A few days ago, I said that reclaiming an incarnational theology -- that God is with us -- that a theology of immanence is really the only way to go forward in refuting a disenchanted world. A disenchanted world, I think, is really the source of what ails Christian faith and its credibility in the modern world. Without a sense of the "grandeur of God" (Manley) in the world, Christians really don't have much grounding on which to stand, or much to say that's Christianly in the world.
The question that's left as soon as I make a claim like that, though, is: How do we get there? How do we modern people recover that sense of divine immanence in the world?
In college, I read what has been one of the most important historical account of how we got here by Philip Lee. Sadly, Lee's work has gone unappreciated by most folks. Lee (and Andrew Greeley after him) made an important argument: Protestants live in a gnostic world. Gnostics believed that salvation was through knowledge, that the material world was created by a lesser (or evil) God, that spirit/mind has nothing to do with flesh/matter, they were dualistic through and through. Gnostic Christianity has no need to see God in the world, it simply vacated the world, and rejected the reality of the Divine throughout the world. Catholics, on the other hand, 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 icons.
When I began writing my dissertation on Bonhoeffer, it was this Catholic imagination that struck me as one of the fundamental influences on Bonhoeffer's life. (Added to the influence that baptists had on the way Bonhoeffer read and lived Scripture, and you have the source of a thorough-going Christian pacifism -- but that's for another day.) It was the holiday Bonhoeffer took in Rome that made his conversion from theologian to Christian possible.
That's because Catholic live in a God-haunted world. Objects, events and persons in daily life are revelations of divine grace. One of the sad consequences of the Protestant Reformation was the rejection of that God-haunted world. (The Protestant Reformation, in that way, was the father of modern atheism, too. But that's also for another day.)
One of the impulses of the Protestant Reformation was to shift the spiritual load onto the laity. This wasn't a bad impulse, per se -- heavens knows it's part of the source of my high-church anti-clericalism. Holiness certainly isn't the occupation of "spiritual specialists" -- clergy, monastics and saints. But when the domain of holiness was shifted away from embodied people and places -- from monasteries and convents and cathedrals -- we're left with a sense of a disenchanted world. Just compare a Catholic cathedral to a Protestant "church house". 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 Church's liturgical calendar was gradually replaced by the time-keeping of the town, the secular clocks and calendars of the marketplace and the nation state. This became sadly evident to me when I reviewed HCSB's Minister's Bible a few years ago. The calendar upon which it builds its resources for pastors was the secular calendar. Whereas the Church's calendar is structured around the life of Jesus, the secular calendar is structured around the larger culture. Those two things are hardly the same. So when the Church jettisons its own calendar, we lose a sense of the Divine invading our every day world. We live in disenchanted time.
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. Some years ago, attending the Holy Meal with baptist friends, I left having felt more like I was at a wake for "poor, dead Jesus" than that I had been at the table, feasting with friends and Jesus. That's so sad, I think, that we lose the ability to discern Jesus in our midst. (It stems, I'm sure, from a Protestant fear of looking too Catholic.)
Things weren't supposed to work out this way. By releasing God into the world the Protestants hoped 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's 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 what I'm calling (following Greeley) "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's 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.
Without that imagination, Christians are going to have less and less to say to the world that's believable.
____________________
* For the record, and in full disclosure, it was this "catholic imagination" that made me Christian. Without I had gone to Duke Divinity, and without the spiritual disciplines of liturgy and worship that captivated my own theological and moral imaginations, I don't think I would have developed the resources to stay Christian. In fact, I think I'd have resorted to the "practical atheism" that plagues so much modern Christianity.
The question that's left as soon as I make a claim like that, though, is: How do we get there? How do we modern people recover that sense of divine immanence in the world?
In college, I read what has been one of the most important historical account of how we got here by Philip Lee. Sadly, Lee's work has gone unappreciated by most folks. Lee (and Andrew Greeley after him) made an important argument: Protestants live in a gnostic world. Gnostics believed that salvation was through knowledge, that the material world was created by a lesser (or evil) God, that spirit/mind has nothing to do with flesh/matter, they were dualistic through and through. Gnostic Christianity has no need to see God in the world, it simply vacated the world, and rejected the reality of the Divine throughout the world. Catholics, on the other hand, 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 icons.
When I began writing my dissertation on Bonhoeffer, it was this Catholic imagination that struck me as one of the fundamental influences on Bonhoeffer's life. (Added to the influence that baptists had on the way Bonhoeffer read and lived Scripture, and you have the source of a thorough-going Christian pacifism -- but that's for another day.) It was the holiday Bonhoeffer took in Rome that made his conversion from theologian to Christian possible.
That's because Catholic live in a God-haunted world. Objects, events and persons in daily life are revelations of divine grace. One of the sad consequences of the Protestant Reformation was the rejection of that God-haunted world. (The Protestant Reformation, in that way, was the father of modern atheism, too. But that's also for another day.)
One of the impulses of the Protestant Reformation was to shift the spiritual load onto the laity. This wasn't a bad impulse, per se -- heavens knows it's part of the source of my high-church anti-clericalism. Holiness certainly isn't the occupation of "spiritual specialists" -- clergy, monastics and saints. But when the domain of holiness was shifted away from embodied people and places -- from monasteries and convents and cathedrals -- we're left with a sense of a disenchanted world. Just compare a Catholic cathedral to a Protestant "church house". 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 Church's liturgical calendar was gradually replaced by the time-keeping of the town, the secular clocks and calendars of the marketplace and the nation state. This became sadly evident to me when I reviewed HCSB's Minister's Bible a few years ago. The calendar upon which it builds its resources for pastors was the secular calendar. Whereas the Church's calendar is structured around the life of Jesus, the secular calendar is structured around the larger culture. Those two things are hardly the same. So when the Church jettisons its own calendar, we lose a sense of the Divine invading our every day world. We live in disenchanted time.
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. Some years ago, attending the Holy Meal with baptist friends, I left having felt more like I was at a wake for "poor, dead Jesus" than that I had been at the table, feasting with friends and Jesus. That's so sad, I think, that we lose the ability to discern Jesus in our midst. (It stems, I'm sure, from a Protestant fear of looking too Catholic.)
Things weren't supposed to work out this way. By releasing God into the world the Protestants hoped 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's 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 what I'm calling (following Greeley) "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's 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.
Without that imagination, Christians are going to have less and less to say to the world that's believable.
____________________
* For the record, and in full disclosure, it was this "catholic imagination" that made me Christian. Without I had gone to Duke Divinity, and without the spiritual disciplines of liturgy and worship that captivated my own theological and moral imaginations, I don't think I would have developed the resources to stay Christian. In fact, I think I'd have resorted to the "practical atheism" that plagues so much modern Christianity.