Book Review: Journey To Reality

It took me some time to discern how I feel about Journey To Reality: Sacramental Life in a Secular Age. On the surface, Zachary Porcu offers what appears to be a basic introductory text—accessible, clearly written, and inviting to readers who may be new to sustained theological reflection. The book clearly aims to serve as a guide for those unsettled by secular reductionism and hungry for a thicker, more meaningful account of reality. Yet beneath that accessibility lies a work that is philosophically rich and evidently well informed. Porcu draws confidently from a wide range of sources, and in many places the book genuinely resonates. His reflections on truth, his understanding of Scripture, and his instinct that reality is more than what can be empirically measured are thoughtful and, at times, compelling. The book succeeds in resisting the flattening tendencies of modern secularism and in inviting readers to imagine the world as charged with significance.

And yet, as I lingered with the book, my appreciation became increasingly complicated.

A central move in Journey To Reality is its appeal to a “sacramental” vision of existence. Porcu repeatedly gestures toward sacramentality as a way of holding together the spiritual and the physical, resisting modern dualisms that fracture reality into disconnected realms or flat-out reject transcendence. This instinct is right, and it draws from a deep and important stream within the Christian tradition. However, the book consistently conflates the sacramental with the enchanted, and this conflation proves deeply problematic.

It is not enough to define the sacramental as the belief that the spiritual and physical are united. That claim is far too abstract and, ironically, depends on the very dualism it seeks to overcome. Sacramentality is not a metaphysical assertion about how reality is structured; it is a theological confession about what God does and the event of God's coming to us in Jesus Christ. The sacramental tradition is fundamentally about God’s agency—God acting in, through, and with material reality for the sake of grace, liberation, and redemption. When sacramentality is reduced to enchantment, it becomes less a confession of divine action and more a posture of nostalgia. The world becomes “meaningful” not because God meets us in bread, water, bodies, and suffering, but because it feels mysteriously charged again.

This move subtly places the book within a romantic recovery project—a longing for a pre-modern imagination in which Christianity supposedly provided a shared moral and metaphysical canopy for Western civilization. This is based on a fictitious understanding of history, but the real problem is not simply historical naïveté; it is theological misdirection. The path charted by Journey To Reality is ultimately a path backward, toward an idealized and selective vision of Christendom, rather than a path forward into the concrete suffering of the world God loves. It gestures toward transcendence but too often bypasses incarnation. 

This backward glance sets the stage for deeper doctrinal concerns. Journey To Reality advances a theological vision that lacks a sufficiently grounded Christology and exhibits clear docetic impulses. Christ is emphasized primarily as the one who overcomes evil, restores order, and defeats corruption, while the significance of Jesus’ full humanity—his vulnerability, grief, and death—remains underdeveloped. Christ appears less as the one who suffers with and for the world and more as the figure who resolves its problems and provides cultural stability. Christianity emerges less as a cruciform journey of grace, humility, and solidarity with the vulnerable and more as an ordering ideology aimed at shaping society through virtue.

As a result, glory is preferred over the cross, sanctification is divorced from justification, and victory is separated from vulnerability. Salvation becomes a matter of moral or spiritual (though not intellectual) ascent rather than a gift received in weakness. Christianity thus comes to function less as a journey into service, sacrifice, and solidarity and more as an ordering ideology by which society ought to be governed. Rather than forming people in humility, dependence, and advocacy for the vulnerable, this vision aims to conform society to “Christian” standards and virtues.

In this sense, the book’s moral imagination is more Aristotelian than Christian. By “Aristotelian,” I mean an understanding of ethics oriented toward the cultivation of virtue for the sake of order, stability, and human flourishing. In such a framework, the task of religion is to form good people who can sustain a coherent and well-ordered society. Virtue is instrumental, excellence is measurable, and the good life is visible in social harmony. There is much that is admirable in Aristotelian ethics, and Christianity has long dialogued with it. But when virtue becomes primary, the scandal of grace is inevitably diminished.

Christian faith, by contrast, is not first a virtue project but a cruciform one. It begins not with human excellence or even with divine excellence, but with self-giving love. It is centered on grace rather than achievement, on solidarity rather than mastery, and on God’s presence in weakness rather than strength or glory. Sanctification is a category of justification. The cross does not simply motivate virtue; it redefines what counts as faithfulness. When order eclipses the cross and virtue replaces vulnerability, the gospel is quietly transformed into an ideology of governance rather than a way of life shaped by costly love.

These theological moves have unmistakable political consequences. While Porcu does not explicitly endorse Christian Nationalism, Journey To Reality functions as a subtle but powerful apologetic for a “return” to “Christian values.” What concerns me most is not the author’s personal commitments in this regard—those were not made clear—but the permission structures the book creates. A Christian Nationalist reading this text would not feel meaningfully challenged. They would feel reassured. The book affirms a vision of Christianity as something meant to guide, shape, and order society, rather than as a community called to accompany the suffering, speak truth from the margins, and bear witness through self-giving love.

This is what makes the book dangerous—not through explicit claims, but through the theological imagination it authorizes. It leaves intact the assumption that Christianity’s primary task is cultural formation rather than cruciform witness.

Ironically, while Journey To Reality is philosophically informed, it remains theologically naïve. This is especially evident in its treatment of Martin Luther, which is both revisionist and overly simplistic. Luther’s theology is reduced to a foil for the book’s larger narrative, stripped of its central claims about justification, the bondage of the will, and the cross as the definitive revelation of God. All the distinctive nuance of Luther's theology is evacuated. What is lost is precisely Luther’s insistence that God meets humanity not in strength or virtue but in weakness, failure, and suffering. What is lost throughout this book is the theology of the cross. 

There is much in Journey To Reality that I do appreciate, and I do not dismiss it lightly. The book raises real questions and resists genuine problems within modern secularism. Yet in reaching so confidently for transcendence, it risks losing sight of the crucified God who loves and serves the world and invites human beings to take up the cross and follow Jesus into that service and love. Porcu charts a path of glory rather than a path of the cross—and Christianity, at its core, is not about conquering death but about entering into it, suffering with the suffering, and awaiting God’s salvation there, by grace alone.