A seasoned pastor once told me, “Satan recycles.” In context, he was saying that the same heresies and philosophical errors tend to resurface throughout history. It’s similar to what C. S. Lewis meant at the end of The Silver Chair when the Narnians were celebrating the rescue of Prince Rilian and the downfall of the Green Witch: “Those Northern Witches always mean the same thing, but in every age they have a different plan for getting it.” There’s nothing new under the sun (Eccl. 1:9).
In Magician and Mechanic: The Roots of “Spiritual but Not Religious” from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution, Michael Horton shows that the surge in people identifying as “Spiritual but Not Religious” (SBNR) has deep roots in Western culture. In the first volume in the Divine Self series, Shaman and Sage, Horton—professor of systematic theology and apologetics at Westminster Seminary California—traces SBNR back to at least the Axial Age (c. 600 BC). This second volume continues that chronological journey into more familiar territory for many readers.
Horton’s retelling of Western intellectual history undermines common assumptions about the origins of modernity. Many of modernity’s problems—which often get blamed on Protestantism—were issues the Reformation was already trying to address. The best solution to the errors of any age is often to look deeper at the ancient Christian gospel, rather than trying to find truth from new perspectives.
Defusing the Disenchantment Thesis
For many critics of Protestantism—whether they’re pagan, Roman Catholic, or Orthodox—the disenchantment thesis, popularized by sociologist Max Weber, offers convincing evidence that the Reformation was a mistake.
The basic argument is that Western culture became individualistic and antisupernatural because Luther and the other reformers who followed him accelerated an inward psychological turn along with an emphasis on the transcendence of God rather than divine immanence in the material world. Secularism, environmental abuse, a sense of meaninglessness in life, the prosperity-gospel movement, and expressive individualism each has its roots in Luther’s emphasis on justification by faith alone. About the only modern problem I haven’t seen the Protestant Reformation blamed for is tooth decay.
Magician and Mechanic doesn’t take on the critics directly. Yet, as Horton provides a heap of evidence, he clearly has the disenchantment thesis in his sights. He writes, “The story of modernity, particularly its central dogma of the divine self, is less the product of disenchanting naturalism than the ‘divine madness’ of natural supernaturalism” (26).
We have to look back to the previous volume, Shaman and Sage, to be reminded that “natural supernaturalism refers to the pantheistic or panentheistic cosmotheology of [the Orphic] tradition,” which prioritizes individual human experience and interpretation of reality.
Horton’s book is terminologically dense. He’s arguing that the world isn’t disenchanted, even for atheistic materialists; they’ve just made the individual the center of enchantment. And once you see that, it’s impossible to unsee.
For example, arch-materialist Carl Sagan famously said, “The cosmos is . . . within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” When everything is divine, there’s no need for God. Furthermore, as Horton argues, “If there are no gods to worry about interfering with our lives, we become gods ourselves, free to create our own meaning and purpose in this life” (13). Many of modernity’s flaws have more to do with the failure of the Reformation to transform the world than with its success.
Reasons for Reformation
Horton’s careful retelling of the story of early modern European philosophy upends other common tropes. For example, he shows that Friedrich Schleiermacher’s idea of “absolute dependence,” which birthed modern liberal theology, isn’t the result of the Reformation’s emphasis on individual justification. Rather, it draws more from the idea of the divine self that Christendom never eradicated and that was often embraced by self-described Christians.
Many of modernity’s flaws have more to do with the failure of the Reformation to transform the world than with its success.
In many cases, individualistic pagan practices were tolerated among church leaders “as long as they were properly glossed by their creators as prophetic allusions to Christ’s advent rather than an alternative religion” (5). However, Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino did more than blur the lines when he combined Neoplatonism and astrology with his official beliefs as an ordained Catholic priest. It’s telling that Ficino is by no means the most prominent figure within the church’s hierarchy who did more than dabble in Orphic spiritualism. There were popes performing magic and consulting astrological predictions for important decisions.
The upshot is that Christendom wasn’t an example of pristine Christianity by either Roman Catholic or Protestant definitions. When contemporary writers like Paul Kingsnorth and Rod Dreher call for a return to a pre-Reformation enchantedness as part of the solution to the malaise of modernity, we should have follow-up questions about what that entails. Medieval and early modern European spirituality were mixed bags, at best.
Though Horton doesn’t address the question extensively in this volume, it becomes obvious why the reformers insisted so vigorously on sola scriptura. They were resisting claims—from both Rome and the radicals—of personal, supernatural revelation that went beyond and often conflicted with Scripture.
On the one hand, the extrabiblical authority of the pope and human tradition provided an insufficiently stable foundation for the Christian faith. On the other hand, “Anabaptist spiritualists were the first critics of the Bible, shifting the locus of authority from external sources to the inner autonomy of the enlightened individual” (345–46). The canon of Scripture—the unchanging Word of God—reliably ties Christians of every age to “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).
Implications for Justification
At points when reading the series’ first volume, I found it hard to tell where this project fits within Horton’s work as a Christian theologian. However, in Magician and Mechanic, we begin to see more clearly how the Divine Self series meshes with Horton’s consistent concern for the doctrine of justification.
In particular, he shows that concern for the salvation of the individual soul isn’t a medieval or early modern invention. That claim raises questions about some basic assumptions of the New Perspective on Paul. Krister Stendahl’s 1963 essay, which arguably launched the New Perspective, argues that Luther misread a crisis of conscience back into Paul’s letters. According to this perspective, concern for individual salvation was a modern idea that must have been foreign to the apostle to the Gentiles, so an emphasis on justification of the individual by faith alone must be anachronistic. Paul could only have been wrestling with corporate rather than personal salvation, because the crisis of conscience is a medieval development perfected by Luther and Freud. These key ideas run through debates about the gospel over the last seven decades.
The canon of Scripture—the unchanging Word of God—reliably ties Christians of every age to ‘the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.’
In contrast, Horton shows in Shaman and Sage that the concept of the divine self existed in ancient cultures at least as far back as the Axial Age. Though there are certainly wrinkles throughout time, variations on the divine-self theme run through Western culture all the way to the modern age. Concern for the state of the individual soul was common.
It need not follow, then, that Paul’s wrestling with his conscience in view of the law (see Rom. 7) is an anachronistic reading introduced by Augustine and adopted by Luther. In light of the first two volumes in the Divine Self project, the traditional Protestant view of Paul seems much more likely.
Critics of modernity often insist that the solution to its spiritual malaise lies in recovering enchantment by turning inward toward the divine self. Horton shows why that impulse only deepens the problem. The reformers’s insistence on sola scriptura and justification by faith alone was a necessary response to the individualistic spiritualism of their day. In Magician and Mechanic, Michael Horton renews our confidence that the gospel is the church’s enduring answer to modernity’s recycled errors.
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