22AR27-24

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AR 27:24 - Pagan polemicists versus Christian history

In this issue:

CULTS - generating empathy for those who have who have "fallen into" a broad range of such movements

PHILOSOPHY - C.S. Lewis and Christian Platonism

WITCHCRAFT - the ill-informed "polemical approach of contemporary pagans intent on discrediting Christianity"

Apologia Report 27:24 (1,577)
July 7, 2022

CULTS

"A Podcast Taught Me That We're Probably All in Cults, and It's (Mostly) Fine" by Gabrielle Bruney (Jezebel, May 20 '22) -- "On Sounds Like a Cult <soundslikeacult.com>, hosts Amanda Montell and Isa Medina analyze everyday cults like Disney adults to multi-level marketing schemes." Bruney explains that "At the end of each episode, Montell and Medina evaluate where the topics at hand rank on their cult scale."

"Instead of offering another retread of Manson, Koresh, Jones, and their ilk, episodes analyze more familiar, less extreme, but still perplexing movements, from the cult of essential oils to the cult of Elon Musk worship. ...

"'I want to generate some amount of empathy for people who have fallen into groups that we subjectively think are extreme or crazy, people that we think are brainwashed, because it's the type of influence that can affect all of us. The type of group that will resonate with each individual is different,' Montell said, 'But the techniques of influence are more or less the same.'"

For background, Bruney adds that "Sounds Like a Cult isn't Montell's first entry into the world of highly controlling religious, spiritual, wellness, and social movements. She authored the book Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism <www.bit.ly/3Hh8gGi> last year, which examines the ways in which language is often used to create in-group loyalty, increase skepticism of outsiders, and disincentivize critical thinking. Montell does this through explorations of groups as varied as Heaven's Gate and CrossFit.

"Cults, Montell told me, tend to proliferate during times of upheaval, as familiar social ties fray and people seek out new forms of connection."

Actually, "Montell's interest in cults stretches back to childhood, as her father's family lived in the group Synanon - which began as a rehab facility and became an alternative living community eventually deemed by a court to have a 'policy of terror and violence' - for part of his adolescence. 'When I tell the story about how I came up with the idea for my book, I talk about how I grew up with this cult survivor in the family,' she says in a recent Sounds Like a Cult episode, 'And as I grew up I heard his stories, and I started to notice cult-like influence like that which he described on the compound, in places where you wouldn't otherwise look for cult influence.'" <www.bit.ly/3ztsomD>

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PHILOSOPHY

"What does Plato have to do with Jesus?" is the theme of the current issue of Credo Magazine (12:1 - 2022). Our readers will be interested in the feature article by Samuel G. Parkison (director, Abu Dhabi extension site, Gulf Theological Seminary, UAE): "It's All in Lewis, All in Lewis, Bless me! - The Resplendent Christian Platonism of C. S. Lewis."

Parkison finds that "the ubiquity of signs we can point to in an attempt to get an appreciative look at [Lewis'] Christian Platonism is so overwhelming, [that] mapping out a path forward can be difficult."

Christian Platonism is the "catch-all designation we give to the tradition that embraces central aspects of Plato's metaphysic and places them in a Christian context - which is actually their natural home." The early Christians "saw no problem whatever with taking insights from Greek philosophy in general - and Platonism in particular - and appropriating them in the Christian worldview. ...

"Lewis penetrated the imminent domain of modernity's suffocating malaise with an irresistibly beautiful vision of an enchanted cosmos. Most readers of Lewis are unaware that this is in fact what he is doing. They do not realize that in his chastisement of chronological snobbery - or his high praise of transcendent Truth and Goodness and Beauty, or his revelry in Christianity as the Myth-made-fact, or his embrace of Nature and metaphysical hierarchy, or his imaginative storytelling in children's fantasy novels - he was exploding the glass house of naturalism and erecting in its place a Christian Platonic cathedral....

"If real truth in pagan writings before the time of Christ could not harmonize with the claims of Christianity, this, for Lewis, would not be a sign of Christianity's superiority, but rather its deficiency." Lewis wrote that "it should (at least in my judgment) be made clear, that we are not pronouncing all other religions to be totally false, but rather saying that in Christ whatever is true in all religions is consummated and perfected."

Parkinson summarizes: "Lewis's Christian Platonism gave him a vision of reality that harmonized everything. ...

"This all-encompassing vision of reality is also what allowed Lewis to create such an expansive imaginative world for his Narnian books to inhabit. In his excellent book, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis, Michael Ward has convincingly demonstrated that Narnia's cosmology was essentially Medieval in nature [and] Narnia's metaphysic is essentially Platonic in nature." Parkison discusses this in great detail and concludes: "More important than calling Lewis's vision of reality a Christian Platonic one is the need to call it beautiful." <www.bit.ly/3QevDnI>

Those who visit the link for this edition of Credo will see other entries addressing Platonism and Christianity. Note the paper by Louis Markos (English, Houston Baptist University), author of From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith, published less than a year ago. <www.bit.ly/3HfFS77>

According to Publishers Weekly (Jun 28 '21), Markos "delivers an illuminating explication of the relationship between Platonic philosophy and Christian apologetics. His premise is simple: the works of Plato were 'inspired writings used by the God of the Bible to prepare the ancient world for the coming of Christ and the New Testament.' After exploring the cultural contexts of ancient Athens, pre-Socratic philosophers, and Plato's early dialogues, Markos engages in a detailed study of Plato's writings, among them The Republic, Laws, and Timaeus. To demonstrate the presence of Hellenic philosophy within Christian evangelism, Markos reveals parallels between Plato's Timaeus and the creation narrative in Genesis, connects Platonic ideals to the earthly and corrupted 'World of Becoming' and the heavenly 'World of Being' in the work of C.S. Lewis, and contends Plato's argument for the preexistence of the soul was a precursor to Christian conceptions of the Holy Spirit. Those interested in philosophical questions of what is true, good, or beautiful will find much to ponder."

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WITCHCRAFT

The June issue of First Things features a review of Queens of the Wild - Pagan Goddesses In Christian Europe: An Investigation, by Ronald Hutton. <www.bit.ly/3MM84j9> British historian and folklorist Francis Young, observes that "In spite of their disavowal of all religion, secular humanists often treat paganism sympathetically - to the point that it is now a cliché for the atheist to bait Christians with accusations that Christianity is an interloper religion with no ideas of its own, which simply took over pagan beliefs and festivals. It is not difficult to see that, for those who choose to weaponize it against Christianity, 'paganism' means whatever people want it to mean, and the imagined paganisms of popular culture bear little relationship to what we know of historical pre-Christian religion. ...

"For over thirty years, Prof. Ronald Hutton <www.bit.ly/3Hzo8UN> has been the leading scholar of the history of paganism, both ancient and modern. While Hutton's iconoclastic masterpiece <www.bit.ly/3ArNTok> The Triumph of the Moon (1999) essentially denied contemporary neopaganism any convincing claims to historical continuity, Hutton has always balanced his scrupulously polite eviscerations of neopagan wishful thinking with an insistence that the history of paganism nevertheless matters, even if the real history is not the one many of us expected. In his latest book, Queens of the Wild, ... Hutton returns to a key question posed in his work in the 1990s: Was there really any continuity or survival of paganism in the Christian Middle Ages?"

Hutton examines "four culturally significant 'goddesses' who have been considered 'pagan' at different times: Mother Earth, a personification of the entirety of nature; the Fairy Queen, ruler of a parallel supernatural world and, Hutton argues, a distinctly British phenomenon; the Mistress of the Night, a mighty supernatural woman who roved the night with an entourage that mortals could join; and the Old Woman, or Cailleach, of Gaelic tradition, a legendary woman of immense age who came to be associated with mountains and wild places. ...

"While the 'Murray thesis' of pagan survival appealed to a post-Christian academic world when the rejection of Christianity was still new and self-conscious, as scholars became accustomed to a secular, pluralistic society, the project of exposing the flaws of Christianity lost its urgency, thus permitting historians to adopt a more objective approach to the analysis of medieval popular Christianity. For the second and third generations of scholars for whom religion is often no longer a lived reality, nor even a component of their experience at all, there is no longer any incentive to favor or discredit one religion over another. ...

All four figures "are of particular interest to Hutton because they took on a life of their own, becoming figures of power with their own kind of agency in the collective cultural imagination."

Young adds that "Hutton shows that popular perceptions of paganism are sometimes still informed by an old historiography that advanced the idea of 'surviving paganism,' most notably in Margaret Murray's <www.bit.ly/3R9Nq05> 'witch-cult' theory.

"In the end, Prof. Hutton is left posing the question of whether the binary categories of 'pagan' and 'Christian' are adequate or useful at all for fully understanding the past or the present." Young concludes that the secular "polemical approach of contemporary pagans intent on discrediting Christianity and portraying the medieval world as pagan at heart does little to advance our ability to reconstruct the thought-world of the past." <www.bit.ly/3zxmoZV>

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