Recapturing the Wonder

I'm currently partway through a book loaned to me by a friend (Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World by Mike Cosper). Although I can't speak for the chapters I haven't yet read (i.e. I can't give anyone a hearty book recommendation...) I've found some life-giving paragraphs scattered throughout what I have read. These excerpts hit me viscerally because of the very specific set of circumstances that are informing my thinking, feeling, and living right now; if you'd given me the same book three or four years ago, I doubt these are the words that would have struck me. They're words that likely are not relevant to many of you simply because the paths you're walking look different than mine right now. I share them here on the off-chance that any of my Christian readers find themselves in a place where they, too, need the affirmation they hold.

(And, hey--having them written here makes them a whole lot easier to find again.)

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"The Bible is treated like any other object in a disenchanted world. Our common approach is to study it, and by study we mean something akin to the study of science or the study of language. The Bible is anatomized, broken into its component parts. [...] The text has no life of its own. It isn't a living whole--a breathing, fiery creature full of mystery, something to be approached with care and humility; it's a subject to be mastered, a corpse to be dissected. [...] It is split into its component parts, footnoted for historicity, and commented on from every angle. In effect, it becomes hedged behind high walls of specialized knowledge, and most Christians--unless they've spent many hours in classes or in inductive Bible studies--are as frightened to talk about what a text might mean as they are to answer a question in a math or science class. [...] If by chance they have applied themselves to many hours of study, they [...] have a frightening certainty. The text has been mastered, the questions all answered. Their Bible has no mysteries; it is all knowable now."

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"We need to know we can trust the Bible, and we need to feel confident that we believe the right things about it. But in many ways, I fear that many Christians are stuck there and that the Bible is never more than an object for analysis for them, as opposed to it being the voice of the Beloved. We can master it like the periodic table of elements or the statistics of the New York Yankees while keeping it divorced from real life.

If the Bible is the voice of the Beloved, then there must be a way of reading it that connects with us as whole people, just as knowing and being known in a relationship is a whole-person enterprise. There must be ways of reading and engaging Scripture that strike us at the level of our emotions, our imaginations, our bodies."

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"How often have you encountered someone whose knowledge of the Bible is encyclopedic but whose presence is harsh, dark, or miserable? [...] The unchanged lives of Christians who have tremendous knowledge of the Bible highlight two of the great consequences of our disenchantment. We think knowledge of the Bible is all that matters, so we fail to attend to our character, our soul, and our relationships. Our way of living the Christian life leaves all of these things unchanged.

We need a way of thinking about the Scriptures that allows us to come to it as whole persons--who think, feel, and imagine--and find nourishment on all levels."

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"In our age, we need to know whether there's someone on the other end of the line when we pray. We need to know whether that person is a superfluous, disinterested deity or a loving Father whose eye is on the sparrow, who is acquainted with suffering and grief, who rejoices over us with singing. And while not all Christians have lived with our particularly modern doubts, many of them are as old as humanity. What kind of God is this? How can I know him? Can he answer the questions about life and meaning that simmer just under the surface of my thoughts?"