Christian Research Journal Reads Episode 143: In Search Of The Sacred: Evangelicals on a Quest and Why it Matters

This is Episode 143 of Christian Research Journal Reads. This is an audio version of the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL article, “In Search Of The Sacred: Evangelicals on a Quest and Why it Matters” by Arthur W. Hunt III. This article first appeared in the Christian Research Journal, volume 40, number 03 (2017). https://www.equip.org/articles/in-search-of-the-sacred-evangelicals-on-a-quest-and-why-it-matters/

 It was accompanied by Postmodern Realities podcast Episode 046: In Search of the Sacred: Evangelicals on a Quest and Why It Matters.

This podcast presents audio versions of Christian Research Journal articles. As the flagship publication of the Christian Research Institute, the Journal seeks to equip followers of Christ to think and to live Christianly—to exercise truth and experience life. Truth, especially essential Christian doctrine, forms the basis for how we live our lives in Christ. As the apostle Paul instructed Timothy in 1 Tim. 4:16, “Watch your life and doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers.”The Christian Research Journal enjoyed a print incarnation of almost 45 years. Now exclusively an online publication, the Journal consists of thousands of free articles. We hope that through these audio articles you are not only equipped to proclaim and defend your faith but that as a disciple you also draw closer to Christ in your walk with Him.  You can find the written version of each article that is an episode of Christian Research Journal Reads at the website of the Christian Research Institute, equip.org. All Christian Research Journal articles at equip.org are completely free and do not require a subscription and are not under a paywall.All episodes will be available at the following podcast platforms with more being added daily! You can help spread the word about this new podcast by giving us a rating and review from the other channels we are listed on and telling others!You can view off our Website at the at this link and off our Journal main page. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
This is episode one hundred and forty three of the
Christian Research Journal Reads podcast In Search of the Sacred
Evangelicals on a Quest and Why It Matters? By Arthur W.
Hunt the Third. This article first appeared in the print
edition of the Christian Research Journal, Volume forty, number three

(00:27):
and twenty seventeen. To read the full text of this article,
as well as its documentation, please go to equip dot org.
That's e qu ip dot org.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
In search of the Sacred Evangelicals on a Quest and
Why It Matters. This article is by Arthur W. Hunt
the third and is read by an automated voice. Conservative
commentator Ann Coulter once said, God gave us the earth.
We have dominion over the plants and animals, trees. God said,
Earth is yours. Take it, rape it. It's yours in

(01:03):
all fairness to miss culture. She said this sixteen years ago,
and she may no longer believe it, that is the
part about raping the planet. Or she may have only
meant to high perbolize, as she is accustomed to doing.
Whether she meant it or not, there are Christians of
plenty who would not object to her notion that the
dominion mandate grants human's utilitarian permission to violate the creation.

(01:25):
Industrialism would not have possessed its ferocity, and Charles Dickens
would have less to write about were it not for Protestants,
who somehow thought they were doing God a favor by
creating the factory system. As Max Weber has pointed out,
statements such as culters and what they imply have led
some Protestants to jump ship and swim over the Catholic Church,

(01:45):
where man's relationship with the world often is viewed in
more sacramental terms. Communication theorist Marshall mccluan was one such jumper.
Influenced by G. K. Chesterton, he confessed that his journey
to Rome was due in part to Protestantism's tendency to
embrace all things new in the name of progress. As
a frustrated young man, mccluan wrote to his mother that

(02:08):
everything that was especially hateful and devilish and inhuman about
the conditions and strains of modern industrial society is not
only Protestant in origin, but their boast to have originated it.
While there was a rash of Catholic conversions by English
speaking intellectuals from the mid nineteenth century to the mid
twentieth century Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Dade, Alan Tate,

(02:32):
Thomas Merton, Marshall mcluan. Such conversions by English language writers
before this period were rare. However, as we move deeper
into the twentieth first century, there is evidence that young
evangelicals are now going over to Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and
Lutheran traditions in growing numbers. While some are leaving the
church altogether in repudiation of their evangelical upringing, others are

(02:56):
finding new meaning in high church liturgy or by following
the Christian calend For reasons that can be described only
as a sacramental hunger, These millennials craved the weekly uterist
over high octane praise bands. They would rather observe lent
than attend a seeker friendly service. Disenchantment of the world.
Young Christians hanker for mystery and meaning in a world

(03:18):
that has become progressively disenchanted over the past five hundred years.
Philosopher Charles Taylor begins his much discussed tom asecular Age
by asking this question, why was it virtually impossible not
to believe in God? In say, fifteen hundred in our
Western society, while in two thousand many of us find
this not only easy but even inescapable. Pro Modern Christians

(03:41):
lived in a world of spirits, demons, and moral forces.
Because the liberal democratic project has reduced belief in God
to a personal matter, no longer allowing the Creator to
play a role in public policy, the official stance on
the divine being is now identical to that of John
Lennon's atheism. Imagine there's no heaven, no humpolous above us,

(04:01):
only sky. If the cultural and political environments in which
we swim shape us to any extent than we are
for practical purposes all devoted materialists. Taylor says a chief
characteristic of modernity is that meaning no longer resigns in things,
but rather in minds. The so called Cartesian mind split,

(04:21):
wrote poet Allentate, is a stunted condition of being able
to perceive only a half horce version of reality. In contrast,
the medieval Church saw the world in terms of a
whole horse. Tate's metaphor is poignant because it maintains moderns
prefer the utilitarian value of thing its infallible workability. Tate says,

(04:42):
the Reformation's drive toward individual spiritual autonomy only served to
complement the Enlightenment straw towards secular self determination. As a consequence,
Protestants over time easily evolved into progressives, what Tate referred
to as half force religionists. Tate observed that half force
religionists tended to believe in horsepower rather than in horses,

(05:05):
and so they gave us lots of assembly lines and smokestacks.
They took a progressive view of things, where B is
always an improvement over a that came before it. Today's
half force religionists prefer efficiency to beauty, what is new
to what is old, big to what is small, global
to what is local, and the abstract to what is particular.

(05:25):
Both Tailor and Tate warned of the dangers of placing
meaning in the mind. Abstractionism can lead to a take
called a controlling materialism. In similar fashion, Taylor says that
once we locate needing in the mind, we become susceptible
of those who would manipulate our brains for selfish ends. C. S.
Lewis also warn of this danger when he said in

(05:46):
nineteen forty seven that we were on the cusp of
something ever practiced before in the history of our existence,
the transforming of the species altogether. Lewis feared the new conditioners,
who would seek to control the masses for their own
good place. The man molders of the new age will
be armed the powers of an omni coompetent state and
an irresistible scientific technique, says Lewis, we shall get at

(06:09):
last a race of conditioners who really cut out all
posterity in what shape they please. The irony of this
kind of controlling materialism is that the conditioners cannot act
upon their victims without acting on themselves. Man's conquest of
nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to
be Nature's conquest of man. As sacramental outlook, Things treated

(06:31):
merely as things in themselves destroy themselves, because only in
God have they any life, writes Orthodox theologian Alexander Schumann.
The belief that physical matter is not merely matter, but
is connected to something greater than itself is not only
a Biblical idea, but also is found in the teachings
of early Christian theologians. The apostle Paul wrote to Christians

(06:53):
at colosse concerning ki r Weiss, that all things were
created through him and for him, that He is before
all things, and in him all things hold together. Because
Paul sought Kawiast is not only the creator of the Cosmus,
but also its caretaker, he was able to speak boldly
to the Pagans in Athens that in God we move

(07:14):
and have our being. Since the beginning of Christianity and
for more than a thousand years, there is a common
belief in all matter, all nature is mysteriously and metaphysically
anchored in God. Hans Borsma, who holds the J. I.
Packard Chair in Theology at Regent College, says in Heavenly
Participation that the Patristic and medieval mind readily recognized that

(07:36):
the heavenly reality of the Word of God constituted an
eternal mystery. The observable appearances of creation pointed to and
participated in this mystery. Of course, any theist position assumes
a relationship between God and this world, says Borsma, But
a Sacramento ontology insists that not only does the created
world point to God as its source, but that it

(07:59):
also subsists or participates in God. Our connection with God
is participatory or real connection, not just an external or
nominal connection. A sacramental outlook permeated a number of prominent
Christian writers of the twentieth century each believe its recovery
was an important antidote to controlling materialism. J. R. R.

(08:21):
Tolkien was not merely describing Mortar as a vast wasteland
when he wrote The Lord of the Rings. He was
providing a critique of modernity. Here nothing lived, not even
the liprius groats that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools
were choked with ash and crawling MUDs, sickly white and gray,
as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their
entrails upon the lands. About the values Tolkien highlights in

(08:44):
his trilogy concerned the proper relationships people should have of
each other, with nature and with God. From the onset
of Tolkien's tale, we find the world under severe threat
from those who worship pure power and are as slaves
the technological and instrumental power embodied in soon after whom
the book itself is named after all, and the epitom

(09:05):
of modernism gone mad. The Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor was
able to bold stroke her characters into fiction because she
believed the Holy lurks in creation. The Catholic imagination tends
to emphasize the metaphorical nature of creation, or its analogical essence,
a perception that objects, events, and persons of ordinary existence

(09:26):
hint at the nature of God and indeed make God
in some fashion present to us. Like Tolkien, O'Connor was
greatly aware of the sacramental power of language. She argued
that fiction should be made according to nature, and when
this occurs, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural
by grounding it in concrete, observable reality. If the writer

(09:47):
uses his eyes in the real security of his faith,
he will be obliged to use them honestly, and his
sense of mystery and acceptance of it will be increased.
Give me that old time religion. Late Robert Webber predicted
that a post Enlightenment strain of Protestantism which deemphasize the
mysteries of God, the full bodied nature of worship, the

(10:09):
significance of the Eucharist, and other features of liturgical and
historic Christianity, which spur of angelicals to seek out churches
that joyfully view their sanctuaries as than places where cher
Weist and his redemptive work are revealed more tangible ways.
Evangelicals on a quest for meaning may have little political
motivation for joining a mystery minded church, but in doing

(10:31):
so they can have a far reaching impact on a
culture that desacralizes everything. After all, why preserve the institution
of marriage if you don't believe it has a sacramental
element behind it? Why resist the abortionist if life is
not sacred. So observers are now suggesting that the real
divide in Christianity is no longer Protestant and Catholic, but progressive,

(10:52):
in historic progressive Christians having cut themselves off from supernatural
belief commitments, and to historic Christians still embracing truths found
in the ancient Creeds. Over the past hundred years, this
progressive historic divide has certainly been evident in the Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran,
and Anglican denominations, and as Notre Dame socialist Christiansmith's research

(11:15):
is indicated what now plagues much of the evangelical church
in North America is moralistic therapeutic deism. Dwight Lonsenecker, a
Catholic priest and writer who follows these matters believes progressive
churches eventually will die out because they are essentially materialists,
with no message other than the one the culture already presumes.

(11:37):
Peter Lathart has gone as far as to suggest in
his book The End of Protestantism that the collapse of
church divisions within Protestantism is both desirable and inevitable. He
sees a future church that is reformed, liturgical, and yet
remarkably diverse. Lathart's postmillennial ecclesiology would dictate such a vision

(11:58):
as an interim stage, anticipateading a fully unified church before
ki r Weist's return, but as musings also reflect a
hard reality that walls are already being breached as Orthodox
groups cross sectarian lines to advance the work of the Kingdom.
Developments like these signal a possible realignment of the denominational planets.

(12:18):
What constellations will form the future remains to be seen. However,
one wonders if the Christianity of the twenty first century
will bear more of the marks of the ancient Patristic Church.
Would it be a positive development if Christians returned to
the trunk of the great tree before it began to
split and splinter into a thousand pieces. Since a defining
factor of that original trunk was a robust sacramental outlook,

(12:41):
such a communion would have the wherewithal to resist any
controlling materialism.

Speaker 1 (12:46):
Thank you for listening to another episode from the Christian
Research Journal Reads podcast, which provides audio articles of Christian
Research Journal articles. If you go to equipp dot org
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(13:10):
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(13:33):
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At equipp dot org, you will also find a lot
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(13:54):
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