The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms (Ministry in a Secular Age): Why Spiritualities without God Fail to Transform Us

By Andrew Root

Post-Christian life and society do not eliminate a desire for the transcendent; rather, they create an environment for new and divergent spiritual communities and practices to flourish. We are flooded with spiritualities that appeal to human desires for nonreligious personal transformation. But many fail to deliver because they fall into the trap of the self.

In the last book of the Ministry in a Secular Age series, leading practical theologian Andrew Root shows the differences between these spiritualities and authentic Christian transformation. He explores the dangers of following or adapting these reigning mysticisms and explains why the self has become so important yet so burdened with guilt--and how we should think about both. To help us understand our confusing cultural landscape, he maps spiritualities using twenty of the best memoirs from 2015 to 2020 in which "secular mystics" promote their mystical and transformational pathways. Root concludes with a more excellent way--even a mysticism--centered on the theology of the cross that pastors and leaders can use to form their own imaginations and practices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781493443390

Andrew Root

Andrew Root (Ph.D., Princeton Theological Seminary) is in the Baalson Olson Chair as associate professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary (St. Paul, MN). A former Young Life staffworker, he has served in churches and social service agencies as a youth outreach associate and a gang prevention counselor.

Book preview

Brilliant, genre-defying—part philosophical history, literary analysis, and a new postmodern apologetics—Root playfully illustrates how we have become trapped in the present by way of the past, and neither heroics nor introspection, nor ourselves, will save us. Instead, he posits an enticing, ancient transformation in confession and surrender to something beyond ourselves. A balm for those guilted by Instagram and self-help, Root’s book is both illuminating, intellectual history and an essential guide for spiritual leaders navigating secular mysticisms.

—Erin Raffety, Princeton University and Princeton Seminary

Andy Root has penned a theological gem. This book is a primer on spiritual theology and philosophical theology that inspires readers to recover and reconsider traditions of confession and surrender. Root balances wit and humor with intellectual depth. His theological musings not only touch the mind but set the soul on fire. This thought-provoking book is an important read that challenges mainline pastors and congregations striving for relevance in the secular age.

—Kermit Moss, Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary

Once again, Andrew Root manages to bring together lighthearted story and reflection with a remarkable mastery of philosophy, theology, literature, and art to help us make sense of how emerging generations think about God and the spiritual life. A gifted practical theologian, Root invites us to wrestle with the nature of historical and contemporary mysticism in the Western world so that we might resist a spirituality that essentially ends in the self and respond to the transformative invitation to Christ-centered relationships. Ministry leaders seeking to understand and connect with the youth and adults they serve will benefit greatly from Root’s practical wisdom that invites us to open ourselves to the God who reaches out to us and calls us into the world.

—Angela Reed, Truett Seminary, Baylor University

Root’s final book of the Ministry in a Secular Age series is like a good farewell speech: full of reflective storytelling and festive comments on the past—here in the form of memoirs. Most importantly, the book passes on a legacy: the mystery of how a theology of the cross paradoxically offers a path for transformation of the self. At the end of his secular pilgrimage, Root becomes a mystical guide, pointing passionately at how transcendence may be found in the receptive life—a life of passive surrender and confession.

—Bård Norheim, NLA University College, Norway; coauthor of The Four Speeches Every Leader Has to Know

© 2023 by Andrew Root

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

www.bakeracademic.com

Ebook edition created 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-4339-0

Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and post-consumer waste whenever possible.

To Dave Lose and Rolf Jacobson,

with gratitude for two decades of friendship and conversation. And hopefully several decades more if we stop eating Idaho Nachos.

Contents

Cover

Endorsements

Half Title Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

Read before Using (Don’t Skip)

1. New Mystics without God: Closed World Structures and Memoirists

2. When Dogs Bark during Paris Lockdown: Meet the Magnificent Jean-Jacques

3. Performing Selves Are So Guilty: Why Mysticism and Guilt Are Back

4. When the Everyday Houses a Mysticism without God

5. The [Bleeping] Triangles Are Everywhere: How Triangulated Dilemmas and Conflicts Map the Mysticism of a Secular Age

6. Mystical Memoirists: Mapping the Spiritual Pathways of a Secular Age

7. Why Not All Mysticisms Are Equal: Welcome to a Smooth, Pornographic World Obsessed with Action

8. Why Passivity Is the Path

9. The Headless Man of Shadows: Into Negativity

10. When a Late-Night Talk Leads to Deconversion: Or, How We Keep from Hating the World

Index

Back Cover

Preface

It happens to me a lot. In committee meetings, I often say things that land with a thud. In group discussions, I come upon a big idea that, when shared, just seems odd. It’s not the committee’s fault. It’s hard to have real estate in my head.

The origins of this final (I promise!) volume of the Ministry in a Secular Age series started one such time. In a committee meeting of faculty and staff at Luther Seminary, we were discussing evangelism and discipleship. Our conversations began moving toward transformation and spirituality. It struck me that people far outside the church, many who had walked away from the church, followed a pathway of transformation and spirituality. They were undeniably seeking to be transformed. All these people possessed some sense of spirituality—usually a spirituality without God—that delivered what they believed was transformation. I came to recognize that we would only understand what practices and visions of evangelism and discipleship were needed if we could front (to both affirm and deny) the many competing secular spiritualities of transformation that exist in our late-modern world. So I suggested we do so. The committee looked at me blankly.

The group had been tasked with creating some exercises to be used in classrooms to discuss evangelism and discipleship. I suggested that we read twenty or so memoirs and trace out the different pathways of transformation they articulate, particularly focusing on their views of the self. My sense was that memoirists had become our new mystics in late modernity. Memoirists offer routes of transformation, stories of conversion, steps into a spirituality. Interestingly, almost all of them articulate transformation without a living, acting God. The more I talked, the deeper the blank looks on the committee members’ faces became. They started to tilt their heads like a dog confused by an odd sound. Recognizing the stare, I returned to where I’m most comfortable, my lonely home office, to dive into memoirs and type away. I wrote this book, completing the Ministry in a Secular Age series, as a way of explaining myself.

The objective of this final book is to delve into one understandable response to the claim that we live in a secular age. People often respond with, If we are in a secular age, it also seems like a postsecular age. There are a lot of spiritualities all around us, aren’t there? Indeed. But those many spiritualities are actually evidence that we are living in a secular age. What Charles Taylor means by a secular age includes this proliferation of spiritualities. Organized and classic forms of religious belief and practice have been fragilized to such a point that a new space is open for all sorts of spiritualities to enter the scene. Our secular age is not void of spirituality but instead creates a buffet of many, many spiritualities. The secularizing forces we’ve discussed in the previous five volumes (particularly the first three) make all spiritualities equal, and therefore those spiritualities are dependent on individual use. We all search for our own unique way of being spiritual.

Even our views of transformation (what it means to be changed, to be made new, to find a new way of life, to discover the right path) are linked directly with our spiritualities. Interestingly, inside this secular age, mysticism broadly returns to our society. By mysticism I don’t just mean an ecstatic experience bound inside an abbey or a monastery; I mean a form of spirituality that seeks to overcome our impediments, impossibilities, and even guilt. We find all sorts of these mysticisms on YouTube and Instagram. The difference in our late-modern age is that these mysticisms are without God (something those in the Middle Ages could not have imagined). These mystics without God, who offer their positions in memoirs, offer us pathways for transformation. My job below will be to lay out these pathways and why they are shaped thus. Before I can lay out these pathways and show their shape, I must first articulate our new conception of the self and how this conception brings spirituality back to the surface. I do so for descriptive purposes, but more so, I believe that the Christian pastor and ministry leader, if not careful, too often adopts these secular views of transformation embedded in our late-modern concepts of the self. What is problematic about these secular views of transformation is not only that they are mysticisms/spiritualities without God but more so that their views of the self become incongruent with the Christian faith. At the core of a transformation into Christ by the Spirit is a claim about how the self stands before God. The self comes before God in need, in confession. The secular mysticisms and their roads toward transformation do something quite different with the self. They apotheosize the self to such a point that the self is not only no longer in need of anything but is the very location of transcendence. The self becomes worshiped.

I don’t mean this to sound so harsh. I actually find many of these secular spiritualities of transformation, these mystical memoirists, interesting and even helpful at points. But hidden under their articulations is a view of the self that I believe, if not uncovered, will wreak havoc on our formation into the life of the crucified Christ. If not examined, this view of the self will colonize our Christian views of transformation, further gutting pastoral identity. Focusing on confession and surrender is important because, unlike with secular mysticism, it moves the self outside itself, into an encounter (into yearning) for a living God who breaks in, arriving in the world. Louis Dupré, a historian of mysticism, says beautifully about Christian forms of the mystical life, Thus while thinking only about God the Christian mystic teaches an important lesson about the self, namely, that the self is in its deepest nature more than itself. To move into myself means in the end to move beyond myself into what is ‘higher’ than the self or ‘deeper’ than the self.1

What is offered in this book continues the direction of my overall project. I offer a description of our contemporary moment through a cultural philosophy that has the theologia crucis (theology of the cross) as its bedrock. The theologia crucis is the cornerstone of a theological building that I hope those directly engaged in ministry can live within.

The shape of this final project matches the other five volumes. It first describes our situation, examining our cultural time and how these new spiritualities evolved in relation to the self. The self is a major focus in the first five chapters, clearing the ground for us to turn directly to these myriad memoirs and their pathways of transformation. If you find yourself anxious to get to memoirs, you can jump to chapter 6. But the importance of the first five chapters is to see how the mysticisms/spiritualities of memoirists are embedded in our late-modern view of the self. In these early chapters, I show particularly how and why guilt has returned with teeth in late modernity—something very unexpected. In chapter 6, I begin creating a map of the spiritualities/mysticisms of our secular age. I’m not shy in my appreciation for mysticism without God, but I’m also not shy in saying that Protestantism particularly needs to return to what I call a Beyonder way of being. A Beyonder way sees transformation coming not through the inner genius of the self or the heroic actions of the self but only through the confession and surrender of the self to something beyond the self. I’ll come to the process of mapping more than a dozen memoirs, revealing their inner shape of transformation. In chapter 7, I turn from description to theological construction, pulling out the theologia crucis to shape a theology of transformation. This will start with a critical chapter that uses the thought of philosopher Byung-Chul Han to show that not all mysticisms (not all pathways to transformation) are equal. The final three chapters show why the pathway of confession and surrender is most helpful to the church and pastoral ministry.

This is the sixth and final book of what started as a three-volume series. These final three volumes are not so much distinct volumes as deepening companions to the first three volumes. The way they connect makes a kind of mirror reflection. Volume 3, The Congregation in a Secular Age, is directly connected to volume 4, Churches and the Crisis of Decline. Volume 2, The Pastor in a Secular Age, is connected to volume 5, The Church after Innovation. And volume 6, this book, is connected to volume 1, Faith Formation in a Secular Age. In volume 1, I discuss Taylor’s articulation of authenticity, showing how it has deeply affected our view of faith, then turning to Paul’s views of what it means to have faith and how faith itself is a movement into (being in) Christ. I discuss a movement from humility to communion to deep transformation. Here in volume 6, I move further into this transformation, pushing more directly into the mystical dynamic. Building on my work with Paul, I return to the mystical tradition of Christianity that supports the theologia crucis, placing all this in conversation with a certain reading of Luther (I did something congruent in volume 1 as well, drawing from the Finnish interpretation of Luther).

There are many to thank as this series comes to end. Particularly in their help with this book I’d like to thank Erik Leafblad, Megan Clapp, Wes Ellis, and Jon Wasson, who again read this whole book and offered important feedback. My colleagues Justin Nickle and Lois Malcolm—two incredible readers and theologians—offered important insights. My closest friends from my Princeton days, Blair Bertrand and Jessicah Duckworth, deeply engaged with this work; I’m thankful to them both for twenty years of conversations. I’d also like to thank Denise Carrell, a student at Princeton Theological Seminary, for helping me gather the memoirs. As usual Bob Hosack and Eric Salo, and all the folks at Baker, have been amazing to work with.

Again it is to Kara Root that I offer the biggest thanks. It is mainly to her and her ministry that I write, with the hope that my thoughts might be a small blessing to her. Her incredibly faithful ministry to her congregation and the persons in it will receive the last word in this book and therefore the series—which is only right!

1. Louis Dupré, The Deeper Life: An Introduction to Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 25.

Read before Using (Don’t Skip)

A very short user’s guide is necessary for this book. Because this book concludes a long six-volume series, there are a lot of dimensions to this final book. In the pages to come I’ll describe the many cultural forms of transformation, spirituality, and mysticism that have shockingly arrived in late modernity. I’ll also offer my take on why many of these forms cannot bring us to the transformation we seek and why pastoral practice should avoid many of these secular mysticisms.

I build to this point by setting stone on top of stone to build an argument. Therefore, you should be aware that my goal in the first four chapters is to lay out how our view of the self has come to be. We cannot talk about spirituality and transformation without understanding our sense of the self. The first four chapters examine how the self became so important to us late-modern people and yet also has become burdened, unexpectedly, with guilt. It is quite odd that in a secular age when people can live without God, our views of the self have led us to seek spiritualities, even mysticisms, without God. All this work on examining the self leads us into thinking about the many ways we imagine that the self can be changed or transformed even in our secular age of immanence.

Chapters 5 and 6 are the heart of the project. Here I map our secular mysticisms. I show that the memoir and the memoirist is the mystic in our secular age. These memoirists have given us three pathways with eleven lanes for transformation. Two of these pathways have no need for a living God. The third pathway cannot be without a living God. Chapters 5 and 6 will sketch and diagram the shape of our secular spiritual world.

But not all of these mysticisms or spiritualities are equal. Therefore, starting in chapter 7, I begin to move from description into normative assertion. Drawing from philosopher Byung-Chul Han I show that the mysticisms/spiritualities without God cannot deliver, and they fall into many of the traps of the self laid out in chapters 1 through 4. In chapters 8 through 10 I delve into theological construction to articulate the shape of transformation/spirituality that occurs before God. This perspective claims a very different view of the self, one that I contend pastors and ministers must embrace to renew their practice of ministry in a secular age. In outline form:

Chapters 1–4. Provide an overview of the self and how late modernity gives us a much different view of what it means to be a self. These chapters show how we can so easily be spiritual but not religious.

Chapters 5–6. Map our secular spiritualities.

Chapter 7. Shows that not all spiritualities are equal.

Chapters 8–10. Provide a constructive theology for transformation and renewed conceptions of the self for a spirituality/mysticism before and with God.

1

New Mystics without God

Closed World Structures and Memoirists

It’s already dark when we land. The evening covers the beauty of the island like a veil. I can’t hear it, but even from outside the airport I can smell the ocean. The alluring presence of the surrounding Pacific laps its aloha into my body. The thought of being surrounded by those blue waters bobbing, even on the Big Island in Hawaii, does something to me. As I await our luggage, I remind myself that we’re standing in the middle of the Pacific, on top of a volcano oasis of tropical beauty plopped in the middle of the majestic belly of the great ocean. Nothing else is around us for almost a thousand miles.

We squeeze our luggage into an UberX and head to an Airbnb. I put the windows of the tattered Toyota all the way down, in part to escape the uninviting personalness of the shared UberX. Sliding into an UberX is always a tad uncomfortable. It’s like choosing to be locked alone with a stranger in their bedroom. You’re forced to sit uncomfortably for thirty minutes with this stranger in one of their most intimate living spaces. In this UberX the heavy smell of Febreze seems to be doing its own veiling of cigarette smoke. This is one reason to put my head as close to the open window as I can. Not close enough to be mistaken for a golden retriever but more than adequate to feel the warm air on my face. With each mile the darkness becomes thicker, but the presence of the ocean more looming.

When we arrive, we can’t tell. As the door swings open there is only the sweet smell of ocean air. The Airbnb is perfect: plain but not tattered. The time change makes it essential we find the bedrooms and call it a day. Kara and I find the master. We open the windows and hear the Pacific. But we can’t see it. It seems close, I say out loud as I fade into sleep.

The next morning, to our surprise, it’s right outside our window, staring us right in the eye. The bluest blue of the Pacific is as far from our bed as first base is to home plate. The rocky shore radiates its beauty. The blue washes each black lava stone. Before I rise from the pillow on the first morning, I know what my whole vacation will consist of: nothing. I’ll sit on a chair right below our bedroom, my feet in the ground, my eyes on the blue, and I’ll just be. I’ll stare at the Pacific as it stares back at me. The mutual gaze, I trust, will be transforming.

Yet, it’s hard to just be. I’ve never been good at staring contests. Transformation, even inside the radiance of such beauty, is seemingly harder to come by than I assumed. To cope with my busy mind’s aversion to being, I drag the dozen books I packed with me to my seat on the beach. I read for a living, so it feels like I’m cheating on my vacation. But I justify this by reminding myself that the books I packed are outliers. They don’t fit into any specific research project. They’re not for a class I’ll be teaching. They’re just fun—at least to my twisted mind. In my stack are a few historical biographies and even a popular history of the English Premier League (I’m a party animal!). I sit and read. I break eye contact with the Pacific blue, but its lapping rhythm still fills my ears. Its majestic aura of salt and breeze wrap around me. It’s good. It’s needed. It’s a gift. But it’s not quite the transformational moment I assumed it would be when I first awoke and caught eyes with the blue.

There’s one book in my stack I’ve been putting off. It has two strikes against it. First, it was a gift. I really shouldn’t write that, because the only thing I love more than books is free books. These words shouldn’t dissuade anyone from gifting me a book or two. Yet, when someone gives me a book that I’m not immediately interested in, it becomes an assignment. Unfortunately, I’m the kind of person who feels compelled to do all his assignments. I try not to have books in my library that I haven’t read. Thus, this book, which I didn’t really want to read, was packed in my suitcase.

The second strike is the genre: memoir. For some reason, to my idea-opposed head a five-hundred-page historical biography on Beethoven is way more appealing than a memoir. I know, stupid. But this stupidity made Tara Westover’s Educated the last book I read at the feet of the Pacific. It was the last but by far the best book of the stack.

Educated and Transformed

Westover tells the amazing story—with such crisp writing—about going from being a homeschooled (really, unschooled) mountain girl in Idaho to earning a Gates Cambridge University scholarship and eventually a PhD. Westover grew up in a very conservative Mormon family that isolated itself, for both religious and political reasons, from the rest of society. They did this most directly by refusing to allow the secular government to get its hands on their children, thereby corrupting them with its ideas and schools. In Westover’s father’s mind, the apocalypse was right around the corner. Therefore, what his children needed to know was not how to live in a society and get a job but how to survive in the end times.

The mountains and the family land became Westover’s classroom. Her primary teacher was her father, with his manic survivalist ways. The picture Westover paints is captivating. The stories of life and the (un)education of her and her siblings is probing, sensitive, and insightful. By the middle of the book the reader can’t help but ask how this person could end up at Cambridge or even write at all (let alone a book).

In part 2 of her book, a great transformation begins. It’s the eve of Y2K. Westover’s father is sure this is it. When the seconds turn us over to the year 2000 the apocalypse will commence. And he’s more than ready! Westover, now in her teens, has tried a few times to persuade her father to allow her to go to school. But he’ll have none of it. Why would he? As the clouds of apocalypse gather on the horizon, what could be more of a waste of time than school? But the storm never comes. The jammed gears of societal breakdown don’t occur. In its place comes the depression. Westover’s feverish father becomes now even more manic than usual.

He’s so agitated that when Westover is in a car accident, severely injuring her neck, her father refuses to allow her to see a doctor or visit a hospital. Her brother Shawn becomes her advocate, heroically standing up to her father. But soon her heroic advocate becomes her abusing adversary. Shawn’s own frustrated torture is physically released on Westover. Home is no longer safe, for multiple reasons. At just seventeen, without a day in school or even much interaction with the rest of society, Westover is on her own.

By chance Westover is told that if she scores high enough on the ACT, Brigham Young University will admit her. They have a program for children just like her, who stumble their way out of the mountains. She scores well enough and soon her first day (ever!) of school is in a university classroom at BYU. As though thawed from a glacier, Westover both appears and feels like a person from another era. She has none of the socialization or years of report cards to assure herself, in this very different world, that she can be educated.

The rest of the memoir proves not only that Westover can indeed be educated but that education itself can radically transform a life. The book has had such a wide reach because it reminds us of the power of education. Westover’s memoir makes the claim that education itself is an engine of transformation. The book is a kind of humanist call back—a late-modern spin on the humanism coming out of the Renaissance. In the Late Renaissance, particularly through thinkers such as Erasmus, it was assumed that education, particularly learning to read and recite the classics, formed a soul. Echoing back to ancient times, humanist thinkers believed that to be educated was to be taught a new way of being. Education wasn’t about future employment. It had little direct functional purpose. To be educated was to have your spirit transformed by sacred and trusted knowledge. This knowledge had as its source an inbreaking transcendence. It had a kind of metaphysical quality to it. The humanists were concerned with the human form, but they believed what made the human form was a rhetorical education that formed the soul (through the tongue).1 Education allowed a person to enter a direct process of soul-shifting transformation. Westover concurs and testifies to how education transformed her.

Westover, of course, is not writing as a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century humanist. Rather, she writes as a late-modern academic. A strange one due to background, for sure, but a late-modern academic nevertheless.

Transformation in a Closed World Structure

Charles Taylor has taught us that our secular age is not without the possibility of belief, transcendence, and therefore deep forms of transformation. Nevertheless, inside this kind of secular age there are groups, collectives, and associations that nevertheless construct closed views of our world. These groups, collectives, and associations see belief in God, religious practice, and the thought of an inbreaking transcendence as misguided at best and pathological at worst. Taylor says such groups, collectives, and associations operate with a closed world structure. There happen to be certain parts and segments (but not the whole) of Western modernity that have little to no openness to what the humanists thought was obvious: being transformed depended on a knowledge that had its source, at least partly, in something beyond (some kind of inbreaking transcendence). Taylor explains that these groups and peoples who presume a closed world structure are scattered across the whole of society. But where they can be found most consistently is in academia. Taylor believes that consistently, and somewhat ironically,2 the academic world operates as a closed world structure, allergic to inbreaking transcendence.

Westover is too sanguine about how our pasts make us—too compassionate on those she’s left in the mountains—to ferociously defend the closed world structure. She throws no shade on those who still believe in a living God. She makes no gestures toward adding another dead bolt to the door of the closed world structure (though she of all people could be forgiven for doing so). Yet her testimony to a great transformation wears few to no marks of the movement of an inbreaking personal God. She seems to have left such language in the mountains as she departs BYU for Cambridge and Harvard. Ultimately, there is no sense that what makes education transformational is that the knowledge itself is bound in the inbreaking being of God (or any other spiritual reality for that matter).

I make this observation not to disqualify or even minimize Westover’s testimony to transformation. The intent is definitely not to say that her transformation doesn’t count. Rather, it’s the opposite. Whether you’re reading Educated on a beach while being serenaded with lapping alohas or in a dentist office awaiting a root canal, the book can trigger a deep resonance. It is a true tale, an honest testimony, of transformation. It’s beautiful. And yet, if we stop and think about it, acknowledging her transformation perplexes those of us who oversee and lead communities of faith and therefore are committed, to some degree, to a world where a living God breaks in, transforming the world and its persons.

In other words, if even inside a closed world structure (whether securely locked down as it is in academia or just relatively so) there are sure testimonies to transformation, why do we need openness to an inbreaking transcendence? Especially openness to the movements of a living God? If this is true, if lives can be transformed without God, why do we need God at all? If education saved Westover, what need is there for the saving God of Israel? Particularly, why is there a need for any church to exist, made up of persons who still yearn for and believe it is necessary to witness to a transformation delivered freely and solely by the hand of the inbreaking God of the exodus? If transformation can happen outside of this—so far outside that it can happen inside closed world structures—what is a pastor or ministry leader doing at all?

The answer is reductive, flattening an entire vocation like a pancake. Not wanting to be confused as someone who is even tangentially similar to Westover’s father, and acknowledging that those who are respected by the closed world structures don’t talk of an inbreaking God (and don’t even trust those who do), we often settle for religious management. Inside the concession to the closed world structure, the church and its leadership can only be about the management of institutional religion. Forget the stuff about inbreaking. The closed world structure heralds that if there is a place at all for those who still gather as believers, it is inside a privatized life segment called religion. Religion is a segment, like a hobby or affiliation, that someone can choose as they wish. Why they would wish to choose it is hard to know for those committed to the closed world structure. But it’s assumed to have something to do with nostalgia or an unfortunate proclivity to weak-mindedness.

Inside the closed world structure, belief can only be belief in a religion that loses the act of the inbreaking God and therefore has no way of testifying to how our being is transformed. The minister’s job becomes ultimately and finally about managing religion. It is not testifying, contemplating, and leading the people into ways in which our finite beings participate in the inbreaking life of the infinite God. Inside the closed world structure, or even adjacent to it, the closed world structure can only offer tales of its own kind of transformation, and the pastor must settle for ossified religion. Church life and pastoral ministry become about something other than reflection, preparation, and direct participation in transformation.

Ironically, just when most mainline church leaders (sick of feeling embarrassed and cross-pressured with an uneasy doubt) stopped talking about transformation, those in the closed world structure, as well as those in many other parts of society in our secular age, began talking about it. For the last fifty years the publication of memoirs has proliferated. For the last decade or so memoir after memoir has told tale after tale of transformation. Almost all of those memoirists have found their transforming moments without the necessity of any inbreaking transcendence. In one way or another, they directly or indirectly claim that deep transformation—so deep it even touches on the mystical—can happen without an inbreaking God. Each claims a kind of salvation without a transcendent savior. As a matter of fact, the memoirists of the last decade and a half might be called mystics without God.3 How this is possible, and what it looks like, will be my task in the chapters to come. My goal will not be simply to point out how one author or another uses the word God or doesn’t. Rather, I hope to sketch out the shape of transformation itself, seeking for the inner logic, the core dimensions of a transformational path that contends with the inbreaking of God. I will ask if it is possible for our secular age to affirm, and therefore return to, the mystical path of transformation that has its source in God.

Before going any further, though, we need a clear definition of mystical. By mystical or mysticism I don’t necessarily mean a call back to abbeys and monks, saints and the ecstatic. Rather, by mystical I mean a spirituality that seeks to overcome our impediments (even our guilt) by drawing us into a spiritual union. It just so happens that the object of this union—the very thing we seek to be united to that can overcome our impediments—has shifted from God to our self. Therefore, we’ll need to focus in the early chapters on how the self has become so inflated in importance to us late-modern people seeking spiritual transformation.

I take up this task only to make a larger point: that pastoral identity is confused, and the ministry of the church is flattened, when we can no longer feel compelled to speak of transformation. As the body of Jesus Christ, we can speak of transformation only when we recover a sense of the inbreaking of God (revelation). As the failures of the last century of Protestantism in America have shown, speaking of God can deliver transformation only when it is the God who is God (and not a mascot to our denominational or political religion). It must be a God who is God. Paradoxically (or better, dialectically), it must be a God who cannot be known but whom we nevertheless encounter as inbreaking.

The ultimate task of this project is to map transformation inside our secular age. This mapping will take some time to build up to. We first need to explore how the self has