A confession: I generally do more wandering than wondering.

What I mean by that is that it’s very easy to walk through the world going about my daily business without fully appreciating what else is going on around me that I can’t see. Out of sight, out of mind. Rod Dreher, in his new book, “Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age” (Zondervan, 2024), wants to bring to our minds that which is typically out of sight.

In his previous book “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents,” Dreher tackled how Christians can keep the faith in an age where totalitarianism is set against them. “Living in Wonder” is different, but it’s not so far removed from the theme — it only approaches the lies of the age from a different front. Covering everything from UFOs and the paranormal, miracles, demon possession, angels to prayer, signs, and nearly all things otherworldly, such a book almost seems fanciful and anachronistic in our day and age.

After all, the Enlightenment and scientific revolution have opened our eyes to wonders of mankind — why would we need to seek archaic ways of describing the unknown? Even Christians — who all profess to believe that an unseen creator God came to earth incarnate, died for our sins, and was raised from the dead — tend to lean toward the camp of the skeptics when it comes to things like little green men.

But as our modernistic world has played out in recent years (think COVID pandemic), even evangelicals like me have taken stock of just how much our conception of the world has been shaped by rational modernity, and just how different that concept of the world is than the world Scripture describes. Thus, the only explanation for UFOs becomes flights of imagination (if not visitors from another planet), neglecting even the possibility that some instances might be something from a spiritual realm. Mental illness becomes merely a chemical imbalance, and the notion that the demonic might be at play is discarded.

But we modern evangelicals have become far too infected with modernity. In a recent sermon I heard about the angels who attended the shepherds at the nativity in Luke 2:8-14, Pastor David Schrock observed:

“For instance, when I took systematic theology in seminary, we didn’t have time to talk about angels. So my professor said, ‘Here’s a handout. Go read it, and we’re not going to talk about it in class.’ Likewise, most systematic theologies seem to just gloss over the subject. And in church history, there have been wild speculations about angels in the past, so that modern Christians seem to ignore or reject any type of angelic hierarchy that is in the universe. And further, with the Copernican revolution, which put the sun in the center of the universe, there came a scientific explanation for everything. Angels and spirits and other invisible agents that the Bible talks about are no longer part of a Christian worldview or a Christian view of the cosmos. Instead, we think in terms of scientific formulas, natural cause and effect. End of story."

Such thinking leaves us to set aside any idea of what Dreher describes as enchantment. During eras (and in places) more enchanted than our own, Dreher says, there was no distinction between the natural and supernatural — it was all part of a unified whole. But the world into which we have been born is now de facto disenchanted.

This lack of enchantment, Dreher argues, can often lead to a yearning for the wrong kind of enchantment, and it may account for a resurgent interest among many young people in the occult. Talking about the book on The Washington Stand’s “Outstanding” podcast, Dreher said:

“In fact, I was in Rome interviewing an exorcist in the Vatican. And we were talking about young people who are drawn to the occult. And he said, ‘The thing about it is, whenever you call on the devil, he will come without fail, and he will promise you anything you want. Of course, he’s lying, and he will steal your soul. You can’t command God that way.’ God is sovereign. God will always hear his prayers. He will answer them sometimes. Sometimes he will answer them in dramatic ways, other times not. But he does hear our prayers. But you can’t treat him like a butler. You can’t treat him them like a vending machine.”

Himself an Orthodox Christian, many of Dreher’s examples and prescriptions will sound odd to the ears of evangelicals. As a convictional Baptist, I certainly have theological differences with Dreher, and I get especially nervous around talk of mysticism. And when he opens a chapter about mysticism with a quote from Karl Rahner, I really get worried. He quotes Rahner saying:

“The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experienced 'something,' or he will cease to be anything at all.”

Rahner’s most famous theological idea was the “anonymous Christian,” a person who would be saved by simply acting spiritually as a Christian having never claimed the name of Christ — an idea heterodox to most of historical Christianity. That particular view of Rahner may or may not relate to the above quote, but mysticism itself can be quite perilous if it isn’t grounded in and tethered to Scripture.

Thankfully, I don’t think an untethered mystical approach is what Dreher is advocating. As he says in the book:

“Why should anyone want to sail into the mystic?

“First, because it’s real and true. The received narrative of the modern world — that mind and body are separated, that the spirit has nothing to do with materiality, and that there is no intrinsic meaning to matter — is a lie. That is not how the world works. We live not in an impersonal universe but in a divinely ordered cosmos permeated by Logos. Christians know from Scripture that this Logos is not merely a rational organizing principle, it is Jesus Christ, the second person of the Trinity.

“Far too many Christians have forgotten this truth and absorbed instead one of the defining ideas of modernity — a lie that has made us rich and strong but also unhappy and alienated from the world around us, even our own flesh. The lie is this: There is no connection between spirit and matter. Matter has no intrinsic meaning.

“It has turned us from a flock of pilgrims on a journey of ultimate meaning into lonely tourists flitting around from place to place, madly trying to stay one step ahead of boredom. We were not made to live in such a world but if we accept the philosophical and metaphysical principles of modernity, it is hard to do otherwise. The bottom line: if we want to live, we have to turn our lives around and walk away from the false parts of the Enlightenment and toward the true Light.”

Dreher is spot on here. After all, Paul urged the Galatian church to “walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.” Walking by the Spirit is ultimately the only thing that will break the bonds of modernity for Christians and allow us to truly see the reality of God and his world.

Again, evangelicals won’t agree with everything in Dreher’s book, but I do think it contains many helpful correctives for believers who have unwittingly been shaped more by modernity than the world of the Bible. For those of us who find ourselves wandering more than we are wondering, “Living in Wonder” may open the door for us to step back in the right direction.