There is a clear exodus from both the institution of church and the Christian faith that shows no signs of abating,[1] Thousands of people are experiencing what is being called the deconstruction[2] of their faith. They are knocking down theological and religious constructs and elements of church culture that no longer make sense, and that may even have caused harm. They are not merely rebels or people who “just want to sin,” as some pastor friends have said to me. What many are seeking is an engagement with life and yes, even spirituality, with what is real and authentic, experienced and embodied, and it may never again look like what people in the church are comfortable with.
Karl Rahner once said that the “Christian of tomorrow will be a mystic, someone who has experienced something, or else he or she will not be at all.”[3] He was pushing back against the scholasticism of previous centuries, in which it was believed that the grace of God was given through externals— the proclaimed word and the sacraments of the church as isolated events, rather than personal encounter and experience. Harkening back to earlier mystics and the patristic era, he believed grace was everywhere, revealed in the “mysticism of everyday life,” and that God could be met and experienced in the moments of daily, ordinary life. In Rahner’s mind this mystical perspective was not a contrast to the arguments and reason of the scholasticism nor the sacraments and teaching of the church, but a logical continuation, outflow, and consequence of both.[4]
His words also rightfully challenge some of the effects of the Reformation and the advent of modernism. Reformers like John Calvin pushed back against the localization of grace in things like the sacraments and rituals, because in their thinking that opened the possibility of human action in salvation. Instead, they emphasized beliefs in the abstract, emphasizing the priority of God’s grace and action. Thus it became the immaterial, abstract beliefs, not magical things like the host that are the means of grace. (Smith 39) Simply put, the rejection of sacramentalism by Calvin and other Reformers was unintentionally an opening to naturalism, effectively “disenchanting” the world. “If the church no longer had ‘good’ magic, then ‘all magic must be black,’ all enchantment must be blasphemous, idolatrous, even demonic.”[5] We lost a deep knowing of the sacred as presence in the world and have dampened our own abilities to sense it.
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Endnotes
[1] Pew Research Center, “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace: An Update on America's Changing Religious Landscape,” Pew Research Center: Religion and Public Life (17 October 2019), https://www.pewforum.org/2019/10/17/in-u-s-decline-of-christianity-continues-at-rapid-pace.
[2] The word deconstruction is borrowed from Jacques Derrida and others, who wanted to unmask the dualistic oppositions in western metaphysics and the privileging of certain words within its many dichotomies. Derrida’s insights may have pinpointed why so many are drawn again to mystery and a new way of being rather than merely a different kind of theology to re-establish certainty.
[3] Annemarie S. Kidder, introduction to The Mystical in Everyday Life: Sermons, Prayers, and Essays, by Karl Rahner, ed. and trans. by Annemarie S. Kidder (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1970), xviii.
[4] Karl Rahner, The Mystical in Everyday Life: Sermons, Prayers, and Essays, ed. and trans. by Annemarie S Kidder (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1970), xix.
[5] James K. A. Smith, How (Not) To Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 39.
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