🌱Seed 😐Neutral 🟡Consideration 🔥Doctrine-Poetry-Story
The Big Idea
How do we as Lutherans interact and respond to the idea of re-enchantment?
Basically it is the idea that the rationalism of modernity and the inward focus of postmodernism are all crumbling and so the thing to replace it with is a renewed sense of the supernatural and the mystical. In other words “re-enchanting” the world to see it more like people of the past with their being more going on in the world than just what is explainable by science.
While pointing out a real issue I think that the bare drive to re-enchant is not necessarily a great thing. All kinds of enchanted understandings of the world can be substituted that are far from Christ centered. Full on paganism and all kinds of superstition are very real possibilities with a blind adherence to only “re-enchanting” the world around people.
In contrast we need to show that the Cosmology of Christianity is alive and vivid even more so than this disembodied goal of enchantment. The active work of God and the reality of spiritual warfare are two places where Christian Cosmology highlights the true and vivid nature of the world. This needs to avoid the animism and idol making that can quickly come out of an ungrounded dive into a world full of spirits fairies and any other beings one might like to imagine. Rather we can accept the desire to return to a more vivid world picture but acknowledge that that world picture starts and stops with the sovereignty of Christ.