Having described Paul Jones' notions of obsessio and epiphania, which define one's theological world, the other thing I'd like to note concerns Jones' observation about the relative balancing of our experiences of obsessio versus epiphania.

Again, the obsessio concerns our experiences of brokenness. Epiphania our experiences of grace. Theologically, the obsessio concerns "the Fall" and the epiphania concerns "salvation." And according to Jones, we locate these experiences in different places creating a unique and particular spiritual experience, quest, and journey. Our theological world.

We'll turn to those theological worlds shortly, but before we do there's one additional thing that Jones puts on our radar screen regarding the relationship of obsessio to epiphania. He writes:

There is one more factor to be identified in the emergence of a theological World—the role played by what we will call temperament (“proper mixing”). While the dynamic of obsessio and epiphania is universal, for some individuals, the emphasis falls heaviest on obsessio; for others, on epiphania…

Beyond the location of the obsessio, which we'll get to, there is the relative experience of obsessio to epiphania. That is to say, for some people the experience of epiphania--the experience of assurance, grace, goodness, and salvation--predominate. For others, the experience of the epiphania is more fleeting, episodic, and fragile. Salvation seems furtive, like the sun hidden behind storm clouds, only peeking out intermittently. For these people, the experience of the obsessio, the felt sense of brokenness, predominates.

In my research and writing, I've described these two types of believers as "Summer Christians" and "Winter Christians." In the Summer Christian experience the experience of epiphania predominates. The top notes of faith are joy, peace, conviction, and positivity. By contrast, among Winter Christians the obsessio is felt more keenly. Faith is shadowed by doubt and lament. Simply:

Summer Christian Experience = Epiphana > Obsessio

Winter Christian Experience = Obsessio > Epiphania

According to Jones, this balance and mixing creates a theological "temperament," and he suggests it might be as durable as your personality. That is to say, while everyone goes through winter seasons of faith, some of us might be consistently winter in orientation, experience, and outlook due to how we're wired or put together. I'll have more to day about how I relate to this in the posts to come.

For today, however, you can think about yourself. Where do your spiritual experiences seem to settle? On the obsessio side of the equation, or the epiphania? More doubt or more conviction? More lament or more praise? More Summer or more Winter? 

What's your theological temperament? 

Over the years, I've written from time to time about Paul Jones' notion of theological worlds, most recently in 2022. 

Whenever I find myself speaking about the spiritual life I regularly bring up the idea of theological worlds, and pretty much no one has ever heard of the idea. So, I'm going to revisit the topic in this series and, to give it a new twist, reflect on my own spiritual life and journey. I'll share my theological world and how it has shaped my faith and thinking. I'm also going to do some creative speculation about the various types of theological worlds proposed by Jones, which I've never done before. All that to say, after two introductory posts there will be some new stuff for longtime readers to engage with. 

So, to begin, what is a theological world? 

According to Paul Jones, we each inhabit a distinctive "theological world." These "worlds" are characterized by a particular obsessio and epiphania. Here is how Jones describes our obsessio:

An obsessio is whatever functions deeply and pervasively in one’s life as a defining quandary, a conundrum, a boggling of the mind, a hemorrhaging of the soul, a wound that bewilders healing, a mystification than renders one’s life cryptic. Whatever inadequate words one might choose to describe it, an obsessio is that which so gets its teeth into a person that it establishes one’s life as plot. It is a memory which, as resident image, becomes so congealed as Question that all else in one’s experience is sifted in terms of its promise as Answer. Put another way, an obsessio is whatever threatens to deadlock Yeses with No. It is one horn that establishes life as dilemma…The etymology of the word says it well: obsessio means “to be besieged."

Basically, the obsessio is the Question of your existence, theologically speaking. Your obsessio names where you think the brokenness of life is located. Where you think the world is wounded or bleeding. What you experience as dislocated or wrong. 

The epiphania, by contrast, is the location or direction where you find an Answer to your obsessio, what might be experienced by you as grace, salvation, answer, fixing, mending, or healing. Jones:

…epiphania, etymologically meaning “to show upon,” that which keeps the functioning obsessio fluid, hopeful, searching, restless, energized, intriguing, as a question worth pursuing for a lifetime. It keeps one’s obsessio from becoming a fatal conclusion that signals futility…Epiphania is epiphany precisely because its absurdity resides in being too good to be true.

The critical point, according to Jones, is that our obsessios are different. That is to say, you and I place the brokenness of the world in different locations. This means that we search for different epiphanias, an experience of grace or salvation that would heal the wound or answer the question. Basically, we each have different felt experiences about what is wrong with the world. And, as a result, we go looking for different sorts of answers. 

Thus, your unique obsessio and epiphania creates a distinctive spiritual experience, defining the sort of faith quest you are on. Your theological world.

"God stands in the divine assembly; he pronounces judgment among the gods"

Psalm 82 is famous for its expression of Hebrew henotheism. Henotheism is the belief in a supreme deity who reigns over lesser gods. As I expect you are aware, the Old Testament presents a mixed witness regarding how populous the heavens are. Some very monotheistic texts suggest that there are no other gods in existence other than Yahweh. Other texts, by contrast, seem to indicate that there are other gods and that Yahweh is supreme over them. Psalm 82 is one of those texts. We see Yahweh take his place in a "divine assembly" where he "pronounces judgment among the gods." 

These gods in Psalm 82 are the cause of injustice and oppression upon earth:

“How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked?
Provide justice for the needy and the fatherless;
uphold the rights of the oppressed and the destitute.
Rescue the poor and needy;
save them from the power of the wicked.”

In Reviving Old Scratch I trace a thread through the Old and New Testaments, linking these divine archons with what the New Testament calls "the principalities and powers." Texts like Deuteronomy 32.8-9 suggest that God assigned angelic archons to rule over the nations of the earth. We see this territoriality play out in Daniel 10 where the angelic messenger faces interference from territorial spirits, the "prince of Persia" and the "prince of Greece." These national angels become objects of illicit worship, the idolatry associated with the pagan gods. They eventually become identified as demons. 1 Corinthians 10.20 makes the connection: "The sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons." A final step is to view Satan as the chief power over all these demonic archons. Satan becomes "the god of this world" (Eph 2:2) who rules over the nations (see the temptation of Jesus and the book of Revelation), the angelic cause of oppression and evil upon the earth.

All that to say, as I describe in Reviving Old Scratch, our battle against these spiritual powers is both moral and political, spiritual and systemic. This complicates how both conservatives and progressives think about "spiritual warfare." Conservatives tend to treat the demonic as a wholly moral/spiritual issue, separate from how nations and economies hurt and oppress. Progressives, for their part, reduce spiritual warfare to social justice and ignore the profoundly spiritual and moral aspects of spiritual warfare. Both miss the richer and holistic vision of Scripture where the moral, spiritual, political, and economic are deeply intertwined. 

In light of Monday's post about enchantment and disenchantment I wanted to return to a topic I've written about before and have described to many audiences in sharing about Hunting Magic Eels. Specifically, the enchanted versus disenchanted divide is one of the biggest, yet least talked about, divisions in our churches.

In most of the faith communities I've spent time with over the years, there are two churches in the same building, two congregations sitting in the same pews. One church is the enchanted church, the church that believes in miracles, petitionary prayer, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and spiritual warfare.

The other church is the disenchanted church, that church that doubts miracles, God answering prayer, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the reality of Satan and demons.

Wherever you go to church, odds are you are worshiping with two congregations, the enchanted and the disenchanted. And in my experience, these groups hardly talk to each other because they find the other group strange and weird.

Here are two examples of this divide I've encountered in my church.

Like a lot of churches, our church had to make some budgetary adjustments after COVID. During these conversations the enchanted/disenchanted divide emerged among our leaders. On the one side where the leaders who approached our fiscal issues in a wholly disenchanted way. The Excel spreadsheet was front and center and the tools we used to address the issue were the tools of corporate finance and accounting. But on the other side were the more enchanted leaders. Fiscal issues were to be addressed with spiritual and miraculous means. The issue wasn't money, the issue was faith. We handle financial shortfalls by getting on our knees in prayer, asking the Lord to act.

Of course, we can do both. And we did both. But imaginations tend to gravitate toward one solution or the other. What is going to save us? Prudent budgetary cuts or the Lord God Almighty?

A second example concerns praying over those about to undergo a medical procedure. Many prayers are miracle-adjacent. We pray for the doctors, the surgeons, and all the medical personnel and procedures. We ask God to be involved in all of that human and technological activity. Others, though, just cut right to the chase. The prayer skips the medicine and petitions God directly for full healing, right then and right there. The petition is literally for a miracle. 

Again, we can pray for both. And we do pray for both. But imaginations tend to gravitate toward one solution or the other. What is going to save us? Medicine or a miracle? 

The examples abound, and I expect you have your own stories to share. Like I said, the enchanted versus disenchanted divide is one of the biggest, yet least talked about, divisions in our churches.

"Who among us will celebrate Christmas correctly? Whoever finally lays down all power, all honor, all reputation, all vanity, all arrogance, all individualism beside the manger; whoever remains lowly and lets God alone be high; whoever looks at the child in the manger and sees the glory of God precisely in his lowliness."

--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Magi"

We seek between sand and stars.
Betwixt this shifting, chameleon landscape
and the vault of fixed invariance.
Squeezed in the vice of time and eternity
we are aching
dreaming dust.

But here we find in a mother's arms
the reconciliation of heaven and earth.
Behold the divinization of flesh and bone
where we the riven
are made whole.

I was recently presenting about enchantment and disenchantment and one of the points I made, a point I've made ever since the publication of Reviving Old Scratch and more recently with Hunting Magic Eels, is the colonial aspect of doubt and disenchantment. I wrote about this here in 2019.

There are two aspects related to the colonialism of disenchantment.

The first aspect is the observation that disenchantment is largely a Western problem. The Christianity of the global East and South is very much enchanted. In Africa, South America, and the East Christians don't need convincing that the devil exists and that malevolent spiritual forces are at work in the world. Educated white people in America and Europe doubt this, but the rest of the world doesn't.

A different way to make this point is to observe that disenchantment is WEIRD. WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. Over the last few decades in psychology a conversation has started about how the vast majority of participants in psychological research has come from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic nations. These studies produce psychological findings we too quickly assume hold for the rest of the world. But do they? How weird are WEIRD participants? The answer, it turns out, is pretty damn weird. Numerous studies have shown that WEIRD participants behave very differently from the rest of the world. Here, then, is another way to describe the colonialism of disenchantment. Most of the world is enchanted. Disenchantment, by contrast, is both WEIRD and weird.

A second aspect concerning the colonialism of disenchantment is harder to admit about ourselves but it has had a historical impact upon colonialism. 

Specifically, the disenchanted Christianity of progressive Christians in the West is considered to be more "educated," "complex," and "scientifically literate" than more enchanted forms of Christian belief. This is largely due to the fact that many progressive Christians, especially ex-evangelicals, have been on a journey away from the enchanted Christianity of their childhood. This journey is typically narrated as a developmental process, moving from childhood naivete into something more ambiguous, yes, but something more adult and mature, more willing and courageous to "face doubts" and "live with the questions." Sometimes this developmental process is described as an "evolution," from a simpler to a more complex faith.

The unspoken assumption here is that enchanted forms of faith are childish, naive, and simplistic. We grow out of certainty to embrace doubt. A Christianity that doubts and questions the enchanted aspects of faith is felt to be mature, sophisticated, and complex. Combine these things and you have the the colonialism of disenchantment. The skeptical, questioning, doubting, faith of progressive Christianity in the West is the more evolved faith. By contrast, the enchanted faith of the global East and South is more primitive, naive, and superstitious. The West, by rejecting enchantment, became "enlightened." Disenchantment is adult and grown-up, whereas enchantment is childish, trafficking in make-believe and fairy tales.

This, I have argued, is one of the great paradoxes of progressive, ex-evangelical Christianity, how it claims to be a champion of a post-colonial Christianity in the world, yet enacts and embodies a WEIRD and colonial attitude when it comes to enchantment.

This isn't idle speculation. Disenchantment had a significant role in the colonial project. As Graham Jones has argued in his book Magic's Reason: An Anthropology of Analogy disenchantment aided colonialism in two different ways.  

First, the rise of entertainment magic in the West was linked to Enlightenment values. The modern stage magician was no longer viewed as an agent of the occult but was, rather, a skilled illusionist. Magic became "scientific" and "technical." The audience knew what they were witnessing was a "trick." What happened on the stage looked like "magic," but the audience knew better, and that was a part of the delight and fascination. This E/enlightened approach to magic facilitated disenchantment among the masses.

As Jones writes, "modern magical showmen were expected to present tricks as tricks to audiences eager to be deceived, but not so credulous as to mistake illusions for reality. These performers agentively carved out associations with science." Thus, "Western illusionism converged with modern materialist cosmology and empiricist epistemology...[B]y the beginning of the nineteenth century, the illusionist had emerged as 'a powerful symbol of progress' in the West, as a scientific popularizer and debunker of superstitions...The close association of entertainment magic with Enlightenment values of rationality, skepticism, and materialism made it a powerful resource for signifying secular modernity..."

Jones' second observation is that, once the stage magician became an agent of disenchantment, he could be used to expose and create a contrast with "primitive" peoples who still "believed in magic." In contrast to the Western stage magician, the sorcerers, witches, and shamans of ingenious peoples were viewed as cons taking advantage of uneducated savages. The modern stage magician demonstrated how indigenous magic was just "tricks," and that anyone who "believed in" these tricks was primitive, childish, and backward. Thus, in "exposing" indigenous magic for what it was, while noting the incredulous nature of the "savages," modern magic fueled the narrative of "progress" that gave birth to the colonial project. Indigenous people who believed in "magic" were "childish" and "primitive" and in need of parenting, education, and supervision.

As Jones writes,

The era of colonialism invigorated Enlightenment discourses of progress by dramatizing the dominion of Western European powers over less technologically advanced peoples of the global south. It also provided magicians with a new foil: "primitive"--or, in Weber's parlance, "savage"--magicians reputed to hold sway among colonial populations. More than Europe's fairground quacks and village soothsayers, ritual experts in non-Western traditions came to figure in the literature and lore of entertainment magic as conceptual embodiments of premodern, non-modern, or antimodern approaches to magic. Magic authors drew on a variety of ethnographic representations and erudite commentaries in constructing these discourses, equating the benighted outlook of present-day colonial subjects with the superstitious beliefs of Europe's historical past. 

In short, a disenchanted approach to "magic" supported the colonial project.

Jones goes on in Magic's Reason to show how modern magicians were used by colonial powers to discredit indigenous shamans and sorcerers. Jones recounts the case of Robert-Houdin, the Father of Modern of Magic, who was used by the French colonialists to "debunk" and "expose" the "trickery" of the marabouts, popular religious figures in colonial Algeria. 

Here in the case of Robert-Houdin we see disenchantment--a refusal to believe in magic--used as an agent of colonial oppression. A disenchanted approach toward "magic" was associated with progress, advancement, and reason, the attitude that justified the paternalistic posture behind the colonial project to educate backward, childish, savage, and primitive colonial populations. If you believed in magic that, quite literally, justified your oppression.

All this, then, is what I call "the colonialism of disenchantment."

"Nativity"

To find you here,
slick with blood
and warmed by straw,
is not what we imagined.
We prayed for magic
and escape,
a cessation to our aching.
But here is answered
a question we were not asking,
reversing expectations
of grace and deliverance.
This strange exodus.

"I tested you at the Waters of Meribah"

The events of Meribah play a huge role in the Torah and the Psalms. Two events are recounted, one in Exodus 17 and the other in Numbers 20. The first occurs near Mount Sinai, right after Israel's deliverance from Egypt, and the other occurs near the border of the Promised Land. Psalm 81 seems to be referring to the events of Exodus 17. Israel has just been delivered from slavery:

I am the Lord your God,
who brought you up from the land of Egypt.
Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.

And yet, having just experienced this deliverance, the people cry out in distrust and dismay for water in the desert. From Exodus 17:

The entire Israelite community left the Wilderness of Sin, moving from one place to the next according to the Lord’s command. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. So the people complained to Moses, “Give us water to drink.”

“Why are you complaining to me?” Moses replied to them. “Why are you testing the Lord?”

But the people thirsted there for water and grumbled against Moses. They said, “Why did you ever bring us up from Egypt to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?”

Then Moses cried out to the Lord, “What should I do with these people? In a little while they will stone me!”

The Lord answered Moses, “Go on ahead of the people and take some of the elders of Israel with you. Take the staff you struck the Nile with in your hand and go. I am going to stand there in front of you on the rock at Horeb; when you hit the rock, water will come out of it and the people will drink.” Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel. He named the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites complained, and because they tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Interestingly, in Exodus 17 all the descriptions of "testing" are on Israel's side, the people "testing" God: 

Moses replied to them. “Why are you testing the Lord?”

He named the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites complained, and because they tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

So the testing seems to be going both ways. God brings the Israelites into the desert where there faith is examined, tried, and tested. And the people, in turn, test God to see if God will bring them water. This testing of God from Israel's side is filled with unbelief and distrust. That theme is echoed in Psalm 81:

“But my people did not listen to my voice;
Israel did not obey me.
So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts
to follow their own plans.
If only my people would listen to me
and Israel would follow my ways,
I would quickly subdue their enemies
and turn my hand against their foes.”

I don't know if this is an appropriate jump in associations, but in pondering this my mind kept going to that enigmatic petition from the Lord's Prayer: "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." Many scholars have pointed out that "temptation" might not be the best word here. "Trial" or "testing" is better. The NRSV renders the petition this way, along with an alternative reading: 

And do not bring us to the time of trial,
but rescue us from the evil one.

And do not bring us to the time of testing,
but rescue us from the evil one.

I can't help but wonder if Jesus has Massah and Meribah in mind here, that the petition, as described in Psalm 81, is to be delivered from our "stubborn hearts," our wavering unfaithfulness. The petition "do not bring us to the time of trial/testing" is a petition to be delivered from the exposure of Meribah. Spare us such an examination! The petition is an acknowledgement of our frailty and failure and begs for mercy and deliverance. We can't pass the test, so we plead for help.

I recently mentioned I had, as a J.R.R. Tolkien fan, finally gotten around to reading The Silmarillion.

One of the things that struck me in reading The Silmarillion was Tolkien's depiction of the cosmic, angelic fall that brings evil to Middle Earth. Again, this is well-trod territory, and I had known about the fall of Melkor. So, it wasn't discovering this part of Tolkien's world that caught my attention but was, rather, the evocative way he describes the impact of Melkor's fall on the world at the end of the Quenta Silmarillion. That evocation is what interrupted me.

But before we get to those haunting lines, let me catch everyone up. Not everyone is a Tolkien nerd.

At the beginning of time Eru, who is also called Ilúvatar, the One, creates the world by singing it into existence. Among his creation are divine beings calls the Ainur. The Ainur are invited by Eru Ilúvatar to participate in creation by joining his harmony. The Ainur do so, but one of their number, Melkor, begins to insert dissonant notes of his own devising:

But now Ilúvatar sat and hearkened, and for a great while it seemed good to him, for in the music there were no flaws. But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself. To Melkor among the Ainur had been given the greatest gifts of power and knowledge, and he had a share in all the gifts of his brethren. He had gone often alone into the void places seeking the Imperishable Flame; for desire grew hot within him to bring into Being things of his own, and it seemed to him that Ilúvatar took no thought for the Void, and he was impatient of its emptiness.

Some of these thoughts he now wove into his music, and straightway discord arose about him, and many that sang nigh him grew despondent, and their thought was disturbed and their music faltered; but some began to attune their music to his rather than to the thought which they had at first. Then the discord of Melkor spread ever wider, and the melodies which had been heard before foundered in a sea of turbulent sound. But Ilúvatar sat and hearkened until it seemed that about his throne there was a raging storm, as of dark waters that made war one upon another in an endless wrath that would not be assuaged.

As is both obvious and often pointed out, given Tolkien's Catholicism, we have here something akin to the cosmic rebellion of Satan. And while we're all aware of this Biblical cosmology, it's not one we readily inhabit. Most of the Christians I know don't assume that the world has been wrecked and remains a wreck because of dark angelic powers. Satan is typically conceived as a moral tempter, a psychological experience within our hearts, than as an angelic Archon ruling over our world. 

I bring this up, as I've pointed out before, because our imaginative distance from the Biblical cosmology affects how we think about the problem of evil. As the power of Satan has waned in our imaginations, shifting from the cosmic to the psychological, we lay the blame for evil increasingly at God's feet. To be clear, I'm not saying this blame-shifting is illegitimate. I'm just being descriptive in noting how beliefs about Satan, or a lack thereof, affect our emotional experience with God. 

Back to Tolkien. 

The Quenta Silmarillion, which is most of The Silmarillion, recounts how Melkor flees Valinor, the home of the divine beings on earth, to live in and terrorize Middle Earth, the mortal part of the world. Lots of stuff happens, but at the end of the Quenta Silmarillion Melkor, now called Morgoth, is defeated and thrown out of the world and imprisoned in the Void. 

And yet, the world is not wholly healed. Melkor has damaged the world, and those scars remain behind. Tolkien calls this the "Marring." Here are the final lines of the Quenta Silmarillion that captured my attention:

But Morgoth himself the Valar thrust through the Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, into the Timeless Void; and a guard is set for ever on those walls, and Eärendil keeps watch upon the ramparts of the sky. Yet the lies of that Melkor, the mighty and accursed, Morgoth Bauglir, the Power of Terror and of Hate, sowed in the hearts of Elves and Men are a seed that does not die and cannot be destroyed; and ever and anon it sprouts anew, and will bear dark fruit even unto the latest days.

This is the Marring. Melkor is banished, but a seed in planted in the hearts of Elves and Men that, ever and anon, sprouts anew and bears dark fruit even unto the latest days.

Interestingly, this seed isn't moral, but epistemological. What Melkor leaves behind are lies. 

Now, Tolkien never intended his stories, lore, and mythology to be Christian allegories. So I don't want to equate the Marring with any Christian doctrine or belief. But Tolkien's evocative description of a dark seed planted in the hearts of humanity, perpetually bearing bad fruit, struck me and made me wonder if there's an idea here that might be of (experimental) use in thinking about the cosmological-to-psychological shift I described above in how we think about Satan.

Specifically, while Melkor's cosmological power over the world is broken his influence persists. His lies continue to ripple out. Might something similarly have happened with Satan? Satan's current relation to the world is ambiguous, especially after the resurrection. Has Satan been defeated or is he still the "god of this world"? Perhaps, if we borrow from Tolkien, it is both. Cosmically, Satan has been defeated, but the moral and epistemic influence--the Marring--persists. 

I just finished watching the HBO documentary "Breath of Fire" about the history of Kundalini yoga as promoted and practiced by Yogi Bhajan, Harijiwan Singh Khalsa, and Guru Jagat. 

Beyond the stories of corruption and abuse, especially related to Yogi Bhajan and his MeToo reckoning and fallout, one big take away from the documentary is how Kundalini yoga, as practiced by these spiritual teachers/entrepreneurs/con-artists, created the yoga version of the prosperity gospel. Yoga would bring you health, happiness, and wealth. 

Breath of Fire is also, in many ways, the story of how the entire wellness industry, especially when it fuses with New Age spirituality, traffics in the prosperity gospel. As a related example of this, last year I wrote about how witchcraft is the pagan version of the prosperity gospel. And if not witchcraft proper, then the adjacent New Age practice of "manifesting" abundance. The New Age prosperity gospel belief in the "law of attraction"-- think/manifest it, and it will happen--is a spiritual thread that runs through the entire wellness industry. 

The point here is that the prosperity gospel haunts every spiritual tradition. Pagan, Western, and Eastern. Christians have their version of the prosperity gospel. Pagans have their version of the prosperity gospel. And as Breath of Fire recounts, yoga has its version. The prosperity gospel tempts the religious and spiritual-but-not-religious alike.

One of the arguments I make in The Shape of Joy is that much of our mental health crisis can be placed upon the widespread assumption that mental health flows from cultivating self-esteem. This pursuit of self-esteem governs much of our parenting, self-help, and therapeutic recommendations. And yet, as I describe in The Shape of Joy, this attempt at mental health through self-regard has proved disastrous. And it's not hard to see why. Consider some of self-esteem's history.

Self-esteem was first described in 1890 by William James in his influential book Principles of Psychology, one of the very first psychology textbooks. In Principles James, for the first time in history, describes and defines "self-esteem," and he does so by offering a psychological equation. Specifically:

Self-esteem = Successes / Pretensions

According to James, self-esteem is an emotional feedback system that reflects the degree to which we have successfully accomplished our goals and dreams, our "pretensions." Even more simply, self-esteem measures the gap between the life you have versus the life you want, the distance between your actual life and your ideal life. 

This equation makes sense. Whenever we accomplish our goals, whenever our dreams are realized, we feel a flush of pride and satisfaction. By contrast, whenever we fail or experience setback and dissatisfaction we feel sad and insecure. In short, self-esteem is that feedback system in your head that keeps track of how well your life is going.

As a feedback system, the variable nature of self-esteem makes it a poor choice for a foundation of mental health. Self-esteem isn't constant and steady. Self-esteem goes up and down, reflecting how my life is unfolding, for good or ill. What that means is that mental health has become for us the constant monitoring, managing, and rehabilitation of our self-regard. And that effort is difficult, exhausting, and interminable. Worse, it's counterproductive as we keep throwing people back inside themselves to secure an elusive happiness and joy. Our lives are spent chasing thoughts in our own minds. And this self-referentiality is only making us sicker and sicker.

I wrote this series prior to participating in the Philosophy Roundtable hosted by my friend Paul that I mentioned in the first post.

During our Roundtable, I focused my short remarks on much of the content of this series, speaking about the apophatic tradition, the causal joint, and providence. But before getting to those reflections, I listed out some mysteries faced by reductive materialism. We might call these "mysteries of science."

Again, as I asked in this series, "What is a mystery?" One way to define a mystery is any question that, in principle, reductive materialism cannot answer. That is to say, a question that falls outside the boundaries of science. In such cases we are denied a mechanistic account, and without knowing "How it works" we're left with mystery.

So, what are some of the mysteries science faces? Where does a reductive materialism hit a wall of explanation? 

First, being itself, the question of existence, is a mystery. Why is there something rather than nothing is a persistent mystery that science cannot answer.

Second, science itself is a mystery. By that I mean that science can never, in principle, get behind its own equations. Even if science were able to reduce down to a single "God Equation," a grand "theory of everything," it would still face the question: Why this particular equation? And why these particular variables? To even write down such an equation demands some givens, givens which themselves cannot be accounted for. In short, science itself is mysterious. 

Third, mathematics is a mystery. Many mathematicians are what are called "mathematical Platonists." According to mathematical Platonism, mathematical truths are objective aspects of the universe. That is to say, mathematical truths are like material "facts" in how they exist independently of human minds. For example, the Pythagorean Theorem existed and was true prior to its discovery. And yet, no scientific account can be given to explain the existence and truth of the Pythagorean Theorem. 

Fourth, consciousness is a mystery. No third person, mechanistic account can explain first-person, subjective experience. At best, we can establish a correlation between a neurological event and a subjective experience (like the taste of apple pie), but a correlation is not a causal explanation. No brain scan will tell you what apple pie tastes like. For an exhaustive tour of this debate, read David Bentley Hart's All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life.

Fifth, free will is a mystery. By definition. Of course, some deny the existence of free will. But the point to observe here is how, if you adopt a stance of scientific materialism, free will is ruled out before you even begin your investigation. Simply because if you assume materialism you're committed to offering a mechanistic view of neuroanatomy which, by definition, nullifies free will. In short, the issue of free will concerns metaphysical axioms which cannot be adjudicated by science. To say that "science disproves free will" is nonsensical for science, in assuming materialistic reductionism, denies free will axiomatically. Even more broadly, this is also why any "account" of free will, an attempt to explain how it "works," is also doomed to failure.

Sixth, the transcendentals--the true, the beautiful, and the good--are mysteries. Hume's Dictum is one example, that you cannot get an ought from an is. No amount of scientific analysis can determine moral duties or imperatives. You cannot extract an ethical claim from a descriptive claim. Another issue concerns the axiomatic nature of moral judgments, what might be called their "universality." Moral judgments, to be moral judgments, cannot be subjective, mere personal preferences. Also, attributions of value, like human dignity, cannot be extracted from materialistic descriptions. Of course, like free will, one can deny the existence of the transcendentals. But insofar as we operate, implicitly or explicitly, in the light of the transcendentals--making moral judgments or acting in light of human dignity--this falls beyond the scope of scientific materialism. 

In summary, while this series focused primarily upon what might be called "theological mysteries," there are also "scientific mysteries," locations where reductive materialism cannot give an account or, in the giving an account, rules out the reality in question.

"Shepherds"

Unlikely we were
to be given this task.
To seek, to stand, to see.
To become a witness to amazement.
To behold what we could not comprehend.
And to return
to silence, stars, and sky.
To know yourself
as one interrupted
and made ill-fit with the world.

"You have fed them with the bread of tears"

Psalm 80 is another song of the exile, the poet struggling to make sense of Israel and Judah's fall and desolation. God's people are fed "the bread of tears" and are given "tears to drink." 

It's an appropriate psalm to contemplate this Friday the Second Week of Advent. The hymns of Advent speak to the condition of exile:

O come, O come, Immanuel,
and ransom captive Israel
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.

I was visiting recently with a pastor from a mainline congregation. I mentioned my envy that mainline denominations have a greater repertoire of Advent hymns in contrast to Christmas carols. But the pastor responded, "Oh, we still have to sing Christmas carols before the 25th. Plus, if we don't sing those carols before Christmas we won't ever get a chance to sing them." All that to say, everyone seems to struggle to consistently adopt an exilic posture for the four weeks of Advent. 

And yet, while this might be a liturgical struggle, it's not an experiential problem. During Advent we don't just look "forward" to Christmas. Historically, the Incarnation is in our past. Advent--from the Latin adventus which means "coming" or "arrival"--is looking forward to Christ's Second Coming. Seen this way, we're living in the season of exile, the agonized period of waiting. Today we eat the bread of tears. Lamentation is our lived experience. Consequently, Psalm 80 expresses our Advent lament and hope. With the psalmist, we cry out:

Restore us, O Lord God of hosts;
let your face shine, that we may be saved.

This series has focused on two sorts of mysteries, the mystery of God's own being and the mystery of God's relation to the world. Both of these concern the contrast between Uncreated Being and created being.

But another location where mystery shows up concerns God's will. Most of these questions concern why God does or does not act in the world. God's will is inscrutable. This is particularly dismaying in relation to pain and suffering, questions of theodicy. Why does God allow horrific things to happen? Why is God not answering our prayers?

At these moments, Christians often appeal to mystery. Texts like Isaiah 55 are regularly invoked:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

In my first post, when I described my allergic reactions to mystery, this particular appeal was the most galling. Appealing to mystery in the face of suffering struck me as calloused, an easy dismissal, a failure to fully face or recognize the pain. In the face of horrors the statement "It's a mystery!" struck me as not very helpful and smacked of indifference. 

Plus, the questions here are hard and the challenges to faith significant. To avoid this difficult reckoning many resort, a bit too quickly, to mystery. Such an appeal can look like an existential defense mechanism, a way to cling to a comforting illusion.

Here's what was happening inside of me, for many years, during my allergic season in regards to mystery. I was so afraid that my faith was a defense mechanism that I refused to be consoled or comforted in the face of pain and suffering. As strange as this may sound, I wanted my faith to hurt. I wanted God to be a problem, a thorn in my side and a stone in my shoe. This pain, I believed, was evidence that God was not consoling me. My guiding Bible verse was Job 13.15, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." God was causing me to suffer. God was killing me. And I took that as evidence that my faith wasn't a fearful grasping at a comforting fairy tale. 

I went on to use this faith configuration to judge others. I had rejected mystery to squarely face the pain of life. Others appealed to mystery in the face of suffering and seemed contented. And I judged that contentment, suspecting it of timidity and superficiality. As a Winter Christian I stood in judgment of the Summer Christians. 

Over the last twenty years, though, a thaw occurred. In current parlance, deconstruction gave way to reconstruction. The icy winter Christian years gave way to a warming. No longer Arctic I'm more autumnal, with some intimations of spring. Having banged my head on the problem of evil for decades, I eventually realized that, well, it's a mystery. This isn't a nut that can be cracked. At the same time, my fear that my faith was a defense mechanism faded. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, spirituality sits at the heart of human flourishing--gratitude, joy, meaning in life, mattering, love, reverence, moral beauty, wonder, awe, and hope. None of that seems to be due to a furtive neurotic delusion. 

Given all this, my posture toward mystery has turned toward the pastoral. I continue to think that a too quick appeal to mystery in the face of grief and loss can be blithe and dismissive, deployed to provide a bandaid or to escape our own discomfort. We can use mystery to obfuscate and avoid. So, while I've come to recognize the place of mystery in the life of faith, even in the midst of suffering, I believe we should be careful and discerning in how to verbalize this truth aloud. For example, if a suffering person asks about why God is allowing some pain to happen I think it's better to say "I don't know" than "God's ways are higher than our ways." "I don't know" steps into mystery while bringing us into solidarity with the one who is suffering. We stand, together, perplexed and unknowing. A mystery is experienced but not offered to explain.

One way to think about mystery in Christian thought is to ask what the opposite of mystery might be. As I hear people talk, the opposite of mystery, as I mentioned in the last post, is a reductionistic and mechanistic explanation for "how" or "why" things "work." Basically, the opposite of mystery is something akin to a scientific explanation, some sort of causal account of the world. 

Consider, for example, quantum mechanics. As Richard Feynman once said, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” The reason for this is that quantum mechanics doesn't present us with a causal mechanism. And lacking that clear causal account, we find quantum mechanics mysterious. We know quantum mechanics "works," from a predictive aspect, but we don't know "how" it works. This lack of a causal account is what made Einstein so suspicious of quantum mechanics ("God doesn't play dice with the universe") as being the final account of the cosmos.

My point here is simply to note that, when we lack a causal account, even scientists resort to "mystery." The opposite of mystery, therefore, seems to be giving a causal account. To explain something is to expose the mechanism. As Feynman said in another quote, "What I cannot create I do not understand."

This is why I discussed the "causal joint" in the prior post. If the opposite of mystery is a mechanism then the "casual joint" between God and the world will be ever shrouded in mystery. No causal, mechanistic account can be given for the God/world relation. 

A more whimsical way to describe all this comes from the paperback edition of Hunting Magic Eels. In one of the new chapters I used Brandon Sanderson's contrast between hard and soft magical systems in fantasy novels. I did a recent series about this as well. A hard magical system in fantasy fiction, according to Sanderson, is when the mechanism of the magic is clear and transparent. We know how the magic "works." In a soft magical system, by contrast, we know that magic exists, it enchants the fantasy world, but we don't know how the magic works. The mechanism is hidden. As I argue in the paperback edition of Hunting Magic Eels, Christianity is a soft magical world. As the old hymn puts it, God moves in mysterious ways. We know that God is at work in the world, but God's actions are not at our disposal. The "why's" and the "how's" are not transparent to us. The world is inherently and persistently mysterious.

Anglican theologian Austin Farrer coined the phrase "the causal joint" in his book Faith and Speculation and I think it gets to the heart of what I described at the end of the last post. Christian mystery regularly shows up at "the causal joint."

The boundary that was vigilantly policed by Jewish monotheism was between Uncreated Being and created being. To worship created being was idolatrous. Only Uncreated Being, the One who created the universe ex nihilo ("from nothing"), was worthy of devotion and worship. During Second Temple Judaism this contrast between Uncreated and created being encountered Greek philosophical thought which eventually led to the Christian apophatic tradition. While created being is accessible to human observation and exploration, Uncreated Being is an impenetrable mystery. What Uncreated Being "is" in itself is beyond human comprehension.

What, then, happens when Uncreated Being and created being make contact? What is the "casual joint" between God and the world? What does this point of connection and influence look like? How does the Infinite and the finite interact? 

As I mentioned at the end of the last post, because one side of the relation is shrouded in apophatic mystery the "casual joint" between God and the world cannot be specified, described, or imagined. At the causal joint we must make an appeal to mystery. This is not done to avoid hard questions or stop the conversation. It concerns, rather, the grammar of God. Due to the asymmetry of being we find at the causal joint no "explanation" can be given for God's relation to and influence upon the world. And the casual joint shows up in a lot of conversations, from miracles, to providence, to prayer. We ask a lot of "how" questions, and "how" questions concern the causal joint. 

Basically, mystery evaporates whenever we have a reductive or mechanistic account, if we can specify a causal chain. So we ask questions like "How does prayer work?" or "How do miracles work?" with the expectation that there's some mechanism behind the scenes that we can investigate and uncover. But since things like prayer and miracles show up at the causal joint--the interface between created being and Uncreated being--a mechanism cannot be specified due to the apophatic mystery on one side of the equation. This renders all of God's actions in and on the world inherently mysterious. 

At the causal joint, mystery is simply unavoidable.

I have used the word "apophatic" from time to time on this blog/newsletter. But readers come and readers go, and "apophatic" isn't a word a lot of people know. So, we should start by getting everyone on the same page. Any conversation about mystery needs to begin with the apophatic tradition in Christian thought.

To start, theologians make a contrast between cataphatic and apophatic theology. Cataphatic theology, also called "positive theology," concerns what can be properly said, claimed, or asserted about God. Basically, cataphatic theology concerns our "God talk," verbal statements that express our ideas and beliefs about God. Cataphatic theology contains creeds, beliefs, doctrines, dogmas, and Biblical teachings. A lot of cataphatic theology involves policing all these words and ideas, drawing boundaries between the licit and illicit, between orthodoxy and heresy. Most of our spiritual lives are spent swimming in cataphatic waters--from books to podcasts to sermons to blogs/newsletters--we share, talk, and debate about ideas and beliefs about God and the life of faith. Some of us gravitate toward abstract, theological cataphatic expressions, others like to keep things literal and Biblical. Either way, we're expressing beliefs about God. 

The apophatic tradition, by contrast, is called "negative theology." Apophatic theology is the Via Negativa, the "way of negation." 

There are a couple of different ways to think about this. First, in contrast to positive theology, what we can properly say about God, negative theology concerns what cannot be said about God. Apophatic theology marks the point where words and mental representations about God falter and fail. A different way of thinking about negative theology is approaching God through a series of negations. Through negations--God is not this, God is not that--we chip away at the mystery of God. Thomas Aquinas deploys this strategy in the Summa Theologica. Critically, for Thomas, this "chipping away" doesn't reveal God at the end of the process in any clear, positive way. As Thomas said, we can know God's existence but not God's essence. That is to say, from a cataphatic perspective, we can assert that God exists. We know this by observing God's effects upon the world. These are Thomas' famous five "proofs" for the existence of God. That said, while we can assert, positively, that God exists (if you find Thomas' proofs convincing), we do not know what God "is." God's essence is beyond human conception. To peer into God's very being is to look into an impenetrable darkness. Following Thomas, we can use negations to narrow in on God, sort of like approaching the event horizon of a black hole. Our knowledge is a boundary encircling a mystery rather than the grasping of something definite. 

The critical point here is how apophatic theology chastens our verbal claims and mental representations of God. There is a literalness in speaking about God that must be mortified. True, our words can help us climb toward God, our thoughts can seek him, but at some point we reach the top of the cataphatic ladder. Words and ideas can only take us so far. At the top cataphatic ladder is a step into the mystical and contemplative. Silence is emphasized over verbalization. Thomas Aquinas reached the top of his cataphatic ladder in a mystical experience, late in his life, during the celebration of the Eucharist. He stopped writing the Summa because after his vision all his words seemed to him as straw.

While all the church fathers and early theologians recognized the apophatic aspect of the theological task, along with the mystical approach toward God, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. late 5th to early 6th century) and Maximus the Confessor (c. 580 – 662) are considered seminal figures in the apophatic tradition. After Aquinas, Meister Eckhart (c. 1260 – c. 1328) and Nicholas of Cusa (1401 – 1464) are also a major figures, along with the author of the mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing (14th century). But again, pretty much every significant Christian theologian, early and late, has recognized the apophatic aspect of theological reflection. The role apophaticism plays in emphasis and centrality varies considerably across theologians and through the tradition as a whole, but it's always there.

The point of this post, beyond introducing readers to apophatic theology so I can freely use the word "apophatic" going forward, is simply to state that, due to God being God, mystery is baked deeply into the pie. Any speech or reflection about God is inherently haunted by mystery. All God talk is mysterious, has an apophatic aspect. To be sure, apophaticism isn't what I was describing in my last post, the way "mystery" can get used to short-circuit a theological conversation or wave away a hard question. But as I'll argue in the posts to come, mystery must be regularly invoked at the God/creation point of contact. Necessarily so, because, as we've seen in this post, there is a persisting apophatic aspect to one side of this relationship.

"Annunciation"

Behold the liminality,
the threshold, the doorstep.
The shimmering translucent membrane--
the thinnest of thin spaces.
Gateway to heaven
as innocuous as Jacob's pillow.
The pivot, the fulcrum of eternity.

Heaven and earth are hushed.

An angel awaits her answer.

"They gave the corpses of your servants to the birds of the sky for food"

Not the most cheery line to select, but Psalm 79 is another of those psalms dealing with the destruction of Jerusalem and Israel's exile:

God, the nations have invaded your inheritance,
desecrated your holy temple,
and turned Jerusalem into ruins.
They gave the corpses of your servants
to the birds of the sky for food,
the flesh of your faithful ones
to the beasts of the earth.
They poured out their blood
like water all around Jerusalem,
and there was no one to bury them.

Given the devastation, the psalmist cries out for God to act:

How long, Lord? Will you be angry forever?
Will your jealousy keep burning like fire?
Pour out your wrath on the nations
that don’t acknowledge you,
on the kingdoms that don’t call on your name,
for they have devoured Jacob
and devastated his homeland.
Do not hold past iniquities against us;
let your compassion come to us quickly,
for we have become very weak.

God of our salvation, help us,
for the glory of your name.
Rescue us and atone for our sins,
for your name’s sake.

I'm struck by a few different things.

First, the reference to atonement in Verse 9: "Rescue us and atone for our sins." The root of the word translated as "atonement" in the Old Testament is kaphar, which literally means "to cover." Atonement is "covering over" sin. What's interesting in Psalm 79 is how that atonement and covering has shifted from the human side of the equation over to God's. In jarring contrast to a pagan imagination, we cannot make atonement. Only God can. The covering of our sins is a Divine prerogative. This reversal sets up the strange gospel claim that God makes a sacrifice for us, rather than the other way around. "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us," declared Paul. Following Psalm 79, it would have to be that way. If atonement is going to be made for sinners, it has to come from God. 

The other thing I'm pondering are those dead bodies: "They gave the corpses of your servants to the birds of the sky for food." 

I'm writing a book right now, tentatively titled The Book of Love. The book goes from Genesis through Revelation showing how to read the Bible as a book of love. I've just finished a first draft of the chapter on Revelation. And guess what? There's a lot of dead bodies in Revelation! Concern for the Christian martyrs is a huge theme in Revelation, perhaps its most pressing concern. My point in making this connection is simply to revisit my pessimistic view of history. If Revelation is any indication, I don't think the plea of Psalm 79 will be answered within history. At least not any history the Bible envisions. Revelation speaks of a time of "tribulation," and I think that is what history is, the tribulation.

Which is a pretty gloomy thing to recognize and contemplate. But that's the whole point of Advent. Looking forward to the Second Coming. 

In my poem on Sunday I wrestled with the relationship between realism and hope. Can hope be realistic? I've been pondering that question. In one sense, no, hope cannot be realistic. To have a "realistic" expectation of a happy outcome might instill confidence and optimism, and that is a type of "hope," but radical hope looks beyond the "bars of the possible." And yet, if hope becomes "unrealistic" it can become wishful thinking. So, when the dead bodies pile up, is it realistic to be hopeful? Does what is seen delimit what we may dream? Or does hope come from beyond, from what is unseen? 

As I said in Sunday's poem, the border of what you think is real encircles what you may hope.

I've been thinking about mystery.

My thinking was set into motion by a brief conversation I had with my friend and ACU colleague Paul Morris. Paul is a physicist and a philosopher and he hosts "Philosophy Roundtables" at ACU where our faculty can gather around conversations where theology, philosophy, and science intersect. When I ran into Paul at our campus Starbucks he mentioned he was thinking about a Roundtable on the topic of mystery. I've been think about mystery ever since.

Theologically speaking, what do we mean by "mystery"? And when is it appropriate or not to make an appeal to mystery in theological conversations?  

I've been pondering these questions because my opinion about mystery has changed over the years. For much of my adulthood, from college into my 40s, I was in a pretty skeptical, disenchanted place. I've described these years as my "Christian agnostic" phase. Still practicing Christianity and committed to my local church, but a bit unsure about if any of it was true. My general stance during this time was basically "even if it's not true, following Jesus is a beautiful way to live." 

During these years I had a strong allergic reaction to any appeal to mystery. My feeling at the time was that "mystery" was a theological "get out of jail free card" whenever the questions got too hard and difficult. "Mystery" felt like cheating. "Mystery" was a conversation stopper. If you ever faced a theological question you couldn't answer you could wave it away with an appeal to "mystery."

My opinions, though, have changed. I've become more comfortable with mystery. No more allergies. This has largely been due to my exposure to the apophatic theological tradition which traffics pretty heavily in mystery. And while it is true that mystery shows up when our intellects hit a wall, I think there's a pretty clear, particular, and consistent appeal to mystery that seems, to me at least, legitimate.

So, this is a series about mystery, about what it is and where it shows up.

The Shape of Joy has three parts. Part 1 is entitled "Curved Inward." In this part I describe how our identities have become increasingly self-referential and how this undermines our mental health. Part 2 is entitled "Turning Away" and in this section I describe how the first step toward joy is a step back from yourself. We disengage from our neurotic, self-referential loop. 

One of the lines of research I discuss in Part 2 concerns the surprising science of humility. I say "surprising" because I don't think many people would have picked humility as being among the most robust predictors of mental health and well-being. For a lot of people, perhaps especially those raised in religiously conservative spaces, humility involves denigrating yourself, actively mortifying your ego and self-image to combat pride. But as psychologists have studied humility they have observed something quite different.

What, then, is humility? In The Shape of Joy I share two influential descriptions. The first comes from the psychologist June Tangney. According to Tangney, humble people possess the following qualities:

• An accurate assessment of yourself
• An ability to acknowledge your mistakes and limitations
• An openness to other viewpoints and ideas
• An ability to keep your accomplishments in perspective
• A low self-focus
• An appreciation of the value of all things, including other people

A second influential list, overlapping some with Tangney’s but also different in some points, comes from the researchers Joseph Chancellor and Sonja Lyubomirsky. Humble people possess or are characterized by the following:

• A secure, self-accepting identity
• A view of yourself free from distortion
• An openness to new information, being teachable
• Being other-focused rather than self-focused
• Possessing egalitarian beliefs, that is, seeing others as having the same intrinsic value/importance as oneself; lacking feelings of superiority

You'll notice that neither list has "thinking less of yourself" as a feature of humility. What these lists do describe is someone who is secure and grounded, and how from that groundedness flow social and psychological capacities. In short, as I describe in The Shape of Joy, humility isn't thinking less of yourself but a capacity to turn away from yourself and toward others.

This is a follow-up to my post a few weeks ago entitled "The Politicization of Enchantment." In that post I used Paul Kingsnorth's comments about Jordan Peterson to offer a warning about what I called the "Nietzschean Christianity" being promoted on the Christian right. To understand today's post you'll want to have read that prior post.

I want to make two clarifying observations about my earlier reflections. 

First, what are my opinions about Jordan Peterson? Readers who just randomly dip into my posts won't be aware that my opinions of Peterson are complex. On the one hand, I've repeatedly expressed admiration for how Peterson gets young people, especially young men, to take the Bible and Christianity seriously. I've found Peterson's reflections on the Bible to be quite interesting and fascinating. I have also appreciated the way Peterson pushes back on prominent atheists. Jordan Peterson is, perhaps, the best apologist of faith we have. So, I admire many things about Jordan Peterson and think the church has much to learn from him.

And yet, I've also been quite critical of Peterson. My major criticism concerns the "Nietzschean Christianity" he is promoting. A second, but related, criticism, as described in my most recent post, is how this vision of Christianity is being put to use on the political right. 

Which brings me to my second clarifying observation. 

I've described Peterson's Christianity as "Nietzschean Christianity." Which might strike fans of Peterson as strange given how Peterson's project is quite explicitly working against our modern "crisis of meaning" which has resulted from a Nietzschean rejection of Christianity in the West. So, if Peterson is explicitly anti-Nietzsche where to I get the notion that he's actually promoting Nietzsche?

The answer goes to Petersons' Darwinian-Jungian approach to Scripture. As everyone knows, Peterson isn't a Christian. He's very pro-Christian and might be on the verge of conversion, put when push comes to shove in his debates with atheists, Peterson doesn't cross the line into full confessional belief. And it's precisely at this point where Peterson stumbles and succumbs to a Nietzschean vision of Christianity.

Here's why.

Lurking behind Peterson's Jungian hermeneutic is a Darwinian view of human evolution and progress. Things like the "hero archetype," which functions as hermeneutical Rosetta Stone for Peterson, are "true" for Peterson because the hero archetype encodes vital information and behavioral strategies that have helped humanity survive and evolve across time. And it's this Darwinian connection that dooms Peterson to a Nietzschean Christianity, for the criteria of "true" for Peterson is always some version of survival and evolutionary success. Which means that Biblical truth, in the hands of Peterson, is always going to tip toward a will to power as the will to power is how Mother Nature sorts the weak from the strong. Simply put, pull back the layers of Peterson's hermeneutic and what you get is survival of the fittest. Truth = Survival. Truth = Fitness. Truth = Evolutionary Success. In short, a Nietzschean Christianity, a Christianity that privileges agonistic struggle, "slaying the dragon," and a will to power. And is it any wonder, when this is made plain, why Peterson's version of Christianity appeals to the political right? Let's quote Paul Kingsnorth again:

For Peterson, Christianity is a Joseph Campbell-style hero journey, one especially designed for young men. In his short film “Message to the Christian Churches” Peterson lays out his civilizational call and challenges the faith to keep up…Peterson goes on to lay out his case for the defense of civilization, which he defines as a society based on the "encouraging, adventurous masculine spirit." The Christian Church, it turns out, exists to encourage this spirit. It is, he states, there to remind people, young men included, and perhaps even first and foremost, that they have a woman to find, a garden to walk in, a family to nurture, an ark to build, a land to conquer, a ladder to heaven to build, and the utter terrible catastrophe of life to face stalwartly in truth, devoted to love, and without fear. Do you see anything missing in this list of what the church ought to be doing? It’s Christ. It's Jesus. He gets not one mention, not in the entire film. Neither does God the Father. Neither does the Holy Spirit. Instead, Peterson's civilizational church is to be a self-help club for young men. It's to be a cultural institution fighting back against the Woke and the bloody Gaia worshippers and the feminists and the life-sapping cultural Marxists. It sees life as a catastrophe, and the correct response to that catastrophe as masculine conquest. What Jordan Peterson wants, in other words, is a church that looks like Jordan Peterson.

I don't know if Jordan Peterson wants a church that looks like Jordan Peterson. But what I do know is that Peterson's Jungian hermeneutic is doomed to produce this sort of Nietzschean Christianity because a Darwinian vision of survival is regulating how Peterson reads the Bible. And until Peterson embraces Christianity, his vision of the faith is always going to drift toward the Darwinian and Nietzschean. For the simple reason that survival, rather than Christ, is regulating his hermeneutical vision and choices. 

This is why metaphysics matters and why Peterson playing coy with Christian metaphysics is shooting his project in the foot. Let me make this plain. 

The kenotic, self-offering love we witness in Jesus Christ only makes sense if you have a metaphysics of hope. More simply: Agape demands resurrection. Sacrifice requires eschatology. If I give my life away in love I have to trust that my sacrifice isn't futile or wasted. For example, think of Maximilian Kolbe's sacrifice in Auschwitz. Peterson likes to describe the hero as going off and making a great sacrifice to return with treasure for the community. But what if the hero never returns? What if, like Maximilian Kolbe, the hero is just dead? What then? A metaphysics of hope and resurrection declares that Kolbe's sacrifice is still heroic, even if it only echos in eternity. As do all acts of sacrificial love. 

The point is that until Peterson adopts a metaphysics of resurrection, that the tomb of Jesus is literally and historically empty, his hermeneutics will never be fully able to describe the self-sacrificing nature of Christ that Kingsnorth so eloquently describes in his lecture. Peterson can't get there because he's not willing to cross over the metaphysical bridge to embrace eschatological hope. And without that hope, Peterson's descriptions of "the hero" will, of necessity, tend toward survival and a will to power. For that is the only vision of the heroic possible in a world governed by Darwinian struggle.

Again, metaphysics matters. Peterson cannot articulate a truly Christ-like vision of the heroic because he lacks a metaphysics of hope and resurrection. Nietzsche was right, it's either Christ or the Anti-Christ. And right now, Peterson's Christianity is on the wrong side of that equation. 

"The Bright Field" by the Welsh poet R.S. Thomas is one of my favorite poems: 

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

 ///

The reason the poem resonates with me is because it captures the thesis of Hunting Magic Eels, that modern disenchantment is due to pervasive attention blindness. Re-enchantment, therefore, is a practice of attention. 

Every day we pass by sacred moments. Each of these moments is the pearl of great price. Our days are filled with fields of hidden treasure. And yet, we hurry past, lost within ourselves. Trapped in nostalgia or regret about yesterday. Fretful or planning for tomorrow. We're never present to the moment and, therefore, miss the sacred encounter.  

To see God we must turn aside, like Moses, to the miracle of the lit bush. These are the "strange sights" I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, those moments in everyday life where eternity awaits us. 

Futility paces cynically
behind the bars of the possible.
The border of the real
encircles what you may hope.
The seen delimiting your dreams.

Prophecies and promises swirl in challenge
to shriveled, shrunken ontologies.

We start, anew, the seasonal test
to view a farther horizon.