Orthodoxy remained. Enchantment died.
This is the tragedy of the Western church. We kept the truth of the faith, but somehow lost the world that made that truth electric. We preserved our creeds but let go of the awe that once made them tremble with life. We defended the doctrines but abandoned the imagination that once knew how to kneel before mystery.
We defend what we believe with admirable resolve. Yet the rooms we gather in often feel thin, as if something essential slipped out the side door while we were busy guarding the front.
Christians today live in a church that is theologically sound yet spiritually hollow. The faith we inherited still stands tall, but the world around us has gone flat. Many of us feel the dissonance deep in our bones.
Charles Taylor gave us the word in A Secular Age.
Disenchantment.
And he was right.
The World Used To Be Alive
For most of Christian history, believers assumed the world was alive with God. Creation was a saturated place, humming with divine presence. Early Christians did not hear the Psalms describing rivers clapping or mountains singing and think it was poetic exaggeration. They believed creation participated in praise.
Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane, describes this older imagination as a world structured by the sacred. People did not divide reality into spiritual versus natural. Everything was drenched in meaning.
Consider Augustine in Confessions, seeing God in every breath and heartbeat.
Think of Hildegard of Bingen in Scivias, watching creation erupt with the green fire of the Spirit.
Think of the Desert Fathers whose fragments in the Apophthegmata Patrum speak of a God found in silence, hunger, wind and sand.
Even Calvin, in the Institutes, called creation “the theatre of God’s glory.”
Somewhere along the way, we forgot this.
We did not lose God.
We lost the sense that God saturates reality.
The Age of the Flat World
Max Weber, in his lecture “Science as a Vocation,” spoke of the modern world as “disenchanted.” Everything became explainable. Predictable. Manageable. We stopped expecting the sacred to break in sideways.
Taylor expanded this diagnosis in A Secular Age, arguing that we now live inside an “immanent frame,” a mental world that assumes transcendence is distant. Even believers feel this pressure.
The Western church absorbed this frame quietly.
We still recite the creed on Sundays.
But we live Monday to Saturday as if God only operates inside our private prayer lives or church programs.
Orthodoxy remained.
But the enchanted world those doctrines were meant to inhabit collapsed into two dimensions.
The Loss of Awe
Evelyn Underhill saw the storm coming in Worship and later in Mysticism. She warned that the church was becoming “efficient but not deep,” organised but not alive, polished but not prayerful.
Look around. She was right.
We know how to run services. We know how to build teams. We know how to create streamlined worship. But awe – that tremble of spirit before the holy – has become rare.
Awe is not emotional excess.
Awe is what happens when a finite soul meets infinite presence.
When awe disappears, something essential dies.
The Concrete Consequence: A Hollow Faith
James K A Smith reminds us in Desiring the Kingdom and You Are What You Love that humans are shaped more by imagination and desire than by information. When the church becomes a place for ideas instead of encounters, we shrink souls without noticing.
David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite argues that Christians have become “tourists in a world that used to belong to them.” He meant that our faith still stands, but our world feels colourless.
Many Christians believe the right things yet feel strangely untouched by them. They trust the doctrine but feel little life.
This is not scepticism.
This is dis enchantment.
How We Lost the World
There was no single disaster. Just a slow erosion.
Rationalism – Descartes and his heirs made ideas the centre of the Christian life.
Fear of superstition – Protestants and Catholics both cleaned their spiritual houses a bit too vigorously.
Technique – Eugene Peterson warned about this in The Contemplative Pastor. We replaced mystery with methods.
Professionalisation – Ministry became a career rather than a calling.
Systems over stories – We read Scripture like a manual instead of the world of God.
Imagination’s collapse – We forgot that truth is often seen before it is understood.
Hans Boersma in Heavenly Participation describes the pre modern world as a sacramental tapestry in which every created thing pointed beyond itself. Modern Christianity tore that tapestry apart and kept only doctrinal threads.
An Examined Faith That Forgot To Look Up
Taylor says modern people live with “cross pressure.” We feel the pull of transcendence while living inside a worldview that keeps the sacred at arm’s length.
Many Christians carry this inner ache. Their minds know God exists. But their world no longer feels alive with God.
Faith becomes technically correct yet practically thin.
Orthodoxy remains intact.
Enchantment fades.
The Tragedy Beneath the Surface
The early church did not survive by orthodoxy alone. It survived because people encountered God. They saw visions. They experienced miracles. They felt the Spirit as rushing wind. They took bread expecting Christ to be present. Acts was not ancient folklore. It was the shape of reality.
We inherited their creed but not their world.
Hart says in The Experience of God that modern Christians have reduced the infinite mystery of God to something manageable. Something tame.
The tragedy is not that God stopped speaking.
The tragedy is that we lost the capacity to hear.
A Crisis of Perception, Not Theology
This is not a doctrinal crisis.
This is a perceptual crisis.
We have the truth.
We have forgotten how to see the truth.
Boersma insists that Christians need a return to “sacramental ontology,” a way of perceiving the world that reveals God in the ordinary. In other words, reality must become transparent to grace again.
Our imaginations must be baptised.
The Ache That Remains
Yet the story does not end in the ruins. Beneath the thinness of Western faith there is still an ache. A longing. A stubborn rumour of transcendence.
Taylor calls it “the nova effect” – the sense that more is possible.
Lewis called it “joy” in Surprised by Joy.
Tolkien spoke of “the far off gleam” in his essay On Fairy Stories.
Underhill simply said it is “life.”
People are not leaving the church because they want less mystery.
They are leaving because they want more.
More presence.
More beauty.
More depth.
More world.
More God.
Disenchantment may describe our condition, but it is not our destiny. Something deep in us remembers the fire. Something in us knows the sacred can return.
And that is where the next blog will take us.
Scribbling Theology 