Paganism Seen Ruin of Western Civilization

A noted evangelical theologian says Western civilization, nurtured by biblical notions of moral absolutes, purpose and ultimate triumph over evil, is now wallowing in a swamp of neo-paganism.

“The spirit of paganism has become deeply entrenched in the cultural enterprise,” says the Rev. Carl F.H. Henry. “We are involved inevitably in a controversy over the gods.”

He says modern naturalism, abetted by a “scientific world-view,” nullifies the classic concept of one universal God over history, but concedes functional usefulness for “multiple, non-existent gods.”

“It allows Christianity no credentials superior to the legendary and mythological gods of the Babylonians, Greeks or Romans, no more metaphysical legitimacy than Hinduism or Taoism,” he says.

The shift shows itself, he notes, in the so-called “emerging religious pluralism” with its numerous cults and “new age” gods.

Henry, of Arlington, Va., who rotates teaching at various colleges and seminaries and is the author of a six-volume opus, “God, Revelation and Authority,” spoke at a recent summit conference of evangelical intellectuals.

“The West has lost its moral compass” and sinks in neo-pagan naturalism that says “nature alone is real, that man is essentially only a complex animal, that distinctions of truth and good are temporary and changing,” he said.

Henry said this reducing of reality to “impersonal, purposeless processes” and man to the “accidental product of a cosmic explosion” who himself “defines and redefines” good, leaves ethical standards in shambles.

It undercuts the Judeo-Christian concepts upholding durable imperatives toward good, the sacredness of life, universal human rights, concern for the poor and weak and divine purpose in nature and history, he said.

“Secular humanism has sacrificed the metaphysical realities that make sense of moral absolutes,” and yet it illogically affirms “certain absolutes despite their incongruity with naturalistic presuppositions.”

It is a “cut-flower phenomenon,” he said, that has been unable to divest itself wholly of Judeo-Christian underpinnings.

The conference was held in June at the Billy Graham Center of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill., under sponsorship of the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies and the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals.

Henry, a Baptist, said the “scientific world-view” rejects divine biblical revelation and sees “neither design in nature nor purpose in history.” He added:

“At the same time, scientism is hospitable to Asian religions that reject a Creator-creation distinction and encourage the theory that all religions are essentially one.”

Henry said repudiation of divine purpose in reality leads “people to play gods themselves,” bringing the “blight of meaninglessness” that plagues Western culture.

“The sacrifice of a personal and purposive Creator and Sustainer of the universe led to new cosmologies that left unsure man’s substance and status in the cosmos,” he said.

“The deletion of divine activity and goal exposed history and nature to unbridled speculation ... about their inherent futility.”

He said naturalistic humanism, while sharing atheism’s disbelief in any divine reality, nevertheless accords various mythological religions a practical usefulness in integrating the “beleaguered human ego.”

“While humanism is embarrassed by the biblical condemnation of other religions, neo-paganism invites enthusiasm over them,” he said. “It champions the inexhaustible fruitfulness of the myths.”

Likening the situation to ancient Greece and Rome, he said, “The issue was not whether religious sentiment is true, but whether religious feelings are useful.”

He cited current “emphasis on the social utility of religion, the secular holiday revelry and commercializing of religion, the preoccupation with health more than with the afterlife, the breakdown of morality among religious professionals and the intolerance of absolutistic religious claims.”

“Today the prospect of an upsurge of religious life on a colossal pagan scale reemerges in the West. It looms as a special possibility in the United States where all contemporary religious contenders maintain a presence.

“It is highly probable that in the world of tomorrow Christianity will need to fend for itself either in a secularized social milieu of intellectual atheism that empties the churches or in a society where a religious sense of many coexisting gods saturates civic culture as it did in ancient paganism.”

In that case, he said, “Christian orthodoxy will be charged anew with intolerance”--as in ancient Rome--”because to deny everyone else’s gods violates public piety and its approval of the plural gods.”

Facing that prospect, however, Christianity must clearly challenge both the neo-pagan “mindset and willset” and the “scientific empiricism” that claims sensory observation is the only way of knowing, Henry said.

“We remind a scientistic society that modern science owes its very life not to the Greek philosophers or to Chinese, Indian and Egyptian sages, but to biblical theism that affirmed human responsibility in nature and the linear view of history.”