Reaching the West with Wonder

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Tim Keller could have chosen to finish his life by resting from his missiological labors. Instead, ever-evangelist that he was, he continued to explore what a missional encounter with contemporary culture should look like. To this end he produced one of his final publications, How to Reach the West Again, in which he sought to offer his final programmatic word to guide the church in North America in the days ahead. 

I came to this work somewhat late. It was published during COVID, and I had other things on my mind at the time. And at that point I had largely turned elsewhere for guidance for our cultural moment. However, when I finally gave it a read, there was one key point that struck me: Keller’s acknowledgment of the realities to which many have come to refer with the label “negative world.” Keller argues that we have entered a “new era” in many places in the West. 

In previous eras, Keller explains that “religion was broadly seen as a social good, or at least benign.” But we are no longer in either–in Aaron Renn’s terms–“positive” or “neutral” world. Rather, Keller admits that “increasing numbers of people now see the church as bad for people and a major obstacle to social progress.” In such an era, “there is not only no social benefit to being a Christian, but an actual social cost to espousing Christian faith. Culture is becoming more actively hostile toward Christian beliefs and practices.” And at what points is the Christian faith particularly offensive to our contemporaries, according to Keller? “Traditional Christian beliefs about sexuality and gender,” which are increasingly “viewed as dangerous and restrictive of people’s basic civil rights.” He reiterates this point later, saying, 

One of the greatest objections to Christianity today is that it has an outmoded sexual ethic. … The Christian view of sex is especially repugnant to today’s understanding of self and identity. That view asserts the self’s freedom to pursue fulfillment and it also idealizes sexual expression. The Christian sexual code is therefore considered both unrealistic and oppressive.

Furthermore, Keller says that many of the moral and metaphysical assumptions that served as “religious dots” which past evangelists could assume and connect are no longer there. Echoing the work of Philip Rieff, Keller argues that the late modern West is defined by a fundamental rejection of “sacred order.” At this point I begin to part ways a bit, even in Keller’s diagnosis. I am not sure if this is the best way to frame our contemporary culture. My disagreement is only exacerbated with Keller’s later comment that the “main alternative” to Christianity in our day is some form of “secularism.” But my strongest point of criticism has to do with what Keller offers in order to reach the West again. 

Keller does what Keller does best here by confronting the various idols predominant in contemporary culture. In the mode of “subversive fulfillment,” he seeks to show how the desires underneath these forms of idolatry are confronted by and fulfilled in Christ. He models this type of apologetic encounter for his audience to emulate in order to reach our secular neighbors. Keller promotes a “Christian theory” that must “critique the forms of secular modernity” and “expose the main flaws in our culture’s narratives, showing how they fit neither human nature nor our most profound intuitions about life—let alone our own moral ideals.” This material, when I first read it last year, felt very out of touch to me, I must admit. And I have taken my students through it and it also does not connect with them. It is just a bit too rationalist. This is all just a bit too buffered, a bit too immanent, and relies too heavily on argumentation.

I was reminded of Keller’s book recently while reading Rod Dreher’s latest book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, which offers an alternative diagnosis and set of proposals for how to reach the contemporary West with the Christian faith. Dreher makes the case that we are not going to argue people into the faith today. Interestingly, both Keller and Dreher invite us to turn to the witness of the early church for inspiration; but what they draw from that era reveals the fundamental differences in their respective proposals. 

One of the works to which Keller often referred toward the end of his life was Larry Hurtado’s book Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctive is the Roman World. Keller found in Hurtado’s summary of the early church’s witness amidst a hostile environment inspiration for how to reach our context. Keller turns to Hurtado again in this late work. What Keller takes from Hurtado is the need for a “category-defying social vision” and “counter-catechesis.” The early Christians “demonstrat[ed]” the truth of the faith, according to Keller’s use of Hurtado, by answering questions and out-narrating their contemporaries—telling a better story. They modeled how Christians in a hostile context can deconstruct the common beliefs of a culture and answer the questions of the heart that the culture’s narrative cannot. 

My read is that this all feels a bit methodical, a form of evangelistic technique even; and it simply lacks sufficient attention to the supernatural and even the “miraculous” which characterized much post-apostolic witness. 

Another work on the early church which would press such recognition is Ramsay MacMullen’s Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100-400). MacMullen explains that early Christians faced a similarly “negative world” (not his term, of course) in which there was no obvious social reward for embracing the faith. How did they connect with unbelievers and win them to the faith in such a context? By confronting the gods and driving out demons. MacMullen’s treatment of these themes comes out most clearly in a chapter titled “Points of Contact, Models of Persuasion, Before 312.” From such a title, one could imagine the author taking a route similar to Keller’s. However, MacMullen gives considerable attention to the role of the miraculous. For many who became Christian, they noted the role of exorcisms and the appeal of other manifestations of the supernatural. Even pagans remarked on how many were won over to the church in response to a display of the miraculous. Not just rational, but also miraculous “demonstration” was key as Christians engaged head-on in a contestation of power against the false gods of the day. This “demonstration” was not limited to answering questions and out-narrating. Persuasion in this anti-Christian context consisted in part in a firm engagement with the supernatural. 

MacMullen’s emphases map more onto Dreher’s new project, which also seeks inspiration from the early church. Living in Wonder is a book about a world filled with mystery, and the growing recognition of the emptiness of materialism. Dreher wants us to see what many of our contemporaries are already coming to perceive, and which most of our Christian forebears assumed: that this world is “enchanted.” According to Dreher’s analysis, our post-Christian world increasingly resembles the pagan world of the ancients, where most just assumed that the gods were everywhere, that the world is filled with spiritual meaning, and that our selves are not “buffered” as rational monads which remain unaffected by realities beyond our mind. Ours is an age defined primarily not by atheism or secularism, but by a longing for mystery–which has opened the door to various forms of neopaganism, even the occult. “The idea that the greatest challenge to Christianity is a form of atheism is an idea whose time has long passed,” argues Dreher. “Our post-Christian world is being re-enchanted;” and we need to discern and confront the demonic forces which take advantage of this shift. Otherwise, we leave our neighbors amenable to forms of “dark enchantment.” 

Dreher explains that evangelism in the early church was not reduced to a rational presentation of the gospel. Rather, magic was everywhere, and miracles were part of the church’s apologetic. Dreher appeals to another historian of the ancient world, Robert Knapp, who argues that part of the success of the early church in winning converts was due to the fact that “the ‘magic’ of the Christians was more powerful than the magic of the pagan priests and sorcerers.” And the writings of many church fathers reveal that miracles–not just a message–played a significant role in conversion of many in the early post-apostolic generations. Most were not converted through persuasion alone, but also supernatural events and encounters. 

For the first millennium (or more) in the West after the resurrection of Christ, the natural and the supernatural were commonly understood as intertwined. Christians shared with their non-Christian neighbors a “sacramental vision,” according to which the material world was understood and experienced as saturated with spiritual meaning and power. The rift between the natural and the supernatural emerges in the High Middle Ages, argues Dreher. From here it becomes much more commonplace to envision the natural world as self-sufficient--without reference to, dependence upon, or being encountered by the supernatural. The world was increasingly desacralized, and in modernity many have come to embrace a technological vision about the material world. Things are, in this milieu, understood to have no intrinsic meaning or value, other than what we place on them or give to them. And modern man comes to imagine that he can manipulate the material world for his own interests without direction or constraint; he increasingly comes under the spell of control, mastery, and domination. This technological frame makes us lose what Hartmut Rosa calls “resonance”—a sense of positive connection between the self and the world outside one’s head. This world cannot be “controlled,” and any attempt at such control leaves us fragmented and closes the door to enchantment. You lose a sacramental vision and you lose mystery; you lose mystery and you lose resonance; you lose resonance and you threaten the loss of deep meaning. 

But, as Dreher explains, our contemporaries are increasingly disenchanted with disenchantment. They are desperate for mystery and meaning. The problem is that most churches today don’t know what to do with this. 

Here I do need to register a certain frustration with Dreher’s portrayal of Protestants, particularly Calvinists. He throws Calvinists somewhat under the bus for dismissing mystery (though at one point he gives a nod to the resources in Calvinism to resist the forces of liquid modernity). However, in light of our discussion of Keller’s work above, I wonder if Dreher is on to something about a potential blind spot or temptation in contemporary Reformed thought and practice. Dreher explains that to those with a penchant for rigorous doctrinal thinking, his arguments might sound like “mystical mumbo jumbo.” And for those who emphasize evangelism and social service, “re-enchantment talk might come off as spiritually indulgent.” To put it in my own words, I think Dreher is calling out many contemporary Reformed and evangelical Christians for a functional materialism or rationalism. And there is likely something to this. 

I think Dreher is right that Reformed and evangelical types today should be pressed to more sufficiently account for spiritual warfare. Our witness should not be reduced to rational apologetics; we need to confront evil and demonic spirits and false gods. And his challenge to embrace God’s work through the serendipitous is likewise a welcome word for expressions of Christianity that like to keep things “decent and orderly” and love systems. 

However, how can we resist letting this emphasis on the mystical traverse into unhealthy territory? As Dreher admits, mystical experience is not enough—assuming such is an error into which many charismatic Christians fall. And there is a “shadow side of the spirit world” for which we must account in any discussion of enchantment. But it is equally dangerous to downplay or deny the mystical, because the longing for enchantment can only be suppressed for so long. Therefore, we need to direct it to healthy Christianity, otherwise our spiritually exhausted and mystically curious neighbors will be drawn to the demonic. And forms of Christianity that demand little and inadequately account for the spiritual leave people vulnerable to such dark paths. They will be drawn to things like the occult, psychedelics, political ideologies as pseudo-religion, an excessive fascination with extraterrestrials, etc. 

Dreher encourages Christians to cultivate an appreciation for beauty and the supernatural. He challenges us to draw attention to great art, the wonder of nature, liturgy, and the lives of the saints. He also wants us to get out of our heads and to open ourselves up to signs, the possibility of miracles, and encounters with the numinous; and, of course, to remain aware of the reality of spiritual warfare. 

There is one author that I wish Dreher would have engaged that perceived similar problems in the modern world, but who also provided healthy guardrails for a true renewal of the sense of the sacred: the twentieth-century French Jesuit Henri de Lubac. In a published interview toward the end of his life, he explained modernity as, at root, a rejection of mystery. This had left modern man spiritually asphyxiated, according to de Lubac. At the beginning of his career, in an important wartime essay titled “The Internal Causes of the Weakening and Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred,” he made similar points. There he argues that doctrinalism and moralism without mystery will not satisfy the human person. Man ineluctably longs for the supernatural but is suffocating in immanence because the modern world is marked by a loss of the sacred. In another wartime essay focused on a theology of mission in such a context, de Lubac explains that this unsatisfied longing in the modern desacralized world had led to all sorts of improper enchantments—which he characterized as forms of “neopaganism.” 

To counter these trends, de Lubac promoted Christian mysticism. He was wary about how this can go off the rails. In the essay “Mysticism and Mystery,” de Lubac argues that true mysticism must lead to God and must be grounded in Scripture. He was also emphatic that authentic spirituality cannot be untethered from Christ. In the aforementioned essay on the disappearance of the sense of the sacred, de Lubac is clear that spirituality must be centered on Christ, who is “The Sacred.” And because Christ is united to his body, this means that Christian mysticism is necessarily an “ecclesial mysticism,” a point hammered explicitly in “Mysticism and Mystery.” It is through their participation in the church that persons are enabled to “breathe the eternal.” In his later writings de Lubac was particularly wary about forms of mysticism and spirituality untethered from the church. To counter these trends, he promoted a sacramental spirituality, and thus an ecclesial spirituality.

In some sense de Lubac also advocated for a sort of “sacramental vision.” According to him, the world is a symbol and sign of God. We can find traces of God everywhere, de Lubac argues in The Discovery of God. “Everything,” he says, “is drenched in that unique Presence.” In the earlier essay on the loss of the sense of the sacred, he had argued that we can understand the world as “a first and immense sacrament, the great natural sacrament” that was intended “in the state of innocence, to lead us effortlessly to the unique Source or all that is sacred, which is to say, to God.” And even in our era, de Lubac explained, nature can still function in a sacramental sense; but it must be clarified by the “supernatural sacrament,” which is the church. A true Christian mysticism finds its “normal setting is the Church and normal conditions are the life of faith and the sacraments.” What this provides is a sense of wonder everywhere, without losing the Christian specificity of ecclesial and sacramental life. 

Keller wanted to help us reach the West again. Dreher’s new work helps us see that we must reach the West with wonder. Our contemporaries are longing for enchantment–for religion that confronts them and connects them to the transcendent. I am convinced that this can be found in traditional Christianity, including Protestantism. De Lubac’s teachings serve as guardrails for any mysticism that loses sight of the common means of grace that God has provided in the sacraments, and the church, which is the great sacrament of Christ, who is The Sacred to which any spirituality must lead. Such means are available in classical Protestantism and should be promoted for the wonders that they are. We are not individuals unaffected by the world around us, merely thinking our way to God. We are those who have been united to Christ in his death and resurrection through baptism, and thereby made into a body in him. This community is unlike any other in this world, and it cannot be explained along the lines of standard sociological analysis (this is a point that Keller, inspired by Lesslie Newbigin alongside Hurtado, regularly proclaimed). And our gathered worship is loaded with ordinary means by which we participate in the supernatural. We regularly enter the heavenly tabernacle, the eternal holy of holies, to feast with (and upon) Christ. We structure our calendars to align ourselves with the rhythms of creation and the revolution of new creation--commemorating the major events of the temporal life of the eternal One, who upholds and is the goal of all creation. We join the heavenly choir of the angels and redeemed saints in our worship, following our great High Priest who leads the liturgy. And this is a particularly strong point in classical Protestantism: We regularly encounter the Transcendent through the Word--read and preached. Through the Word, the Divine Other confronts and comforts us. This is meat-and-potatoes Christianity, but it is more mystical than many realize. May we remind others (and ourselves) of these wonders as we seek to reach the West again.