Toward Re-Enchantment of the Cosmos

Today, youth and youthfulness has become an avatar for authenticity—used to authorise everything from commodities to politics to faith. Andrew Root reveals that adding youth and youthfulness was part of a larger strategy of Christian formation that must be judged theologically inadequate and anachronistic, since it participates in “secular ii” logic of addition—more youth, institutional affiliation, information and instruction. Root believes a focus on youthfulness is a distraction which must be relinquished as we attend (in the cross-pressured secular iii) to our yearning for true authenticity, which is a manifestation of a more essential desire for transcendent union that makes central personal encounter. Root believes that the age of authenticity serves to clear the ground of the additive logic of secularity ii, making way for an experience of personhood “in Christ.” According to Root, with Luther, kenotic ministry “in Christ” must be the heart of Christian formation in this new era of secularity iii. This review of Root’s book is largely framed by deep appreciation, but also points to problematic aspects of Root’s uber-Protestant perspective that does not adequately address such priorities as analogia entis, sacramentality, beauty and re-enchantment. Only a wider embrace of Anglo-Catholic-Methodist thought can point to both the risk of idolatry of youth, and to the sacramental possibility that youth are parables of God.