...to prepare the way for the re-evangelization of the spiritually exhausted West. So says the Christian theologian Peter Leithart, who says that at least good old-fashioned pagans understanding something about the world of spirit that postmoderns have forgotten. Excerpt:
When it arrived in the world, Christianity announced the end of sacrifice. But in its growth over the long centuries since then, it may have muted its own founding message, a victim of its own success. Does Galatians have much to say to people who have never worried about ritual contagion or the danger of contracting impurity from table companions? Does the Letter to the Hebrews resonate with people who have never seen a sacrifice, much less performed one? Can the New Testament speak to people who have lost all sympathy for primal religion?In Europe and North America, the Church faces an unprecedented challenge. American Christians don’t deal with paganism—not real paganism anyway. In the West, the Church is surrounded by the spiritual lethargy that accompanies a surfeit of wealth and aimless ease. We face a general accedia. Our neighbors are adherents of a sometimes jaded, sometimes gleeful, post-Christianity. The Church has triumphed over paganism before. But never before has she confronted a sophisticated civilization haunted by Christ.
Here, as on so many other questions, there’s much to be learned from Christians in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s a truism among African theologians that the Church has grown most rapidly where traditional African religions are strongest. According to Ghanaian theologian Kwame Bediako, this is no accident but highlights the “special relationship” that African “primal religions” have with Christianity. Like primal African religion, Christianity displays a strong sense of human finitude and sin, believes in a spiritual world that interacts with the human world, teaches the reality of life after death, and cultivates the sacramental sense that physical objects are carriers of spiritual power. Christianity catches on there because it gives names to the realities they already know and experience.
I imagine Franklin will have something to say about this...
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Ouch. We seem to be in that Twilight Zone of cross posting. :-)
I believe that I have a clear understanding of Christianity, and have come to that point after years of having a faulty understanding. I also think, to be fair, that my understanding will never be a complete one. I depend on people like you (and Erin and Cleveland) to offer to correct me.
My revealed vs. acquired comparison is one I've been working on for some years now. I believe that, whether faulty or not, that I have a clear view of Christianity as it is experienced by the masses of the faithful. I would submit, respectfully, that flaws are there because they belong there; one cannot expect the masses to understand, let alone need to understand, the questions and discussions raised by St. Augustine, Martin Luther or C.S. Lewis. Call it a lack rather than a flaw; I don't find that lack in need of criticism, per se.
Franklin said:
In case there is anyone who doesn't immediately recognize my pompous, longwinded style...
Slight change of direction - though I'm not sure anyone is listening anymore.
In the absence of "more pagans," what attracts converts wholesale to Christianity? Formerly-Buddhist, formerly-South Vietnam has experienced an evangelization since the victory of the North. People abandoned Buddhism and embraced a very energetic brand of Christianity even against the wishes of the communist authorities. There is no animal or human sacrifice in Buddhist practice, no spells, no embracing of darkness. Quite the contrary - the teachings are about keeping an open, loving heart in the face of adversity and not grasping and identifying with greedy or hateful ideas that pop into one's head. Yet convert they have.
What accounts for this? Any ideas?
After WWII, Japan experienced the "Rush Hour of the Gods" in which new religions or new versions of the old ones, sprang up to replace traditional forms.
These examples suggest that people abandon what they were taught when life circumstances deal a crushing blow, such that the people are ready to abandon/reject eveything related to the destroyed society. They may interpret the defeat as a message from the spiritual world that they needed to be chastened, that they were on the wrong path, etc.
On the other hand, why are formerly-Catholic Central American and soon-to-be-formerly-Catholic South American countries adopting evangelical protestant forms?
I don't think the pagan/Christian thesis holds water.
Ack, Elizabeth, you are giving me a flashback; as the underappreciated Chauncey Gardener remarked, "I have seen this before, Ben."
The countercultural generation of the '60s and early '70s rejected the perceived superficial, institutional culture of their parents (who embraced Fundamental Great Meaningful Things) and embraced Fundamental Great Meaningful Things--just different Fundamental Great Meaningful Things.
The generation that followed them embraced superficial, materialistic, consumer-driven "Greed Is Good", as if greed were a discovery like M-theory.
Those passing through this blog now embrace Fundamental Great Meaningful Things--albeit via global, cybernetic, high bandwidth blog with reference linkage ability, capitalized with the wealth of Imperial Rome, that would have made the Head Librarian at Alexandria simply detonate with wonder and disbelief. It's doubtful this telecomm plant capacity would accompany those adherents to their simple life during the coming Dark Ages, unless of course we understand those Dark Ages as somehow conveniently supporting and providing such capacity (albeit darkly).
Are we truly the users of this new cultural medium, using it instead of pursuit of good greed now once again in pursuit of Fundamental Great Meaningful Things? Or has this rekindled pursuit of Fundamental Great Meaningful Things merely become one more facet of a final, purely formal, consuming culture's endlessly reconsumeable content?
The old...is now new...is now old...is now new is...probably just cynical on my part.
The "formerly-Catholic Central American and soon-to-be-formerly-Catholic South American countries adopting evangelical protestant forms" are doing so because they are inherently more valuable to their new adherents, right?, not simply newly and differently valuable as consumeable product--as inherently more valuable as the turn to Orthodox Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity are to those embracing it from Protestantism an Evangelicism, who equally do not value it as simply new and different consumeable product.
When I went back and read Leithart's piece in its entirety, it called to mind another article from First Things from several years ago. This one is much longer and more detailed but it speaks to some of the same issues that Leithart's piece does.
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=533
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