes or no? My tendency is to bracket questions like that. And a large part of that is because I’m trained as a social scientist. You can do good empirical descriptive work in situations where there is explanatory disagreement.

And what I find most useful about this is that in many theological discussions, when you shift away from explanation to description, you can get warring and irreconcilable theological positions to find common ground.

Although it began shipping early from Amazon, Reviving Old Scratch is now officially out.

Thanks to all of you who have already ordered a copy of the book. If you're waiting and wanting to kick the tires of the book, reviews are starting to appear on Amazon and you can read the Table of Contents, the Prelude and Chapter 1 at Fortress Press.

Over the last two weeks Reviving Old Scratch has been the on-again off-again--the list is updated every hour it seems--#1 New Release and/or the #1 Best Seller in "Christian Angelology and Demonology."

This is--How best to say it?--an interesting genre. Last week when I looked at the list in this category the Amazon bestsellers were Unmasking the Devil: Strategies to Defeat Eternity's Greatest Enemy, Angels by My Side: Stories and Glimpses of These Heavenly Helpers, and My Radical Encounters with Angels (Book Two): Meeting Angels, Witches, Demons, Satan, Jesus and More!

You can check out the current list here.

Hmmm. Which of those books is not like the others?

All that to say, if you'd like to see some good theology a the top of the Amazon bestseller list for "Christian Angelology and Demonology" do the world a favor pick up a copy of Reviving Old Scratch.

One of my favorite images from the psalms comes from Psalm 84.

Psalm 84.1-4
How lovely is your dwelling place,
Lord Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints,
for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh cry out
for the living God.
Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may have her young—
a place near your altar,
Lord Almighty, my King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in your house;
they are ever praising you.

The image is from verse 3, the image of sparrows and swallows making nests in the temple courts. 

What I like about the image is how, very plausibly, it places the poet in the temple courts at the time of composition. You can imagine the poet sitting in the temple with the intent to compose a song. The poet begins with expected lines, extolling the temple as home, as the resting place our hearts are yearning for. The poet then pauses and begins to think about what should come next in the song.

And then an unexpected image. Birds nesting in the temple. Where did this image come from?

The origin seems obvious enough. As the poet's eyes take in the temple courts, heart searching for the next lines, the poet looks up at the sky and notices the birds overhead, flying to and fro from their nests high up in the nooks and crannies of the temple. The poet watches the birds meditatively. And then the flash of recognition--Look, even the birds long to live here!

Of course, the poem could have been written at some other time and place, with the birds nesting in the temple as a memory of a past visit. But I've always felt that the insertion of the nesting birds in the poem was most likely a spontaneous insight prompted by the poet actually siting in the temple court while composing the song. The poet's vision caught by the sight of the birds.

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

--Thomas Merton