About True Magic
“On earth as it is in heaven”—a podcast helping Reformed Christians to embody Christ’s reign, by finding the spiritual patterns expressed in physical things. We ask scripture and nature two main questions:
How is spiritual meaning expressed in the material world? We understand the physical realm as fundamentally symbolic, participating in heavenly patterns—and we want to better understand how.
How should this intersection of fact and meaning shape our piety? In light of what we learn about the physical imaging the spiritual, and we ourselves being images of the invisible God, how should we live so that we are properly participating in these patterns—that “thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven”?
Why magic?!
Magic is not what you think. At its most fundamental definition, it is simply the setting up of a resonance with spiritual patterns, through physical ways of expressing them. That’s why the term “movie magic” makes sense. You don’t think movie magic is intrinsically evil, right? You don’t even think it’s “real” magic. But it is.
The feeling of transport and transcendence you get in a movie is because it really is connecting you with some “higher” reality. You are feeling, which is to say, participating in, a “spirit” of longing, or levity, or wonder, or melancholy, which is a heavenly pattern that unites all kinds of similar experiences.
It’s not woo. It’s just the way the world is made—but we have broken apart facts and meaning, and let the pagans co-opt the language, so it sounds woo.
That’s why we chose the name True Magic. Magic is a much more mundane principle than most Christians imagine. Pagans twist it into something darkly absurd, just like they twist all kinds of creational things. They worship the creature rather than the creator; what do you expect? But magic is just the setting up of a resonance with spiritual patterns, through physical expressions of them. We do this every Sunday in worship and no one thinks anything of it.
But all of life is worship. All of life is liturgy. All of life is magic. So we should be very careful to ensure that it is true magic. We explain and justify this in greater depth here:
![[S1E0] What the heck is true magic?](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F720cc2e8-6f54-4088-b76c-306549d32b4d_1920x1281.jpeg)
True Magic is a project of Bnonn and Smokey Tennant. It is one half doctrine, and one half documentary. Smokey presents historical and cultural knowledge, and Bnonn applies hermeneutical and theological insights.
We are Reformed Christians and attend Redwood Reformation Church in Rotorua, where Bnonn is a lay shepherd. He is also the author of The Spine of Scripture: God’s Kingdom from Eden to Eternity, and It’s Good To Be A Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity.
If you’d like to contact us, the easiest way is by email:
hello@truemagic.nz
The symbolism of our logo
The True Magic logo combines a number of basic biblical symbols.
The fundamental image is of the cosmic mountain. There is an axis rising into heaven from the top of the mountain, symbolizing both the tree of life and the cross.
There is a Chi-Rho in there, where one side of the Chi becomes the serpent around the tree, but also the river out of the garden, giving life to the world—for chaos and death are both destructive and transformational.
The other side points up to heaven on the right, and down to Sheol on the left, reflecting how Christ’s own hands are represented in iconography throughout Christian history.
The river feeds into the waters beneath the earth, and the branches of the tree become clouds above the earth.
The two inner circles represent the limits of the earth, and the skies and the seas; the outer circle the spiritual realities outside our own that these things point to.
Where to find True Magic in your podcast app
Or, you can just copy the podcast’s RSS URL into your podcast app, to subscribe directly to the feed:
https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/1143240.rss
