HavenMage wrote:
Aww, the post left out this little gem from the article:
"Post-Christian paganism is, first and foremost, a search for an escape from God. It is a hunt for the blessings of heaven without the trouble of submitting to heaven. As such, it is ordered toward unreality, though much hampered in the pursuit by the work of the Holy Spirit."
Anyone want to take that on?
Not really...
I think it's worse in context:
Quote:
But that brings us to our second point: namely that paganism takes two basic forms — pre-Christian and post-Christian.
Pre-Christian paganism was, says philosopher Peter Kreeft, a virgin. Post-Christian paganism is, he adds, a divorcee. And that matters enormously because there are two basic reasons people ask questions: to find something out and to keep from finding something out.
Pre-Christian paganism was (for the most part) an attempt to find God. It was (as we shall see in our next discussion) often alloyed with all sorts of error and hampered by original sin. But the fundamental goal was a search for God. As such, it was ordered toward reality, though much hampered in the pursuit by the effects of sin.
He also seems to have no clue about modern paganism, and seems to be thinking at all the new age bunnies are 'real pagans'. Neopagans, to him, are people who do not see the dark and bad in the religions.
The next
segment (Anyone else realize it was a series?) is
more insulting.
Quote:
I used to be a pagan. Not a neo-pagan with phony stilted semi-Tolkienesque speech (“Bright blessings! Merry meet!” “An it harme noone do as thou wilt”). Nor was I an adherent of some recently minted group of Gaia-worshippers playing dress-up in their Society for Creative Anachronism costumes and pretending they are living by Ye Olde Religion like somebody from The Da Vinci Code’s central casting department.
No. I was a real pagan, which is to say, I was like jillions of other kids raised in American suburbia in the 1960s and ’70s, so remote from God that I didn’t even know it was God I was seeking.
Lets not forget a dig at atheists while we're at it!
Quote:
I was never an atheist because I didn’t have enough faith for it.
In his next
column, he talks about getting the gospel to the pagans...
Quote:
In other words, Paul recognizes that sometimes we are ignorant because we have chosen to be ignorant. Concupiscence darkens the intellect.
This brings us back to the distinction between pre- and post-Christian paganism. Pre-Christian paganism often is a search for God that results in repentance and the response to grace. In post-Christian paganism, we face something different: the deliberate search for something besides God and the attempt to return to the worship of the creature instead of the Creator.
That places the error far more deeply in the will than in the intellect.
The impulse to worship the creature seldom expresses itself these days in the crude forms of pagan antiquity.
There aren’t too many statue worshippers out there. But paganism is still as diverse as it was 2,000 years ago, and in many ways, it is now more resistant to the antibiotic of the Gospel.
That last line gets me:
There aren’t too many statue worshippers out there. But paganism is still as diverse as it was 2,000 years ago, and in many ways, it is now more resistant to the antibiotic of the Gospel. antibiotic has been hailed as a poor word choice for medicine. It literally means 'against life'.
Which is probably closer to what the gospel
s are.
<shudder>
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