Christians of all people should of course know that this world is NOT all there is. Indeed, this world is transitory and passing. Sure, it is an important and valuable world because God created it. But the entry of sin into the world meant that it is now radically marred and twisted. Thus the Christian looks forward to a new heaven and a new earth.
This is all basic Christianity. But as I have written elsewhere, too many believers live as if this world is all there is. They may speak about God and the supernatural and miracles and so on, but too often they are living lives indistinguishable from that of any non-believer.
We can be just like those in the world when we basically share their values and beliefs. We can be too much like them when we let the material world determining our frame of reference and how we look at things. We can be like the world when we effectively deny the power of God that is available to us. As I said in an earlier piece that discussed worldviews and the culture wars:
Simply consider the basis of the Christian life: the supernatural power of the indwelling Holy Spirit, helping us to live above-ordinary lives of holiness, boldness, power and grace. We have been equipped from above. We have been given all the spiritual tools we need to live a Christ-centred, God-pleasing and world-changing life.
Part of the reason we are living like the world is because we are thinking like the world. We go to church on Sundays and sing about glorious, heavenly things, but the rest of the week we live as if this world is the only reality. Sure, there can be some believers who are too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. But the bulk of Western Christians have the opposite problem: they are too earthly minded to be any heavenly good.
Part of the problem is we are overly dependent on our five senses. Only what we can see and hear and feel seem real. And given that we serve an invisible God, that can really make things even more difficult. It is far easier to see the immediate problem in front of us than the problem-solving God in the spiritual realm.
I have written about this as well, and mentioned some earlier books such as Philip Yancey’s Reaching for the Invisible God (Zondervan, 2000). As the West becomes increasingly secular, materialistic, and doubtful of metaphysical truths and spiritual realities, the Christian must more than ever affirm and represent the God that we actually serve.
With all this in mind I simply want to point out a new book that deals with all this, and offer a few quotes from its opening pages. I may yet do a proper review of the volume, but for now, alerting you to it will suffice. I refer to the most recent offering from Rod Dreher: Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age (Hodder & Stoughton, 2024).
I have of course discussed him before, be it looking at his The Benedict Option (2017), or his more recent volume, Live Not By Lies (2020). See these pieces for example:
His new book is suitable both for believers and non-believers. The former need to be reminded of the spiritual realities we claim to believe in, while the latter can learn about the shallowness and incompleteness of their naturalistic worldview.
Both groups need a good dose of enchantment. But I need to stop right here. As Dreher says, “Some Christians are suspicious of the word ‘enchantment’ because of its magical overtones.” But he refers to a secular definition of re-enchantment as containing these elements:
-Mystery and wonder
-Order
-Purpose
-Meaning, as a “hierarchy of significance attaching to objects and events encountered”
-The possibility of redemption, for both individuals and moments in time
-A means of connecting to the infinite
-The existence of sacred spaces
-Miracles, defined as “exceptional events which go against (and perhaps even alter) the accepted order of things”
-Epiphanies, which are “moments of being in which, for a brief instant, the center appears to hold, and the promise is held out of a quasi-mystical union with something larger than oneself”
This, within a thoroughly Christian context, is our goal. If you are not a religious believer, you may think this is impossible. The good news is that you are wrong—and I’m going to tell you why in the pages that follow. And if you are a religious believer who reads this list and sees its goals as far from the dry or shallow kind of Christianity with which you’re familiar, well, read on: you will discover that deep within the traditions of the Christian faith are resources that can illuminate your religious imagination and renew your soul. (pp.14-15)
Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Ageby Dreher, Rod (Author)
Earlier on he puts it this way:
“The world is not what we think it is.” That phrase is at the core of this book. This is a book about living in a world filled with mystery. It is about learning to open our eyes to the reality of the world of spirit and how it interacts with matter. This is a world that many Christians affirm exists in theory but have trouble accepting in practice. It’s too scary. Even good things that upset our sense of settled order unsettle us. After all, remember the first thing that angelic messengers tend to say to people in the Bible? Do not be afraid! It is natural for us to feel uneasy in the presence of those portions of the world that are normally unseen. And all the more so for us moderns—we prefer to keep God and his movement in the world safely sequestered within a rationalistic, moralistic framework. After all, can’t that be controlled? (p. 3)
The point of a book like this, as I say, is to get both Christians and non-Christians to think again about the sort of world that we live in. And that is so important, because “we are all on a path either toward or away from the God who revealed himself in the Bible.” (p. 15) Christians should be growing more and more aware of the sort of God we claim to believe in, and non-Christians can be shown that the materialist creed is far too empty and reductionistic to explain what life is really all about.
Let me share the closing words of his first chapter:
As with my last two books, adherents to non-Christian faiths may not be able to accept all the Christian claims here, but I believe they will nevertheless find much of value that resonates with their own traditions’ teachings. Unbelievers will struggle with parts of this book, but I hope they will at least come away from it with minds more open to the possibility that God exists and that there really is a transcendent realm. All readers of this book should come away with eyes that can see more deeply into the world, beneath the surface, into the truth of things.
A friendly warning: learning how to see for enchantment is not going to be easy. It is going to cost you something. In fact, it has to. In the medieval masterpiece The Divine Comedy, the greatest story of Christian re-enchantment ever told, the pilgrim Dante can’t escape the prison of the dark wood without putting himself in the hands of a trustworthy guide. That guide, the poet Virgil, takes him on a long and arduous pilgrimage of repentance and rebuilding the inner life so that Dante can bear the weight of God’s glory. Repentance begins with the sacrifice of control—and that can be frightening.
The thing is, enchantment that doesn’t compel you to change your life is not enchantment at all. It’s going to be hard to make this journey back to a richer and more vital understanding of our spiritual lives, but what else can we do? As Virgil says to Dante when they first met in the forest clearing, if you stay here, you’re going to die. I am convinced that the only way to revive the Christian faith, which is fading fast from the modern world, is not through moral exhortation, legalistic browbeating, or more effective apologetics but through mystery and the encounter with wonder. It’s not going to come quickly or without struggle. A pilgrimage is not the same as a three-hour tour.
The philosopher Elaine Scarry says that education is the process of training people to be looking at the right corner of the sky when the comet passes. This book is what I worked on while I waited, hoping that through the things I would discover along the way I would learn how to see what is right in front of me—which is to say, to perceive in the everyday and the commonplace the comet blazing across the night sky.
The world is not what we think it is. It is far more mysterious, exciting, and adventurous. We have only to learn how to open our eyes and see what is already there. (pp. 16-17)
Or as he says in the closing paragraph of the book:
This book has shown you how to open your mind and your eyes to real reality—if you have the courage. Seek the living God and the experience of him, in the ways of our faithful ancestors, while you may. The hour is late, the times are dark, the heavens full of signs and portents are wheeling about us— and the stakes could not be higher. (p. 261)
