Please note that due to software, not everything in this transcript will be accurate.

Spiritual ≠ Religious

John Dickson (Studio)

She almost needs no introduction … Oprah Winfrey – talk show host, producer, author, actress – is one of the great proponents of being “spiritual but not religious”. That clip is from an episode of her TV show Super Soul Sunday which ran for 10 years until 2021, where she talked to her guests about spirituality. Way back in 2002, Christianity Today published an article called ‘The Church of O’, naming Oprah one of the most influential spiritual leaders in America. The “Oprah Effect” has been described as a key factor in mainstreaming the New Age movement. Fast forward, and we’re reading newspaper headlines like “Are we in the middle of a spiritual awakening?” and “Spiritual but not religious”: inside America’s rapidly growing faith group”. A 2023 study from the Pew Research Centre found that 22% of Americans would describe themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’. That’s 1 in 5 people. My guest today says this is not really a new phenomenon. The ‘spiritual but not religious’ category actually has ancient origins.   – down through the ages. Where does the ‘spiritual but not religious’ concept come from? What does it say about us humans? And why do so many people see it as preferable to Christianity? I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions. 

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson:
Can you define spiritual but not religious in a way that works for the ancient, the medieval and the modern descriptor?

Michael Horton:
Yeah. Well, in brief, I chart the emergence of, uh, this strange fellow, um, from the grave clothes of being a shaman to becoming a sage, a philosopher. It’s really remarkable that, you know, the, a lot of historians say that around the sixth century BC, something big happened across, uh, continents and religions became less ritualistic and focused on this life – having, you know, getting the gods to do what you want now by giving them enough sacrifices and so forth, to thinking more metaphysically, philosophically about the afterlife and the soul.

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s Michael S Horton, a well-known theology prof at Westminster Seminary in California. He’s the author of a bunch of books including an enormous, multi-volume project charting the intellectual history of the “spiritual but not religious” phenomenon. I’m interested in volume one, Shaman and Sage: The Roots of “Spiritual but not religious” in antiquity. According to Professor Horton, before the 6th century BC, the stories about creation and the cosmos were mostly about reinforcing boundaries: Know your place in the grand scheme of things. Harmonise yourself with the natural order. You can see it in the myths of the age. As Horton points out, the great Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, which was read out in public each year, has human beings created out of the blood of a losing god for the simple purpose of serving the gods their food — through temple offerings and so on. Public religion, in this frame, was about the gods, the priests, and the people, all following their assigned roles in the great hierarchy of the cosmos. But outside this scheme there was the shaman, a kind of medicine man – a spiritual entrepreneur. People would go to him (and it was mostly a him) outside the city walls, outside the bounds of the cosmic order … and through his mediation, folks could commune with the divine, with the powers, and with dead relatives. It was a kind of private spirituality — unconnected to civic religion — and it became increasingly popular, right around the world, about 500 years before Christ.

Michael Horton:
And you find the emergence of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, and late-period Egypt, same developments there across this wide territory. You have figures who are emerging as they had been outsiders in the ritualistic religion before. Now they are philosophers and they’re gaining adherence. And their philosophy is not the public religion. It is … it’s mysteries that they bring. And that’s the beginning, I think of a kind of and somewhat antagonistic relationship between the spiritual – people who are into spirituality – and the public religion, whatever that public religion happens to be.

John Dickson:
So is that the simple distinction that my listeners should get their head around, that “spiritual” is opposed to public religion? So is spiritual just spirituality that’s private – it’s still religion, but it’s private, um, or, or is there something more philosophically different about spirituality and religion?

Michael Horton:
Yeah, you find in this spirituality, for example, the emergence of the doctrine of reincarnation, never been heard before in Greece, or in India for that matter. And yet it sweeps into the Western world, particularly through Empedocles and Pythagoras and Plato. So you have all these foreign ideas, but they’re now popping up. People are beginning to get a sense of the self, you know? In the locative world of, uh, pre 6th Century BC, uh, you really weren’t aware of yourself. Everything about you, your whole identity was your relationship to others. So I am so- and-so’s son born in this family, belonging to this clan, which belongs to this city, which belongs to the King. And that begins to become undone as people are thinking about their own individual selves and where they’re going to spend eternity, where their soul came from, and so forth. And so people are not as interested in doctrine and ritual as they are in philosophical interpretations of reality.

John Dickson:
And it’s a kind of self-actualisation that they’re aiming for, isn’t it?

Michael Horton:
Absolutely. People are realizing, “I’m an individual. I have rights. I have agency here. I’m not just a part of something. I, I have my, I have my own life.”

John Dickson (Studio)

One of the big ‘spiritual’ movements of this revolution was Orphism – which Michael Horton says has shaped modern spirituality more than we realise. Orphism was named for Orpheus – the mythical son of the god Apollo and the muse Calliope, who was renowned for his music. He could charm nature and even the gods with his lyre, voice, and poetry. He even rescued his wife, Eurydice, from the underworld — almost. His music tamed the deathly powers right up until he broke the golden rule of Hades: he looked back. He lost her forever. His myth became associated with creativity, independence, spiritual power, immortality, and a vast “spiritual but not religious” literature!

John Dickson:
So I can give listeners some concrete examples of this spirituality, I want to, um, just talk about a bunch of figures  that you mentioned in the book. And if you can, uh,  give this the tiniest pracie so I can move on to the next one. And the obvious one is Orphic spirituality, going back to the legendary figure Orpheus. What’s he on about?

Michael Horton:
I know. Well, so as the legend goes,  Dionysus and his half-brother, Apollo, governed  Delphi, the oracle of Delphi, uh, at different times. So when Apollo, the rational God, the God of reason and stability and form, when he went off to Summer in the north, Dionysus would awaken from his tomb and run around pricking his votaries with a stick called a Thersis stick. At the end, there would be a needle (whether there actually was one or not, you know, whether his followers actually used them, there’s some evidence that they did, Dionysian cult), but that’s the myth, and they are at odds with each other. One’s rational, one’s the party, God. Uh, it’s like they have a bad family thing and daddy issues. Zeus is not that big on Dionysus. He favours Apollo. So anyway, they get into these clashes. Orpheus is someone who comes along, a legendary figure, and combines them. He tries to reconcile Apollo and Dionysus and gets killed in the midst of it. So really, Orpheus comes to stand for this philosophical reconciliation of reason and mysticism. And when, when Plato, for example … it’s significant that Plato says ‘Really when you become philosophical, you become Dionysian’. In fact, he says, uh, ‘Philosophers are the true Theursus bearers’. They’re the ones pricking people with madness, divine madness, uh, the madness of philosophy.” And so this is, uh, this is the sort of thing that, I think is deep in the Western psyche that we have these two brothers in us, Dionysus and Apollo at war, reason and mysticism, and they’re often there together, you know, uh, the most … 

John Dickson:
And Orpheus represents that, yes?

Michael Horton:
Orpheus represents that. The most rationalistic thinkers in Western history are

John Dickson:
So you would say Plato is a, is like the example of this. So we, we often think of Plato as all head, but he’s not, he’s really a mystic, isn’t he?

Michael Horton:
Oh, he really is. In fact,  he will say, you know, uh, he’ll refer to the Orphic mysteries as scripture, practically. He’ll say, ‘As we know in the sacred story, and that will be an Orphic text. So he’s very, very dependent on this kind of mysticism. And you know, you find it …Reason only takes you so far for Plato. And then you have to have, have a mystical experience, a flash, a shock, where you just know that you know that you know intuitively; you don’t have any external authority telling you, you’re just absolutely intuitively convinced of the truth. 

John Dickson:
And it is ultimately about, um, uh, a kind of merger with the “One”, with the good. Uh, that’s, that’s the goal. So in the end, the goal isn’t just to be thinking; it’s to be thinking into the One.

Michael Horton:
Yeah, to be united to the One, because we all fell into diversity through having individual bodies, and the goal is to get out of our diversity, out of our bodies, and return to the great Flame, the great Origin, the One, and that, that really is the goal of philosophy in the golden age of Greece.

John Dickson (Studio)

From these Orphic mysteries develops the idea that humans have a dual nature – a physical body and a “divine spark” or soul. This isn’t the only source of the idea, but it is one deep well in Greco-Roman thought. According to one version of the myth, the Titans (the older, violent generation of gods) devoured the infant Dionysus, one of the younger so-called Olympian gods associated with wine, ecstasy, and rebirth. Father Zeus then destroyed the Titans, and out of their ashes arose humanity. Humans therefore inherited both a Titanic nature, prone to corruption and irrationality, and a divine element derived from Dionysus. (And don’t worry, Dionysus got better after being eaten by the Titans!!). You can forget the details. The point is: It’s from reflection on myths like these that many people came to see human beings as partly earthly and bodily, and partly spiritual and oriented toward the divine. It was then a short step to the idea that a divine soul is trapped within a physical body. Plato, writing in the fourth century BC, famously described the body as a “prison of the soul.” So when people speak of a “Platonic” outlook, they generally mean this sharp distinction between the earthly and the divine, the body and the spirit. The goal is to see the soul liberated from the lower world and restored to the higher reality from which it comes. Plato and his successors helped shift attention away from traditional civic religion and toward the spiritual destiny of the individual soul.

John Dickson:
And there is a Christian version of it that I wanna ask you about after I ask you about Hermes and the whole Hermetic tradition. So, uh, we’ll, we’ll get to the Christian version of this, but tell me about Hermes and the, the whole Hermetic tradition.

Michael Horton:
Sure. Oh, Hermes Trismegistus. Trismegistus’s just Latin for thrice great. Uh, Hermes was, was thought in, in, in Greece to be the, the God who communicated between the living and the dead. He was the one who took souls to Hades, and he’s the one who communicated messages from the gods to mortals. Well, he becomes fused in Alexandria after the time of Alexander. Now Egypt is … you have a Greco-Egyptian culture, and Hermes gets fused with the Egyptian God Thoth, who is the scribe, who takes down everybody’s good and bad, and determines who goes to heaven or hell. They become fused, and that figure is thrice-great Hermes. Hermes Trismegistus, who is considered … He never lived, of course, but he had … They thought he did. They thought he was the father of technology, of art and culture, of science, of religion and law, and of all the mysteries. And so you have, for example, he’s called the first theologian, and, you know, Augustine in the City of God rejects that claim. He’s not a theologian, he’s a, he’s a philosopher. But it’s, it’s interesting. He, becomes, in the imagination, um, a, a, a sort of representative figure for a literature, a particular literature that emerges in the first and second century in Alexandria. And it is magic, it is mysticism. It’s very heavily Platonic and Stoic in nature with some Egyptian magic thrown in. It’s really about spiritual technology. It’s about how to escape the bonds of this world and all the evil forces that try to keep us from ascending out of this realm. That really becomes a tradition with a lot of manuscripts, a lot of writings. Basically, it becomes velcro that everything sticks to for these kinds of philosophers talking about “how do we return to the One”.

John Dickson (Studio)

You might be able to identify a family resemblance between hermetic ideas in modern new age practices like “manifesting”. Master your thoughts, and you can alter your physical reality. The background idea, in both Hermeticism and new agism, is that everything is ultimately one universal mind. So, trained human thinking – thinking that taps into the One – can change our surroundings. Often today’s ‘manifesting’ has material more than spiritual aims — a better job, more money, physical health — but it’s a similar concept at play. Orphism and Hermeticism are two of the big influences of the ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ today. After the break, we’ll look at a third influence that has a Christian tinge: Gnosticism.

Break

Media – ‘The Matrix’

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s the famous blue pill/red pill scene from the philosophically charged sci-fi film, The Matrix. This is where Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) promises to show Neo (Keanu Reeves) the truth of the Matrix, a simulated world designed to imprison humanity. Film critics frequently point out the similarities between The Matrix and Gnostic theology. The term gnostic comes from the Greek word for ‘knowledge’, gnosis. Gnosticism is a bit of a catch-all term for a diverse collection of religious and philosophical ideas that emerged in the late first/early second century, and, for reasons that aren’t clear to us, somehow latched onto Christianity. People with a basic Orphic or Hermetic outlook began to see the recently famous “Jesus” as the ultimate bridge from this grubby physical world to the highest spiritual realm. In the second and third century Gnostic Gospels—the so-called Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Judas, and so on—Jesus didn’t come from the OT god. That god was a lower being associated with the created earth. No, Jesus came from the eternal light, far above this physical prison. By listening to and obeying the secret knowledge which Jesus whispered to Thomas, or Philip, or whatever, while the other disciples weren’t around, the Gnostic believer can hope one day to escape this world and become one with the eternal spirit world from which Jesus had come. Gnostics would take the red pill. 

Michael Horton:
Yeah. Gnosticism is like platonism on steroids. In fact, Plotinus, probably the greatest interpreter of Plato, an heir of Plato, said, uh, “Perhaps the Gnostics got their hatred of the body from Plato.” So he, he recognized that there was a connection, but he said that they took it to ridiculous lengths. The Gnostics separated from the so- called great church, in other words, the Orthodox, pulling together a lot of the mysticism and mythology of this Greco-Egyptian religion and their main thing was, in contradiction to Christianity, was that this world, the material world, is the creation of an evil God called Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, the God of the Jews. And salvation, the whole goal of salvation, is to rise up out of being a material-focused person to being a Gnostic – someone who knows immediately and intuitively, and whose mind is ‘one’ with the universal mind. And so they didn’t believe that Jesus really was incarnate. He only appeared to have a human body. They didn’t believe that, therefore, that we will be raised bodily, because Jesus wasn’t raised bodily, he only appeared to die. And which, of course, Islam also teaches in its own way. So, there was absolutely no point at which Gnostics and Orthodox Christians – ordinary churches – could have any fellowship. The doctrines were diametrically opposed. 

John Dickson:
And yet it’s amazing, isn’t it, that, that in the Gnostic texts that survive, they’re putting all this stuff that you’ve been describing on the lips of Jesus. Yeah. It’s Jesus who told all that stuff about, “Don’t worry about that, uh, Jewish God, the horrible creator, we need to escape and go away.” It is a remarkable fusion, um, and I don’t know whether it says something about the innovative power of Christians or the attractive nature of Jesus to pagans. I, you know, is Gnosticism Christian that’s gone astray, or is it really just paganism on the lips of Jesus? What would you say to that?

Michael Horton:
That’s a great question, John. I think without overstating things, throughout this whole project, leading up to now finishing, concluding with our own day, I think that what we keep getting is a Gnostic revival. We keep getting this revival of, you have Christian terminology, appeals to Jesus, and so forth, but it’s clearly focused on inner therapy, self-help, getting out of the body,  finding ways of, uh, turning theology into philosophy or mysticism. And it’s really, wherever you see it is a violent opposition to the God of creation, the God who created the world, who has certain laws, that he put in place, who judges, who redeems and does so through physical means. This whole, you know, body of Christianity, which came out of the faith of Israel – very earthy faith – you know, they’ll say, for example, not the ancient Gnostics said, “We don’t need bloody sacrifices. All those bloody, you know, offerings of bulls and calves in the Old Testament, Jesus didn’t really offer his blood as a sacrifice for us.” Well, you hear people talking like that today: we don’t need all this blood and flesh stuff. Let’s just raise our minds to contemplate the Easter experience or new life or, you know, how to turn it into, to something new agey.

John Dickson:
It’s totally recognizable today. I, I mean, you and I could name names right at the, but let’s not. Can I, can I ask you sympathetically to describe the essential good news of this outlook? If you, if you had to, you know, describe what they thought was good news about this outlook, and then, and then I want to turn to Christianity’s critique.

Michael Horton:
Yeah. How do you get out? I mean, that’s, that’s really the question. Everyone’s looking for salvation in 2nd-century Alexandria. The hermeticists, the Gnostics, uh, and the Christians are all giving different ways of salvation. So philosophy initially really was a way of salvation. Plato even called it a way of life, not a way of doctrine, but a way of life. And I think that … So I think that, uh, you know, you, you have, for example, the, this tremendous fear that demons are all around us. They’re slithering as snakes under our doors. There are all these cries in the Gnostic literature about, uh, you know, these arcans, these, these evil beings that are spoiling our happiness and giving us diseases and so forth. How can our soul … the Gnostic is addressing this question … how can our soul rise from our body and get past, it’s like a video game, get past all of these, uh, evil arcans, which are basically planets, to break through the crystalline sphere to get out and be safe in heaven? That’s what they’re promising, uh, how to get out. Salvation from this world, and Christianity was preaching: how has God saved this world?

John Dickson:
Yes. So it, the, the premise of this spirituality that we’re talking about is a fundamental pessimism about what is, about the life we find ourselves in.

Michael Horton:
Right.

John Dickson:
And would you say that, um, Christianity from its Jewish heritage has a fundamental positivity about the world and the body and, and so on? Is that a simple way of thinking about it?

Michael Horton:
Absolutely. I think Christianity is so unique in world religions because…for a lot of reasons, but, but especially because when it comes to its view of nature, it says that the reason for sin is moral, not ontological. It’s not because we’re material bodies, it’s not because we live in a material world, it’s not because, it’s because we’re sinners. And that’s actually good news because you can redeem a sinner but you can’t really redeem a human being who is inherently, essentially, garbage and not worth saving, which is what the gnostics thought. “We gotta get out of here, like a lot of transhumanists today. We’re, our bodies aren’t worth saving, but Christians said,”Oh yes, no, absolutely. This, th- this world and our bodies in it are integral to who we are, and God created them. God will not destroy anything that he made that is good. He’s going to destroy sin. He’s going to, he’s going to destroy, uh, uh, evil and injustice. He’s going to, uh, judge the world in righteousness, and then he’s going to raise the dead to life everlasting. And he … How do we know this? Because he’s raised his son from the dead, who was like us in every way except for sin.” Two completely different ways of looking at the world. One, that you, you look at it dualistically, it’s because of matter versus mind or spirit, or sin versus grace.

John Dickson:
One of my favorite prayers from the Anglican prayer book is the Good Friday prayer, which has a line that says, “Thou hateest nothing that thou hast made.”

Michael Horton:
Yeah. I love that. I love that prayer and, and it’s from the Psalm. So, I mean, that’s right. I mean, we have to really think about that. This, we have this in our own circles, uh, Christian circles today, this idea of the late great planet earth, you know, um, it’s, uh, you know, gonna all be destroyed and that kind of, apocalyptic, uh, catastrophic outlook really has tinges of the gnostic belief that this world will just cease to exist.

John Dickson:
Can I ask you though to describe for us, um, in, in this context, I mean, you described the good news from the perspective of the spiritualists, but what would be the best Christian response to it?  You seem to like Irenaus, that’s good, because Irenaeus hated this stuff, didn’t he? But, uh, how do you think the, what’s the best critique of it? Let’s just start in the ancient world, who deals with it best from a Christian perspective?

Michael Horton:
Sure. Well, and I, I think Augustine deals with it really well in the City of God. He, he goes right after hermeticism and Gnosticism, uh, but Irenaeus in the second century, he was right on top of it. And if you read his Against Heresies, I’m sure you have … If you, if you read it from cover to cover, it’s, it’s almost basically, uh, how to read the Bible.

John Dickson:
Yep. I make my students read it.

John Dickson (Studio)

Let me give you a little taste of one of Irenaeus’ lovely arguments. He lays out the Gnostic use of words and names plucked from Scripture but disconnected from the actual theme or story of Scripture. So, ‘Grace’ is one deity, according to the Gnostics, ‘Father’ is another, ‘Christ’ is another, Jesus is yet another, and Logos/Word is still another — and all of them are different from the highest being toward which our souls long. Irenaeus first compares this to someone taking a mosaic of a king made out of jewels and rearranging it into an image of a fox. The bits are jewels, but the portrait is junk. Then Irenaeus offers another brilliant analogy of the same thing. Imagine someone taking lines from the epic poems of Homer (from the Iliad and the Odyssey) and turning them into a random nonsensical nursery rhyme. Here’s Irenaeus from Against Heresies:

Reading

After having entirely fabricated their own system, they gather together sayings and names from scattered places and transfer them, as we have already said, from their natural meaning to an unnatural one. They act like those who would take verses from Homer and arrange them according to a theme of their own, so that the inexperienced think Homer composed them that way. For example:

There was sent Hercules, the powerful hero,
By Eurystheus, the son of Sthenelus,
That from Erebus 
he might fetch the dog of dark Hades.
Therefore Hermes together with blue-eyed Athena did send him.

One who is well versed in Homer will recognise the verses, but he will not recognise the concocted theme, since he knows that some were spoken of Ulysses, others of Hercules himself, others of Priam, and so on. If he puts each one back into its own context, he will make the concoction disappear. In the same way, anyone who holds onto the unchangeable the Rule of Truth received in baptism will recognise the names, sayings, and parables (of the Gnostics), but they will not recognise this blasphemous theme of theirs. For even if he recognises the jewels (of the mosaic), he will not accept the fox for the image of the king.

Ireneaus, Against Heresies, Book 1, part 8.

John Dickson (Studio)

I love Irenaeus. Back to Michael. 

Michael Horton:
It’s a great biblical theology, and in it, he sharply contrasts the biblical story with the gnostic stories, and we have to say in plural, because they were, it was a Fisiper’s kind of movement every time, uh, because it was based on a cult leader, and once that cult leader died, it split off into three or four different branches and so forth. But Iraneus explains each of those groups and their various views, and then he, then he says, “Here’s what they have in common, and here’s what Christianity teaches in sharp contrast”. What I love about Iranas, John, is, well, one of the things is, is that he, he talks about deification or glorification, not as something that happens to the soul when it leaves the body, but as something that happens at the resurrection of the body, when we will be like God as much as it is possible for a creature to be, but we’ll be embodied, but so is God the Son. So we will be, we will be like the Father in terms of our, our, our conformity to righteousness and holiness and goodness, but we will also be like the Son as he is now in his glorified state. And Iranas, I, you know, one of his lines that I love is “The glory of God is a human fully alive.” Isn’t that marvelous?

 

John Dickson:
Yeah. I mean, you couldn’t get a less hermetic, Orphic statement.

Break 2

Media – Isaac Asimov on religion and superstition

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s legendary 20th century science fiction author (and biochemist) Isaac Asimov. I don’t know how these references get snuck into my scripts, but apparently Asimov wrote a tonne of books including the Foundation trilogy and I, Robot. There he’s talking about religion as superstition – widely held, but ultimately just a set of irrational beliefs in supernatural influences on our lives. Some people have to wear their favourite pair of undies for an important soccer match; others say “Our Father, in Heaven Hallowed be your Name …” and so on. Well, it’s certainly a view!!

John Dickson:
Can I ask you a, uh, a question that might be sitting in the minds of, um, listeners who are maybe a little bit skeptical about Christianity or just don’t know what to make of the Christian faith? They might think, so you’ve sort of described superstition, you know, the spirituality, the, the magical thinking, the sort of ultimately leaving the body, the icons, et cetera. Why isn’t Christianity just a more developed superstition?

Michael Horton:
Well, um, first of all, it’s, it’s interesting that, um, that a lot of the magic of, of the Middle Ages, for example, um, laid the groundwork for the sort of technological orientation of early modern science, but you couldn’t get out of that superstitious worldview until Christianity critiqued it. And so the early pioneers of the Scientific Revolution, I cover in the second volume, they are Orthodox Christians for the most part. Robert Boyle, for example, wrote a treatise, great treatise, uh, attacking this idea of nature itself being divine. No, divinity belongs only to the triune God. There, there’s God and there’s everything else. And that opened the door for science to study nature as nature. Uh,

John Dickson:
Another book. It’s, it’s, it’s a book from God. It’s not God. 

Michael Horton:
Exactly. It doesn’t emanate from God. It’s spoken by God from nothing. And that, that, uh, really opened the door. Creation X Neelo- really opened the door as it did in the ancient world. Christianity fundamentally is focused on, again, salvation of the world, not salvation from the world. It’s focused on the resurrection of Jesus Christ after he was really dead for three days. He really rose on the third day as the beginning of the new creation, and that triggered a new era of human history. It’s now the age of salvation. And I think that I would tell someone who’s kind of working through these things, struggling through these things. Spirituality is like nailing jello to the wall. It’s all mix and match. Make it up as you go, cafeteria, whatever helps you. But Christianity is, is a historical claim. And so it’s either true or it’s false, but it’s not something you can make up. It’s not something you can add to your Buddhism or to your, uh, Islam or to, you know, your spirituality. It’s not something you can tack on you can add. It is a, a completely historical claim that either is true or not. And if it’s true, it is the beginning of the new creation. Jesus is risen, and we are, uh, caught up in that, that mystery, uh, and one day we’ll be raised glorious like him.

 

John Dickson:
Other listeners might be thinking, your mention of science might remind them that science disenchanted the world, left us without mystery and transcendence, and they, they themselves are a bit disillusioned by that. So is Christianity responsible for taking the magic out of our world?

Michael Horton:
Yeah, that’s, that is a key question, that I, I’m dealing with here in this project. Well, first of all, disenchantment, um, uh, comes from Max Weber, uh, the sociologist, uh, the, uh, turn of the 20th century, uh, Max Weber, but he didn’t coin it. He got it from Schelling and other romantic writers who said, basically, Christianity disenchanted the world. So the way this story goes, and Max Weber tells it like this, um, the Hebrew prophets in saying, making God the only God, there is no other chased the other gods out of the world and chased superstition and magic out of the world, everything was idolatry, and then the Christians just followed in that train and the Protestant Reformation took it to a new, a new level, and that’s why we live in a disenchanted world. That’s basically Charles Taylor’s take in a secular age. Well, disenchantment, the, the word, Max Faber uses it the way the romantics did. He gives that same genealogy from the Hebrew prophets to the Christians to, uh, the Reformation, this disenchanting of the world. If we want to go back to enchantment for Faber and company, that means going back to the superstitions and myths and magic of the pre-Christian world. So we don’t want that, but, you know, here’s something real: The word became flesh. I don’t know how, you know, more magical you get than that, but it’s not a natural kind of magic. It is God actually entering into our world and caring for us and suffering with us and then rising again on the third day, bearing our sins. And, and this, this is, again, this is not vague or abstract; it’s historical, and it, it, it brings us into it rather than having us as the stars of the show creating it. I think that that’s, at the end of the day, um, whatever criticisms can be made of how Christians have talked about this story sometimes, the story itself is amazing.

John Dickson:
Yeah, because it means the material world we’re in isn’t magic in the sense of being capricious and scary, and you need to placate it and watch out for it. It’s actually more like all the sentiment of a gift of love from a lover is in this gift. 

Michael Horton:
Yeah. A great example of that, I think, is the contrast between the, uh … And I know you’ve done work on this,  the myths of Israel’s neighbours, the Gilgamesh epic, and Enuma Elish. You get from all of these, all of these religions outside of Israel, the world being created out of violence, you know, the gods are, you know, there’s this war in heaven, there’s this war between the gods and out of it comes human beings who are part divine and part, uh, part garbage, really. And they’re there to just do the work of the gods because the gods are tired of making bricks and building things on earth. They, they basically want slaves. And then you turn to Genesis, and what you have there in Genesis is not only the king, but everyone, male and female, is made in his image as royalty, and he created just because he wanted to. He created out of love, not out of violence. So this world is founded in love, not in some kind of prim- primordial, uh, uh, sci-fi thriller, but out of just for the sheer heck of it, God s- so loved the world, he created it.

John Dickson (Studio)

Let’s press pause. I’ve got a 5 min Jesus for you. When asked what is the single greatest obligation of the human being, Jesus said there were two: Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind. And love your neighbour as yourself. Christianity is all the things. Christianity is not a civic religion. With apologies to the Christian nationalists, no one who knows what they’re talking about imagines the founding documents and found centuries of Christianity envisaged the way of Jesus as a government program. In this way, it was different from both Old Testament Judaism and from the Roman state religions, where religion was fused with government, where external rituals – whether Sabbath keeping or animal sacrifice – were civically mandated (and policed) for the public. For Jesus, loving God with all your heart referred to things like praying to God, listening to his word, embodying his virtues, NOT performing state sanctioned observances. This is why Christianity has something in common with the ‘spiritual but not religious’ vibe of the ancient and modern worlds. You can, as an individual, know God in a personal relationship of love. You can know God’s love for you, especially in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and you can respond in love. On the other hand, unlike Orphism, Hermeticism, Gnosticism, or contemporary New Age spirituality, Christianity is not about private soulish liberation. This spirituality sends you back out into the world to build relationships with others: love your neighbour! Christianity can sometimes sound like a therapeutic spirituality, just as it can sometimes sound like a civic religion, but it isn’t meant to be. What it’s meant to be is a worldview that inspires love for God that overflows in love for others. It is spirituality with community. There’s another paradox or tension—another way Christianity is ‘all the things’. Christianity is at once supernatural and rational—it is about a God of love, but you’re meant to love this God with all of your ‘mind’! But here’s the other paradox or tension—the other way Christianity is ‘all the things’. It is at once supernatural and rational—it is about a God of love, but you’re meant to love this God with all of your ‘mind’! And you can make your way to this Faith from either direction. Loads of people come to Christianity after having spiritual longings and experiences. We did a whole episode on that with NYT columnist Ross Douthat – check out episode number ….??????? But it is equally true that people come to Faith through rational enquiry, through pondering the historical evidence for Jesus or the maths of the universe. Unlike other religious figures, we can know loads about the life of Jesus via the secular historical method. You can’t prove it all, but it’s pretty clear we do have the kind of evidence you’d expect if Jesus did live, heal, teach, die and even rise — and loads more evidence pointing in that direction than you could expect if it was made up. Then there’s the maths, as I say …  From the tiniest particle to the furthest reaches of the cosmos, there is some spookily elegant order built into the fabric of things. This doesn’t prove God, but it does help a lot of people think that behind the universal order is a Mind not ‘magic’. Superstition is ultimately a magical view of fundamental reality.  And, sometimes, not always but sometimes, atheism can sound like it rests on magic. I don’t mean to be unfair but I have had atheists say to me that the logic of a First Cause behind the universe is strong. They admit there can’t be an infinite chain of cause-and-effect and that an Uncaused Cause that wills the first effect is an elegant logical solution. But then they insist that the rules of logic don’t have to apply to the origin of the Universe. The Universe is rational all the way back to first effect, but the cause of that first effect need not be rational because it is by definition outside this rational cosmos. The universe just is. No further explanation required. To me, that can sometimes sound a little like magic. But plenty of us find ourselves more compelled by the idea that it is rationality all the way down and all the way up to the First Cause himself! 

What’s my point?

I think it says something about Christianity that people come to this worldview through either—or both—transcendent experience and intellectual enquiry. What’s more, Christianity tends to make the spiritually inclined a little more disciplined in their thinking. The rigours of Scripture and theology demand it. And it makes the nerdy intellectual who embraces it a little more open to transcendence. As Søren Kierkegaard loved to point out, Christianity isn’t sub-rational, but it sure is supra-rational. That was a moving episode on Kierkegaard’s Blind Faith’, episode 103. As the great Dane insisted, rationality can bring you to the shores of the ocean of God, but it’s only by diving in that you come to know him. You can press play now. 

 

John Dickson:
There’s There are so many things, Mike, we, we could explore. I mean, because your book is massive it’s, um, it’s 500 pages and  something. Um, but I have a final question because I’m thinking of the, the listener who is wary of institutional religion, like Christianity, drawn to the spiritualities on offer today, what encouragement can you offer them about the Christian faith?

Michael Horton:
Yeah. Well, I would say first of all, um, I understand um, uh, but I also think that institutional religion is like institutional anything else. Institutions have all sorts of flaws because they are historical bearers of a tradition of sinners. I mean, we all … And that’s true in the church, too. Uh, so we have, we, we have to take the good and bad of it. When, when, when Jesus says that we are his branches, he’s the vine, we’re the branches. When Paul says that Christ is the head of the church, he’s not just talking about the invisible church, he’s talking about the visible church, the institution. And so I th- I think that, uh, if Christ, the head doesn’t mind being attached to this problematic body then, then we have to as well. To, to be united to Christ is to be united to hi- to his body. And so I would say, don’t think in terms of institutional religion as an abstract thing, go to a church, go, go to a church that preaches Christ and him crucified and risen. Go to a church that wants to understand this story better, where there are people who, uh, welcome you and, and wanna come alongside you and wanna learn with you and grow with you. Go to church for a while. Just sit there. You don’t even have to participate. Just sit there and, and kind of, you know, take it in. That’s what I would say. Come and see, or come and hear even better.

John Dickson:
Michael Horton, thank you so much for your time.

Michael Horton:
Thank you, John. Appreciate it so much.

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Alasdair Belling is a writer-researcher.

 

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