Have you heard someone say, "I'm spiritual, but not religious"? It's a phrase everywhere, from casual conversations to celebrity interviews, and it might leave you wondering: What does that mean, and where does it come from? In this enlightening episode of Candid Conversations, Jonathan Youssef welcomes back Dr. Michael Horton, a renowned theologian and founder of Sola Media, to answer these questions and more. Dr. Horton’s latest book, Shaman and Sage: The Roots of 'Spiritual But Not Religious' in Antiquity, uncovers the ancient origins of these modern beliefs and their profound influence on today's culture.
If you're curious about why so many people reject organized religion yet embrace spirituality or want to understand better the challenges this mindset poses to the Christian faith, this episode is for you. With insights from history, philosophy, and theology, discover how to navigate these conversations with clarity and compassion.
Listen in as Dr. Horton helps untangle the complex threads of modern spirituality and points us back to the enduring Truth of the Gospel.
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[00:00:00] The central theme in all of those philosophies is the Divine Self. I don't really distinguish between God and me, and I'm an emanation of God in my inmost self. Now, my body may be a prison, but the inner self, that inner light is always shining. That's the theme that I'm tracing, and it's been really interesting.
[00:00:26] I really think it helps to understand that this phenomenon of spiritual but not religious really isn't new. It's just another eruption of the natural religion of the West.
[00:00:47] Hello and welcome to Candid, where we never settle for less than the truth. I'm your host, Dr. Jonathan Youssef. Each week we'll tackle tough issues, answer your hard questions, and take a candid look at the Christian faith.
[00:01:01] We have a special repeat guest. We have Dr. Michael Horton, who is the J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary, California in Escondido. He is the, do you call yourself the founder of Sola Media? Founder and president?
[00:01:19] That's what they call me. Yeah, I'm not the president.
[00:01:22] Just the founder.
[00:01:22] I do what they tell me to do.
[00:01:25] You own stock in the company.
[00:01:30] Well, it's been 30 years since we started the White Horse Inn, out of which this organization came.
[00:01:38] And so it's been a fun ride.
[00:01:39] Yes. Sola Media is a producer of the White Horse Inn, which is a podcast you can find on any of your streaming platforms, I'm sure. And also the publication Modern Reformation, which I recommend you go and check out.
[00:01:56] And for Christianity, also with Adriel Sanchez, for every level of engagement from beginner to advanced. We love conversational theology. That's what we call it. What we do is conversational theology.
[00:02:09] Yeah. Well, a friend of mine mentioned an episode recently. He said, you got to go and listen to this on pragmatism. And he said, man, it was great. And I said, you know that that was from 30 years ago, right?
[00:02:20] And he said, no way. Because it's just as relevant in the early 90s as it is in 2024.
[00:02:28] Hasn't gone away.
[00:02:30] It hasn't gone away. And I particularly loved one of your most famous episodes with where Robert Shuler came in and then left and then came back again.
[00:02:40] I mean, that was the most profound conversation. I was just baffled with all that took place in that.
[00:02:47] There's a lot of drama.
[00:02:48] It was a lot of drama. Drama in Southern California. I went and did some more research because I, of course, was familiar with Crystal Cathedral.
[00:02:58] But I thought he came out of a school of positive thinking and all that sort of thing.
[00:03:02] But he came from the Reformed tradition and really got caught up in some of what we're going to talk about today, which is your new book entitled Shaman and Sage, The Roots of Spiritual But Not Religious in Antiquity.
[00:03:21] And it's a three-part series.
[00:03:24] Yeah. History of Spiritual Not Religious in Antiquity. And then the second is in early modernity. And then the third is all the way up to the present time.
[00:03:36] And the first one is the only one that's out right now.
[00:03:39] So, it's all kind of built around this notion of the divine self.
[00:03:43] You know, whenever you hear people say, I'm spiritual, not religious, you get beneath that slogan.
[00:03:50] And people generally mean, I follow my inner light, my heart, whatever.
[00:03:55] When it comes to religion, I don't listen to anybody else.
[00:03:59] I really don't trust external authorities.
[00:04:03] Unless that resonates with what is inside me.
[00:04:07] Exactly. Because I'm a spark in here.
[00:04:09] My inmost self, the real me, is a spark of divinity.
[00:04:14] So, that's the whole idea of the divine self.
[00:04:17] That is the central dogma of modernity.
[00:04:21] Yeah.
[00:04:21] The autonomy of the inner self.
[00:04:25] You know, Mike, it's interesting.
[00:04:26] I remember when I was a student at RTS in one of our evangelism courses, we went out to a large public park.
[00:04:32] And we would try and engage people in conversation and just kind of very sort of surfacy questions.
[00:04:40] But digging down a little bit by a little bit.
[00:04:42] And then I remember several people gave almost these exact answers.
[00:04:47] And they would say, well, I'm a Christian.
[00:04:49] I go to church.
[00:04:50] But essentially, I don't agree with everything my pastor says.
[00:04:54] I agree with some things and not others.
[00:04:56] But it was very much like I'm trying to be true to myself and who I am.
[00:05:01] And it very much had this language of I'm my own sort of divine inner light.
[00:05:06] And Jesus says some helpful things.
[00:05:08] And I take some of that on.
[00:05:10] And I take some of Buddha's teachings.
[00:05:12] And I take Hare Krishna.
[00:05:14] And I just this amalgamation of just things.
[00:05:16] But essentially, the God is themself.
[00:05:19] And that was really the first time that I realized these people don't have, as you said, an external source of truth that you listen to, that you display obedience towards.
[00:05:33] It was really you've made yourself out to be a demigod.
[00:05:36] And the problem, I think, is that a lot of Christians hear that people are not atheists but are spiritual.
[00:05:44] And it gives them a sort of a buzz, you know, like an excitement of, you know, hey, you know, they're on their way and they're on their journey when that doesn't really seem to be the case.
[00:05:53] And it seems like your book is really getting us to the roots, to the core of where all of this came from.
[00:05:59] So let me ask you, what was sort of the impetus for doing the, you know, the massive research for a book like this, for a topic like this?
[00:06:07] Yeah, it's about 30 years ago.
[00:06:10] I was doing my Ph.D. studies and I attended a series of lectures.
[00:06:17] One of the great things about being an expert is you don't have to work on your own dissertation.
[00:06:23] You can go listen to these other lectures that are more interesting.
[00:06:26] And this was the largest hall they had, about 600 students gathering regularly to hear these lectures.
[00:06:36] And each week he drew a Venn diagram.
[00:06:40] Each was a circle and it was the mystical tradition of all the major religions.
[00:06:46] So for Islam, it was Sufism.
[00:06:49] For Buddhism, it was Mahayana, as if Buddhism itself isn't mystical.
[00:06:54] Anyway, all the mystical traditions and Christianity, the mystics throughout the Christian era, especially focusing on Meister Eckhart.
[00:07:04] And we all saw where he was going and some of us blanched because he was basically reducing all of our particular religions to the outer darkness.
[00:07:18] And that center was basically mystical religion of his own making.
[00:07:24] So a number of us were talking from different religious traditions that, well, he actually did bring us together because we're totally opposed to what he's doing here.
[00:07:35] Basically, it's his own religion.
[00:07:38] This middle-aged, upper-middle-class, white Englishman, former inner varsity leader, is now creating his own religion, basically.
[00:07:52] And it's a religion that jide with a lot of the people who were there.
[00:07:58] It struck me that this is a pretty common theme.
[00:08:03] He was doing it at a very scholarly level.
[00:08:05] Right.
[00:08:06] But it's a very common theme.
[00:08:08] When we come to religion, it's not about history.
[00:08:12] You know, if we're talking about history, for example, I mean, the whole Bible's history.
[00:08:17] Sure.
[00:08:18] So it stakes all of its claims on historical events.
[00:08:21] So it's outside of me.
[00:08:23] I can't say, well, I can't really find any inner resources or help in believing that Alexander conquered most of Asia.
[00:08:34] It's not for me.
[00:08:36] The Battle of Waterloo, I'm not sure.
[00:08:38] It doesn't really matter to me.
[00:08:39] I'm not sure it really happened.
[00:08:41] You know, you've got to crawl outside of yourself to actually believe that there's an external world.
[00:08:49] Right.
[00:08:50] That things happen outside of you.
[00:08:52] Right.
[00:08:52] The whole Christian faith is a beautiful narrative, an unfolding drama of God's action on the stage of history.
[00:09:01] And so when we turn religion into something that's purely inward, that we express then to others, it becomes a completely relativistic phenomenon.
[00:09:18] You just basically make it up as you go.
[00:09:20] Whatever works for you, you do you.
[00:09:24] Christianity isn't that kind of religion.
[00:09:26] You either believe Jesus rose from the dead or you don't, but you don't say, well, I'm a Christian because I feel something inside of me that jibes with it.
[00:09:39] Right.
[00:09:40] Well, in the sort of introduction to the book, you've given this statistics.
[00:09:47] You write,
[00:10:28] I mean, that's staggering.
[00:10:35] Staggering.
[00:10:35] Staggering.
[00:10:35] But not surprising in some strange sense.
[00:10:40] So I guess the question and what the book is really doing is how in the world did we get to a place like that?
[00:10:47] Yeah, those statistics explain the person you're sitting next to on the airplane.
[00:10:51] That's exactly right.
[00:10:53] So there are about 4% of the American population says that they're atheists.
[00:11:00] And even most atheists hold at least one of those new age tenets.
[00:11:08] Right, right.
[00:11:09] And so, you know, they're very mystical.
[00:11:12] They just don't like Christianity, but they're very mystical.
[00:11:15] Right.
[00:11:15] They'll still talk about spiritual forces and everything.
[00:11:19] Well, I thought you were materialists.
[00:11:22] Anyway, it's really what C.S. Lewis calls the materialist magician.
[00:11:27] Yes, materialist magician.
[00:11:29] I love that.
[00:11:29] Yeah.
[00:11:30] You know, that's what we have right now.
[00:11:32] It's a kind of inner contradiction.
[00:11:34] But, you know, where did that come from?
[00:11:36] That's what I wanted to study.
[00:11:38] And it goes all the way back to not only ancient Greece, but it spread across the whole Persian Empire from India all the way to Egypt, including everything from the Black Sea, what's now Ukraine, all the way down through Greece and Egypt.
[00:11:54] But a whole movement where you have the rise of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, late period Egypt religion, which is different from the earlier, and what's called Orphism or the Orphic religion in Greece.
[00:12:13] Named after Orpheus.
[00:12:15] It's a long story.
[00:12:17] Orpheus, the one who was considered the father of poetry.
[00:12:21] And poetry meant, in that day, inspired verse, scripture.
[00:12:27] And that is really how religions became mysteries and mysteries became philosophies.
[00:12:36] And the central theme in all of those philosophies is the divine self.
[00:12:45] Is that I don't really distinguish between God and me.
[00:12:49] And I'm an emanation of God in my inmost self.
[00:12:54] Now, my body may be, you know, a prison.
[00:12:57] A carcass.
[00:12:59] A corpse.
[00:13:00] Right.
[00:13:00] But the inner self, that inner light is always shining.
[00:13:04] That's the theme that I'm tracing.
[00:13:07] And it's been really interesting.
[00:13:10] I really think it helps to understand that this phenomenon of spiritual but not religious really isn't new.
[00:13:18] Right.
[00:13:19] It's just another revival.
[00:13:22] It's another eruption of the natural religion of the West.
[00:13:28] Christianity is not the intrinsic faith of the West.
[00:13:34] Christendom has always existed kind of as a city built on top of the stream flowing beneath it.
[00:13:43] This thin patina of thin crust of Christendom, a stream rushing of this kind of Orphic myth of the divine self.
[00:13:54] And every now and again, you know, renaissances.
[00:13:58] It pops up as a geyser and washes over everything.
[00:14:04] So let me ask you this.
[00:14:06] These concepts, I mean, they sound like some kind of warped sort of bastardization of the imago Dei, right?
[00:14:18] In some of your research, were you seeing like, here's the thread of truth as we know it revealed through the scriptures, but then corrupted and broken down and then, you know, deemphasizing the one true God and really emphasizing the self over.
[00:14:37] Yeah.
[00:14:37] In fact, that's the way a lot of early Christian apologists approached it.
[00:14:42] You have on the one hand, good Christian apologists who were able to see, for example, the imago Dei and say, this is a bastardization of the imago Dei.
[00:14:52] This is the truth of the imago Dei.
[00:14:55] We're not a spark of divinity.
[00:14:58] We are creatures who bear God's likeness.
[00:15:03] We are his analogies.
[00:15:05] We're like God.
[00:15:06] We're not God.
[00:15:07] No part of us is God.
[00:15:09] But there's that truth.
[00:15:11] There's always a truth that Satan corrupts.
[00:15:15] Satan can't invent anything.
[00:15:17] He's not an artist.
[00:15:18] He's not a poet.
[00:15:19] Satan has really no talent.
[00:15:22] Original, yeah.
[00:15:23] Except to corrupt what God makes.
[00:15:26] Yeah.
[00:15:26] And so you have truth in every lie.
[00:15:28] Then you have some Christian apologists.
[00:15:32] They were trying to find that kernel of truth, separate it from the error.
[00:15:38] But instead, they tended to assimilate the truth of Christianity to that error.
[00:15:47] And so that's always been a challenge for Christian apologetics.
[00:15:53] Always been a challenge.
[00:15:55] You know, you want to understand and exegete your culture and reach it and find those bridges and say, well, here's what you're really after.
[00:16:06] This is what you're saying you believe.
[00:16:07] But here's what you're really after.
[00:16:09] But the danger in doing that is always that we can actually end up doing the opposite.
[00:16:19] Instead of clearing away the brush of error to reveal the truth, we just assimilate the truth to error.
[00:16:26] And we face that in defending the faith all the time.
[00:16:31] We want to reach the lost.
[00:16:33] We want to reach those who don't understand the Word of God.
[00:16:36] And sometimes we bend over too far and fall in.
[00:16:44] Can you give us some modern examples of where we're seeing that play out?
[00:16:49] Well, I think, you know, for example, there's a wonderful truth that the Holy Spirit indwells us.
[00:16:58] And that the Holy Spirit illumines our hearts, regenerates us, and illumines our hearts to understand His Word.
[00:17:06] Okay?
[00:17:07] He's not a part of me.
[00:17:08] He indwells me.
[00:17:10] He is qualitatively different than my soul or body.
[00:17:15] Right.
[00:17:15] He's not a part of me.
[00:17:16] But He indwells me.
[00:17:18] Yes.
[00:17:18] But you hear a lot of Christians talk about the Holy Spirit as if He's an it, a force.
[00:17:26] People confuse the Holy Spirit with their own spirit.
[00:17:29] Yeah.
[00:17:30] You know, and they'll say things like, yeah, well, my voice within.
[00:17:35] And you say, what is a voice within?
[00:17:38] The Holy Spirit doesn't speak new words.
[00:17:41] Right.
[00:17:42] The Holy Spirit turns the light on.
[00:17:45] Yeah.
[00:17:45] So that we can understand and accept the external work.
[00:17:50] Right.
[00:17:50] The Word that comes to us from the outside.
[00:17:53] Right.
[00:17:53] And I'm not talking about liberal Christians.
[00:17:55] That's...
[00:17:56] Right.
[00:17:56] I'm talking about a lot of evangelical Christians talk like this.
[00:18:01] They talk as if that inner light within can't be defeated by any argument from without.
[00:18:11] And how do you know?
[00:18:14] You know, why are you a Christian?
[00:18:15] How do you know that God exists and so forth?
[00:18:18] And people will say, well, I...
[00:18:19] They'll immediately go to their experience.
[00:18:22] Immediately go to their inner conviction.
[00:18:25] Yes.
[00:18:25] And then you say, what do you say to a Mormon who says, well, burning in my bosom?
[00:18:32] Right.
[00:18:33] I'm convinced.
[00:18:34] That could be too much barbecue.
[00:18:38] Nashville hot sandwiches.
[00:18:40] Kind of pull back.
[00:18:40] Yeah.
[00:18:41] That's not going to convince you, and it's certainly not going to convince anyone else that Christianity is true, that Christ is the way, the truth, and life.
[00:18:52] It's interesting, too, Jonathan, that 4% say they're atheists, and even they are not really atheists.
[00:19:02] But we spend about 95% of our apologetics on atheists.
[00:19:08] Right.
[00:19:08] It's kind of astonishing.
[00:19:10] We really need to do a lot more work thinking about how we defend the faith in the face of this widespread phenomenon.
[00:19:21] Yes.
[00:19:22] Not spiritual, but not religious.
[00:19:23] Well, and that's why I think when we last had you on and you had mentioned you were doing this, that excited me because I thought to that exact point, you're right.
[00:19:31] Our apologetics tends to be to the person who's just with zero.
[00:19:36] But that's not true.
[00:19:37] And as I've just mentioned to you, so many of my encounters, including the person sitting next to me on the airplane, the person I meet in the park, the person who works at the restaurant or whatever, that language of I'm spiritual but not religious.
[00:19:53] So many of the artists and musicians who are out there and have a voice into a very wide sphere, that's a lot of the language of what they're saying.
[00:20:05] And again, I think there's moments where I think the evangelical Christian says, ooh, you know, hey, they're on the right path.
[00:20:11] They're understanding the spiritual realm and all this sort of thing.
[00:20:14] But I mean, Satan's in the spiritual realm.
[00:20:17] And so how do we articulate and understand origins?
[00:20:23] And I think, again, that's what your book is doing here.
[00:20:26] And then I'm assuming as you get closer into the modern era, that's going to help you in your conversationally as you do make a defense to be able to understand where they're coming from and then to articulate it well.
[00:20:39] Where the line of demarcation is between spiritual and following, you know, the Christian faith, what are those lines that create differentiation?
[00:20:49] Mm-hmm.
[00:20:50] This book has a lot of philosophy in it.
[00:20:53] It has a lot of history in it.
[00:20:55] Is it a philosophy book?
[00:20:57] Is it a history book?
[00:20:57] Or is it an apologetics book?
[00:21:01] That's a good question, Jonathan.
[00:21:03] I kind of looked to Amazon to tell me what kind of book it is.
[00:21:09] They're very good at that.
[00:21:10] That's your inner light.
[00:21:12] That's my inner light.
[00:21:13] Amazon, your inner light.
[00:21:16] They have the book in various categories.
[00:21:19] Comparative religion, history of philosophy, historical theology.
[00:21:25] And I think it is kind of all of those.
[00:21:28] It intersects with it all.
[00:21:29] And partly because the great philosophers of the past tell us, we don't have to just infer it, they tell us that philosophy grew out of religious mythology.
[00:21:43] Philosophy is the love of wisdom.
[00:21:47] And it's sort of an attempt to clarify and conceptualize what they think are truths expressed in allegorical ways in mythology.
[00:22:01] And that's the approach that you often see taken, especially, of course, by liberals to the Bible itself.
[00:22:08] That the Bible is mythology that nevertheless tells the truth.
[00:22:17] So, for example, the resurrection of Jesus.
[00:22:19] He didn't rise bodily.
[00:22:21] His body is somewhere in Israel, decomposed.
[00:22:28] But the Easter experience is totally real.
[00:22:32] You know, the turning of the page, the new life, the new possibilities.
[00:22:37] You know, when you hear those sermons on Easter, instead of Jesus Christ is raised and so we will be raised bodily with him.
[00:22:47] Right.
[00:22:48] And glorified.
[00:22:48] Right.
[00:22:49] Then you, you know, see the same tendency to turn the Bible into a collection of philosophical dogmas instead of a historical announcement.
[00:23:02] Right.
[00:23:03] And it's those philosophy departments have infiltrated the seminaries to a large extent.
[00:23:09] Well, yeah, I mean, we can't do theology without philosophy because so much of Christianity, especially, you know, philosophy has been helpful against the heretics.
[00:23:21] When you say that, okay, so Trinity isn't in our concordance, the word Trinity.
[00:23:27] Right.
[00:23:28] But we know from the whole teaching of the Bible that there is one God, but the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God.
[00:23:38] That's right.
[00:23:38] But there's one God.
[00:23:39] Right.
[00:23:39] So, we know there are three persons who are God, but there's one God.
[00:23:45] Okay, that can be simply said to the guy at the car wash.
[00:23:49] But when you have people who are really sophisticated using philosophy against that, then you need to find philosophical terms to oppose that.
[00:24:02] And so, theology has done that.
[00:24:06] Philosophy isn't evil.
[00:24:08] Philosophy isn't bad.
[00:24:09] It's like technology.
[00:24:11] You know, it's what we do with it.
[00:24:13] Right, exactly.
[00:24:14] And theology, theology can be dangerous.
[00:24:18] Bad theology is the worst kind of threat.
[00:24:23] Right, exactly.
[00:24:24] It's mainly been an inside job, Jonathan, I have to say, along those lines, it hasn't been philosophers who have corrupted Christianity as much as theologians throughout the ages who have capitulated to these.
[00:24:39] And all the way back to, you know, doesn't Paul warn the Colossians?
[00:24:44] Right.
[00:24:45] About vain philosophies, corrupting the gospel?
[00:24:50] Instead, he says, take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.
[00:24:55] We bring down strongholds with arguments.
[00:24:58] So, it's not that we're fideous, we just believe, you know, just because we believe.
[00:25:03] Right.
[00:25:04] We believe because of reasons and arguments.
[00:25:07] Right.
[00:25:07] It's a logical faith.
[00:25:09] It's a logical thing.
[00:25:10] And people place Christianity in the same category as religion generally.
[00:25:16] I remember years ago, I had part of a weekend conference deal with a panel with Bill Nye, the science guy.
[00:25:27] And it was on religion and mostly non-Christians.
[00:25:31] It was a mixed group.
[00:25:33] But mostly non-Christians.
[00:25:34] And he, you know, loved debunking religion.
[00:25:37] It's all myths and spurious claims to miracles.
[00:25:43] There's a kernel of history in it.
[00:25:45] And then it just grows like the big fish story.
[00:25:47] The further it goes out, the greater the time elapses.
[00:25:51] Fish gets bigger and bigger.
[00:25:53] And he did all, you know, all of this sort of generalizing.
[00:25:56] And then it came to me and I said, well, I agree with most of what Bill said.
[00:26:02] Debate over.
[00:26:05] He expressed a little shock.
[00:26:07] And I said, but can I talk about the resurrection of Jesus?
[00:26:12] And so, then I went through arguments for the resurrection.
[00:26:16] And he tackling all of his criticism, how that doesn't fit with anything you've said about religion.
[00:26:24] And at the end, I said, Bill, would you like some?
[00:26:29] I have footnotes that I didn't use.
[00:26:31] You're a scientist.
[00:26:33] You know, I can give you arguments, footnotes and so forth.
[00:26:37] And no, no, I'm not interested.
[00:26:41] And I said, okay, just remember this day when you said, as a scientist, no to investigating facts.
[00:26:53] And decided to go with your own inner will.
[00:26:58] And that was the end of that.
[00:27:00] Unfortunately, we didn't have any further contact.
[00:27:02] But I really think that that's what happens also sometimes for Christians.
[00:27:09] That it's just a sheer act of inner will.
[00:27:14] And people don't know why.
[00:27:17] There's something outside of them to believe.
[00:27:21] Of course, we believe the truth affects us inwardly.
[00:27:25] But it comes to us from outside of us.
[00:27:29] Nothing in me.
[00:27:31] As Paul says, there's nothing good that dwells in me.
[00:27:36] Deep down, she's a really good person.
[00:27:38] I know she killed a few people.
[00:27:40] But deep down, she's a really good person.
[00:27:43] No, the deeper you go, the dirtier it gets.
[00:27:45] That's right.
[00:27:46] The heart is desperately wicked and who can understand it?
[00:27:50] That needs to be dealt with.
[00:27:52] Yeah.
[00:27:52] And you can't deal with it yourself by tinkering with something inside of you.
[00:27:57] You have to have an external gospel of an external Jesus outside of us 2,000 years ago.
[00:28:03] Somebody asked me, you know, when were you saved?
[00:28:06] And I said, 2,000 years ago, outside the center city of Jerusalem.
[00:28:10] Weren't we all?
[00:28:11] Yeah, it doesn't mean I don't believe that the Holy Spirit creates faith in my heart through the preaching of the gospel.
[00:28:16] But he comes to us from outside to save us from the inside out.
[00:28:22] Yeah.
[00:28:23] And it has to be external.
[00:28:25] We can't fix ourselves.
[00:28:27] I've heard you mention that just in your research of all this, you've sort of had your mind blown kind of a number of times.
[00:28:35] I wonder if you could just give us a little bit of insight into a couple of those moments where you just had this sort of like, aha.
[00:28:42] Sure.
[00:28:43] Well, I can mention one at the beginning and one at the end.
[00:28:47] One at the beginning is the extent to which Socrates, Plato, Hermenides, all these great thinkers were mystics.
[00:28:57] They said they were.
[00:28:59] We don't have to infer that.
[00:29:00] They said they were.
[00:29:01] They said they were Orphics.
[00:29:04] This Orphic mysticism.
[00:29:05] They depended on the writings of these Orphic philosophers.
[00:29:11] And the idea of the divine self within and everything we associate with Plato's theology, that is something he inherited.
[00:29:20] Not only from Socrates, but from Pythagoras and going all the way back to that revolution.
[00:29:27] And so that has surprised me, the extent to which we think the most rational people in our Western heritage were also mystics.
[00:29:40] That rationalism and mysticism actually are two sides of the same coin.
[00:29:45] And then more recently, this is in my third volume, the extent to which scientists today are spiritual but not religious.
[00:29:54] To the extent to which so many scientists say that they are materialists.
[00:30:00] Yeah.
[00:30:01] But they believe that the material world is moved.
[00:30:07] Supernatural.
[00:30:08] Or moves itself.
[00:30:09] Yeah.
[00:30:09] By some spiritual entity.
[00:30:11] So that they're not really materialists.
[00:30:14] They're spiritualists.
[00:30:16] Right.
[00:30:17] The material world kind of has its own spirit.
[00:30:21] Right.
[00:30:21] And you get that again and again.
[00:30:24] And I have a lot of quotes there.
[00:30:26] It's interesting that there was a basically summer camp for New Agers, you might call it, in the Alps, the Swiss Alps in the 1930s.
[00:30:39] And people would gather there to talk about Gnosticism, reincarnation, Jewish Kabbalah, all these radical mystical movements.
[00:30:52] And who were there?
[00:30:55] Well, people like Heisenberg, Trilling, Gerdel, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Mercier Eliade, one of the most important scholars of, one of the founders of the study of comparative religion.
[00:31:14] In other words, you go down this list, many of the founders of these disciplines were deeply involved in the occult.
[00:31:22] That has surprised me.
[00:31:24] Spiritual but not religious.
[00:31:26] Deep phenomenon among those in science.
[00:31:30] Very, very, very few people I've been able to come across are really, truly atheists.
[00:31:37] Yeah.
[00:31:38] In the scientific community.
[00:31:40] Well, I think it's such an excellent work.
[00:31:44] I think it's going to help people to understand, truly, their next door neighbor, the person in the seat next to them on the airplane or the train.
[00:31:54] And so, Shaman and Sage, the roots of spiritual but not religious in antiquity.
[00:31:59] Michael Horton, we're so grateful for you to take the time to be with us on Candid Conversations.
[00:32:05] Thank you, Jonathan.
[00:32:06] And I really appreciated it.
[00:32:09] Candid is a podcast from Leading the Way with Dr. Michael Youssef.
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