Popular podcaster, author, and Gospel Coalition speaker Mike Cosper presents an enigmatic reflection in Recapturing the Wonder that ultimately distills into a technique-oriented approach to recapturing “the magic” of disenchanted evangelicalism.
Earnestly lamenting that his “ordinary life felt strangely irreligious” (4), Cosper says that by reading authors such as Charles Taylor, Hannah Arendt, and mystics such as Thomas Merton, he awoke to the fact that there should be more to the Christian experience of divine transcendence and presence than the “biblical deism” that contemporary evangelicalism offers. The “practical magic” of sensing and encountering the divine, as Cosper describes it, isn’t to be found in the spectacularly miraculous, but in “the more quiet and invisible magic of how anxious souls find wholeness and how broken people find healing” (4–5).
Such a thesis would seem to resonate strongly with Martin Luther’s pursuit of divine grace, and might therefore have driven the author’s discussion of the presence of a transcendent and holy God to the immanent voice of Christ in the gospel and within the sacraments. However, instead of finding the real voice and real presence of God in Christ within the “pure preaching of the gospel and the sacraments administered according to the gospel” (Augsburg Confession VII.2), Cosper steers his readers to the religious practices he elsewhere upbraids as “the business of appeasing gods” (35) in his recommendations for recapturing the wonder.
Cosper begins by acknowledging that he once harbored skepticism about the spiritual realm and divine transcendence. The evangelical world he inhabited was disenchanted—devoid of “supernatural presences, of spirits and God and transcendence” (10). He traces today’s evangelical conformity to “the discipline of disenchantment” back to Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who confirmed Copernicus’s heliocentricity and paved the way for Isaac Newton’s mechanistic universe in which God was banished to the outer limits of the cosmos, negating divine immanence and providential care. According to the author, evangelicals still long for a heavenly transcendence to permeate spatiotemporality, along with God’s enriching immanence, but have adopted worldviews and religious practices antithetical to these ends. This book intends to lift the lid and draw back the curtain for evangelicals. The challenge for Cosper is doing so within the commitments of what Luther might have called evangelical “sacramentarianism,” in which the transcendent One’s presence is not objectified by way of real presence and real voice in spatiotemporality, but rather subjectively experienced through, in this case, “ancient paths” of spiritual disciplines adjudicated by Cosper himself.
Thus a host of “pathway” chapters are proffered to stimulate for the evangelical a sense of the wonder of God, ranging from “Re-enchanting Our World” to “Breath Prayers” and “Practicing Abundance.” A pathway demarcated “Marking Time” is typical. Cosper suggests acquainting oneself with the liturgical calendar and, cafeteria style, selecting days to observe in order to re-sacralize time: “Whatever your church tradition is, there’s value in marking out these days as sacred (or if you don’t like that term, then call them ‘unique’)” (29). But isn’t this precisely the problem with disenchanted evangelicalism: Leaving the subject as the arbiter of both what may be denominated sacred time and whether to even use the nomenclature of the enchanted ecclesial world?
In the same section, Cosper encourages weekly observance of sacred/unique time at church where “the signs of the kingdom are present in bread and wine and in the waters of baptism” (29). Signs, however, point away from themselves to something not immediately present. The lid therefore remains secure, and the curtain drawn closed; only the signs are truly present; not the immanent God, not the embodied Christ, not the manifest kingdom—just signs with an ill-determined terminal point. Stated differently, the reader must import meaning rather than conform to an objectified meaning within an intentional context. So, while it may be commendable to introduce the church calendar and liturgical elements to evangelicals, they lose their intentional content and context when placed adrift alongside “breath prayers” and “lighting candles” or, put differently, alongside a more ephemeral religion based on volition and personal taste.
In sections leading to “Pathway Seven: The Rule of Life,” Cosper describes traditional “religion,” which he says “was birthed as a substitute for that life [of longing for God], an independent pathway to transcendence,” which he juxtaposes with his own set of (supposedly) nonreligious pathways (44). To be quite critical, Cosper’s own pathways seem to be a lot like traditional religion itself without commitments to any particular religious tradition, such as Lutheranism or Anglicanism.
This otherwise noble proposal begins and ends with a resigned appeal to discipline, duty, and techniques, and thereby comes off as an evangelical version of The Benedict Option. But there is an alternative narrative to Cosper’s for readers to consider namely, the possibility that the desacralization of Christianity (as well as the disenchantment of the world) began not with Galileo but with the sacramentarianism of the Radical Reformation and the subsequent triumph of Pelagianism within Arminian evangelicalism. Descartes merely added his piece to render it thoroughly modern.
Recapturing the Wonder is an effort by a sincere evangelical to recapture the ever-abiding “magic” found within the sacramentalism of the first traditions of the Reformation for his own sacramentarian tradition. But there’s a sense in which the title of the book does in fact describe the outcome—namely, a self-chosen faith of reconfigured monastic habits. In the end, God remains objectively distant, so all that’s left for those desirous of greater intimacy with the Creator is a cornucopia of subjective spiritual disciplines. At best, Recapturing the Wonder may engender a short-lived sympathetic following (like the Emergent Church fad); at worst, it may frustrate to the point of leading some to abandon the Christian faith altogether if the techniques don’t “bring the practical magic.” In sum, Cosper asks of evangelicalism what its sacramentarianism cannot give: a God of divine miracle and presence in sacraments.
Confessional clerics would do well to read this book in part to become better informed about what many disenchanted evangelicals long for and attempt to self-fulfill through ad hoc religion. A disposition of mercy and a willingness to invest in conversations with such evangelicals may yield the joy of seeing thoughtful Christians like Cosper step more deeply into an evangelical-catholic faith and so experience the grace and presence of God afresh, abidingly, even religiously.
John J. Bombaro is senior pastor at Grace Lutheran Church, San Diego, and is coeditor with Adam Francisco of The Resurrection Fact: Responding to Modern Critics (New Reformation Publications, 2016).
