The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms: Why Spiritualities without God Fail to Transform Us (Andrew Root) - A Review

 

THE CHURCH IN AN AGE OF SECULAR MYSTICISMS: Why Spiritualities without God Fail to Transform Us. By Andrew Root. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023. Xviii + 269 pages.  

The church exists in a secular age, or so it seems. It’s not that spirituality and religion are absent. Rather they have taken a backseat to a larger secular ethos. While religious movements and communities have attempted to adapt, they have found it difficult to keep up. Besides the authority structures of our age work against the spiritual/religious. As a result, religion is not only personal, it is private.

                The question of the church’s status within this secular age has been the focus of a series of six books written by Andrew Root. Root, who is the Carrie Olson Baalson Professor of Youth and Family Ministry at Luther Seminary, intended to write a trilogy of books, but that trilogy ended up being six books. The final book in this series focuses on, as the title suggests, the challenge posed by secular mysticisms. In other words, people still want mystical experiences, but many seek them without turning to God. This particular book under review, and I’ve reviewed most of them in the series, can be considered a companion to Root’s first book in the series, Faith Formation in a Secular Age, a book that focused on the search for youthfulness.

Earlier books have focused on ministry and congregational life, but as with the first volume, The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms looks more broadly at the nature of faith in a secular world. Being that this is the final volume in a series that has attempted to show how the secular age has impacted the church, including causing much of the decline we've experienced. In large part, this decline is due to our inability to keep up with the ever-changing nature of the secular world. In this final book, Root addresses what he sees as the emergence of spiritualities or mysticism that are secular in nature in that they seek mystical experiences without God. Now forms of Buddhism are nontheistic, but we're not talking about that kind of nontheistic spiritualities. These are spiritualities deeply rooted in the modern secular world. The problem is that these spiritualities do not transform us.

Standing at the center of this conversation is the role of the self, which has become so important in the late modern world. But as Root demonstrates in the first four chapters of the book, the self has become weighed down by guilt (something earlier generations sought to set aside). This reality has led many who experience this sense of guilt to search for secular spiritualities that can help them deal with their guilt. Along the way, we are introduced to people who express this search for mystical experiences to deal with this sense of guilt, including through the increasingly popular memoir. It is soon clear that this is not a genre that Root puts great hope in, but it is revealing.

After Root introduces us to the current problem of the self and its entanglement with guilt, which leads to a search for spiritualities without God, in chapter 5 he introduces us to a series of triangles. These triangles are centered on three dimensions of experience. First, there are those Root calls the Exclusive Humanists (E.Hums). This group of people believes that all forms of flourishing come from within humanity. There is nothing outside or beyond the human. At the far bottom corner of this triangle, we encounter those persons/groups who embrace what he calls the Counter Enlightenment. For them, the identity of the self is to be found external to the self, but as with its opposite, it does so without any reference to God. Counter Enlightenment adherents focus on the will to power (Nietzsche) and pursue the heroic. Finally, sitting at the top of the triangle are the Beyonders. Unlike the other two poles of this triangle, these folks operate from a position of submission to God. Unlike them, the E.Hums and the CEs are in agreement that there is no beyond, but they envision the path differently. Of course, few of us live on the points of the triangle but rather situate ourselves somewhere on a continuum between points of the triangle. With this in mind, Root places Mainliners on a continuum between the E.Hums and the Beyonders (mostly near the E. Hums). He places evangelicals between the CEs and the Beyonders. I found this chapter very helpful in the way Root places different people and groups on these continuums. One of the results of this effort of placing folks on these continuums is that we see how clearly that transcendence has been lost. These three points serve as forms of transcendence. This chapter does a good job of placing a variety of people and groups along the three sides. In chapter 6, Root returns to the "Mystical Memoirists," he uses several memoirists to illustrate where they fall on the three sides of the triangle. Each of these memoirs expresses aspects of the self and the ways it deals with guilt, usually without reference to God.

In the final four chapters, Root explores how the Beyonders help us experience transformation. The point he wants to make is that not all forms of mysticism are equal or transformative. In Chapter 7, Root notes that people who seek mystical experiences often want to create “a smooth, pornographic world, obsessed with action.” Here he speaks of a “late-modern neoliberal aesthetic obsession with the smooth” (p. 170). We want things to go smoothly. It is an expression of an embrace of positivity. Root uses contemporary art to embody this ethic.  It is pornographic in the sense that we seek “transparency,” lacking any hermeneutical depth or meaning. This undermines the mystical. It is obsessed with action; in that it leaves no room for contemplation. In such a culture nothing lasts. In Chapter 8, Root offers an alternative to the former, which emphasizes the passive, receptive perspective expressed by Luther and Meister Eckhart, who sought to balance the active and contemplative ways. Finally, in Chapter 9, Root introduces us to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the mysterious father of Christian mysticism who took the name of Paul's convert but seems to appear somewhere between the third and sixth centuries. His embrace of the via negativa influenced later theologians including Maximus the Confessor and others. While the contemporary seeker after mysticism focuses on the positive, Pseudo-Dionysius invites us to embrace the negative. He writes that for Denys (the French for Dionysius) “negativity is the confession that the self—which so needs encounter what is beyond and other—has no (zero) capacity from within the self to do so” (p. 233). The path here takes us radically beyond the self.

One thing to note from earlier books as well as this one, is that Root introduces us to numerous figures, many of whom are philosophers. In chapter 10, the final chapter of The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms, Root introduces us to Franz Rosenzweig, a secular Jew who pursued conversion to Christianity, having embraced what Root calls the Marcionism of 19th-century Protestantism, one that sought escape from the world. A conversation in 1913 with his cousin, who had converted, led him to reject this Marcionism and embrace the world. At the same time, Rosenzweig decided not to convert to Christianity. What Rosenzweig does is discover that to love God is to love the world. In other words, to love God is to refrain from hating the world. While Rosenzweig didn’t convert from Judaism to Christianity, he revealed something important. Both Judaism and Christianity are or should be moved by missions of redemption of the world. Thus, “It is a mission that affirms the world as the place where God ministers to the world inside I-You relationships. Mission is neither imperial (Constantinian) nor bound in market growth; it is personal, bound in relationships of persons in confession and surrender” (p. 255). What Root hopes we’ll take from this conversation is that “transformation is in the shape of the cross.” It is receptive, it is transcendent. Thus, “The mystical is in the world in the shape of Jesus Christ, who is in and for the world, calling us by name” (p. 262).

As with other books in this series, Andrew Root's The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms invites us to slow down and stop chasing the latest promise of growth. Instead, he wants those of us in the church to recognize that we can’t keep up, so instead, let’s wait on God. It’s not an easy message to embrace because we feel pressured to fix the problem. Thus, like the secular world itself, we live on the immanent frame and fail to draw on the transcendent. Throughout the book, we get a travelogue, as Root and his family travel across the globe, seeing expressions of the secular. At the same time, he recognizes that the secular is not the answer, for it lacks the power to transform. That is because it seeks to transform without reference to God. While I can’t say this was my favorite book in the series it is a fitting conclusion. Root's books tend to be dense, yet they offer valuable guidance for the church in this secular age.