Astrology and Christian faith: where the quarrel comes from

Is it all right to read a horoscope and still go to church? The question sounds harmless and is not. It occupied people in the fourth century, it appears in church decrees of the early modern period, and it comes up today in almost every longer conversation about astrology. This page carries the name of the astrologer Liz Greene; what is dealt with here is the quarrel itself and not the person.

What is at stake for faith

The theological objection has nothing to do with the scientific one. Whether a distant planet can have an effect does not interest it; it grants the point for the sake of argument and goes on to ask: what would then be left of the person, and what would be left of God?

Too little would be left of the person, runs the one answer: without the possibility of acting otherwise than laid down, there is no guilt, no forgiveness, no repentance – and Christian faith is built on those. The other answer has to do with rank. Anyone who checks with the sky before every decision orders their life by something that, on Christian teaching, is itself created – the confusion of Creator and creature. In the church texts this is the worry that weighs heaviest.

What the Bible says about it

Both sides find support there. In Deuteronomy a passage warns against being drawn into worship at the sight of Sun, Moon and stars. In the prophet Isaiah the astrologers of Babylon are mocked for not seeing the disaster over their own city coming. What that strikes at is the worship of the heavenly bodies and the swagger of those who promise to foretell everything – not the arithmetic.

Against it stands the best-known scene of all. In Matthew's gospel astrologers come from the East, follow a star and are not rebuked for it. What they did in technical terms the text does not say – which is exactly why the passage is usable by both camps. Anyone who reads it as a licence puts more into it than is there; anyone who passes over it strikes the astrologers out of the Christmas story.

Augustine and the twins

Augustine had gone into astrology seriously as a young man and rejected it later. His best-known argument is still in circulation: two children born shortly one after the other have practically the same birth chart and lead completely different lives. The reason he turned away lay deeper, though. Anyone who ascribes their faults to the heavenly bodies turns into a spectator of their own life – and where nothing can be laid to a person's account, there is nothing left to forgive.

Why astrology stayed all the same

It did not disappear on that account. It was taught at universities, physicians calculated with it, calendars were drawn up according to it. That was possible because two kinds of use were kept apart. Anything aimed at nature and the body remained unobjectionable: weather, sowing, seafaring, the favourable moment for a treatment. What was objected to was anything that set out to give information about a person's will and their future decisions.

That dividing line held for a long time. When the predictive craft was banned in the early modern period, the decrees expressly exempted farming, seafaring and medicine. The quarrel was never about the study of the stars as such, but about a particular kind of statement about a particular person.

How things stand today

The churches remain reserved to dismissive, but the reasoning has shifted. The charge of forbidden art has receded; more weight now falls on the objection that a second reading of the world is on offer here, one that answers the same large questions: where I come from, what is laid down for me, what I may hope for. To that is added a pastoral experience: anyone caught in a crisis easily becomes dependent on someone who tells them what is coming.

Much hangs on what astrology claims about itself. If it takes itself for a description of dispositions, a language for particular traits, the distance from faith is smaller than either side supposes; what a birth chart contains is set out in the overview on astrology. If it takes itself for a fixed timetable, the conflict is as sharp as it was in the fourth century.

That is for you to decide; no astrologer settles it for you, and neither does this page. The horoscopes show what worked-out interpretations look like.