Casey Bedell
A famous painting by Normal Rockwell called Lift Up Thine Eyes (1957) captures well the sentiment many of us feel when it comes to formation and discipleship in today’s world. In the painting, a church custodian is high on a ladder in front of St. Thomas Church on 5th Avenue and 53rd with a priest standing below him. New Yorkers walk by with hunched shoulders and downcast eyes as the custodian posts the message “Lift Up Thine Eyes” on a marquee above the church’s gothic doors—a sardonic message on the loss of religious faith in America. Rockwell noted, “I was showing the America I knew and observed to others who might not have noticed.”
What Rockwell observed in his mid-twentieth century America may have been true for his time, but the shift in religious belief today is actually more complicated than the painting captures. The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor perhaps more than anyone has captured this shift most astutely with his prolific output that aims to interrogate what he calls our “disenchanted age.”1
The Western church has reached something of a fever pitch in seeking to respond to this “disenchantment.” It is often assumed that Christianity grew and maturated in the ancient world because the gospel “fit” its sense of enchantment. So many have proposed that we need to re-enchant that which has been disenchanted. For example, just Google “make Christianity weird again” to survey the proposals on hand, and you will see why there has been an ever-increasing interest in liturgical and sacramental churches today. One aspect of enchantment evidently means rehabilitating ancient Christian practices—and the weirder it is, the more enchanting.
While the weirdness of Christianity is unavoidable, this article wants to argue something more obvious and overlooked: Re-enchament abounds when Christians live out their ordinary lives in the midst of an unbelieving world. As Peter says, your life should be such that it will provoke the watching world to ask you to give “a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15).
Understanding our age and the loss of meaning
Spanning one thousand years, the medieval period was perhaps the era of Christian enchantment. If you go back to the medieval world of Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas, it was undeniably an era that was oriented towards the transcendent. Theology was the queen of all sciences, after all. God and politics were so closely integrated that seven religious crusades spanned close to two centuries, as Western European Christians believed it was essential to stop the expansion of Muslim states and reclaim for Christianity the Holy Land in the Middle East. No doubt a historically complicated period, but it was oriented towards the transcendent—it was what Taylor calls “enchanted.”
By construing our own age, in contrast, as “disenchanted,” Taylor does not mean a disavowing of the supernatural but simply that the supernatural functions differently for many of us. While many talk about the loss of belief in America, Taylor instead argues that people actually still believe—they just believe differently.
Today, belief in God has been reduced solely to immanent ends—what Taylor calls the “immanent frame.” Taylor notes early on in A Secular Age that “for the first time in history a purely self-sufficient humanism [has come] to be a widely available option. I mean by this a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing. Of no previous society was this true.”2
Unlike us, the medieval world did not expect this age to bear the full weight of meaning for our lives. Indeed, even if one could gain everything it had to offer, that would not save one’s soul (Matt 16:26). Thus, ultimate meaning for medievals was found beyond this age—in the age to come (Matt 12:32). It was God’s gift of eternal life (John 3:16), something present in this age (Luke 17:21) but whose fullness was still to come with the beatific vision (1 Cor 13:12). They understood that life had transcendent meaning, as life with God was directed towards transcendent ends (Col 3:1).
Comparatively, what Taylor describes now of our age is not a loss of belief in God. God is still believed in and welcomed in the immanent frame, but he is not the center. Prayer and attending church are still observed as they were in the medieval period, but not because they engage us in transcendent ends with a transcendent God who is worthy of our devotion, but because he helps us to flourish now in the immanent frame—a spiritualized version of “gaining the whole world but forfeiting his soul” (Matt 16:26). The self is the center, and God is an accessory for the self’s flourishing. Psychological wellness and emotional health are the primary ends now. The great irony of this shift, as Taylor captures so well, is ultimately the loss of meaning—even as we maintain the quest for it!
By reducing the totality of life to the immanent frame (God included), we experience what he calls a cross-pressured existence that leads to a nova effect. Similar to Athens in Paul’s time (see Acts 17:16, 22), today we have many options available in our quest for meaning. Yet unlike those in Athens, we today have lost a sense of the transcendent. We therefore experience profound existential tension in the midst of feeling overwhelmed with so many options available in the quest for meaning. This is the uniqueness of a post-Christian world compared to a pre-Christian world: We have tried Christianity and moved beyond it. This moving beyond has reduced our lives to the immanent frame with a search for meaning that feels like a pinball ricocheting within a closed system.
Ministering amidst this loss of meaning
How does one minister in an age of meaninglessness? And how does the message of 1 Peter 3:15 speak into this?
Until recently, I had spent most of my energy as a pastor trying to integrate the life of the mind with embodied practices alongside the best of the missional church. While this has been fruitful to some extent, I have come to accept that what we are facing today both inside and outside the church is deeper than what I had guessed.
The starting presupposition I have led with, both for Christian formation and evangelism, was “If only they knew the truth.” I assumed if “truth” was presented clearly and if the Holy Spirit was active, then a real encounter with God was possible. But as John Seel noted recently, following the insights of Taylor, the crisis we face today is not first of all a matter of truth—it is more deeply a matter of meaning. This is not to suggest that truth does not matter. Far from it.
The medievalist C. S. Lewis taught that the organ of meaning was the imagination, and reason was the organ of truth. Lewis scholar Michael Ward explains what Lewis meant: “Once the imagination has determined that the thing at hand is meaningful, we can then begin to judge whether its meaning is true or false. Before something can be either true or false, it must mean.”3
It must “mean.” That is the real challenge of discipleship today. Before we form and evangelize people with the truth, we must understand that what most people are wrestling with is a loss of meaning. Their experience with a utilitarian spirituality has not led to the flourishing they hoped for. It all feels meaningless—even Christianity! Therefore, Christian leaders who are seeking to form and reach people without addressing the loss of meaning are missing the mark and leaving people vulnerable, asking them to apply Christian doctrine and Christian practice without any reason to do so.
More recently, Taylor scholar Andrew Root has sought to understand this cultural shift in the context of ministry and has noted that while many of us are struggling to grow our ministries, we are overlooking a massive mission field. He acknowledges, yes, we must preach the truth of the gospel, but we must not forget that people are still looking for meaning in a variety of ways—through non-traditional spiritual quests, intense involvement in fitness regimes, and digital experiences. The question Root is wrestling with has to do with whether the church is even remotely concerned with giving the world meaning.
Root emphasizes the importance of addressing what Taylor calls “fragilization,” where both believers and non-believers experience moments of existential doubt. Believers are tempted to not believe and non-believers are tempted to believe. It is a fragile time but it is a ripe time, which is why Root advocates that the discipleship landscape and mission field should unapologetically focus on the same thing: guiding individuals to first discover meaning and then connecting that to the historic gospel of Jesus Christ.
Recovering meaning through re-personalization
Root, however, questions the possibility of discovering meaning through re-enchanting our world the way most are suggesting. Whereas most suggest we simply need to retrieve older aesthetics and ancient practices as the path towards recovering meaning, Root suggests instead an alternative approach that he calls re-personalization. And this is where 1 Peter shows us a way forward.
While Peter’s world was a pre-Christian world and ours is a post-Christian world, they are both destabilizing worlds for Christians to inhabit. As Karen Jobes says in her commentary on 1 Peter, this “universal relevance is due to its presentation of how the gospel of Jesus Christ is the foundational principle by which the Christian life is lived out within the larger unbelieving society.”4 This is the same concern many church leaders acutely face today.
A sampling from 1 Peter shows that Christians are called to the following within such destabilizing worlds:
- Lives of fidelity to Jesus in the midst of various social trials and persecutions (1:6)
- Conformity to a countercultural way of being human as a minority group (1:14)
- Lives reviled as evil and recognized as good at the same time (2:12)
- Submission to evil government institutions (2:13)
- Enduring sorrow while suffering unjustly (2:19)
- Suffering for doing good (2:20–21)
- Blessing those who are evil (3:8–9)
There is a deep theme connecting each of these that holds promise for re-enchantment. In short, Peter’s first epistle is all about holding relationship with the world that personally costs us. And these deeply personal ways of relating to the world are what ultimately lead others to ask the reason for our hope (see 1 Pet 3:15). Re-echantment flourishes, in other words, when we relearn the deeply personal way of Jesus in how to relate to the world around us.
Consider this: A significant aspect of our disenchanted age is the loss of deep personal connection. Selfie culture, the embrace of remote work, and life mediated through a screen are all just symptoms of a culture that has lost a deep sense of the personal and relational. What all of these have in common is what Taylor calls a “buffered self.” Christians believe, however, that reality is relational and personal to the core, as it is held together by a tri-personal God who is in his essence relational.
Root advocates that the first step to potentially restoring meaning in people’s lives is to foster deep personal relationships and rich communal care that is not useful or transactional but simply is (Acts 4:32–35). CrossFit gyms offer this to some extent: They are just predicated on the assumption that you are fit! But to encounter the gift of being welcomed, known, and dignified in a deeply personal way is to encounter at the immanent level what has always been at the transcendent level. It is to create a relational context that invites people to imagine that there might be something to all of this. Imagination in this sense is about working from the immanent frame back to the transcendent frame.
While this is not sufficient on its own for formation or evangelism, it is the soil we have to work with in order to truly form people and reach people for Christ. Michael Ward explains again, “We should think of reason as being like a tree and imagination as being like the ground in which it grows. Reason rests upon, indeed relies upon, imagination, as a tree roots itself in the ground. … Reason can’t survive without imagination.”5
Re-personalization, in other words, is the imaginative soil we need in order to engage people with the truth of the gospel, because disenchantment is ultimately a de-personalization, a breakdown in our relationship with the deeply personal God who calls us into existence for transcendent ends.
We cannot address the challenge of meaninglessness without a robust engagement with the imagination. And we cannot get people to pine for something more if we are not able to offer something deeply relational and personal, something that points to something worth imagining. Christianity may not be seen as true for some, but we can make them want it to be true. We can provoke them the way Peter calls us to (see 1 Pet 3:15) through countercultural ways of being human.
Connecting with each other as “masks” of God
It was Martin Luther perhaps more than anyone else who understood the paradox of human-to-human engagement as one’s encounter with God. Luther once prayed, “Lord, what you do not do remains undone. If you will not help, I shall gladly surrender. The cause is not mine. I will happily be your mask and disguise if only you will do the work. Amen.”6
That word “mask” is essential for Luther and his engagement with the world of his day. In his exposition of Psalm 147, Luther writes,
God could easily give you grain and fruit without your plowing and planting. But He does not want to do so. … What else is all our work to God—whether in the fields, in the garden, in the city, in the house, in war, or in government—but just such a child’s performance, by which He wants to give His gifts in the fields, at home, and everywhere else? These are the masks of God, behind which He wants to remain concealed and do all things …We have the saying: “God gives every good thing, but not just by waving a hand.” God gives all good gifts; but you must lend a hand and take the bull by the horns.7
Luther is making a bold move here, and this is one of his most unique contributions to Christian spirituality. We could reframe what he is saying by asking, “How does God feed us?” He could rain down manna like he did for Israel (Exod 16:4–36), but instead he gives us farmers, grocery stores, and kitchens. How does God heal us? He could (and sometimes does) heal us in an unmediated, miraculous way. But in the normal course of things, God gives us doctors and nurses. How does God teach us? He could divinely impart knowledge to our minds, but instead he gives us teachers and pastors (Eph 4:11).
Luther is saying that through our various vocations, God is behind the scenes doing the work. Through the parent, he is parenting children; through the barista, he is pulling the espresso shot; through the retailer, he is clothing bodies; and so on. We are the masks of God in the world behind which he is undergoing his secret work and unfolding his eternal kingdom.
Luther’s doctrine of the hiddenness of God is a prescient outlook on reality for today. If God feels hidden in this disenchanted age, it is because he is! But that hiddenness is intentional, redemptive, and paradoxically deeply personal and relational. Just has God hid himself in the flesh of Christ on the cross to reconcile the world to himself (2 Cor 5:19), so he hides himself in our vocations to provide for the world. Luther works backwards, we could say, from the immanent frame to the transcendent frame and declares that God is present in us. Our vocations are his way to bless the world.
In other words, Luther would say to us today that meaning is recovered by realizing in faith that God is meeting each of us in the face of our neighbor in a deeply personal way. If re-personalization is the kind of imaginative-rich soil that we need to even warrant our neighbors to ask for the reason for the hope within us, might our disenchanted age be a fresh opportunity for us to declare this hope?
Related resources for further study
1 Peter, Second Edition (Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament | BECNT)
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- In his works like Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007), along with his more recently published Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (2024), Taylor shows us how belief has shifted for many.
- Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Belknap Press, 2007), 18.
- Michael Ward, “C. S. Lewis on Imagination and Reason,” November 22, 2015, Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University, transcript, https://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/22%20Nov.pdf.
- Karen H. Jobes, 1 Peter, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Baker Academic, 2005), 1.
- Ward, “C. S. Lewis on Imagination and Reason,” 2.
- Martin Luther, Luther’s Prayers, ed. Herbert Brokering (Fortress Press, 1994), 90.
- Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 14: Selected Psalms III, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann (Concordia Publishing House, 1999), 114.
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