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Few today would deny that we live in a world marked by disenchantment. A term popularized by Max Weber, “disenchantment” captures the sense that nothing—including ourselves—has any great significance, that we’re at best cogs in some giant machine, whether political, bureaucratic, or economic. There’s irony here: Human beings are exceptional—capable of feats, positive and negative, to which no other creature can aspire. We can produce beautiful art and develop cures for diseases; we can engage in acts of deliberate cruelty and have even produced weapons that could annihilate our species. Yet the net result of all this brilliance has been to render us small in our own eyes. Our intellectual and technical brilliance has all but eroded our sense of mystery not simply with the world in general but with ourselves in particular. We’ve become nothing more than raw matter, talented for sure but ultimately of no account. In this context, it’s not surprising to hear calls for the reenchantment of the world. If the problem is that materialism has reduced us, then the answer is to find the depth in our existence that has been lost, to recapture a sense of the mystery of existence. Even in this disenchanted world, there are still hints of something deeper: Stories of great deeds still have the power to inspire, many of us still experience love for another, and even our dissatisfaction with disenchantment indicates we crave something more. While the disenchantment/reenchantment model contains much truth, it’s ultimately inadequate both as an explanation of our world’s problems and as a solution to them. Destroying the Sacred Take, for example, the shift in language surrounding abortion. Thirty years ago, abortion advocates argued it should be “safe, legal and rare.” That’s the kind of approach we might expect in a disenchanted world. It has an air of resignation and of the acceptance that, in a world like ours, sometimes we have to do things that we find distasteful. It was a medical procedure, unpleasant but necessary in certain circumstances. Quite a contrast with the approach to abortion that caught the headlines in the 2024 U.S. elections: Pro-choice advocates “shouted” their abortions, taking evident pride in having availed themselves of one. T-shirts proclaimed the fact to passers-by. And it was asserted as a basic human right—in short, to be denied access to abortion is to be denied something constitutive of one’s humanity. The linguistic shift is eloquent because it indicates this world isn’t characterized simply by disenchantment. It’s also characterized by a delight in the destruction of things once considered sacred. This world isn’t characterized simply by disenchantment. It’s also characterized by a delight in the destruction of things once considered sacred. Life in the womb is just one example. The sexual revolution is another. It isn’t enough that society no longer subjects many forms of sexual immorality to judicial punishment or even social shame. Our culture now has to lionize those who pursue it and demonize those who stand for chastity, continence, and monogamous fidelity. A recent stained glass window in Belfast City Hall bears the legend “Save Sodomy from Ulster.” Both the artistic and linguistic idioms used are religious in origin and yet represent a mockery of Christian moral convictions. This isn’t the ennui of disenchantment so much as the ecstasy of iconoclasm. We might also point to the passion with which the tech bros pursue their transhumanist projects. The game seems less and less about enhancing human life by enriching human agency and increasingly about transcending humanity as a whole, defined by its various limits—physical, mortal, intellectual. This will come at a significant cost, first for the weakest of us and then possibly for all. But the projects are pursued regardless of the consequences. The exhilaration of overcoming humanity, even at the cost of its self-destruction, is simply too great to resist. There’s a clear theological reason for this. Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche saw in the 19th century that the killing of God was an intoxicating experience. For Marx, the destruction of religion and of the God who enforced it was a necessary prelude to liberating human revolution. And for Nietzsche, nothing made someone feel more powerful than having the blood of the divine dripping from his or her hands. That led inevitably to attacks on the single most significant sign of God’s authority in this created realm: humanity. Human beings are made in his image, the symbol of God’s ownership of and rule over this world. Only by demolishing that image—by overcoming its limits, by creating our own rules and our own values—can the death of God be truly realized. For Nietzsche, the Enlightenment philosophers, most notably Immanuel Kant, had failed to do this. They had removed God as a living, necessary presence but had smuggled him back in by asserting a moral structure to the universe, most notably in the idea of “human nature.” True liberation from this dead God would only be achieved by ridding the world of those sacred limits that defined what it meant to be made in his image. From Disenchantment to Desecration In this context, it’s no surprise that the body—something considered sacred in Scripture and central to who we are as God’s image-bearers—became a locus of desecration. Babies in the womb are merely part of the woman’s body, of no more moral significance than toenails, to be removed whenever they’re even merely inconvenient. Sex, once surrounded with sacred significance and ritual, has become nothing more in the wider culture than recreation, even if our laws on sexual assault would suggest otherwise. Transgenderism as a philosophy denies the significance of the naturally sexed body, seeing it as a potential threat to the real person trapped inside. The body must be mutilated to conform with the ideology. Death too has been trivialized by the entertainment industry and reduced to a matter of mere procedure by the medical practice of assisted suicide. Even the post-mortem treatment of bodies now presses us toward thinking of a corpse as a piece of refuse, not as something to be treated with honor and dignity. Of course, this assault on the Christian notion of what it means to be human—embodied, limited, moral—hasn’t really liberated us at all. It has made us less, rather than more, human. As in the age of disenchantment, our technical brilliance and exceptional abilities have again served to make us less. But while the reduction of humanity in disenchantment involved resignation, that in desecration involves exhilaration. From the promiscuous to the abortionists to the transhumanists, the path to human nothingness is marked with headlong and ecstatic enthusiasm. God is dead. We have killed him. And goodness, does that not make us feel good as we become nothing even in our own eyes. Church’s Task So where does hope lie? For the disenchanted, it lies in reenchantment. But that’s a vague and rather weak concept. If the problem is desecration, the answer is consecration: a realization of who we are as those made in God’s image. And that’s the task of the church. This is good news. First, the church is a supernatural entity. She exists because of Christ’s work and therefore her power doesn’t rest on the knowledge and abilities of her members. Preaching, for example, isn’t simply lecturing on a religious topic. It involves the supernatural address of God to his people. That consecrates us. When a husband tells his wife he loves her, he isn’t merely communicating information about a state of affairs; he’s performing an action that deepens their relationship. That’s analogous to hearing God’s call from the pulpit: It both reminds us of who we are and in a mysterious sense makes us who we are. When we participate in worship, we respond to God in the way that reflects our humanity, shaping our imaginations so we think and act in ways that indicate we are not our own but were bought with a price. This assault on the Christian notion of what it means to be human—embodied, limited, moral—hasn’t really liberated us at all. We sing praises, we take the Lord’s Supper, we join with others in acknowledging that, whatever categories the world uses to divide and objectify us, the gospel of Christ speaks to that deeper humanity that unites us in him. The church’s proclamation and the church’s worship draw us toward what it truly means to be human—that is, made in God’s image and now redeemed in Christ. It consecrates us. That consecration doesn’t terminate at the benediction or at the church door. It spills out into the world. As ancient Israel was to be a light to the Gentiles, reflecting God’s character through her devotion to him, her treatment of her own members, and her hospitality to those outside, so that’s the role of the church today. If the world is committed to the destruction of what it means to be human through its acts of desecration of the same, we’re to be those whose words and actions, whose whole lives, demonstrate what it means to be made in God’s image. The good news is that this isn’t particularly complicated. The church has many members. We can each play our part. Some are great teachers, some evangelists, some apologists. But every single one of us can worship God in the congregation and then treat others with the kindness and hospitality that acknowledges that stamp of the divine image in others. Desecration is a heavy burden because it ultimately destroys even those who rejoice in it. Consecration is a light yoke, one that should be easy to bear, because it makes us truly human.

Most Christians would likely struggle if, out of the blue, someone asked them to share a message about Easter Sunday. But Victor Glover was put on the spot while 250,000 miles from home and with the whole Earth listening. “I don’t have anything prepared,” said the unflappable former Navy test pilot and NASA’s current Artemis II pilot. “I’m glad you brought that up, though; I think these observances are important.” “I think that for me one of the really important personal perspectives that I have up here is I can really see Earth as one thing,” he added. “And you know when I read the Bible, and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us who were created—it’s . . . you have this amazing place, this spaceship.” “You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe,” Glover said. “Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you—just trust me—you are special. In all of this emptiness—this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe—you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together,” he said, referring to Earth. “I think, as we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about, you know, all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we’ve gotta get through this together.” Glover was responding to a question from a reporter who mentioned the Christmas message delivered by the astronauts from NASA’s Apollo 8 mission. During that 1968 mission, about one in four people on the planet watched the video transmission from space on television. NASA’s deputy administrator for public affairs had told the crew before the launch that more people would hear the crew’s voices than any other voice in history. He said, “So, we want you to say something appropriate.” One of the astronauts asked his wife what the team should say. “Why don’t you begin at the beginning?” she said. And so they did. On Christmas Eve, the first humans to orbit the Moon read from Genesis. Astronauts Bill Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman recited verses 1 through 10 of the Genesis creation narrative from the King James Bible: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth . . .” Static We Live In In any other context, these reflections wouldn’t seem particularly noteworthy. Reading from Genesis has been common for thousands of years, while reflections about “Spaceship Earth” date to at least the 1970s. Yet there’s something about hearing the same words and thoughts from a spaceship that gives them a sense of, well, gravity. Why is that? Part of what we’re catching is something called the Overview Effect. That term was coined by “space philosopher” Frank White to describe the perception shift when astronauts view the Earth from space. In interviews with the men and women who had been to space, White found that many were profoundly affected by their experience. They consistently reported an overwhelming sense of Earth’s smallness and preciousness, a feeling of interconnectedness with all humanity, and often a kind of grief that people on the surface can’t see what they’re seeing. The secular account says that what they experience is merely a perspective shift. The visual data is producing a cognitive reframe, a new way of seeing the world. A more biblical explanation is that astronauts aren’t gaining new information at all. They’re losing the noise that lets them ignore what they’ve always known. Being in space merely helped them to see with more clarity what creation has always been declaring. Being in space merely helped them to see with more clarity what creation has always been declaring. As Psalm 19:1 tells us, the heavens declare the glory of God. All humans at all times have access to this information. We refuse to recognize what’s obvious, as Paul tells us in Romans 1, because we actively suppress this knowledge. Ordinary life makes it all too easy to ignore or deny what God is clearly expressing about himself and his creation. Our lives are continuously busy and distracted by things that occur on the human level. This isn’t just metaphorical either. We almost never change our perspective from looking at what can be seen at the horizontal level of humanity. When was the last time, for instance, that you spent more than a few seconds actually looking at the heavens above us? (In thinking about this question, I realized it has been decades since I had spent even a few minutes pondering the “lights in the expanse of the heavens” [Gen. 1:14].) What seems to happen for the astronauts is that they gain enough distance from the distractions that it interrupts their internal suppression. They move far enough away from the static of everyday life that God’s signal can once again be heard with clarity. And what they hear profoundly changes them. What Space Can (and Can’t) Do It can be tempting to read too much religious significance into these moments. While they’re important culturally, they aren’t exclusively Christian. The Apollo astronauts reading Genesis weren’t proclaiming the gospel. Likewise, although Glover is a follower of Jesus, his off-the-cuff Easter remarks weren’t a profession of faith in the resurrection. As profound as the Overview Effect may be, a change in perspective doesn’t necessarily lead to a change in heart. General revelation is sufficient to condemn us but not enough to save us, since it cannot provide the “good news” of special revelation. No one has ever been saved by looking up into the night sky—or by orbiting the moon. No one has ever been saved by looking up into the night sky—or by orbiting the moon. Still, the astronauts’ experiences are a helpful reminder that God continues to speak through his creation. The heavens have never, not even for a second, stopped declaring the glory of God. It’s just that we have, all too often, allowed the static in our lives to keep us from hearing it clearly. Few of us will ever know what it’s like to hear God speaking to us while on a spacecraft. But while we don’t have the same seat as NASA astronauts, we all have access to the same heavens. Fortunately, we don’t need to travel a quarter-million miles into the sky to be reminded that the heavens are still declaring. We need only to step outside, look up, and listen.