Overview

The first volume of Michael Horton's magisterial intellectual history of ""spiritual but not religious"" as a phenomenon in Western culture Discussions of the rapidly increasing number of people identifying as ""spiritual but not religious"" tend to focus on the past century. But the SBNR phenomenon and the values that underlie it may be older than Christianity itself. Michael Horton reveals that the hallmarks of modern spirituality--autonomy, individualism, utopianism, and more--have their foundations in Greek philosophical religion. Horton makes the case that the development of the shaman figure in the Axial Age--particularly its iteration among Orphists--represented a ""divine self."" One must realize the divinity within the self to break free from physicality and become one with a panentheistic unity. Time and time again, this tradition of divinity hiding in nature has arisen as an alternative to monotheistic submission to a god who intervenes in creation. This first volume traces the development of a utopian view of the human individual: a divine soul longing to break free from all limits of body, history, and the social and natural world. When the second and third volumes are complete, students and scholars will consult The Divine Self as the authoritative guide to the ""spiritual but not religious"" tendency as a recurring theme in Western culture from antiquity to the present.

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9780802877116

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Reviews

"""Michael Horton illuminates our contemporary spiritual restlessness by examining its earliest roots in Western antiquity. Certain to become the authoritative history of our age-old quest to encounter 'the divine self, ' Shaman and Sage explains how the most creative moments in our collective spiritual journeys did not come through contrite obedience to a power ruling from above. They emerged instead from the hunger to experience a power pulsing from within."" --Robert C. Fuller, author of Spiritual but Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America ""Professor Horton might not be a shaman but he is certainly a sage. His is a book of immense learning and vaulting ambition, ranging from Bronze Age civilizations to Greek philosophers. While Charles Taylor and Carl Trueman recounted the rise of modern selfhood, Horton engages antiquity. In this copiously documented first volume, Horton offers a Plato and a Platonism that our college professors never told us about (and perhaps didn't know about)--not luminously rational but darkly mysterious. He links ancient humanism less to logical arguments than to incommunicable ecstatic experiences. Horton's readers will grow in understanding of the archaic roots of today's esoteric and New Age religions--centered not on faith, nor on reason, but on individual and private gnosis. Impatiently I await the forthcoming volumes to learn how ideas of selfhood continued to evolve, and what that might mean for us today."" --Michael McClymond, professor of modern Christianity, Saint Louis University"

Author Information

Michael Horton is J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California and founder and editor-in-chief of Sola Media.

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