Re-enchantment is not about restoring a paranormal worldview

It is about re-learning the art of biblical meaning-making: applying biblical hermeneutics to discern and integrate the meaning in all things.

I was encouraged last week to see Josh Robinson publish a piece on the importance of restoring thees and thous to our worship:

Recovering Liturgical English

One reason I was encouraged is because — I believe Josh will take this in the spirit I mean it — he is a hick American ministering to the stock of Appalachian coal miners, and if anyone is likely to balk at the notion of speaking in the highbrow language of 17th century King’s English, it would be a pastor whose speech is formed by the American version of a chav brogue: the redneck twang of West Virginia.

(I say this as someone with an appreciation for regional modes of speech and an affection for the American South.)

Another reason that I was encouraged, however, has to do with what I believe is (must be) the full and foundational telos of Reformation 2.0 — which is synonymous in my mind with “re-enchantment”:

We must learn the art of hermeneutics from scripture, instead of imposing a prefabricated hermeneutic on scripture.

People tend to speak of of re-enchantment as being about restoring a paranormal view of the world.

I think this is wrong.

Restoring a paranormal worldview is actually just one natural side-effect of learning how to rightly read the world.

This in turn follows naturally from learning how to rightly read scripture — because scripture does not just teach us what to think; it teaches us how: it does not merely fill our minds; it forms our souls. Specifically, it forms our souls into the image of Christ. This is something I have already argued extensively; e.g.:

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Looking at the beam and seeing by the beam

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So the project of re-enchantment is really a project of learning to read both scripture and the world like Christ does. To discern the meaning in scripture and the world that Christ actually put there. To properly integrate all the data — scriptural and creational — into Christ.

Re-enchantment is thus fundamentally a project of popularizing the art of biblical meaning-making: learning and applying biblical hermeneutics to discern and integrate the meaning in all things under the arche of Christ.

The chief issue that re-enchantment is correcting — the chief enemy we are fighting — is not an Enlightenment worldview, but an Enlightenment hermeneutic. An Enlightenment way of reading God’s dual revelation.

To say it from another angle, our perception of scripture is as tainted by the Enlightenment as our perception of the world. There’s not merely an analogy between reading empirical events well, and reading scripture well — there is a direct correlation. I’m too young and dumb to spot every point where we’re going wrong, but I know that reading the phenomena of the world as mere scientific or historical facts is fundamentally similar to reading scripture like a newspaper: both involve interpreting a form of revelation in the spirit of anti-Christ. One produces philosophies in the spirit of anti-Christ, like empiricism and rationalism; the other produces theologies in the spirit of anti-Christ, like dispensationalism and premillennialism.

I use this language not to condemn, but actually to illustrate the point I’m making. When I speak about reading “in the spirit of anti-Christ,” what I mean is reading in a way contrary to intent of the Spirit who breathed it out; the Spirit in which Christ himself reads and understands his world and his word. Yet that is not how most modern ears will hear what I said. A typical modern conception of what anti-Christ must mean (even if you spell it like that, instead of Antichrist), is personalized and bound up with an arbitrary and fantastical eschatology; while the term spirit has undergone a similar transformation — making it very difficult to read the phrase properly, or interpret what is being said with it.

Unfortunately, a lot of the modern re-enchantment “space” has been consumed by various anti-Christ spirits, seeing re-enchantment in terms of reasserting a particular worldview for the sake of our passions, rather than learning to integrate all things into Christ for the sake of our own souls. This is the difference between being ruled by our affections, and being ruled by love — something Josh and I warned about back in 2023:

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An open manifesto for Christian paranormalish ministry

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As I said back then:

We want to normalize the desire to know the world as God made it, both physically and spiritually—so that we may better serve him through it. We do not want to normalize a desire for the world to be weird and wild merely to serve our own amusement.

The degeneration of much of the re-enchantment “space” into engagement farms, enslaved to whatever notion du jour the masses are currently consuming, is as sad as it was predictable given their lack of interest in understanding re-enchantment as a hermeneutical project: as a willingness to study meaning-making, rather than an eagerness to hear and tell strange stories. The trajectory of, ahem, certain ministries into all manner of unseemly tribalisms was a natural and predictable consequence of this deficiency.

I don’t mention this as a way to say I told you so, but rather to again illustrate how centrally important hermeneutics — meaning-making — is: not just for getting our “worldview” right, but also for not getting it wrong. Re-enchantment, properly understood, is an all-encompassing project because it is the work of integrating all things under Christ, who is an all-encompassing savior. You might look at an issue like Christian Nationalism — and all the fringe blood-and-soil worldviews feeding on it — and think it was quite unrelated to re-enchantment.

But it is not unrelated.

Re-enchantment is the lens through which we should be able to say what blood and soil mean.

Re-enchantment is the work that should allow us to integrate blood and soil into the arche of Christ:

Rightly ordered affections: natural vs covenantal identity

The paranormal is merely one slice of the world that re-enchantment informs: a particularly juicy, interesting slice to many, and one in dire need of reform — hence it attracted much attention and became (for a while) almost synonymous with the project of re-enchantment itself. In a way, the paranormal highlighted the power and potential of re-enchantment, because here was an area of ministry with real-life significance to many who had previously been foundering in the ditch of the Enlightenment. Re-enchantment was their way out.

But it is also the way out of every other error.

There are many other slices of the world (and the word) that are equally important — and become even more important, as they cycle into the focus of those in the Church and thus require integration into Christ.

One especially significant slice is language.

If re-enchantment is really just learning and applying biblical hermeneutics to everything, then our words are obviously central to this project. To return to where I began this essay, re-enchantment is a liturgical project — and so our language of liturgy must be of chief importance. Words are what convey meaning, so they are of the utmost consequence when meaning-making is at stake.

Josh understands this well. He is right to say that liturgy — how we speak in the Lord’s Service — deserves, warrants, indeed requires elevated language. I called King’s English “highbrow” before, and now I call it elevated — these are not coincidental terms, but natural symbolic ones, intuitively locating this manner of speech closer to God, the head of all things, in whom they all hold together. It is a natural induction from the character of God’s own words in scripture — which, contrary to some, is not written in the colloquial language of the common people of its day, but in an elevated style befitting its elevated content. Michael Marlowe’s Was the Bible Written in ‘Street Language’? for instance, compiles a fine summary of some of the key arguments — though it is hard to read on a wide screen.

We ought to be cultivating a reverence for God’s word, and learning to imitate it when we speak to him in return, by cultivating an appropriate linguistic aesthetic. We do not go to church wearing beach clothes — and we should not speak at church using beach words.

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[S1E6] How should we dress for church?

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Complaints about “thees” and “thous” being archaic and unfamiliar and discomfiting to the modern church-goer thus miss the point as much as similar complaints about suits. I do not mean that we must immediately rewrite our liturgies to use only early modern English — but we should have aspirations, and be moving in that direction. Even the most uneducated savage of a zoomer probably knows the Lord’s Prayer as, “Our Father who art in heaven” — and intuitively grasps that this language is more fitting than whatever modern abomination one might copy and paste out of the ESV. The language itself is forming them — it is shaping them to be better meaning-makers; to grasp more intuitively the distinction between God’s words and ours, and our liturgical words and our regular ones.

(On this point, one excellent little resource that I highly recommend for learning to pray in liturgical English is The Valley of Vision: A Collection of Puritan Prayers and Devotions.)

Obviously, everything I have said has significant implications for our doctrine of translation — and especially for what I have already tipped my hand by calling modern abominations. How we actually convey God’s original words in our own language is a question at the heart of the re-enchantment project — and in my view a locus of the most urgent need for reform.

But that is a topic for another time.