We should be equipping people to discern God’s still, small voice encountered through the Scriptures or the Body, not teaching them to ask God to say it again, this time to them personally and audibly if possible. The truth is, our “frame” may be immanent, but reality itself inherently participates in the transcendent. If it is enchantment that we seek, it is not hard to find.

Since Charles Taylor published his monumental work A Secular Age (seriously, try picking up a copy, it’s huge) in 2007, Christian thinkers of a certain cast have been talking about “disenchantment.” This discourse persists through the present day, when, just as one example, O. Alan Noble has engaged with books on the subject of enchantment from David Bentley Hart and Rod Dreher.

The basic story, as I understand it, is that the advent of modernity has, through a complex series of developments that you can read all about in Taylor’s book if you have a spare couple of months, resulted in a general experience of reality in which the “heavens are closed.” Where people once experienced the world as filled with spiritual encounters, we now experience the world as fundamentally mechanical, dead, and indifferent. Whereas, in the past, humanity was at least as likely to explain a given phenomenon by referencing spiritual forces and powers, not least God himself, in the present we normally reference natural forces and laws of nature and causality. We live within an “immanent frame,” according to Taylor, each of us a “buffered self,” trapped within our own minds and subjectivity, cutoff from the people and world around us, and trapped within a “natural” world system, cutoff from anything divine or transcendent that may or may not exist “beyond” the natural.¹

To bring this back out of the lofty heights of academic philosophy, people live not really expecting to encounter anything we might call “supernatural” in their day-to-day life. You might think these things exist (God, devils, spirits, ghosts, the demiurge, whatever), but most of us do not expect to run into the transcendent at work or on our daily walk. Some of us think that it is essentially impossible for this to happen; if we were to run into something that felt spiritual and miraculous, we would explain it away and give ourselves a good talking to for letting our imagination run wild.²

The problem, though, is that we long for transcendence. We long for an encounter with something beyond us, to know that our lives have meaning beyond what we ourselves assign, to be assured that something or someone out there sees us and is watching over us.

More practically, I’ve lost track of the number of students I’ve had who have expressed something similar. They want to believe in God, they really do. If only He could reach out, just once, and make himself obvious.

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