We must resist the disenchantment of the modern world, and instead maintain our grasp on the reality that we are deeply vulnerable – to the devil’s schemes, to the powers of this dark world and the spiritual forces of evil. And as we open our eyes to recognize this ‘classic’ vulnerability we will find that such an honest appraisal of our circumstances brings great blessings. 

“Vulnerability was the most basic reality – reinforced by every aspect of human experience and never forgotten in the sweat and labour it took to maintain a flourishing life in its face.”

Joseph Minich, Bulwarks of Unbelief

What Max Weber described as the ‘iron cage’ of modernity distorts Christian life and community in countless ways. But perhaps one of the most pertinent is when it comes to the idea of vulnerability.

‘Classic’ Vulnerability

As the quote above suggests, premodern existence was profoundly colored by a pervasive sense of vulnerability – that life was lived at the mercy of external agencies and powers to an almost unfathomable extent. This was an existence in a world that was beyond our comprehension and control – what I will call a world of ‘classic’ vulnerability. A world in which the edges of maps were marked ‘here be dragons’ – territories and geographies beyond the bounds of our knowledge, beset with unknown dangers.

Closer to home, as the father of three young children, I can hardly (bear to) imagine what it was like to inhabit a world where infant mortality was not a theoretical possibility but a lived reality. Where which of the children I loved survived to adulthood seemed to be determined either by brute chance, or the inscrutable providence of God. Where Job’s cry that ‘The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away’ (1:21) was woven into the fabric of existence.

In this world, the basic reality of vulnerability provided a natural motivation for the building and maintaining of human communities and companionship, of structures of order and authority – namely to hold the forces of chaos and destruction at bay to whatever extent possible, and to provide networks of care and support when disaster did (inevitably) strike. And for most of its life the church has been more than, but not less than, such a human community. ‘Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress’ (James 1:27).

Post-Vulnerability

Many of us no longer live in a world where vulnerability accosts us as a basic reality of our existence. Indeed, the central thrust of the industrial project of science and technology is to extend human power into the world around us in such a way as to push back the forces of chaos around us, and create an ever increasing space of perceived invulnerability. As products of modernity our precognitive “take” on the world around us is that it is something that is, in all meaningful respects, within the scope of human comprehension and control. It is something that can be understood, managed and used for our ends.., This is what Weber meant by his much employed concept of ‘disenchantment’.

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