Astrology and Christian faith: what the argument is about
Can someone who believes in God read a horoscope? Hardly anyone asks the question out loud, and it occupies a great many people all the same. The argument behind it is old and well documented; it can be followed through without taking sides.
What the churches say today
The clearest answer belongs at the start: the major churches say no. The Catechism of the Catholic Church counts the consulting of horoscopes as divination and turns it down. The Protestant offices for questions of belief and worldview arrive at a similar result by another route. The revealing part is the reasoning: the charge is not, in the first place, that astrology does not work.
Who is being asked
The charge proper is aimed at the fact that anything is asked here at all — in a place where, on faith's own understanding of itself, there is nothing to ask. This point carries the whole argument, and it is older than Christianity: the mockery in the prophetic books falls on the astrologers of Babylon, who have calculated everything and still cannot turn the matter aside. What is meant is not weak arithmetic, but that something created becomes the source of answers and occupies a place that faith has already given away.
The worry about responsibility is easier to grasp. If the sky fixes at birth how a person acts, then no one is good or bad for anything any more. A religion whose core is repentance can make little of that. Anyone who appeals to their configuration has already talked their way out.
The best-known objection comes from this corner. Augustine, who had gone into the matter himself as a young man, points to twins: two children come into the world almost in the same moment under almost the same sky, and their lives run far apart. Astrologers answer with minutes and degrees; to this day the objection has not been settled.
Why it was taught at the universities all the same
None of that made astrology disappear, not for centuries. It was on the university curricula, was part of the training of physicians and supplied the calendars by which sowing and treatment were timed. That was possible because a line was drawn — not between faith and science, but straight through the subject itself.
What aimed at weather, soil and body was allowed: the weather to come, the sowing, the course of an illness. What was not allowed was information about what a single person will decide. Against this second kind explicit prohibitions were issued several times, while the first ran on undisturbed.
The astrologers in Matthew's gospel
The other side likes to cite a single passage: the astrologers from the East who follow a star. As proof it does not amount to much. The text does not give their number — the three are a later addition — it does not call them kings either, and it says not a word about whether their craft is to be approved of. Anyone who cites the passage has shown that astrologers occur in the story. No more than that.
Tool or belief system
This is where the argument is decided today. The astrologer Liz Greene has called astrology a tool and not a belief system, and the chart a map. A map asks for no assent: you can use it, think it badly drawn, or leave it lying. There is nothing in it to believe.
The distinction holds as long as it is kept. It falls the moment someone asks a chart what they should do. Then it is no longer a map but an authority — and it is against authorities of that kind that the theological charge is directed, quite apart from whether there is anything in the readings.
What you can go by
If your faith matters to you and astrology interests you all the same, the situation is not hopeless. Two questions are enough as a test: are you receiving a description or an instruction? And does the decision stay with you, along with the responsibility?
Where the line runs for you is for no one else to decide, and this page does not try to either. What astrology claims about itself is on the astrology page; what a birth chart is put together from is shown by the pages on the planets and the zodiac signs.