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Being Modern

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FEATURES 22

Secular Spirituality: A Brief History B Y M I C H A E L S. H O R T O N

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Engaging a Culture of Unbelief

BY RUSSELL MOORE

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Modern Pluralism: Challenges Old and New R A C H E L S. S TA H L E

COVER ILLUSTRATION BY STUDIO MUTI

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DEPARTMENTS

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“Concerning the Word of Life”

The Soul of an American President: The Untold Story of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Faith REVIEWED

BY HYWEL R. JONES

BY STEPHEN ROBERTS

BOOK REVIEWS

9 T H E O LO GY

God’s Obnoxious Friends

BY ALLEN C. GUELZO

Interpreting Eden: A Guide to Faithfully Reading and Understanding Genesis 1–3

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REVIEWED BY HARRISON PERKINS

14 FOCUS ON MISSIONS

The Alien Word B Y B A S I L G R A FA S

Transhumanism and the Image of God: Today’s Technology and the Future of Christian Discipleship

B A C K PA G E

Boring Pastors

BY ERIC LANDRY

REVIEWED BY J O H N J. B O M B A R O

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry Managing Editor Patricia Anders Review Editor Brooke Ventura Marketing Director Michele Tedrick

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Creative Direction and Design Metaleap Creative Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith

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LETTER from the EDITOR

Our second article comes from Russell Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Dr. Moore recently spoke at a White Horse Inn event on “Engaging a Culture of Unbelief.” His talk, transcribed here for the magazine, is a brilliant survey of both the challenges the church faces and the answers that have proven effective in every age.

Our final article is from Rachel Stahle, a scholar specializing in the work of America’s first theologian, Jonathan Edwards. In her his issue of Modern Reformation is article, Dr. Stahle examines the challenges of the second and final in a short series pluralism—tracing that challenge from Israel that began with our January/February in Egypt, through the early church, to our own issue. In these two issues, we’re tackmodern context. What may have been a great ling the challenge of our contemporary culture. hurdle for early apologists of the faith, Dr. Stahle In January/February, we debunked the “myth of argues, is now a potential boon to the mission of secularism.” Now, in this issue, we’re the church. helping you understand where your In both our January/February unbelieving friends and neighbors are issue and in this issue, we are coming from and how you can address addressing the “modern” in our the questions (and objections) they quest for a modern Reformation.

“BEING have about the Christian claim.

We earnestly believe that the rich The great hubris of our modern culresources of the first Reformation MODERN IS ture is the historical amnesia that at can be applied to our contempoREALLY best forgets all that has come before rary context with great benefit for JUST A NEW us, or at worst denigrates it as a kind our churches. We hope that you of pre-Enlightenment state from agree and that you are enjoying WAY OF BEING which we were lucky to have escaped. content that meets the chalANCIENT.” But as the Preacher of Ecclesiastes lenges of our day with confidence reminds us, “There is nothing new in God’s word and in his work under the sun” (1:9). Being modern is throughout history. really just a new way of being ancient.

I’d love to hear from you as It’s only as we understand the ancient you make your way through this foundation of our modern confusion that we will issue. Please e-mail me at editor@modernreforbe able to minister effectively in the world. mation.org with your own stories of reformation That’s the claim made by our editor-in-chief, and renewal.

Michael Horton, in our first article. Dr. Horton uses three cities (one ancient, one medieval, and one modern) to trace the challenges of belief that have plagued the church from her beginning. This article is a preview of an exciting new book project Dr. Horton is working on.

ERIC LANDRY exec utive editor

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PA R T T W O O F A F O U R - PA R T S E R I E S

“Concerning the Word of Life”

by Hywel R. Jones

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.

(1 John 1:1–4) par t from the Epistle to the Hebrews, no other letter in the New Testament begins as impressively as this one does. In some way or other, they all give an indication of the identity of their author and his standing in the church, and they designate those

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addressed in terms of their character or locality or both. Such introductions, which had a counterpart in first-century secular correspondence, draw attention to the historical setting and personal character of each letter. By contrast, 1 John seems to lack all such touches. All that we have are “we” and “you.” But those pronouns are

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not as impersonal as might be thought, because the “we” frequently gives way to an “I” and those addressed are described as “my little” or “dear children”—and sometimes the “we” includes the “whole family”! This letter is not only personal 1 but also truly pastoral.

Although there is this warm-hearted immediacy about the letter, its opening sentence (vv.

1–3) is rather abrupt. It does not read smoothly in the original from a grammatical point of view. But that, of course, was deliberate on John’s part, because he was posting headlines to gain the attention of his readers. He began what he was going to write about (the object) and piled up a series of clauses to climax in its description—“concerning the word of life” (v. 1).

This functions as a kind of title, which he then explains in a lengthy parenthesis (v. 2) before returning to his opening words and supplying the main verb, which is “we proclaim to you” (v.

3a). Finally, he makes an explicit declaration of his purposes in writing the letter (vv. 3b–4).

We are going to take the expression “concerning the word of life” as the overall theme of this study and consider it from various angles.

“THE WORD” OF LIFE This Epistle can be said to have a “prologue,” as does the Gospel, and in both John refers to a “beginning” in connection with “the word” and “the life.” But there is a difference between them that should be noted and appreciated. In John’s Gospel, “the word” refers exclusively

to a divine person, but in the Epistle it is also related to a message about him. We may therefore say that while the Gospel prologue presents “the Word,” the Epistle presents “a word” about that “Word.” This is shown by two facts: (1) the relative pronoun that opens the section cannot mean “who,” and (2) several references are made in it to human testimony and proclamation. Its opening expression, “that which was from the beginning,” is therefore best understood as a reference to the inauguration of the new covenant era along the lines indicated in Jesus’ own expression to his disciples in the Upper Room: “You also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning” (John 15:27; see also 1 John 2:7–12; 2:24; Acts 1:22).

To put it rather blandly but bluntly, something about somebody is being referred to in these verses—and it is by someone who knows what he is talking about. That being so, why did the author speak in the plural? It should not be thought that he was functioning as a scribe who recorded the combined efforts of a committee. When it comes to great artistic productions of any kind—and the First Epistle is as great a composition as the Gospel or the Apocalypse—“too many cooks spoil the broth” is more apposite than “many hands make light work.” John used the pronoun “we” because he was aware that what he was writing was a testimony that others were also able to give—namely, the apostles of Jesus Christ.

He was specifying them, as is obvious from his mention of “our eyes and hands” (v. 1), and so distinguishing them from those addressed. The apostle Peter did the same when he wrote, “For

We may there­fore say that while the Gospel prologue presents “the Word,” the Epistle presents “a word” about that “Word.”

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we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of the Lord Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 1:16).

Christianity did not begin with the apostles but with the coming of the Messiah himself.2 “Apart from me you can do nothing. . . . You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you” (see John 15: 5, 16). The message of “great salvation . . . was declared at first by the Lord” before being “attested . . . by those who heard” him (Heb. 2:3).

This letter is therefore not only personal and pastoral but also “official,” because in their teaching, the apostles communicated the mind and will of Jesus Christ as head of the church.

Their word about what they had “seen and heard,” accompanied by the Holy Spirit’s power, was the appointed means by which many came to know Jesus Christ, the Son of God (it still is!).

Peter and John preached “all the words of this life” in Jerusalem (Acts 5:20) and elsewhere.

In this letter, John is reminding believers in Ephesus of what he has proclaimed, and he is continuing to do so through what he is writing.

Their ministry was not just church-founding but church-building.

Although there are no more apostles of the Lord—their number being closed with the inclusion of Saul of Tarsus (see 1 Cor. 15:9), and their ministry as eyewitnesses of the resurrected Jesus not capable of being transferred to others—they still bear that authentic testimony to the coming 3 of the Son of God into the world. Although our calendar is no longer marked by the letters BC or AD—both now being thought to be too proChristian—it is the watershed event in terms of God’s dealing with humanity. The apostle John insisted on it in this letter, as did the other apostles. And the church must insist on it too if she would be worthy of the name “Christian”!

“THE LIFE” OF THE WORD In the light of what has just been said, John’s opening phrase “from the beginning” does

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This letter is . . . not only personal and pastoral but also “official,” because . . . the apostles communicated the mind and will of Jesus Christ as head of the church.

not only refer to the apostles’ ministry and to the period post-Pentecost. It also includes the life-bringing ministry of Jesus that John twice describes by saying, “The life was manifested.”

Pre-existence is necessarily implied in that verb—as it is in the frequently used verb “to come” in his Gospel, which is correlated with being sent. In prayer to his Father, Jesus said with reference to all humanity, “This is eternal life, that they know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). It is a “hiddenness” brought to an end by asserting a presence visible to human eyes and tangible to human hands—and not previous nonexistence.

Describing that life as “eternal” and “with the Father” indicates that it was found in his Son (5:11) and the kind of relationship that exists between them. Having an identity of nature, the Father and his Son live in light and love with each other. They are distinct from each other and yet never separate, so that no one can

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“have” the one without the other and whoever denies the one also denies the other (2:22–23).

“The word became flesh and dwelt among us” is therefore as much insisted on in John’s Epistle as in his Gospel. Over against those who claimed a knowledge of divinity that was dismissive of materiality, John thundered that Jesus was the Christ come in the flesh (see 4:2–3) and that the Son “came by water and blood—not by the water only but by the water and the blood” (5:6).

“LIFE” THROUGH THE WORD Although John safeguards the uniqueness of the apostles in this letter, he does not use the pronoun “we” with reference to them alone.

Sometimes—as was intimated in our opening paragraph—he includes those addressed as well; for example, the several affirmations of faith beginning with “we know” in the closing verses of the letter. Each use of the first-person plural pronoun in the Epistle has therefore to be considered in its context and on the basis that what is not specific to the apostles in their unique ministry applies to them and Christians generally. In this “prologue,” John speaks of “we,” “you,” and then “you . . . with us.” The word ministered by some and received by others results in “fellowship” with them but also “with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” and consequent “joy.” The life of the word is therefore the life of the Son “with the Father”: life through the word is “with the Father and his Son.” What is “eternal” means belonging to “the age to come,” and so the “life” is only everlasting because it is “heavenly.” It is nonperishable (John 3:16).

By definition, “fellowship” cannot begin and end with oneself. Others must be included, because it involves interaction. A relationship is therefore required. An example is provided in that John himself and James, his brother, were in partnership with Peter (Luke 5:10).

Applied to gospel work, this involved “giving and receiving” and “going and sending” (Phil.1:5; 4:15; 3 John 8). With regard to the gospel word,

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it consisted in the provision of “life” and the response to that blessing.

John deliberately describes this living interaction as being “with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.” He reserves the expression “with God” for a false claim to fellowship (v.

6). In the Gospel, God reveals himself as “the Father [who] sent the Son to be the Savior of the world” (1 John 4:14); and so response is to each and to both together—not with the Father to the exclusion of the Son, nor the Son to the exclusion of the Father (2:22–23), but each in distinction from and yet in association with the other. This is a powerful testimony to God as triune, although there is no mention of the Spirit in this paragraph. Life is provided by the Father in giving the Son to fallen humanity (John 3:16) and the Son’s self-giving for sinners (John 10:10). Those who receive that message respond (by the Spirit) to both and also to each.

The Father testifies to the Son (5:9–10), the Son reveals the Father (5:20), and the Spirit adds his testimony to that mutual attestation (5:6).

Such fellowship was to be characterized by all-round joy. Even if John wrote “our joy” (the better reading) rather than “your joy,” what he was concerned about was that those addressed might—knowing joy through believing—cause him to rejoice as well (see 1 Thess. 2:20). So he wrote for that purpose, well aware that they had been unsettled (see 2:19) and that they were lacking in assurance that eternal life was theirs (5:13). Taking note of how John sets about helping them to such certainty will be our task next time.

HYWEL R. JONES is professor emeritus of practical theology at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

1. Early Christian tradition identifies the author as John, the son of Zebedee, who resided at Ephesus, and those addressed as believers living in its vicinity toward the end of the first century.

2. The unity of the church with Israel of old and the harmony of the Old and New Testaments are not being questioned by this statement, but the difference between them must be acknowledged and appreciated. This is marked by the term “Christian” coming into use in Antioch (Acts 11:26).

3. The noun “apostle” is used in the New Testament not only of those chosen and sent by the Lord personally, but also of those sent by churches.

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THEOLOGY

God’s Obnoxious Friends

by Allen C. Guelzo

very one of us, I’m sure, has a friend we wish we didn’t have. You know the sort: the obnoxious friend, the really colossal copperplated bore, the one-subject expert, the incessant autobiographer, the crackpot inventor. The variations on this sort of friend are endless, but our response is always the same. Patiently, with gritted teeth, we jolly them along, try to exhibit signs that it’s late and it’s time for them to go, and privately hope the moon goes through a few phases before they’re seen again.

But we don’t drop them either, do we? The reasons are as endless as the variations: maybe we’ve known them since first grade, and someone you’ve known that long just can’t be shunted

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off. Maybe they’re friends of our parents, or even relatives, and we feel the burden of being family. Maybe we’re simply trying to be decent about things and not add one more to the levels of social indecency with which the world is already filled. We shuffle along with them, feeling resigned, feeling taken advantage of, and above all feeling provoked. Provoked, because no matter how decent we try to be, we can’t escape the feeling that we are being put upon—that someone is presuming more about our good feeling toward them, or more about their importance to the universe, or more upon auld lang syne, than they have any right to. Faith, hope, and love are the three great things that abide, but they don’t wear nearly as well when they are taken for granted.

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I am sure that when the devil pursued Jesus into the wilderness (Matt. 4:3), he did not do it out of any motives that come near to faith or hope or love, but out of fear. From the day Jesus was born, and probably even for a long time before that, this once-mighty angel had seen in Jesus nothing but a monumental threat to what he regarded as his own sphere of influence, which was “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” (Matt. 4:8). He responded to that threat by recruiting a number of hard-eyed proxies to do the work of snuffing out this threat for him, starting with Herod the king. When the proxies failed, it was up to the devil to get on with it himself. So once Jesus was baptized by John in the River Jordan—the surefire sign that the ball was now in play—the devil tracked him into the wilderness and got down to the business of personally tempting Jesus away from his identity and mission.

Characteristically, though, the devil doesn’t actually make the move himself. Instead, he

His powers as the Son of God have but one purpose, and that is to tes­tify to his Father in heaven.

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suggests, for the best possible reasons, that Jesus do the job for him. “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread” (Matt. 3:3). Notice: the devil doesn’t produce loaves with a little arsenic in them and invite Jesus to eat. That would be much too crude. He suggests that Jesus, as a routine matter of authenticating himself as the Son of God, turn some stones into bread.

In other words, if you’ve got the powers, let’s see them.

Except that Jesus’ powers as the Son of God are not conjuring tricks to be shown off like an exhibit at the circus. His powers as the Son of God have but one purpose, and that is to testify to his Father in heaven. The moment Jesus would begin gratuitously doing the devil’s bidding, he would not only be betraying that purpose, but he would also be accrediting the devil’s authority to demand the display. And so Jesus turns the play around: “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).

The devil then tries another tack. Standing with Jesus on the pinnacle of the temple in Jerusalem, he takes Jesus at his word and quotes Scripture to him. “If you are the Son of God . . . throw yourself down. For it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’” And again, Jesus turns aside the invitation: “It is also written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’” (vv. 5–7). Strike two.

So the devil throws it all on the table, takes Jesus up to “a very high mountain,” and offers him control of everything he sees if he will “bow down and worship” him. This, of course, is the real attack, which Jesus repulses completely: “Away from me, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only’” (Matt. 4:8–10). It’s then that the devil gives up and goes away, and the angels come and wait on Jesus. If there had been champagne in Jesus’ day, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to hear the angels popping a cork.

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Why not “put the Lord your God to the test”? Isn’t that what we ought to be doing?

Isn’t that what God invites us to do?

Yet there is something peculiar about these responses. Why would it have hurt so much for Jesus to have done what the devil asked? So what if he turned a few stones into bread? Why is that a mistake? Doesn’t Jesus later on turn water into wine and a few loaves and fishes into a banquet? When the devil makes him the offer of the kingdoms, why doesn’t Jesus say what both of them surely knew: “Those kingdoms don’t belong to you, they belong to my Father, and they’re not yours to give away.” Above all, why not take a Superman leap from the temple roof? Can you think of a better way to put the world on notice that you’re not just some wandering rabbi from Nazareth? Why not “put the Lord your God to the test”? Isn’t that what we ought to be doing? Isn’t that what God invites us to do? The prophet Isaiah says, “Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear” (Isa. 59:1). Isn’t this what God tells the prophet Malachi to do? “Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this, says the

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Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that there will not be room enough to store it” (Mal. 3:10). Doesn’t King David say, “Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Ps. 37:4)?

The answer to this is related to my example of the obnoxious friend. I try to make it a rule in my classes, as an encouragement to participation and curiosity, that there is no such thing as a stupid question—until it is asked the second time. I learned that from my ninth-grade algebra teacher, and it’s never been disproved. You welcome a question generated by a real interest in knowledge; you resent a question generated by lack of attention. Just so in this case. The Lord says through Malachi, “Test me . . . and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven” so that you can see and believe. But not if you have already been shown and didn’t pay attention, or want only to be entertained, or think that this somehow makes God your toy whose buttons you can push at any time to get the desired result. Do

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Peter didn’t just heave himself out of the boat on his own initiative; he did so because Jesus told him to step out.

not, in other words, presume. Because presumption will get you a response wholly and entirely other than the one you so routinely expected.

The people of Israel, in the desert, were not offering Moses a demonstration of their faith but of their lack of faith when “they quarreled with Moses and said, ‘Give us water to drink.’”

Moses knew what was really motivating their demand for turning sand into water; they didn’t really believe it could happen, and they wanted this to be the basis for a no-confidence vote in Moses and in God. So he responded: “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the Lord to the test?” (Exod. 17:2). This was such a transparent ploy that hundreds of years later King David was still talking about it in Psalm 78:18–22: They tested God in their heart by demanding the food they craved.

They spoke against God, saying, “Can God spread a table in the wilderness?

He struck the rock so that water gushed out and streams overflowed.

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Can he also give bread or provide meat for his people?”

Therefore, when the Lord heard, he was full of wrath; a fire was kindled against Jacob; his anger rose against Israel, because they did not believe in God and did not trust his saving power.

But the testing of God is not always as simple to discern as it was in the deserts of Sinai long ago. We do the same thing, although we attach it to different rationales and justifications. We test God—we provoke God—especially in those cases when we take no responsibility for what we ask. There is a pious way of doing this, and it sometimes takes the shape of what we call “stepping out in faith” or “letting go and letting God.” What this usually means is that on great occasions, we have to set aside the usual means of discovery, throw caution a little to the winds, and go ahead in the expectation that God is going to make it right. After all, God is a sovereign God, and if we have understood his will correctly, then we have only to follow him and all will turn out right.

It’s true that in the Christian life we “live by faith, not by sight” (2 Cor. 5:7), that many times we have to put aside the evidence of our senses and trust God in some extraordinary ways, like Peter trusting Jesus (Matt. 14) to the point where Peter got out of the boat and, keeping his eyes on Jesus, walked on water. But you’ll remember that Peter didn’t just heave himself out of the boat on his own initiative; he did so because Jesus told him to step out. It’s a different case when we decide, purely on our own, that because we want a certain result, we can throw ourselves at that result without reckoning on the consequences, and then expect that God will come bustling up in a hurry to keep us from hurting ourselves.

I have seen more than I like of churches and Christian people who commit themselves to plans and strategies that were nothing but pure folly—buying a property, making a career

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choice, dealing with a life-threatening crisis— and then wrapping it in claims to be expecting a miracle or claiming the promise. What is really going on in these cases is an example of people throwing themselves from the roof of the temple and expecting the angels to bear them up. They are not trusting God but testing God. They are not living by faith; they are trying to take God’s faithfulness hostage to their own plans. Far from this praising God, it provokes him. It was always Jesus’ direction to count the cost: “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it?” (Luke 14:28).

Those words make the difference between following God and testing him. You’ve heard it often said that there’s a fine line between genius and insanity. There’s also a fine line between prayer and presumption, but it’s the line Jesus is walking here when he says, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

And we know what this is like, because all of us have had our patience tested or our good manners deranged by our obnoxious friends—and if you have an obnoxious friend, you know just what I mean. They expect you to bail them out; they expect you to put up with their misbehavior; they expect you to overlook their boorish disregard for your feelings. The problem this

poses for our Christian lives, however, is this: How eager are we to be God’s obnoxious friends?

How easily do we provoke God by taking no responsibility for what we ask or do and then holding God responsible to fix our follies?

The mercy here is that God is patient even with his obnoxious friends. As much as the obnoxious friend provokes, infuriates, and exasperates us, there is still something that restrains us from just dumping them then and there. In our case, it might be simple niceness or politeness. In God’s case, it’s called grace.

Because the truth is that we are all God’s obnoxious friends. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). But God does not turn his back on us. In fact, he does more than we could imagine: he sends his Son to redeem us and remake us in his own image; and as we conform ourselves to the image of Jesus Christ, we become less and less like obnoxious friends and more and more like his own family. We learn to walk with God but to let him set the pace. That is when we have truly learned what it is to live by faith and not by sight.

ALLEN C. GUELZO is senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities and director of the Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

How easily do we provoke God by taking no responsibility for what we ask or do and then holding God responsible to fix our follies?

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The Alien Word

by Basil Grafas

For the Word of God is quick, and mighty in operation, and sharper than any two-edged sword: and entereth through, even unto the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit, and of the joints and the mary [marrow]: and judgeth the thoughts and the intents of the heart: neither is there any creature invisible in the sight of it. For all things are naked and bare unto the eyes of him, of whom we speak.

(Heb. 4:12, Tyndale Bible 1534) he heart of Christian missions is the speaking of the word of God into the unbelieving world. The book of Hebrews reminds us of a few things. This word is not inanimate, and it is not powerless. Filled with divine intent and projected with spiritual power, it breaks through human resistance. It finds our consciences, confronts our idols, performs heart transplants, and recreates sinful humans.

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With that in mind, I was struck by a few posts I saw recently on Facebook, and I started to correlate them into two kinds of concerns. One set cited inadequately missional churches that do not reach far enough into and engage communities as part of their incarnational ministries. These ministries primarily promote moving into communities and coming alongside their people. The dynamic I imagine includes walking with, serving, and listening—it is participatory. It strikes

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me as implying patience and focuses on interaction with responses from the community itself.

The other set bemoaned the insufficient and unclear missionary proclamation of the gospel into the world. Its dynamic is proclamatory. It seems to me to be more of an ambassadorial function. It is prophetic. We deliver messages.

It does not depend on a favorable reception. It involves saying what needs to be said, whether or not the hearers like it. It may presuppose resistance or disinterest.

Two men, Martin Luther and J. H. Bavinck—a Dutch pastor and theologian, who was also the nephew of theologian Herman Bavinck— explored two very different means by which that living, powerful word carries out the will of God.

Speaking into the world, God saves the people who live in it when they are powerless to do so.

LUTHER’S “ALIEN WORD” Luther referred to the gospel as an “alien word” that dealt with his own dread and anxiety 1 (Anfechtung). He summarized the good news as something foreign to us that breaks into our fallenness from the outside. This alien word of God conveys an alien righteousness that does what we are powerless to do: save ourselves.

This snatches us up and conveys us home to the Father’s house. A former professor of mine, Dr. Heiko Oberman, described what the implica2 tions of Anfechtung were for Luther’s theology.

This was an alien word that was the only real response to the devil and unbelief. It is a word suited for the reality of spiritual warfare. Luther was clear that nothing he could say was adequate to deal with sin and the strategies of Satan.

Oberman noted the oddness of a professor of theology, Luther, confessing, “My scriptural knowledge would not suffice if I did not rely on the alien word.” This was a statement of trust.

Luther could trust the strangeness, the confrontational nature of God’s word, to stop the devil 3 in his tracks. It is crucial to understand Luther here. He does not trust his own memory or ability to discern what God is up to in the world.

Rather, he trusts God to confront and defeat

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Satan. Luther understands that Satan has a grip on the world and that humans are not powerful enough to resist it. Only God, who is vastly greater than any creature, can do that. Speaking into the world, God saves the people who live in it when they are powerless to do so.

This alien word is confrontational. It changes us against our will. It creates from nothing and remakes everything, destroying our selfrighteousness even as it declares sinners 4 righteous. The alien word commands because God commands. This word defines us. It is not context-dependent. In his letter to the princes of Saxony, Luther counseled against using force, by the state or the mob, to stamp out

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unrighteousness. Rather, he said, “We must adopt the right way to drive out the devil and all offence, namely, by the Word of God. When we redeem the heart, the devil and all his pomp and power will assuredly fall of themselves.” 5 This is the word that Luther had to proclaim.

He saw himself in simple terms: as one who taught, preached, and wrote; but even then, 6 the word did everything. Luther did nothing. His role was to trust it and watch it work.

Scholars and enthusiasts who appear to make themselves indispensable to its understanding just distort its meaning or get in the way 7 of its powerful activity. Luther knew that all efforts to master the word are foolish. God is fundamentally and salvifically hidden from our minds. We cannot find him. He must 8 reveal himself to us in his word. Even more to the point, God reveals himself and his will to a resistant world enslaved to the devil, overcoming the most stubborn resistance. The word is alive and powerful.

BAVINCK’S POSSESSIO Possessio is a Latin word introduced to modern missions by J. H. Bavinck in the 1950s. He had served as a Dutch missionary to Indonesia before leaving to teach the theology of missions.

He spent years seeing how the gospel worked in the non-Christian world. Although his theological commitments were solidly Reformed, he worked his thoughts out in the field wrestling with a counterpoint of theology, cultural anthropology, and to a degree, psychology. This is what makes his ideas challenging.

Bavinck focused his thoughts on human beings by addressing their core concerns. This is what he called “five magnet points”: (1) the sense of cosmic relationship, an understanding that one senses belonging to this world; (2) a religious sense that provides an intuition not to always follow one’s desires; (3) the riddle of existence, living “between action and destiny”; (4) the craving for salvation; and (5) truth, what 9 Bavinck termed “the reality behind the reality.”

These are human concerns, and we can consider none of them without addressing who God is and what his being means. Bavinck’s five magnet points are very modern and very pre-Christian questions. They start with human beings and go from there. As a twentieth-century neoCalvinist, however, Bavinck insisted that the final answers all must come from God. If the word speaks into the unbelieving world, then how does it work? What does that progress of gospel truth look like for people not living in a Christian context? A related way of saying it might be to ask, what does conversion

Luther knew that all efforts to master the word are foolish. God is fundamentally and salvifically hidden from our minds. We cannot find him. He must reveal himself to us in his word.

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look like? Getting a grip on Bavinck is not any easier than it was to enter the thought world of Luther. Bavinck’s twentieth-century European modernist age was fascinated with new fields: cultural anthropology, linguistics, and psychology, to name a few.

Discussions about religion began to have a sociological gloss to them. Much of that involved a constant pursuit of common ground.

Bavinck, however, had a profound sense of the spiritual realities undergirding religion. In one sense, all religions emerged from the thoughts of humans made in the image of God. But as Hendrik Kraemer once said, “Even those parts of another religion which might appear lofty and uplifting, prove to be parts of a whole that 10 is under the judgment of God.” People are not looking for God; they are avoiding the God who reveals himself and constructing gods that suit themselves. Therefore, interreligious contact is innately confrontational. The trend was moving toward accommodation or what became known as acculturation and contextualization, which 11 carry the greater risk of syncretism. Bavinck shaped much of that confrontation in his articulation of elenctics, which is the discipline of confronting wrong ideas with right ones. This confrontational process, however, had a thoroughly spiritual dimension to it.

In his Introduction to the Science of Missions, Bavinck responded to the Catholic preference for accommodation and syncretism with his own proposal of possessio, which means to take in possession. The idea of the gospel adapting itself to culture (the overwhelming practice by evangelical missions today) seemed strange to the Bible. In the first place, syncretism would be inevitable. Second, Bavinck preferred a term that underscored that God’s word was powerful and transformational. It did not fit in. It revo12 lutionized. Possessio, unlike its successor in missions “contextualization,” led to the gradual 13 erasure of syncretism.

Therefore, when people come to Christ, their idolatrous practices and customs must be stopped or redirected. God takes possession of

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Bavinck preferred a term that underscored that God’s word was powerful and transformational.

It did not fit in.

It revolutionized.

those lives and rebuilds them. When Muslims or Hindus become Christians, their whole lives change. Bavinck illustrates possessio as he addresses the choices that govern daily life, such as marriage customs. The changes include their ethics. He knows that possessio forces difficult choices on people, but we 14 must make them regardless. Different things motivate Christians.

Bavinck is emphatically not suggesting that false religions such as Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism are subject to a takeover. Bavinck, like his colleague Hendrik Kraemer, is talking about changing human lives, not false revelation. As Kraemer cautioned, “The entrance to this impregnable religious citadel (Islam) cannot be opened by presenting Christianity to the Muslim mind as the enrichment of its

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half-truths.” 15 The more one penetrates different religions and tries to understand them in their total, peculiar entity, the more one sees that they are worlds in themselves, with their own centers, axes, and structures, not reducible to one another or to a common denominator that expresses their inner core and makes them all 16 translucent. The new believer is not a Christ follower. The new believer is categorically different. God changes the inside and outside.

That made Bavinck’s idea so consistent with his Reformed understanding of the Bible and equally out of step with Roman Catholic missionary practice.

WHAT THIS MEANS TO MISSIONS Both Luther and Bavinck remind us that believers are beggars before God—beggars who became sons and daughters—but God himself has a superabundance not only of love (a fashionable thought) but also of holiness, righteousness, and power. He does not need to accommodate the fallen representations of religions that look like Satan, not Christ. God will bring these down even as he breaks their grip on people.

More than that, God invests believers with his word and Spirit. They become ambassadors who convey the words to that unbelieving world. They become vessels, however cracked, that contain the sweet aroma of Christ. God is in control, and the advantage is not with the fallen systems of the world. It is the word of God that is living and powerful, not the pronouncements of governments or religious authorities.

We do need to speak to real people. We need to love them in visible and meaningful ways.

We need not bargain with our beliefs. We do not have the authority to do so. As Luther and Bavinck well understood, their new faith placed them in the face of evil, right in the crosshairs.

They knew confrontation and personal communication was necessary. Common ground, in the sense of the shared experiences of life,

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was there. Common ground, in the sense of worshiping the same God, never was.

There is a vast and growing chasm between missionary organizations and local congregations. The former routinely embrace concepts to include syncretism and inclusivism (at the very least) that conservative churches would likely outright reject. I think there are also some divisions growing between pastoral leadership and the members, but not nearly on the same scale as we are experiencing today in missions. We need to be clear about this. As a Reformed minister and missionary, I am not just talking about someone else. I am also including my people. As my youngest daughter used to say, “We’ve got issues.” Yes, we do.

BASIL GRAFAS is the pen name of an American missionary working overseas.

1. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers (Nashville: Broadman, 1988), 60.

2. Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

3. Oberman, 226–27.

4. Gerhard Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to His Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), 238–39.

5. Martin Luther, “Letter to the Princes of Saxony Concerning the Rebellious Spirit,” Luther’s Works, vol. 40, 59.

6. Cited in George, 53.

7. Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 89.

8. David C. Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1995), 24, 31.

9. J. H. Bavinck, The Church between the Temple and Mosque: A Study of the Relationship between the Christian Faith and Other Religions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961), 32–33.

10. Hendrik Kraemer, Why Christianity of All Religions? (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), 136. Cited in David J. Hesselgrave, Paradigms in Conflict: 10 Key Questions in Christian Missions Today (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2005).

11. Roman Catholicism, with its emphasis on natural theology, has always had a high degree of tolerance for syncretism. Not so with Reformed missiologists (at least not historically). For the contemporary Roman Catholic and neo-evangelical perspective, see Robert J. Schreiter, The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2004), 62–83.

12. J. H. Bavinck, An Introduction to the Science of Missions (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1960).

13. Paul J. Visser, Heart for the Gospel, Heart for the World: The Life and Thought of a Reformed Pioneer Missiologist Johan Herman Bavinck (1895–1964) (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2003), 292.

14. Bavinck, Introduction to the Science of Missions, 184–85.

15. Hendrik Kraemer, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1938), 355.

16. Hendrik Kraemer, Religion and the Christian Faith (London: Lutterworth, 1956), 76.

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THERE IS A KIND OF CHRISTIANITY THAT CAN TAKE THE WORST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS: OF SIMULTANE­O USLY BELIEVING THAT WE ARE A MAJORITY AND MOST PEOPLE AGREE WITH US; AND A SENSE THAT WE ARE AN AGGRIEVED MINORITY CONSTANTLY UNDER SIEGE AND VICTIMIZED.”

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SECULAR SPIRITUALITY: A BRIEF HISTORY

ENGAGING A CULTURE OF UNBELIEF

MODERN PLURALISM: CHALLENGES OLD AND NEW

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SECULA SPIRIT A BRIEF HISTO 

BY MICHAEL S. HORTON

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y S T U D I O M U T I

R TUALITY: RY 23

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ccording to a 2018 report from the Pew Research Center,

Most American adults self-identify as Christians. But many Christians also hold what are sometimes characterized as “New Age” beliefs—including belief in reincarnation, astrology, psychics and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects like mountains or trees. . . . Overall, roughly six-in-ten American adults accept 1 at least one of these New Age beliefs.

This percentage is the same for professing Christians (and 47 percent of evangelicals) and “nones” alike. Seventy percent of Roman Catholics in the United States hold at least one of these New Age beliefs. Yet instead of replacing traditional religious doctrines, New Age ideas are blended in with them. “Religious” or not, most Americans are “spiritual”—creating their own playlist. With roots in theosophy, the New Age movement glories in exchanging religious dogma and rules for an à la carte menu of spiritual therapies.

Contrary to what many have assumed, the United States is not exceptional in this respect.

Surveys of religion in Europe confirm a similar trend, although with higher percentages of atheism. Yet, European leaders flock to psychics.

More Europeans are likely to believe in reincarnation than in the resurrection of the dead and to say that they believe in a spirit or higher power (38 percent) than in the God of the Bible 2 (27 percent). Despite their empty churches, beliefs and practices that their pulpits would once have identified as “pagan superstition” are 3 on the rise.

The actual practice of the denizens of former Christendom defies the central myth of modernity—namely, that the steady march of reason and science (that is, progress) would eventually extinguish any culturally significant embers of “superstition” (that is, belief in the supernatural). Instead, it appears that Western culture is experiencing a revival of an indigenous “paganism” that has always existed beneath the patina of Christendom.

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As Friedrich Nietzsche presaged, the passing of the Triune God of Christian theism has led not to atheism as much as to a “rain of gods.”

“In all my lectures,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “I have taught one doctrine, namely, the infini4 tude of the private man.” Catherine L. Albanese observes that Emerson’s “antitraditional individualism” drew many young Americans into the search for a new spirituality in which “the Each 5 was taken up in the All.” She adds, Today we still can find a species of mysticism in the voices that come to us both from the center’s right flank, as in fundamentalism, and from the left outside the center, as in those nonaffiliates who are drawn to 6 the New Age.

JOURNEY TO THE ORIGINS OF “SPIRITUAL, NOT RELIGIOUS” This article is the first salvo in my forthcoming three-volume project on modernity, each gravitating around a particular city: Alexandria is our departure city, Florence is the connection city, and Las Vegas is the destination. Like many travels, we leave the city for the suburbs in each case, tracking formative movements elsewhere, but I have found it useful as well as intriguing to gather my material around these hubs. One of my main goals in this project is to pull this thread further back, beyond the theosophists and transcendentalists to radical Christian mystics who preserved the myth of a perennial philosophy grounded in the more “magical” universe of theurgic Neoplatonism. With the eclectic mixture of the formally religious and informally spiritual documented above, we may discern the throbbing heart of the past in our present.

What we call “New Age spirituality” is not an odd effluence from the “flower power” generation of the 1960s, but a perennial tradition in Western civilization.

Throughout this study, we will attend especially to five distinct motifs or themes, each of which depends on the one that precedes it:

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1. Supernatural naturalism (or vice versa).

A theological cosmology whose dualism is inscribed in an even deeper monism.

2. A perpetual search for a “new mythology.”

The production of stories concerning the gods and how the world, with us in it, came to be, how we fell, and how we return.

3. Mystical rationalism. Seeking saving gnôsis or knowledge—of the inner self as divine or as one with divinity—by an intellectual-spiritual ascent that is simultaneously through contemplation or theurgic magic (or both).

4. Esoteric. An emphasis on such knowledge being a secret, belonging only to a circle of elites who are worthy of it; sometimes, in fact, as a unique and private experience, but only rarely as public knowledge communicated to oneself externally (exoteric).

GILLES QUISPEL OBSERVED, “IT IS A CURIOUS PARADOX THAT MODERNITY ORIGINATED IN EGYPTIAN MAGIC.”

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5. Perennial philosophy. The insistence that such secret knowledge, though eluding (and excluding) most of one’s contemporaries, belongs to a hoary chain of sages reaching into the deep past and across cultures.

ALEXANDRIA Our story begins with third-century Alexandria, a thrilling and exotic bazaar of religious influences shaped by the interaction of hellenized Egyptians, Jews, Persians, Indians, and Middle Easterners. In this place, at this time, arose Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism— as well as a school of Christianity, whose openness to such influences gave rise to a tradition of Christian philosophy that would provoke admiration and controversy for centuries to come.

Gilles Quispel observed, “It is a curious paradox that modernity originated in Egyptian 7 magic.” Like Whitehead’s famous aphorism that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, this verdict

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by a renowned philologist is an exaggeration.

But it is an exaggeration with a story tied to its tail, and it is this story that forms the dominant thread of this work. As a historian of ancient Greek philosophy, Peter Kingsley explains, “A correct assessment of the nature and function of ancient esoterism is essential for a correct assessment not only of religious history in the West but also, ultimately, of what we now are as 8 individuals in the modern western world.”

The horizon of all the movements of thirdcentury Alexandria was Platonism, with generous contributions by Persian astrology, Indian philosophy, and Egyptian ritual magic.

Yet none was more radical in its myth of the human soul as trapped in the material world of an alien God (who turns out to be Yahweh, the Creator God of the Bible).

Although gnostic sects barely survived medieval pogroms, their influence may be seen in the radical Anabaptists of the sixteenth century and radical Pietists later. Hans Blumenberg (The Gnostic Religion) has pointed up gnostic influences in modernity, while Eric Voegelin argued that modernity is basically gnostic.

Whether in its transcendentalized form (such as original Gnosticism) or immanentized (as in Marxism, Nazism, and other utopian movements), the basic idea is that man is alienated from an essentially evil creation and must either escape it or re-create it. The Christian eschaton has been brought forward into history as the work of the “ones-in-the-know”: that is, the gnostic Übermensch (“Superman”). We do not have to accept all of the parallels, much less assumptions of direct influence, to recognize the enduring option that Gnosticism represents in our age.

FLORENCE Next on our itinerary is Florence. The Renaissance to a large extent was sparked by the rediscovery of pagan Neoplatonism (especially Hermeticism), which had already attracted the interest of important and controversial Christian thinkers of the Middle Ages. Steeped in these sources, radical

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Protestants blended magic, secrecy, and utopianism with their hopes for a “new reformation” that would reconcile all religions and branches of learning with the end of improving human life. Here we observe the slow and not always complete transformation of alchemists into chemists, astrologers into astronomers, and magicians into mechanics.

Typically passed over as harmless flies in the ointment of the myth of progress, Hermetic magical doctrines and practices were as important in the thinking of scientists from Ptolemy to Newton as were calculus and physics. In fact, it was all part of the same discipline of natural philosophy. In some ways, the Hermetic outlook inhibited the growth of early modern science, but in other ways it was an essential catalyst. The grand Hermetic vision of man as magus—a magi who learns to harness the powers of heaven and earth and transform nature into a higher, more useful form of existence—spurred invention in medicine and toxicology, engineering, botany, astronomy, and other fields. The alchemist’s close laboratory study of the interaction of opposite elements, properties, and chemicals helped to shift the modern mind from timeless ideas (rationalism) in books to timely operations in labs (empiricism). More than anything else, the Hermetic imagination shaped the practical aim of scientific endeavor toward transforming nature for the benefit of human well-being.

The great Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino translated these texts and dedicated himself to practicing their magic. Combing through the various genealogical legends, Ficino in his foreword to the Corpus Hermeticum adds to the lore concerning the “Thrice-Great” Hermes (Latin for Mercury): At the time of Moses’ birth, there lived Atlas, the astrologer, who was the brother of the physicist Prometheus and, on the mother’s side, the grandfather of the elder Mercury, whose grandson was Mercury Trismegistus. Augustine wrote this concerning him [Ficino cleverly omitting Augustine’s appraisal], while Cicero and Lactantius were of the opinion that this

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Mercury was the fifth, and that it was the fifth Mercury who was called Theut by the 9 Egyptians and Trismegistus by the Greeks.

Hermes built Hermapolis and was the priestking of Egypt, continues Ficino: As the first philosopher, he turned from natural and mathematical things to contemplation of the divine. . . . He was followed by Orpheus, . . . Pythagoras, [and finally] Philolaus, who was the teacher of our divine Plato.

There thus arose a single, internally consistent primal theology (prisca theologia), from six theologians in wonderful order, which had its beginnings in Mercury and 10 its fulfillment in Plato.

Like other Hermetic texts, the Asclepius is a conversation of Hermes and his son, but in this instance with two other figures, Asclepius and Ammon. They are discussing the thesis that “all is part of one, or one is all.” Florian Ebeling states: “This hen kai pan (‘one and all’) is the pantheistic connecting thread of the 11 text, for even ‘God [is] one and all.’” These myths, doctrines, and ritual practices will be “revived” (or better, reconstructed) by leading Renaissance thinkers and in the Romantic and Transcendentalist movements that continue to attract wide interest in our own day.

The idea of man as magus—even a mighty god in his own right—would be revived centuries later in Pico’s famous charter of modernity, “Oration on the Dignity of Man” (1486). It was here, in third-century Alexandria, where the legendary Hermes Trismegistus became the avatar in whom various streams of perennial wisdom met, blending mysticism and magic that would endure through the Middle Ages and erupt powerfully in the Renaissance. In fact, one of its formative figures, Ficino, declared, In things pertaining to theology there were in former times six great teachers expounding similar doctrines. The first

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was Zoroaster, the chief of the Magi; the second Hermes Trismegistus, the head of the Egyptian priesthood; Orpheus succeeded Hermes; Aglaophamus was initiated into the sacred mysteries of Orpheus; Pythagoras was initiated into theology by Aglaophamus; and Plato by Pythagoras. Plato summed up 12 the whole of their wisdom in his letters.

As Wouter J. Hanegraaff suggests, As has been well formulated by Peter Brown, what caught the enthusiasm of our platonic Renaissance humanists was “not the Plato of the modern classical scholar, but the living Plato of the religious thinkers of Late Antiquity.”

[It sought] the attainment of a salvational gnosis by which the soul could be liberated from its material entanglement and regain its unity with the divine Mind. Allowing for the great differences between various systems, this is what the gnostic, hermetic, and theurgical currents of late antiquity all had in common; and to an extent that has not always been sufficiently recognized, this is what platonism came to mean for its 13 Renaissance admirers.

This “flight to Egypt” became an obsession among many Renaissance figures throughout Europe. Many of the founders of modern science straddled the two worlds of magic and science, alchemy and chemistry, astrology and astronomy, because for them they were in fact one and the same world of discourse.

From Lactantius to the Cambridge Platonists, the Corpus Hermeticum was appealed to as evidence of an often secret but perennial tradition that prepared the way for Christianity as its purest expression. Others, such as Giordano Bruno, considered pagan Neoplatonism (especially the religion of Hermes) to be better than Christianity. Still others, following Augustine, regarded contemporary Hermeticists as quacks at best and demonic conjurors at worst (hence, the legend around Johan Faust).

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In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, disciples of Renaissance magi Paracelsus and Cornelius Agrippa seemed to come out of the woodwork: Böehme, John Dee, Robert Fludd, Jane Leade, and many others, all the way 14 to Isaac Newton, “the last sorcerer.” As R. T. Wallis observed, magic was not an aberration of a few obscure figures but belonged to the mainstream of early modern philosophy and science: Renaissance enthusiasm did not confine itself to the least fantastic aspects of Neoplatonism; a taste for the occult was characteristic of the time, not least among many pioneers of modern science, Paracelsus and Kepler being notable examples. Thirdly, and linked with the lastmentioned point, until Casaubon’s dating of the Hermetica in 1614 the Platonic tradition was regarded as a later development of the pristine Egyptian wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus, the supposed original source of the philosophy perennis. And, finally, and in contrast to literary humanists like Petrarch, Renaissance Neoplatonism was by no means invariably hostile to either 15 Aristotle or to Medieval Scholasticism.

In magnificent mosaic crafted in 1488, Hermes Trismegistus found a home in the Sienna Cathedral, depicted as a contemporary of Moses. At the turn of the sixteenth century, the Borgia pope Alexander VI (a fan of Ficino and Pico) had the papal apartments decorated lavishly with imagery and lore of Hermes Trismegistus, where he held elaborate occult ceremonies. It was the sixteenth-century Vatican librarian Hermetist and anti-Reformation polemicist Agostino Steuco who coined the term “perennial philosophy” (philosophia perennis).

Combining with the millennial utopianism of the twelfth-century mystic Joachim of Fiore, the early modern era was eagerly expecting the dawning of the “Age of the Spirit,” when there would be no more ministry of preaching and sacrament. Everyone would know God directly, immediately and intuitively within.

This fit perfectly with a revived Hermetic ideal

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THE EARLY MODERN ERA WAS EAGERLY EXPECT­ING THE DAWNING OF THE “AGE OF THE SPIRIT,” WHEN THERE WOULD BE NO MORE MINISTRY OF PREACHING AND SACRAMENT.

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of a “perennial philosophy” or “pure religion” that unites all peoples.

Although the Zurich reformer Ulrich Zwingli shared Erasmus’s appreciation for Origen, Martin Luther and John Calvin identified 16 explicitly with Irenaeus over Origen. Of Pseudo-Dionysius, Luther quipped, “He platonizes more than he christianizes,” and Calvin remarked, “One would have thought he had returned from heaven to tell us of these things.”

Curiously, Luther not only translated the Neoplatonic-mystical treatises of Johann Tauler, but he also considered the Theologia Germanica second only to the Bible itself. It was the Anabaptist radicals, however, who were most deeply immersed in the gnostic (Manichean) metaphysics that had survived the Inquisition’s purges through the Middle Ages. Their sharp opposition between inner and outer, spiritual and material, worlds extended in the thought of Anabaptist writers such as Menno Simons (founder of the Mennonites) to the doctrine that Christ, instead of assuming his humanity from the Virgin Mary, wore a “celestial flesh,” and that in the resurrection believers too would exchange their human bodies for the same. Reformed leaders such as Jan Łaski and Calvin attacked this teaching as a denial of the incarnation. In fact, Calvin referred to Anabaptists as “strange alchemists” in their Christological speculations.

Nevertheless, Hermeticism appealed to more mainstream humanists, including Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, translator of the French Corpus Hermeticum, who had been influential in Calvin’s early development. (However, Calvin was more suspicious of Hermetic mysticism, which was never as entrenched in his native northern France as it was in Germany and the Low Lands.)

In 1614, a crucial event occurred. Although questions about authenticity had been raised from time to time in antiquity, the Hermetic texts were generally received as predating the writings of Moses and the pre-Socratic philosophers, until the textual criticism of Isaac Casaubon, a young colleague of Theodore Beza at the Academy in Geneva. Regarded by many as the leading philologist (especially of Greek

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SE CIRCLES, THE ED IN THIS HOUR RS WAS ANOTHER LESS OF DIVISIVE OF AN ACTIVISTIC ULD UNITE THE DER THE BANNER CHRISTIANITY HERHOOD. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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texts), the Calvinist professor was appointed royal librarian to King Henri IV of France and was subsequently lured to England by Francis Bacon and King James I. There he dedicated himself to a lengthy critique of the Roman Catholic Church historian Caesar Baronius that appealed to the Corpus Hermeticum for support of his claims.

Casaubon demonstrated that the sacred oracles of Hermes Trismegistus were written in second-century Alexandria, probably by gnostic-inclined Christians. While many of the tracts are free of gnostic influence, Casaubon’s learned intuition was justified by the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library, in which various gnostic texts were bound together with Hermetic treatises. However, just as the fifteenth-century discovery regarding Dionysius the Areopagite (namely, that he was not Paul’s convert in Acts 17:34 but a fifth-century Syrian monk) did not erase his immense influence, so Casaubon’s labors did not quench the search for the philosopher’s stone.

In fact, in the immediate aftermath of his findings, Lutheran Pietists such as Johann Valentin Andreae sought to fuse evangelical faith with Hermeticism. For many in these circles, the “alchemy” needed in this hour of religious wars was another Reformation—less of divisive doctrine than of an activistic piety that could unite the confessions under the banner of practical Christianity and brotherhood. Drawing on the narrative of a “perennial tradition” beneath the layers of contemporary accretions, this “Rosy-Cross Order” was a largely informal network of like-minded ecumenists, educators, theologians, pastors, and scientists. These writers were fascinated by “Egyptian” mysteries, Kabballah, and a modernized fusion of magic and science that Hermeticism represented in their minds.

Complaining that the official churches of Protestantism seemed to them as hopelessly committed as Rome to dogma over the improvement of the self and the world, much of this energy went into the formation of loose trans-European networks of what they often called the “Invisible Church”—which are the

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foundations of modern Masonry. It is difficult to overstate the influence of this nebulous but welldocumented constellation of brilliant, pietistic esoterists on the rise of modern states, science, education, religion, and other fields. Cambridge Platonists such as Ralph Cudworth dismissed the impact of Casaubon’s research: even if the Hermetic texts themselves are not as ancient as once thought, the ideas are pure, true, and reach back to the hoary and misty past.

The combination of influences from pagan and Christian Neoplatonism (especially various gnostic and Hermetic texts, as well as Eckhart and Anabaptist leader Caspar Schwenckfeld) was exhibited with imaginative originality by a Pietist cobbler, Jakob Böhme.

Böhme in turn became the muse for F. W. J. Schelling, G.W. F. Hegel, William Blake, and other Romantic thinkers. Goethe was not only enamored of the legendary Faust, but he also practiced alchemy in his attic. M. H. Abrams captures the Romantic cosmology well in his 17 phrase “natural supernaturalism.”

The catch phrase of Hermeticism—hen kai pan (Greek term meaning “one and all”)— became the slogan for Lessing and the German absolute idealists. Being essentially pantheistic (or at least panentheistic), the Hermetic worldview has no room for miracles, per se.

The “supernatural” refers not to a God who is qualitatively different from the world, who created it ex nihilo, but to the divinity of nature itself. Astrology, alchemy, Kabballah, and other forms of natural magic are just that: natural.

The magus brings down the energy in the stars (considered to be embodied gods) to create the philosopher’s stone (that is, the true gnosis) according to prescribed rules. The whole business is perfectly natural, involving supernatural agents (angels and demons), who nevertheless belong to the “All” that is simultaneously natural and divine.

In fact, it was in Romanticism that the controversy over Spinoza’s pantheism was revived.

Excommunicated from his Amsterdam synagogue, Spinoza (1632–77) disdained the God of the Jews and considered the Reformed church the embodiment of ecclesiastical domination

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of society. Nursing his wounds among an eclectic circle of Arminians, Baptists, Quakers, and Freethinkers alienated from the “people’s church,” Spinoza found support for his modernized Stoicism. Everything (and every person) is a modification of the single, undivided Divine Being—namely, the material world. Absent any ex nihilo creation, the world possesses no real contingency; everything that happens must happen. There is no freedom of God from the world or for it, much less for human beings in the world.

For Spinoza and his close circle of confidants, this was—as Einstein would conclude three centuries later—the most beautiful system ever devised. But for most of Europe, it was quite scandalous on every level: theological, ethical, and political. Spinozism had to wait for the Romantic period to ripen. Notes Jason A. Josephson-Storm: It was the Catholic theologian Franz von Baader (1765–1841), an acquaintance of Hegel, Schelling, and Jacobi, who recovered [Meister] Eckhart from near obscurity and placed him alongside Böhme and others to suggest a mystical tradition, which Baader contrasted with what he saw as the destructive rationalism of enlightenment.

In effect, mysticism was constructed to be a third term reconnecting humanity and 18 God, or philosophy and nature.

Besides hailing Böhme as “the first German philosopher,” Hegel is the likely author of “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism” (1796), which revives the theme of “disenchantment” and calls for a “new mythology.” Hegel’s direct and explicit dependence on Plotinus, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism has 19 been documented at length by specialists.

Hegel also laments that Christianity had “emptied Valhalla, felled the sacred groves, [and] extirpated the national imagery as a shameful superstition.” For Hegel (Philosophy of History), disenchantment begins with Judaism, 20 where God is distinguished from the world.

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Hegel complained that “men are regarded as individuals, not as incarnations of God; sun as sun, mountains as mountains, not as pos21 sessing Geist and will.” Hegel’s deep debt to Hermeticism, Eckhart, and Böhme has been 22 fully explored.

The future will not be a simple return to a pagan past but the past in a higher key: a re-enchantment with new myths to replace the worn-out ones. Novalis called it “magical idealism” (Magischer Idealismus), a new naturemysticism. Comparisons of Eckhart and Indian Buddhism have been frequently made, especially

by German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). In fact, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and as Representation (1819) draws deeply from the well of Indian Hinduism (and Buddhism), linking it to the esoteric Western heritage (via Eckhart).

So it wasn’t physics but philosophy that invented the idea of “the modern” and “the myth of disenchantment.” And it wasn’t a triumphant anthem, but a somber requiem. Most often it was a lament for a fading mysticism, as the higher magic surrendered to the dead and mechanical materialism of positivistic science.

This lament for a lost perennial wisdom from traditional (pagan, pre-Christian) cultures continues to be heard among theosophists and New Agers today.

We arrive at the nineteenth century where there appears to have been another renaissance of Neoplatonic, gnostic, and Hermetic ideas. A century after Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) had revived Christian Neoplatonism in America to stem the tide of deism, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) shaped the young nineteenth century by reconstructing their own version of pantheistic Neoplatonism as nature-mysticism.

Ironically, this is the century in which science was supposed to have triumphed over superstition and Nietzsche pronounced God dead. However, materialism’s atrophy of the soul merely encouraged a significant backlash.

Nietzsche was certainly interested in a “new mythology,” particularly a rediscovery of the

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Greeks and the pagan folk religion seething beneath the last floor planks of Christendom.

Yet what he disdained most were the elements of Christian theology that seemed hardest to eradicate from modern philosophy. He seems to stand in the shadows of all of these attempts to substitute a vague natural-supernaturalism for Christian theism, asking, “When will all these shadows of God no longer darken us? When will we have completely dedeified nature?” (The Happy Science, 1882).

Josephson-Storm states the situation well: Although the God of monotheism may have taken a few knocks—if not actually “died”— in the nineteenth-century European story of “the disenchantment of the world,” the gods and other agents inhabiting practices of so-called “superstition” have never 23 died anywhere.

LAS VEGAS Finally, we arrive at the neon city in the desert, Las Vegas, where simulacra (simulated phenomena) reign and embody the loves and lives of late modernity. Here there is no correspondence between the lower and upper worlds; present moments do not participate in a whole divine plan, but are ephemeral and self-contained units of experience to be enjoyed and, if possible, repeated. “New York, New York” is not a sign of something real (namely, “the city that never sleeps”); rather, the simulation becomes the reality. There is no real society or community here on the Strip; only a lonely antinomianism whose “worldliness” masks a desire to escape the real world itself: “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.” Nothing here is a sign of something transcendent, but merely of other mundane signs. There are no “signatures” of the divine in nature or a humanist “brotherhood of man.” Yet, is this City of the Sun drained completely of spiritual refreshment? Not at all. It is one of the most spiritual—indeed, religious—places we have encountered thus far.

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As in the past, cries are heard of nihilism and disenchantment. According to political scientist Randall L. Schweller, the international order “is moving toward a state of entropy.” Like many experts, he speaks of “global ennui,” especially in the network of modern states: Chaos and randomness abound [as] the story of world politics unfolds without coherence, . . . a plotless postmodern world . . . subsumed by the inexorable forces of randomness, tipped off its axis, swirling 24 in a cloud of information overload.

THE ONE THING WE CANNOT DO IS LIVE WITHOUT A MYTH—SOME SHARED NARRATIVE IN WHICH OUR OWN LIFE STORIES HAVE MEANING.

Every now and again in the long and winding history of the West, a similar ennui sets in, celebrated by some and lamented by others, but mostly in an inchoate sense of metaphysical and existential disorientation. The one thing we cannot do is live without a myth—some shared narrative in which our own life stories have meaning.

The lament for the gods of Greece and Rome became a familiar topos (a literary traditional theme or formula) at seminal moments in Western history: from late Roman Alexandria to the sack of Rome, the Renaissance, Romanticism, and in contemporary trends ranging from the Frankfurt School to the New Age movement. In the wake of the First World War, the renowned poet and theosophist W. B. Yeats famously reprised in “The Second Coming” the angst expressed by John Donne three centuries earlier: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

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MODERNITY IS NEITHER AN INEVITABLE FATE NOR A MERE STYLE THAT INDIVIDUALS ADOPT

BY CHOICE, BUT A CULTURE—SPECIFICALLY, A WESTERN ONE THAT HAS EMERGED AND IS STILL EMERGING OUT OF A LONG AND FASCINATING TRADITION.

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Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 25 Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

In fact, Yeats’s combination of themes from Christianity (the second coming) and Platonism (the Spiritus Mundi) is a major thread of my project. In spite of having different gods and myths, modernists and anti-modernists alike sound the alarm that they are dying with no apparent replacements. Such “laments for the gods” (or their modern equivalents) punctuate periods of particular anxiety and ennui among cultures and societies. We will meet them at every major turning point in the narrative that I explore in this project.

CONCLUSION William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead.

It’s not even past.” Of course, in none of these episodes was the “revival” a mere repristination; the past is always read through the lens of the particular cultures that interpret and invoke it. Yet what they share in common are several important features that became embedded genetically in what we call modernity.

I should divulge at the outset that by “modernity” I mean a particular culture with its own founding narratives together with the languages, doctrines, institutions, and practices that inculcate a specific way of being in the world. Modernity is neither an inevitable fate nor a mere style that individuals adopt by

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choice, but a culture—specifically, a Western one that has emerged and is still emerging out of a long and fascinating tradition. As much as we talk about “globalism” today, what we really mean is modernity, and by modernity we really mean the spread of habits of thinking, feeling, and acting, as well as institutions of cultural formation that are peculiarly Western.

Like previous conquests, particularly of Alexander, modernity is to some extent a twoway street. An upwardly mobile New Yorker may feel more cosmopolitan than ever, with better connections to contacts in Delhi, Singapore, and Nairobi than to cousins who live in rural America. An elite culture emerges across the empire, simultaneously assimilating the local cultures of the “barbarians” to its ostensibly universal techniques and presuppositions, while also being transformed in the process. These quasi-borrowings from conquered cultures, however, become mere spices in the dominant culture of globalism. However much we might privilege ourselves historically by invoking the label “postmodern,” the cultural hegemony of Western modernity appears as secure as ever, colonizing traditional societies with its postEnlightenment modes of thought and behaviors.

At the heart of our modern self-consciousness is the assumption that we are “disenchanted,” whether we regard this as a decline or an advance. I take issue with this widely held assumption, arguing that modernity is less a break from than a continuation of so-called pre-modern myths and practices. In fact, I don’t really believe in modernity (or postmodernity) at all. “The Modern Story” is familiar to us: Once upon a time, people were superstitious, but then we discovered the natural causes of things; it was gradual, but eventually science and reason triumphed. This is not a myth, we tell ourselves, but the inexorable march of progress.

Who can deny that what used to be attributed to supernatural beings—whether God or Satan, angels or demons—now are seen to have purely natural explanations and solutions? Not even highly religious people live as though this world is filled with supernatural influences. We are now secular. Ironically, this Modern Story is

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presupposed by secularists and fundamentalists alike, whether as a narrative of progress or of decline.

But this is a myth—not necessarily in the sense of being entirely fabulous, but of being an interpretation of our history in light of a presupposed telos—goal or end-point—of it all and of our place in that story. While we acknowledge that there are a few exotic characters along the way, the culture-shaping forces have been increasingly rationalistic and materialistic. This story does not stand up to close scrutiny, however. We have always been enchanted, most of all when we hear laments of disenchantment. Laments (as well as triumphant announcements) of disenchantment themselves belong to that shared horizon down to our present day. Within that shared horizon, different interpretations of founding myths created assimilation, conflict, and boundaries that still define us today.

By myth, I do not mean fiction as opposed to nonfiction, but the narratives that generate the largely subconscious, communal, and ineluctable pre-understandings in which we live and move and have our being. I don’t mean that there is just one such myth; on the contrary, there are several. But like streams, they flow in and out of each other, and in so doing form the distinct yet variegated terrain of our lives as modern Westerners. As Mircea Eliade (d. 1986) argued, myth and ritual are not merely ways of commemorating past hierophanies but also of 26 participating in them.

The “search for a new mythology” is a trope of the Western imagination. Already with Socrates and Plato we find the explicit program of “producing new stories” that will form (and reform) individuals and society, instead of reinforcing mischief on the basis of the behavior of the Olympic divinities as constructed by the poets (that is, theologians). Pythagoras and Plato even turned to Egypt and the East— India and Persia—to find resources for their religious imagination, much as moderns do today. This program recurs again and again in the Renaissance, then in German Idealism and Romanticism, and becomes a refrain from Nietzsche to the New Age movement.

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Christianity only barely evangelized the major cities, much less vast reaches, of a religiously syncretistic empire. Once it spread its domain over public life and culture, with imperial support, the one Church provided the rhythms and disciplines that ensured at least superficial participation in the gospel narrative. The church was visibly in the center of the town or city; even the illiterate majority could “read” the Bible’s familiar narrative on its walls. Yet despite its importance, the gospel was incorporated into a broader horizon of a Neoplatonist cosmology and theurgic practices buttressed by a social, economic, and political hierarchy that reinforced the Ptolemaic astronomy in which medieval and Byzantine cultures were born.

The West has lost its religion, if we are talking about Christianity, but it is as spiritual as ever—beliefs, assumptions, and practices that previous generations would have regarded as “pagan superstition” are thriving in the desert of late modernity. What we find is less a break between premodern and modern (much less postmodern) thinking than a long history of combining natural philosophy (the old name for “science”) and a pantheistic or panentheistic vitalism that rejects or at least diverges from a traditional theistic framework. The result is what M. H. Abrams calls “natural supernaturalism.” Born in the late Roman period, this worldview was revived and propelled in a more utopian direction by the Renaissance and fostered by the pioneers of modern science and the leaders of Romanticism and Idealism. Even in our “enlightened” age, where the secularizing trend in the West continues unabated, disbelief in traditional theism goes hand-in-hand less with outright atheism or agnosticism than with rising interest in the occult.

The Austrian clairvoyant, philosopher, social reformer, architect, economist, and literary critic Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) is but one example of what it means to be “spiritual, not religious” in the desert of calculative reasoning and mechanistic materialism. The range of his contributions is typical of the Hermetictheosophical mind, which sees all of reality as connected as a pulsing, living organism. Steiner

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said, “It does not surprise me to be condemned from one side as a ‘Mystic’ and from the other as a ‘Materialist.’ . . . Whoever goes his own road, as I do, must needs allow many a 27 misunderstanding about himself to pass.”

There is no need, however, for mystic materialists to feel lonely and misunderstood.

Steiner’s is actually the road most travelled wherever modernity has taken root; in fact, imagining oneself as a lone ranger is intrinsic to the self-identity of Westerners. “Materialist mystic” is about the best way I can think of describing the average Westerner who in surveys self-identifies as “spiritual, not religious.” And pulling on that thread, all the way back to its sources, is a significant part of what this project aims at. It goes against the usual story of the gradual replacement of religion, mysticism, and magic with reason and science—a story that, ironically, is often presupposed by secularists and fundamentalists alike.

Those familiar with C. S. Lewis may recall at this point his “Materialist Magician” in The Screwtape Letters. Here Screwtape instructs his junior demon that their real triumph over “the Enemy” will not be atheism straight-up but a mixture of science and superstition that offers religion without gods—at least without personal ones that live and act in the world of human affairs. Screwtape explains, I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalize and mythologize their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy.

The “Life Force” . . . may here prove useful. . . . If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of spirits—then the end of our war 28 will be in sight.

A society of this type will at last “hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.” 29

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Theosophists such as Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner, René Guénon, and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy were part of a larger group of scholars who staunchly opposed the materialistic reductionism of science ever since the triumph of mechanical philosophy. Eliminating the spirit from the cosmos, such materialism has led to the “disenchanting of the world.” It was in the “‘mixed intellectual and spiritual vacuum’ in the last quarter of the nineteenth century” that “the not insignificant influences of neo-Gnostic thought” were revived, having 30 been part of Western thought all along.

Given its immersion in materialism, rationalism and empiricism, however, the purer streams of gnosis are to be found in India, according to these scholars. “The Indian tradition,” writes Coomaraswamy, “is one of the forms of the Philosophia Perennis, and as such, embodies those universal truths to which no one people 31 or age can make exclusive claim.” Similarly Guénon, who was raised a strict Jesuit but then joined a French Masonic order and eventually converted to Sufi Islam, writes, If Religion is necessarily one with Truth, then religions can only be but deviations 32 of the primordial doctrine.

Coomaraswamy, like Origen and like the Hellenistic Gnostics with their categories of hylic, psychic, and pneumatic [physical, soulish, and spiritual], also held the view that canonical religious and premodern philosophical texts and systems could be interpreted variously; that is, that meanings were multivalent and directly commensurate to the perceptive ability of 33 the interpreter.

Only the spiritual elites can decipher the secret knowledge encoded in the literal sense of various scriptural texts. In his Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, Guénon distinguished between “exoterism” (elementary teachings accessible to everyone via sacred texts) and “esoterism” (a higher order of knowl34 edge communicated orally by a master). It is

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precisely such distinctions that Origen proposed in his distinction between the literal sense of Scripture and its allegorical sense. Frances Yates observes: Thus that religion of the world which runs as an undercurrent in much of Greek thought, particularly in Platonism and Stoicism, becomes in Hermeticism actually a religion, a cult without temples or liturgy, followed in the mind alone, a religious philosophy or philosophical religion 35 containing a gnosis.

Max Müller (1823–1900), known as the founder of Indian studies as well as the field of comparative religion, was a Vedantist who argued in his Gifford Lectures that theosophy was the highest stage in religious evolution.

It would take us too far afield to recognize the number of formative thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—scientists, artists, philosophers, sociologists, historians, and theologians—who rallied around the lament of “disenchantment” and the call for a re-enchantment of the cosmos through a revival of Hermeticism and Gnosticism.

In the twentieth century, we have clear evidence of belief in what Christians would have called “superstition.” Attempting a Darwinian Hermeticism rooted in Kant, Baron Carl du Prel (1839–99) was hailed by Sigmund Freud as a “brilliant mystic.” Indeed, after early disagreements with self-proclaimed gnostic Carl Jung, Freud himself came to embrace magic. Du Prel 36 was also read eagerly by William James.

Max Weber is often credited with coining the phrase “disenchantment of the world,” but it goes back all the way to the seventeenth century.

This hand-wringing over “disenchantment” continued into the twentieth century, and the list of twentieth-century magi reads like a Who’s Who of modernity: besides Weber himself, this includes philosophers William James, Ludwig Klages, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, and the influential Jewish gnostic Gershom Scholem, psychologist Carl Jung (and the later Freud), pioneering physicists such as Werner

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Heisenberg and Hans Thirring, as well as Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Julius WagnerJauregg, mathematicians Richard von Mises and Kurt Gödel, and artists such as Wassily Kandinsky.

These figures often met in what is called the Cosmic Circle and later the Eranos Circle. The liberal theologian and historian of religion Ernst Troeltsch “not only wrote on mysticism, but—as he confessed to his student Gertrud von Le Fort—was also himself a mystic in the model 37 of Jakob Böhme.” Einstein too said that the religion that comes closest to his own view is 38 Spinoza’s pantheism. This is but a partial list of celebrated thinkers of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were fascinated with Eastern religions and the esoteric, gnostic, and 39 hermetic traditions of the West. Justifiably, Josephson-Storm concludes, Disenchantment is a myth. The majority of people in the heartland of disenchantment believe in magic or spirits today, and it appears that they did so at the high point of modernity. . . . Secularization and disenchantment are not correlated. Moreover, it is easy to show that, almost no matter how you define the terms, there are few figures in the history of the academic disciplines that cannot be shown to have had some relation or engagement with what their own epoch saw as magic or animating forces. . . . For example, the influence of theosophy, witchcraft (Wicca), and neo-paganism on all three waves of feminist movements has been well studied. That artistic and literary movements often went together with magical rituals and spirit summoning should also be no surprise: the occult can be found from the Harlem Renaissance to the Surrealists, from Wassily Kandinsky to 40 Victor Hugo to W. B. Yeats.

Josephson-Storm continues, “Biologists like Alfred Russell Wallace and inventors like Thomas Edison, Nobel Prize-winning physicists from Marie Curie to Jean Baptiste Perrin to Brian Josephson have often been interested

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in parapsychology.” Even computer scientists such as Alan Turing believed in psychical powers. Moreover, despite the laments of the new materialists, panpsychism has been a persistent countercurrent in philosophical circles, as well-known thinkers—including Spinoza, Leibniz, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Margaret Cavendish, Julien La Mettrie, Gustav Fechner, Ernst Mach, Henry David Thoreau, C. S. Pierce, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, Henri Bergson, Samuel Alexander, Charles Strong, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Albert Schweitzer, Arthur Koestler, and Gregory Bateson—all argued that the material universe should be thought of as thoroughly animated or possessed of mind and awareness. Mechanism has long had established enemies. This list barely 41 scratches the surface. Josephson-Storm adds, When combined with survey after survey that suggests popular belief in the supernatural, miracles, witchcraft, spirits, and the mysterious, it makes it hard to

1. Claire Gecewicz, “‘New Age’ Beliefs Common among Both Religious and Nonreligious Americans,” Pew Research Center (October 1, 2018), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/10/01/ new-age-beliefs-common-among-both-religious-and-nonreligious-americans/.

2. “Being Christian in Western Europe,” Pew Research Center (May 29, 2018), https://www.pewforum.org/2018/05/29/ being-christian-in-western-europe/.

3. Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 24–37.

4. Newton Dillaway, ed., The Gospel of Emerson, 6th ed. (1939; repr., Wakefield, MA: Montrose Press, 1949), 73.

5. Catherine L. Albanese, “Religion and the American Experience: A Century After,” Church History 57, no. 3 (1988): 343.

6. Albanese, 345.

countenance the idea that disenchantment is the central feature of the history of the industrialized “West.” As I interpret Max Weber, we live in a disenchanting world in which magic is embattled and intermittently contained within its own cultural sphere, but not a disenchanted one in which magic is gone. Restated, 42 magic never vanished.

The early proponents of the new physics, Wolfgang Pauli and J. Robert Oppenheimer, looked for “the turn to Oriental religion and mysticism that would later be popularized 43

by New Age thinkers.” Ironically, many pioneers and contemporary leaders in the field of religious studies belong to this long train of perennial theosophists whose “secularism” stands in contrast to traditional Christianity, but not to myth, ritual, and spirituality.

Wherever this outlook dominates, even secularism appears to be abuzz with rumors of angels.

If disenchantment has been so central to the Modern Story, then perhaps modernity itself

10. Ebeling, 62–63.

11. Ebeling, 14.

12. Marsilio Ficino, “De Immort. Anim., XVII.i.386,” in G. R. S. Mead, Orpheus (1896; repr., London: J. M. Watkins, 1965), 15. It is interesting that Ficino singles out Plato’s letters, since (as we will see) these letters (especially the Second and the Seventh), regardless of their authenticity, belong to the so-called esoteric teachings rather than the published dialogues and contain more controversial doctrines.

13. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esoterism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 12.

14. Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

15. R. T. Wallis, Neoplatonism (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995), 170–71.

8. Peter Kingsley, “An Introduction to the Hermetica: Approaching Ancient Esoteric Tradition,” in From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme, 19.

16. Scheck observes, “The magisterial Protestants (Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, Beza) cited the texts in which Origen repudiated the ‘formula’ of ‘justification by faith alone’ to show that Origen was no true Christian but a Pelagian or even a pagan.” See the introduction to Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Books 1–5, 33.

9. Florian Ebeling, The Secret History of Hermes Trismegistus: Hermeticism from Ancient to Modern Times (repr., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 62.

18. Josephson-Storm, 189.

7. G. Quispel, “Reincarnation and Magic in the Ascelpius,” in From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme: Gnosis, Hermeticism and the Christian Tradition, ed. Roelof van den Broek and Cis van Heertum (Amsterdam: In de Pelikaan, 2000), 231.

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17. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973).

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is a myth, which implies that postmodernity is one also. We tell ourselves stories that we assume to be true but run against the grain of the actual history of our time. Josephson-Storm relates that the German philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz (Die Krisis der europäischen Kulture) coined the term in 1917. He writes: The postmodern man is an encrusted mollusk, a happy medium of decadent and barbarian swarming out from the natal whirlpool of the grand decadence of the 44 radical revolution of European nihilism.

technology and enchantment can be intertwined. Magic and secularism are 45 not opposites.

We can exchange one myth for another, gradually or in a revolution, but we cannot—we do not—live without myths. Even in Las Vegas, we can be—indeed, we must be—“spiritual, not religious.”

MICHAEL S. HORTON is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California in Escondido.

Yet all of these laments have been heard before. The Story that there is no myth is itself a myth. Again, Josephson-Storm observes, But there is plenty of evidence that there have been bureaucracies fully committed to magic and ritual, that capitalism has the capacity to absorb all the magic of the world, that mythopoesis can be constant and no less alienating, and that

19. For example, see Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994) and Gnostic Return in Modernity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001); and Glen Alexander Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).

20. Josephson-Storm, 85.

the International Association for the History of Religions, Mexico City, 1995 (Leuven: Peeters, 1998), 273.

31. Quoted in William W. Quinn, Jr., The Only Tradition (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 14.

32. Quoted in Quinn, 14.

21. Quoted in Josephson-Storm, 86.

33. Quoted in Quinn, 14–15.

22. See esp. Magee, Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, and O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel.

34. Quinn, 15.

23. Josephson-Storm, 16.

35. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991), 4–5.

24. Randall L. Schweller, “Ennui Becomes Us,” The National Interest, no. 105 (January/February 2010), 27, 38.

36. Josephson-Storm, 189–90.

25. Y. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” Poetry Foundation, https://www. poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming.

38. Alice Calaprice, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 325.

26. Wendy Doniger, foreword, Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), xiii.

27. Rudolf Steiner, foreword, Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911), vii.

28. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (repr., New York: HarperOne, 2015), xx.

29. Lewis, xx.

37. Josephson-Storm, 293.

39. Josephson-Storm, 305.

40. Josephson-Storm, 304–5.

41. Josephson-Storm, 305.

42. Josephson-Storm, 305.

43. Josephson-Storm, 313.

44. Quoted in Josephson-Storm, 307.

45. Josephson-Storm, 315.

30. Garry W. Trompf, “Macrohistory in Blavansky, Steiner and Géunon,” in Antoine Faivre and Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Western Esoterism and the Science of Religion, select papers of the Seventeenth Congress of

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ENGAGIN CU OF UNBELI 

BY RUSSELL MOORE

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recently noticed a statement by leadership guru Seth Goden, who said that one of the things that best prepared children in the late twentieth century for life was “sea monkeys.”

Do you remember the old comic books with advertisements for sea monkeys and how the pictures depicted these sea monkeys as majesticlooking characters, with a mom, dad, and kids who all resembled aliens? Children sent in an order because they wanted to get these sea monkeys. But when they opened the package, the “sea monkeys” were brined shrimp and looked absolutely nothing like the creatures in the advertisement. Goden said that this moment, wherever it came, helped children to know an important life lesson: You are going to be sold things that do not in any way live up to what they claim to be. So there is a dose of cynicism that starts at an early age, which can be helpful in some aspects of life and ultimately devastating in other aspects.

While I don’t know that I had my cynical crisis moment with sea monkeys, I did have it within the church. As someone who was an heir and survivor of the Bible Belt, I found myself as a fifteen-year-old thrown into a deep crisis of faith. I looked around and saw Christianity all over the place, but it didn’t look much like the book of Acts. Much of the Christianity I saw seemed to have a kind of cheap grace transactional form of the gospel in which people repeated a few words and then were pronounced to be born again, whether or not they ever followed Christ. I saw a kind of cultural Christianity where a lot was said about profanity, including euphemisms like “gosh darn it,” but nothing about virulent racial slurs, even when they took place in church fellowship halls. I heard a lot about sex and violence on television but a lot of cover-ups about sex and violence within the church.

There came a point when I started to wonder: Was Christianity just another form of Southern honor culture? Was Christianity just something tacked onto the way one is supposed to behave in order to prop up the way things are in order to be normal? If that was the case, it meant that the world I saw in front of me was dark and

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meaningless and Darwinian. It was a horrible, horrible wrestling.

I found my way out of this through a wardrobe in a spare room in England. Having read the Chronicles of Narnia as a child, I recognized C. S. Lewis’s name on the spine of Mere Christianity in a bookstore and took it home and read it. What was remarkable to me about reading Lewis was not the argument he was making in Mere Christianity. I didn’t need reasons to prop up the faith at that moment. What I needed was somebody who bore an authentic witness to something that was true, someone who was obviously even in the way he spoke—not someone trying to sell me something.

The voice of such a person could not be any more different from this fifteen-year-old Southern Baptist in Mississippi. This smoking, drinking Anglican, long dead by that point, bore witness to something bigger than the Bible Belt—something mighty and awesome as an army with banners. This saved my life and helped me conserve and hold fast to what was good.

I think we are in another moment of crisis today. The very real challenges facing the church might lead it to one of two things, both of which are entirely disastrous and unhelpful.

One of those is a sense of denial about the rampant secularization taking place, and a sense of “if only we do a little bit more of what we have always done, everything is going to turn around and be exactly the way it was” in some real or imagined Golden Age. Or, we could be the kind of people who see the cultural shifts and the secularization around us and wring our hands in desperation or clench our fists in anger.

What’s happening around us right now is the shaking that is coming through secularization and with some of the horrific things we see taking place, even on a weekly basis—such as pastors, teachers, or leaders greatly influential in the lives of their congregations announcing to them their own moral failings or that they no longer believe in Jesus Christ.

This is rattling and shaking, but I would argue that the shaking happening in American culture right now is not a sign that God has given up on

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the church. Instead, I think it is a sign that God is rescuing his church from a captivity we didn’t even know we were in. In order to move forward into the future, there are two things I believe we must reclaim. One of those is a sense of gospel integrity, and the other is a sense of gospel community. This is exactly what I think the apostle Paul is arguing at the beginning of his letter to the church at Galatia.

GOSPEL INTEGRITY Paul begins by talking about his apostolic authority and the fact that this authority, this gospel, did not come from man. “I was given this by Jesus,” he says. “This is coming as a revelation from Jesus and, therefore, what I am giving to you is the authority of God himself” (Gal. 1:11–12). He repeatedly testifies to the fact that he’s telling the truth. This is desperately needed in terms of the way we approach the outside world, because our biggest problem is not a growing secularism. The biggest problem we face is a growing cynicism in which people not only mistrust the church or religion but mistrust everything. There is great reason to mistrust everything! Since we are at the point where almost any claim to authority is seen to be a means to an end, what then should be the stance of the church against this sort of culture of not just unbelief but of incredulity toward any claim of belief?

It has to do with exactly what the apostle Paul is talking about at the beginning of Galatians.

He takes the stance of one who sees himself in front of the judgment seat of Christ when he says, “Am I now a servant of man, or am I a servant of God? If I wanted to please men, I would not then be a servant of Jesus Christ” (v.10). This is a theme Paul uses in many of his Epistles, such as 1 Corinthians 4:3: “I consider it a small thing to be judged by you.” Why? Because he knows that there is another judgment that is going to take place.

If you say to any group of secularized Americans right now, “Tell me what you think about Christians,” the topic of judgment will

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probably be one of their first few responses.

Sometimes those who don’t know any other passage of Scripture will know the phrase, “Judge not lest you be judged.” In reality, however, the thing we most have for the world is a sense of judgment day—not a censorious moralizing over and against the world, but an understanding that there really is an objective and personal accounting for evil and for sin. This gives meaning to the individual person’s life and frees us from the shackles of cowardice in order to be free to actually bear witness.

Why is it that Paul is able to do this? Why is it that the church throughout the ages has been able to confront everything from fatalism to atheism? It’s because there is a sense of accountability and integrity that is based on a real conviction about the judgment seat of Christ, and where we stand before this judgment seat, that frees us from the judgment of everyone else. Think about the passage in John 12:42–43. At one level, many in the crowds believed the things Jesus was saying, but they wouldn’t commit themselves to him. This is because they were fearful of being thrown out of the synagogues and because they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. This is the primary challenge right now, not only for the church of Jesus Christ but for everybody. Why is it that we have skyrocketing levels of depression among adolescents and young adults that can be directly tied to social media? It’s because we’re living in an environment where almost everyone is using social media the way a politician uses daily polling tracking data, except without an election day in sight. Where do I stand in terms of my image? Where do I stand in terms of displaying my success? This leads to a hollowing out of the person, which then leads to a desire to find a herd to belong to or a hive, and to transfer one’s convictions, intuitions, and affections to that herd.

The gospel and the integrity of the gospel free us from this. Because we are people who understand and know who we are in Christ, we have the approval of God and are therefore able to

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avoid the kind of false gospels that American cultural Christianity can give. We can say, “I am free to pour my life out. I am free to stand confidently in the face of unbelief without being given over to some sort of frantic outrage.” Why? Because the worst thing that can possibly happen to me has already happened.

The worst thing is not the disapproval of the culture around me, losing a job, or my spouse walking out. The worst that can happen to me is dying under the wrath of God outside the gates of Jerusalem. In Christ, however, I have already experienced that. When I stand before God, he sees me hidden in Christ (Col. 3) and thinks of me exactly in the same way he thought of Jesus at the waters of the Jordan, pronouncing, “This is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.”

With a word from that God, who shapes and forms our entire outlook on the world around us, we are then freed from this frantic desire to be found in some protective herd. This means we need to be a people who actually know and are shaped by the text of the Bible.

For many years, I trained some of the best future pastors and missionaries. I noticed that even though the people I was training were deeply theological, they were often people who were deeply theological at the point of specific controversies. They could argue whether or not there should be infant baptism or believer’s baptism. They could argue whether or not complementarianism or egalitarianism is right. They could argue limited atonement and general atonement. But they didn’t know the difference between Josiah and Jehoiakim.

They didn’t know the rhythms of the narrative of Scripture itself in a way that would cause them to understand their actual identity, to see through the grid of the eyes of Christ. The sort of integrity of the gospel the world needs from us is a deep and constant attention to the word of God in Scripture.

GOSPEL COMMUNITY In addition to gospel integrity, we need gospel community. Paul says in Galatians that he didn’t

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THE GOSPEL OF JESUS CHRIST DOES SOMETHING SO STRANGE AND DISTINCTIVE AND UNNERVING, AND IT HAPPENED IN HIS CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD. MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

go and ask permission. Jesus commissioned him. He didn’t receive this secondhand from the apostles. He went as someone chosen by Jesus Christ to others chosen by Jesus Christ: “I did not yield to the false teachers and false brothers who came in to spy out our freedom in Jesus Christ.” And why not? “We did not yield to them for a moment so that the gospel would be preserved for you” (Gal. 2:4–5).

There is a kind of Christianity that can take the worst of all possible worlds: of simultaneously believing that we are a majority and most people agree with us; and a sense that we are an aggrieved minority constantly under siege and victimized. A secular journalist friend of mine who is not a believer sent me a photograph she took of a bumper sticker. It was obviously a Christian’s car with all sorts of Christian bumper stickers; but one of the stickers said, “If Jesus had had a gun, he would be alive today.” My response was, “Jesus is alive today!” The message being projected on that sticker was not so much a claim about Jesus as a claim about an argument that would be taking place regardless of whether the tomb was empty or full. Jesus is a means to carry that argument to another level.

That is not what the gospel of Jesus Christ does to us. The gospel of Jesus Christ does something so strange and distinctive and unnerving, and it happened in his crucifixion and resurrection from the dead.

We are not people who simply attach Bible verses to issues we’re concerned about and debating on social media. We find other matters of far more importance—matters that we tend to suppress through our unrighteousness (Rom. 1), matters we don’t want to acknowledge, even in our own consciences (Rom. 2), and all because we have a sense of fear of judgment (Rom. 3).

Those matters can only be answered in the cross of Jesus Christ, and Paul says he would not yield to any who wanted to use the gospel as a means to any end, regardless of what that end is. What he wanted to do was to conserve and to preserve the gospel for us.

What American cultural Christianity often does—and lost secular America can see this and recognize it—is seek to be separated from

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sinners but remain infected with sin. And so, we turn on its head what the Holy Spirit says to us in 1 Corinthians 5:12: “It is not those on the outside that I judge; it is those who are on the inside.” We turn that on its head, and we speak loudly about whatever sins do not have a voting majority in our church and then are mute about those that do. The outside world can see that.

And when they see that, it fuels the kind of cynicism that says, “We understand and know what you have here, and what you have here is just another marketing scheme.”

To paraphrase Paul, he says, “I am a servant of Jesus Christ. I am not bringing this gospel out of a desire for getting a vote from other people. I’m not bringing this gospel to you as a means for something that I want based on other things. I’m not test-marketing this message.

I’m bringing you something that is of such critical importance, and with the authority of Jesus himself, that I am willing to stand and stand alone.” That is really difficult to do when we’re living in a culture that is simultaneously consumed with nostalgia for the past while craving novelty. That’s why we have constant reboots of thirty-year-old television shows. And it’s very difficult when we’re dealing with the sort of world where truth has become a means to an end, such that any claim to authority and truth is immediately disbelieved.

The Freakonomics gurus, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, did a piece a couple years ago about those repetitive Nigerian e-mails that say, “I’m a prince in Nigeria; I need you to send me $500.” Levitt and Dubner asked why the e-mails don’t come up with new material. It’s been the same message with the same grammatical and spelling errors, and none of them seems sophisticated enough. These researchers say that this was exactly what the scammers were trying to do. They didn’t want the messages to be sophisticated; they wanted to be able to identify who out there is so gullible that they hadn’t heard about these Nigerian prince e-mails. As they put it, the gullibility is unobservable, so you want to get the gullible people to show themselves; that’s who you want to talk to if you’re running an e-mail scam. Anybody

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who doesn’t fall off their chair laughing is exactly the right person.

If all we want to do is to build some sort of religious movement, then we can put together a coalition of successful lunatics and heretics who are able to sell books on tying Bible prophecy to every current event; and as soon as those things no longer exist, we can move on to something else. You can have a movement that sells a prosperity gospel and a market for end-times dried food for the imminent apocalypse, sometimes on the same television program. But this is not the gospel.

We need to speak to people with the sort of transcendent authority that comes with the gospel Jesus entrusted to his apostles and handed down through the ages to us—the sort of gospel that creates such disruption so that when Paul says, “They told me to remember the poor, the ones I was very eager to remember in the first place” (Gal. 2:10), he not only sees that in terms of charity but in exactly the way that James does (James 2), with a kind of trillion-year perspective that says the standards of success and power the outside world values are not of the kingdom of God. We need to speak to people in a way that advances the gospel in a world of unbelief, not by retaining some sort of easy, illusory influence.

John the Baptist could have had a lot of influence by saying, “That’s some great dancing, Herod.”

Influence is illusory. The marrying parson who marries whoever comes into the room can have influence, but he doesn’t have respect. In the long term, the message we have will reach a secularizing culture not by its sameness but by its distinctiveness—by conserving what is odd and distinctive and strange about the gospel.

A couple years ago, I was on a lesbian talk show in San Francisco. The host said to me, “I’m not going to take callers, because that would be bad for you.” She said, “I just want to talk to somebody I don’t talk to very often.” As we talked, she asked me why Christians think this or do that, and I answered all her questions. Once we were off the air, she said, “I really wanted to have this conversation because I think you’re crazy. I don’t know anybody who thinks the way you people

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think. When I’m looking at people around me, if somebody has been dating one or two times and they haven’t had sex, I’m not going to conclude that they have some sort of religious or moral framework—I’m just going to conclude that they have some sort of deep psychological problem.

And that’s the way everybody I know thinks. So when you’re talking about this Christian understanding of marriage and sexuality, you just need to know that I don’t think you realize just how strange that sounds to me.” I said, “I think I might, because a Christian vision of marriage and sexuality has always been difficult. If you read the New Testament, you’ll have a constant reiteration of why these things matter to people who are tempted to walk away from it. But what I want you to know is that as strange and weird and odd as our views on marriage are, we believe stranger things than that. We believe that a previously dead man is going to show up in the sky on a horse!”

The message we have for the outside world is one that Scripture says comes with its own authority. An appeal (2 Cor. 4) that is an open proclamation of the truth, in which the light and the glory of God are found in the face of Jesus Christ, addresses a person. Regardless of how confident a secularized world seems, and regardless of how confident a de-converting band of ex-evangelicals may seem, we’re dealing with people who—like all of us—are outside of Christ and who are deeply, deeply afraid.

The message we have is one that comes exactly the way in which C. S. Lewis brought to me a reminder of the gospel I had already heard: There is a deeper magic than the stone table. We are the people who ought to have the tranquility and the confidence to patiently bear witness, to wait on the Holy Spirit to move and work, and to march to Zion farther up and farther in.

RUSSELL MOORE (PhD, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and visiting professor of ethics at Southern, Southeastern, and New Orleans Baptist Seminaries. He is the author of several books, including Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel (B&H, 2015).

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luralism has emerged as a hot topic among Christians today. This can suggest that it is a new phenomenon, representing a thoroughly unique situation with new tensions and benefits. But as Ecclesiastes states, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

Although the extent of modern pluralism is new, God’s people have encountered the competitive interaction of diverse worldviews for thousands of years.

In Egypt, Israel’s challenge was to preserve her faith in the midst of another religion.

Later in Canaan, it was to conquer diverse idolatries. God’s judgment on Israel in the Babylonian captivity was prompted by her having adulterously betrayed him in favor of disgusting local religions that belonged to cultures God had commanded her to eliminate.

In Christ’s time, although she had managed to maintain a sense of her own identity in the midst of the Greco-Roman climate, Israel had replaced Abraham’s religion of faith with a hollow legalism. Jesus challenged his hearers to turn away from false religion of all kinds, Jewish or Gentile, and to turn to him alone for salvation. The early church faced paganism, emperor worship, philosophy, Judaism, or Eastern mysticism squarely with its salvation message. From Pentecost onward, she was challenged to share the gospel in a culturally, ethnically, and religiously pluralistic scene.

Modern pluralism is global, but our challenges are not much different from the ones that faced Christians then.

As we engage a pluralistic society, our first goal sounds simple, but it may be the most difficult: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (James 1:27).

We must cultivate a holy lifestyle that actively seeks to know and obey God’s word by banishing all corrupting influences. The pure in heart also reach out to care for those in need and thus avoid the separatist, ghetto mentality that characterized many Pharisees. Only spiritually upright believers are adequately equipped to carry out this evangelical lifestyle, being ready

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in and out of season to share the reason for their hope (see 1 Pet. 3:15).

In his preaching, Paul demonstrated a basic knowledge of the religions he encountered.

Effective witness must do the same today. In the twenty-first century, we should be at least generally aware of the world’s distinct religious and cultural perspectives so we can engage others in intelligent conversations. Studying other religions in order to share our faith more effectively can be a daunting prospect, because their terminologies and concepts can be so confusing. In fact, it is just plain hard work to learn other faiths well enough to have discussions with our friends. In addition, many non-Christians assume there is universal salvation and are repulsed by our claims about sin and judgment. The answer to our hesitation or ambivalence about sharing the gospel is the simple fact that Jesus Christ commands his church to do so (see Matt. 28:19–20), and he equips us for the task with the power supplied by the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit (see 2 Tim. 3:14–16; Acts 1:8; 2:4). If we are devoted to living holy lives and are knowledgeable about our faith and the beliefs of others, as well as devoted to taking every thought captive to obey Christ (see 2 Cor. 10:5), then joy-filled evangelism follows naturally.

While ancient Israel was charged to seek and destroy all idolaters, we are charged to seek and save the lost. This requires compassion, energy, and understanding. Those who do their divinely appointed jobs as ambassadors for Christ will be persecuted (see 2 Tim. 3:12).

In fact, if we are not being persecuted, then we should ask if our lives are really manifesting the gospel. Jesus warned, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18). Yet when we are falsely reviled, we are blessed just like the prophets, and we will receive a great heavenly reward (see Matt. 5:11–12).

Sometimes Christians paint life in a pluralistic world as a foreboding prospect where truth is threatened at every turn and nonbelievers are enemies who are suspect until they prove themselves worthy to hear the gospel.

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A different “spin” goes like this: pluralism, global communication and travel, and English’s dominance as an international language provide us with what may be history’s greatest harvest field. The mission field is both “over there” and “right here,” next door. So we must make certain that our lives are blameless. We must research the sacred texts of our neighbors’ religions. We must befriend them and pray for them, sincerely caring for them so they know they are not just another mission project. We must ask them to explain their beliefs and then discuss how they differ from ours. We must pray that our witness to them will show the gospel in both our words and our daily lives. Above all, we must love them unconditionally, as God does. Christianity is the only religion in which salvation is an unearned gift that has the sure outcome of a transformed earthly life and eternal joy in the presence of a personal, loving God. No other religion guarantees salvation and provides the peace of knowing that the weight of our eternal destiny is not borne by us but by God himself in Christ. We must reflect seriously on just how revolutionary Jesus’ gospel is, especially in an age confused by a hodgepodge of worldviews that all require reliance upon self for fulfillment and redemption.

So our modern pluralistic situation is not unique, although it does present some distinctive challenges. Pluralism should excite our hearts as we are stretched to think through the content and implications of the gospel and see the evangelistic opportunities that pluralism allows. Spiritual complacency has no place today. Though pluralism threatens to stain even us by the impurities of its tainted fruit, we are after all equipped and enabled by the Holy Spirit to overcome all obstacles.

RACHEL S. STAHLE (PhD, Boston University) is the author

of The Great Work of Providence: Jonathan Edwards for Life Today (Wipf & Stock, 2010).

This article was originally published in the July/August 2007 issue of Modern Reformation.

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KNOW WHAT YOUR NEIGHBOR BELIEVES. FOR THIRTY YEARS, White Horse Inn and Modern Reformation have been trusted sources for biblical exegesis, cultural reflection, and theological instruction.

Everything we do is designed to help Christians “know what they believe and why they believe it.” In our increasingly pluralistic society, the art and science of defending the faith is more important than ever. Militant atheism, the rise of the “nones” (those claiming no religious adherence), and the hollowing out of evangelicalism requires faithful Christians to have reasonable arguments at the ready for the hope that lies within them (1 Peter 3:15).

In this collection, we turn our attention to what our neighbors believe. To kick off this series, Shane Rosenthal, producer and host of WHI, talks with Adam Duker about his interest in comparative religion, and his experience teaching this subject among a predominantly Muslim student body at the American University of Cairo.

We hear what Hindus really believe in a discussion with a persecuted Christian living in India. We learn about alternative views of the afterlife and salvation, new spiritualties and new questions people ask, and tactics to have in mind when talking with our neighbors.

DOWNLOAD “KNOW WHAT YOUR NEIGHBOR BELIEVES” FOR A DONATION OF ANY AMOUNT. As Christians, we face many challenges (old and new), but we can meet those challenges together when the gospel is recovered, believed, and taught again. Please support us with a donation of any amount!

MAY GOD BLESS US WITH COURAGE TO STEP IN FRONT OF THE UNBELIEVING WORLD AND BEAR WITNESS TO THE INCARNATE GOD, JESUS CHRIST, WHO DIED SO THAT WE MIGHT LIVE.

DONATE AT WHITEHORSEINN.ORG/NEIGHBOR

LET’S EXPLORE TOGETHER. “Do we all worship the same God?” “Who am I?” Our study kits are perfect for small groups, family devotions, or individual study. With a donation of $15, you can download a Leader Guide, full-length audio, and short audio clips.

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BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviews 60

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Interpreting Eden: A Guide to Faithfully Reading and Understanding Genesis 1–3

Transhumanism and the Image of God: Today’s Technology and the Future of Christian Discipleship

The Soul of an American President: The Untold Story of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Faith

By Vern S. Poythress

By Jacob Shatzer

By Alan Sears and Craig Osten with Ryan Cole

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

REVIEWED BY

Harrison Perkins

John J. Bombaro

Stephen Roberts

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BOOK REVIEWS

Interpreting Eden: A Guide to Faithfully Reading and Understanding Genesis 1–3

By Vern S. Poythress Crossway, 2019 400 pages (paperback), $32.99 he opening chapters of Genesis have long been grist for the exegetical mill and remain a source of debate even for those within the same tradition. In Interpreting Eden, Vern Poythress has written a thought-provoking work that addresses hermeneutical issues involved in understanding Genesis 1–3, working broadly from general discussion about interpretive categories toward more specific issues. While most of those who read this kind of book will be anxious to know immediately the conclusions that will be argued regarding hot-button topics, Poythress is careful and makes rea ders work patiently with him through the entire thought process of interpretation before he offers concrete verdicts about the text’s meaning.

The opening chapters of part one begin by considering what it means to approach this text in light of its divine inspiration. Later chapters consider more specific issues, such as the genre of Genesis and how we should interpret it in relation to other texts from the ancient Near East.

Poythress raises several helpful points here: with the discovery of more ancient texts, the study of comparative religion exploded, and biblical scholars became almost obsessively enamored with finding similarities between the biblical texts and literature from Israel’s neighbors.

Without denying that this other literature is useful to gain more understanding about some

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things in the biblical text, Poythress makes what should be the obvious point (but one that even conservative biblical scholars seem to forget at times): that if we affirm that the Bible is God’s inspired revelation, then this means that its authors were not limited to writing about what they knew by natural means. This is not to say that the biblical texts are utterly disconnected from their time and place, but it reminds us that the biblical authors were able to say additional and different things from what the other nations surrounding them said. Scholars using the comparative method claim, for example, that other ancient cultures believed that the earth was surrounded by a solid dome, with a heavenly sea on the other side of that dome. They claim that Moses (or whoever they claim wrote Genesis) affirmed that view of the physical universe in Genesis 1 when he wrote of the “expanse” or the “firmament.” These scholars then argue that even though Moses affirmed a specific scientific model, since that was not the theological point of the text, we are free to dismiss it and look for the truth of Scripture in other affirmations.

Poythress, however, affirms that Genesis is historical narrative and that all the indicators in the text seem to say that the author intended his accounts to represent real and true events. He also points out that Genesis’s language on this particular topic is sparse and that we should not make more of small things than we can justify according to good exegesis. He then works through some supposedly parallel literature from other societies, showing how there are actually more differences between them and the biblical texts than some have claimed.

Part two deals largely with how Genesis 1–3 relates to what we know about the natural world

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as it is today. Poythress bases his arguments in the confessional distinction between God executing his decrees in the works of creation and providence. This distinction means that the creation events, as the actual beginnings of the physical universe, are not identical to God’s ongoing providence as we know it now, but there are indeed analogies and continuities between God’s creative and providential works. Poythress documents and discusses many of these analogies well in this second part. The most important contribution here (combined with a related appendix) is the discussion of the language of “expanse” or “firmament,” depending on the translation. Poythress argues that Moses was not affirming a specific scientific outlook in this language, nor was he making a description of the workings of the physical universe, but that he was describing some features of the world from a phenomenological standpoint (meaning he described things as they looked to him).

Drawing on Calvin’s view, Poythress argues that the point of “the expanse” mentioned in Genesis 1 is simply that rain comes from the sky and God used the atmosphere to separate the sky’s source of water from the creation waters, and the “waters above” are simply the clouds or perhaps visible waters. I have to admit that I was at first skeptical of what seemed to be an

overly concordist interpretation, but Poythress slowly laid out the argument in a way I found to be ultimately persuasive. This was precisely because he did not articulate a specific relationship between Genesis and science, but because he convinced me that the descriptions of those waters above in Genesis 1 are phenomenological language that accord with general knowledge.

Part three is mostly occupied with one of the most contentious issues in Genesis: the length of the creation days. Poythress has an extended discussion on how we should consider the concept of time, particularly during the creation week. At first, this discussion seems only indirectly relevant to the issue, but Poythress frames the topic in such a way that it demands patient attention to the end of his argument.

He concludes that, given the other details in the sparse narrative about miraculous events, the days in Genesis 1 are primarily six cycles of God’s work and rest, which is the unit the text uses (instead of our standard) to measure time.

It borders on speculation to insist on more than that from a strictly exegetical perspective, so (while affirming special creation and rejecting human evolution) he remains focused on the biblical text.

The result is a learned work that forces readers to be thoughtful about every aspect of their

The result is a learned work that forces read­ers to be thoughtful about every aspect of their interpretive approach to the first chapters of Genesis.

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[This book] doesn’t answer every exegetic question (it doesn’t intend to), but it compels readers to consider thoughtfully their methods, which is always a valuable lesson.

Third and most significantly, one would have hoped for more detailed treatment of the differences between Genesis 1 and 2. Research into Hebraic writing has shown that “synoptic resumption” is an important tool that intentionally retold the same events from a different perspective, as in Ezekiel 38–39. I think Poythress’s arguments about time and what the early Genesis narrative intended to say would have been decidedly enhanced by a discussion of synoptic resumption. Nonetheless, the book remains an immensely useful resource to guide us through interpreting Genesis 1–3. It doesn’t answer every exegetic question (it doesn’t intend to), but it compels readers to consider thoughtfully their methods, which is always a valuable lesson. The lasting effect is that the Bible addresses the whole world but is not a precisionist, scientific document, and even its first chapters are worth our close meditation.

HARRISON PERKINS (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast) is the assistant minister at London City Presbyterian Church (Free Church of Scotland) and a lecturer in Christian doctrine at Cornhill Belfast. He is author of Catholicity and the Covenant of Works: James Ussher and the Reformed Tradition (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

interpretive approach to the first chapters of Genesis. He demonstrates a high level of biblical scholarship, as well as a thorough grasp of scientific research in physics and mathematics.

There are a few quibbles that might be made—the title (which admittedly is not always an author’s choice) is a bit misleading, as the book is more about creation than the events in Eden. Second, he cites his own work frequently, which admittedly is only problematic in certain contexts.

Academic publications tend not to appreciate that, and this work is certainly substantial; but more lay-oriented works might like having a guide to extended discussions by the same author.

If we read this book as a guide for pastors with theological training, it is not a massive problem.

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Transhumanism and the Image of God: Today’s Technology and the Future of Christian Discipleship

By Jacob Shatzer IVP Academic, 2019 192 pages (paperback), $22.00 February 1999 Christianity Today magazine cover featured “The New Theologians” with a capture of N. T. Wright, Ellen Charry, Miroslav Volf, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Richard B. Hayes—new theologians who were top scholars with something important to say to the church. But that was twenty years ago, and these same theologians—now established

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and significant contributors—have broached their sixties and seventies. Not so “new” anymore. But there is a crop of truly new theologians emerging who are entering the orbit of James K. A. Smith and Michael Bird. These would include Kelly Kapic, Adam Francisco, Jonathan Linebaugh, Jordan Cooper, Korey Maas, and now Jacob Shatzer, author of Transhumanism and the Image of God. S h a t z e r, w h o h a s a d o c t o r a t e f r o m Marquette University, is an excellent writer possessing a keen philosophical mind with theological acumen. These skills are applied to taking what at first blush may seem to be intimidating topics—transhumanism and posthumanism—and rendering them altogether interesting and establishing their relevance as an ongoing phenomenon and concern, making Transhumanism and the Image of God a timely call to understanding and action.

Complementing Alan Noble’s Disruptive Witness: Speaking Truth in a Distracted Age (Intervarsity Press, 2018), Shatzer presents a more indepth view and a big-picture analysi s o f t e chnolo g y’s impact on human living, thinking, and habits, with a calm voice and plausible proposals.

The author sets the stage by presenting posthumanism and transhumanism as related philosophical movements tied closely to the optimistic promises of technology to advance the next phase(s) of human evolution.

Posthumanism argues that there is a next stage in human evolution, wherein humans become posthuman because of our interaction with and connection to technology. On the other hand, transhumanism promotes values connected to this change, providing the thinking and method for posthumanism.

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The upshot is a technosocial community where present and future communities are formed and informed in thought and habits derived from technological principles and values. But do not be mistaken: Transhumanism is not value-neutral, merely a matter of advancing technology and reaping its benefits. Posthumanism is an agenda. It is a worldview, one in which supernaturalism is rejected and Darwinianism and scientific positivism are extolled. The engine of posthuman agenda—transhumanism—involves faith in technology to vastly expand the capabilities of humans. This is to say, transhumanism entails a values-specific life philosophy that is decidedly nontheological and it rejects biblical anthropology. It is an intellectual and cultural movement saturating nearly every dimension of modern human living, normalizing the logic of “morphological freedom,” which celebrates the possibility of radically altering human nature via technology, as a fundamental individual right (over against community priorities). In short, as a faith-based worldview, it is an ideological competitor with Christianity.

Shatzer observes that much of modern technology tends toward a transhuman future—a future created by the next stage of evolution (the posthuman), moving beyond what it currently means to be human. This has ethical implications for the church. He notes how personal electronic devices and various platforms encourage and shape us toward certain goals—goals for which these devices and platforms were made. But are these goals, he asks, agreeable to the kingdom of God and to what it means to be created and, through regeneration, recreated in the image of God? Shaping people is another way of talking about discipleship and mentorship, indoctrination,

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and habituation. The church, cautions Shatzer, should concern itself not only with our technological future but also with our technosocial future—a future defined by how our evolving technological powers become embedded in coevolving habits, values, doctrines, and institutions. The church should be mindful of the challenge of employing technology, without being shaped into “technological people” with technological values, especially where such values—the values of transhumanism and its rationale—may conflict with those of the one holy catholic and apostolic church.

It all seems so wonderful, so innocent, and so positive: the transhumanist movement seeks to improve human intelligence, physical strength, and the five senses by technological means. Who could find that problematic? But, says Shatzer, just as every technology is an invitation to enhance some part of our lives, it is also necessarily an invitation to be drawn away from something else. Since technology is not valueneutral, we must ask what we have been drawn away from and what we are being drawn to.

The author notes three main realms of concern: social networking (identity and relationships), gaming (attention, addiction, and aggression), and search engines (learning and

memory). Each of these can bring changes in behavior, performance, and neurological configuration, all of which affect social norms. How do they—along with virtual and augmented realties—affect understanding, engaging, and interpreting the world through the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus? If a different anthropology is the starting point of posthumanism, then a different narrative of salvation is going to follow and with it, different goals and values for being human.

Discipleship and churchmanship are also at play. Personal data collection on all devices is aimed at algorithmic behavior modification of its users. Data collection devices (smartphones and computers) are purposed to promote consumerist thinking and habits, as well as a dependency on them for even the basic things of life. It is what they do: they make disciples of tech, not as a community but as individual consumers. What Christians are called to do within the church is to be aware, to exercise awareness—both of technology’s usefulness and lure, its aid and addictiveness, how it helps and how it hurts what it means to be truly human, as opposed to a mere hue in the theoretical spectrum of “humanity” that is now passing away.

Since technology is not value-neutral, we must ask what we have been drawn away from and what we are being drawn to.

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There are two concepts related to the technosocial future, according to Shatzer. First, there is our “givenness” to technology; its constant availability (even necessity) makes it increasingly difficult to identify, seek, and secure the ultimate goal of ethics—a life worth choosing, a life lived well (that is, according to the values of pre-transhuman society). The value of present-day humanity is thus ambiguous and undervalued, if not countermanded, by posthumanism. But we don’t really see this. Shatzer, with other scholars, opines that we may have “acute technosocial opacity” (blindness) due to immersion and saturation. Second, we may need to develop “technosocial virtues” to help us see and choose a “future worth wanting.” We must draw on the right resources to develop wisdom in the face of the technology that shapes us. That requires, again, awareness and intentionality in discipleship. Catechesis cannot be passive when technological saturation is always active.

Digital technology has the potential to become the end rather than the means. It has its own lifestyle, and many within the church have uncritically embraced that lifestyle and by implication its ethos and ideas—both of which are antithetical to the way, the truth, and the life. This is the point of contact with discipleship. It begins with “awareness” and continues by employing the mind of Christ and exercising self-control.

Transhumanism and the Image of God warrants the widest possible readership and discussion. It should be read by all pastors, educators, leaders, collegians, and especially parents. Its potential to reorient parental permissiveness concerning their children’s technological saturation and personal device usage cannot be overstated.

Technology may be leading us, quite unawares, into a dystopia; but Shatzer’s measured book encourages us to remember that it doesn’t have to be so, at least within the church.

JOHN J. BOMBARO (PhD, King’s College, University of London) is the associate director of Theological Education for Eurasia, based at the Rīga Luther Academy in Latvia.

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Catechesis cannot be passive when technological saturation is always active.

The Soul of an American President: The Untold Story of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Faith

By Alan Sears and Craig Osten with Ryan Cole Baker Books, 2019 240 pages (hardcover), $22.99 s a US Army chaplain, I have incredible oppor tunities to engage a broad cross-section of American society with the gospel, while facing the legal restraints natural to a civic institution. Students of churchstate ethics will also recognize the inherent tension of serving in such a capacity: chaplains are paid by the government and serve, in part, at the will of civil authorities. Throughout the history of the military chaplaincy, chaplains

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have felt pressure to preach “nonsectarian” sermons and focus primarily on morals and morale.

J. Gresham Machen recognized long ago the temptation in war to sanctify the sacrifice of the soldier as part of a broader civil religion to the exclusion of the gospel.

It was with great interest, therefore, that I read The Soul of an American President: The Untold Story of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Faith

by Alan Sears and Craig Osten (with Ryan Cole). Both Sears and Osten have ties to the Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF)—the former as founder and the latter as a senior director.

The ADF has proven to be an effective defender of religious liberty over the past several decades. With this background in mind, it is easy to discern the authors’ intent to explore and defend the oft-neglected and occasionally criticized religious life of President Eisenhower (22–23).

To this end, the authors provide a bit of helpful scholarship. They effectively prove that Eisenhower went out of his way to avoid using his faith for political gain. He became a church member for the first time (at National Presbyterian in Washington, DC) as president, not while running for president, for specifically this reason. As shown through countless letters, he greatly resented any undue publicity of his faith or church attendance.

As the only American president baptized while in office, his faith by all accounts actually seemed quite genuine. He was fervent in his church attendance wherever he traveled, would ask for sermon transcripts when he missed church because of travel, and loved to question his pastors on various biblical passages, doctrines, and sermon points. This level of engagement did not abate when Eisenhower

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left the presidency and the public limelight. If anything, it increased.

Some historians doubt the credibility of Eisenhower’s faith due to the fact that he didn’t join a church prior to becoming president. The authors, however, easily swipe aside this objection by highlighting the convoluted religious background of his childhood (his mother was a Jehovah’s Witness) and by the transitory nature of his army career. As an army chaplain, I can attest to the reality of this latter dynamic: army chapels are not denominational and tend to lack doctrinal consistency, let alone structures of membership and discipline.

Yet, all that the authors gain in highlighting the authenticity of Eisenhower’s faith is lost in their inability to provide a simple definition for faith, such as faith being a “saving grace, whereby we receive and rest upon [Christ] alone for salvation, as he is offered to us in the gospel” (Westminster Shorter Catechism Q/A 86).

Instead, their portrait of faith is largely pragmatic and political in orientation. “Faith” is primarily treated in relation to the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, the innate dignity and rights accorded those created in God’s image, the contrast with the evils of atheism and Communism, and the motivation for social change. In other words, it fits better within the American civil religion than within a Christian system of doctrine.

It is not that theologians alone can write spiritual biographies—certainly, they would likely devote more time to definitions and doctrinal substance—but that the authors of this work demonstrate an apparent ignorance of their own worldview and its effect on their interpretation of history. They strip off the mask of another Eisenhower biographer—a religious cynic who

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thus read Eisenhower’s religion cynically—only to show themselves devout acolytes of American civil religion who venerate Eisenhower as their patron saint.

In light of the present postmodern culture, the authors’ interpretation of history reflects a worldview that now seems hopelessly antiquated. The reader feels a propagandist tug throughout the book to resist the pernicious pull of godless atheism and return to the faith of our fathers, so that God may heal our land. This call, parroting the excesses of several generations of American evangelicalism, will go unheeded.

While it was useful in galvanizing Christian civic engagement for the past half century, it did so at the expense of a specifically Christian identity. “Judeo-Christian” is a rallying cry, not a religion; the term should be stricken from the public discourse. It is a cruel irony that this pragmatic exploitation of Christianity is partly to blame for the spiritual mud puddle that is the present culture.

We are not growing more atheistic or secular as a society, but more pagan and spiritual. The call to embrace “faith” and “God” will not garner as much dissent as the authors might assume.

Present society is happy to appropriate such ill-defined terms into their own pantheistic categories. Every graduation speaker preaches faith in ourselves, and God has become a suitable term to describe the amalgamation of our ambiguous, platitudinous beliefs and unfettered desires. Even the demons believe—and shudder.

A better spiritual biography of Eisenhower would have highlighted his shallow—yet sincere—faith in the Lord and the comfort this brought him through countless tragedies and hardships. Ike’s principled stands against Communism and segregation would be treated as faithful implications of his faith rather than its substance. Critical terms such as “faith” and “God” would be carefully defined (while being faithfully shown as inarticulately expressed in the life of Eisenhower), so that readers could be inspired by the source of Eisenhower’s hope rather than its reflection.

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In light of the present postmodern culture, the authors’ interpretation of history reflects a worldview that now seems hopelessly antiquated.

Faith in any figure cannot be properly treated without regard to its object. American civil religion will not save the reader, let alone my soldiers. Secularism was never the root issue; sin is the problem. And secularism is no longer the dominant cultural paradigm, which means attempts to engage it will prove fruitless. The crying need of the hour is a clear-eyed view of the culture that enables us to faithfully and unambiguously present the gospel in our unique context. We don’t need more faith—we need Jesus.

STEPHEN ROBERTS is a US Army chaplain and has written for The Washington Times and The Federalist.

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05

B AC K PAG E

Boring Pastors

by Eric Landry

e was just a young man when he started preaching, and newspapers soon called him the marvel of our age. Over the course of his life, he preached more than 18,000 times. His sermons were dramatic: he cried, he danced, he even screamed to make his points. The largest churches could not hold the crowds that came to hear him, so he began preaching outside. In what was probably the largest gathering of Americans to that point, he once preached to more than 23,000 people on the Boston Common. I’m referring, of course, to George Whitefield, America’s first celebrity preacher.

The church has always struggled with celebrity. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul had to deal with exactly this problem. Already that early in the church’s life, certain names had become authoritative: Paul, Apollo, and Cephas (or Peter). Parties formed around them, and divisions in the church claimed them as their leaders. To put it in modern terms, people today would buy their books, go to their conferences, and quote them on Twitter and Facebook.

But is that how Christian ministry in supposed to look? When Paul describes the work of a pastor, he seems almost dismissive: “What then is Apollos? What is Paul?

Servants through whom you believed as the Lord assigned to each” (1 Cor. 3:5).

It seems as if Paul is saying that pastors should be interchangeable, like doctors.

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You probably have a family doctor, but how many times do you actually see that doctor?

More often than not, we see the nurse practiti­o ner, the physician’s assistant, or maybe even another associate in the same office. Do we complain? Of course not—any medical professional will do!

That’s the way Paul frames his question about the ministry: “What then is Apollos? What then is Paul?” You and I would ask, “Who is Apollos? Who is Paul?” We would be focused on their personalities, but Paul says it’s not who they are; it’s what they are. He’s not focused on their personalities but on their office. Whoever they are, they must be faithful to their work.

They must actually do what God commanded them to do as servants of the Lord.

When you look for signs of faithful Christian ministry, you’re really looking for boring pastors. Is your pastor willing to give up the book tour, the speaking gig, and the limelight? Does he realize, as Paul says in Philippians 2, that you are his joy and his crown? That the church is his reward? Only that pastor is safe to be a shepherd to you and your family. Only that kind of pastor can be the hands and feet of Jesus to the world.

May God be gracious to his church and give us all boring pastors, who will “always be sober-minded, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill [their] ministry” (2 Tim. 4:5).

ERIC LANDRY is executive editor of Modern Reformation.

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SECULARISM IS NO LONGER THE DOMINANT CULTURAL PARADIGM, WHICH MEANS ATTEMPTS TO ENGAGE IT WILL PROVE FRUITLESS. THE CRYING NEED OF THE HOUR IS A CLEAR-EYED VIEW OF THE CULTURE THAT ENABLES US TO FAITHFULLY AND UNAMBIGUOUSLY PRESENT THE GOSPEL IN OUR UNIQUE CONTEXT. WE DON’T NEED MORE FAITH— WE NEED JESUS. ST E P H E N R O B E R T S