(RNS) — Four powerful and irreversible forces are rapidly transforming the Jewish and Christian worlds.

But many leaders in both communities are unable or unwilling to recognize these new changes. Such leaders, trapped in the past, risk losing real influence and relevancy and face the grim possibility of being tossed into the “dustbin of history.”

The first two forces relentlessly at work are demography and geography.
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For centuries, Europe and North America were the centers of Christian and Jewish populations and the sources of religious leadership. However, today most Christians reside in Central and South America, Africa and Asia while Christians in Europe and North America are older, and their numbers are declining or barely holding steady.

In his fifteenth book, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Professor James L. Kugel offers a theory to explain why ancient and modern peoples experience God in such profoundly different ways. He delivers a scholarly tour de force that is also accessible to the general reader.

Kugel argues that Abraham, Joseph, Moses, the Hebrew prophets, and other ancient people possessed a “semipermeable mind” that was receptive to seeing, hearing, and meeting the Divine Presence. He asserts that such contacts, which allowed for direct, personal contact with God, take place within the “fog of self,” a dream-like quality most modern people lack.

The Israelites of Scripture, he says, felt they were part of a collective entity open to experiencing the divine; in contrast, moderns tend to be a collection of spiritually closed individuals, ill-equipped to encounter God. Kugel laments that our biblical ancestors’ openness to-meet God attribute has shifted into “…oddly stunted and closed-off organs, which today are scarcely aware of their tiny opening to the Outside [God].”