29^th January 2018

A paper entitled “The Gospel for a Neo pagan culture.” by Carl E Braaten was part of a Conference held in Minnesota U.S.A. during the mid-1990s. While it was presented before some of the current issues now facing the Church it is still a telling analysis of trends enveloping the Church in Australia. This summary-comment of Braaten’s paper should alert and concern all thinking Christians in the Uniting Church.

While the Western world and Church has basked in the Christian heritage and cultural values derived from Judeo-Christian roots, like the frog in warm water that is slowly being brought to the boil, the church and our way of life is in danger of being cooked. This statement and analogy is not intended to introduce the latest world conspiracy theory or in some way to be extreme or subversive. However, it calls for an urgent willingness on the part of Christian people to adjust their body temperature, to be alert to the ‘spirit of the age’ and to ‘neo-pagan’ influences quietly penetrating our thinking to the point of now threatening what we know as orthodox Christianity.

While it must be clear that creative change is important and can be positive, a failure to discern the truth and to act or ‘jump now,’ leaves the church very vulnerable. Carl Braaten, supported by other contributors, contends that there is a re-emergence of pagan elements within the church that deconstruct core Christian beliefs. The focus here is not the threat from outside the church but from within.

In his introduction Braaten mentions three sociologists who have found that the majority of church members are “lay-liberals” who have no clear understanding of what Christianity is or why they are Christian. They vaguely know that it has something to do with belief in God and respect for Jesus and the Golden Rule.”

Braaten states that his paper arose, not for those who hope to remain neutral in the current “cultural wars” of our time. He is not seeking dialogue between contending parties. “The acknowledged context is a deadly conflict over what Evangelical Catholic and orthodox Christians believe about the Triune identity of God, salvation through Christ alone---, the oneness of the Church---, and the great commission.” p5.

In other words he is not promoting a discussion, he is making an important statement.

While we may attribute the decline of the main line church to simply lack of belief, many thousands of people in congregations have grown up into the secular thought patterns of our day with no clue of their ministers or leaders having any different Christian convictions. If the church is to regain its integrity and vitality it is stated that the church must address crucial issues for the gospel head on.

Patterns of thinking under the guise of progressive pluralism, generous multi-culturalism, feminist liberation and inclusive hospitality both permeate and threaten the core substance of Christian belief. A distorted view of the unique Divinity of Christ (Docetism) was typical of the experience of the early church, as was a Gnostic focus on selfism and freedom through special knowledge (1John 4:2-3, 2 John7, 1 Tim:3-16.) The thrust of Braaten’s paper shows how, unbeknown to many, today elements of these heresies attack the essential Biblical doctrines central to the Christian faith.

The Early Church recycled.

By suggesting that we are living in a neo-pagan context Braaten claims the American (Australian) church is a new mission field struggling for survival. Today we are replaying the struggles of the ancient church when within the fellowship of the church, unconverted, influential Gnostic’s distorted the gospel. In our time as early as the 1950s even Dr W. Visser’t Hooft, former Secretary of the World Council of Churches highlighted the blind denial of the church by saying that churches could not evangelise because they had not faced the renewed paganism that is the actual religion of those to whom the gospel must be spoken. The point is made that this was not an analysis of the health of an isolated part of the church. It was typical of the world-wide church.

In their paper, Carl E. Braaten and Robert W. Jenson provide the illustration of neo-paganism in the church by recalling a World Mission Conference that claimed to be a “Second Reformation.” A Sunday morning service was staged that explicitly worshiped ‘Sophia’ who was identified as the female face of the human psyche. (This deity was originally devised by Gnostic believers and was a reinvention of fertility worship.)

While this series of essays draws on American material I am aware of one Uniting Church at least in Melbourne where ‘Sophia’ has been used. It soon becomes obvious that this form of gender spirituality and experiential religiosity that claims to be ‘progressive’ and ‘freedom giving’ is typical of an Australian equivalent that violates the normal basis of historical Christianity. In Australia, the National Church Life Survey shows clearly that what has been termed ‘the culture wars’ finds all the churches conflicted on important issues and there is also widespread theological uncertainty about the triune identity of God, salvation through Christ alone, and Biblical authority/interpretation.

The Gospel for a Neo-pagan Culture.

With other futurists like Os Guinness, Graaten sees the church as comfortable and largely conforming to a progressive secularism and a return to paganism.

The church needs to identify all expressions of neo-paganism within its life. Three factors are essential to the gospel where this battle must be fought. 1. The importance of history in the Gospel. 2. The nature of Gospel as proclamation. 3. The function of dogma for the Gospel. The historical Jesus (Jesus of Nazareth). The proclaiming Christ (The risen Lord). The dogmatic confession equating Jesus with God. (God’s only begotten Son).

Graaten points out that the whole gospel of the Church rests on these three, inter-connected, Christological points. When one of these three points is removed or shortened in the life and witness of the church, the door of hospitality opens to a pagan spirituality. p9. The Gnostic form of thinking based on self-assured experience can never tolerate any of these three points.

(It was foolishness to the Greeks to believe God would choose to become a human being. It is an insult to human dignity and pride to teach that salvation must come from outside and that objective salvation comes through the Apostolic proclamation. It is also an intellectual affront to assert that the dogma of the church is the gift of the Holy Spirit and is liberation).

Danger Trends Today

The search for the Jesus of history has taken all sorts of twists and turns. The historical Jesus, the Word became flesh must always remain the starting point of Christology. The focus on the critical historical search failed to include kerugma (proclamation) and dogma (teaching).

A new quest then placed the emphasis on kerugma and dogma. History was bypassed. This opened the way for the entry of the heresies of Docetism and Gnosticism that highlighted freedom through knowledge, the inner spark of experience and self redemption.

For liberal theologians “Jesus own history came to a stop at the cross, as if the apostolic proclamation and church teaching did not provide a definitive disclosure of the identity of Jesus”.

One trend today comes with an emphasis and focus on God at the centre of the universe of faith. (debunking Christ) Christ is just one of many ways. This is the basis of feminist theology and the pluralistic theory of religions. Jesus is a good example, one of many world leaders, ---not a risen Lord or God-man of Christian dogma.

Braaten suggests that many current Christology’s are trying to equip the Church for its mission without the resurrection of Jesus or the divinity of Christ, trying to experiment/accommodate culture by a subtle modifying of the message.

While some within the Christian community pursue their own spiritual journey and believe in an “emerging universal fellowship in the spirit of love, (advocating the modification of marriage and gender) many do not understand the doctrines of the gospel to be true statements that happened once for all.”

Today a range of commentators clearly document this uncertainty of the church. It is not unusual for leaders to dismiss the historicity of the faith in a way that reduces history to a series of ancient stories, “to nothing more than a resource of symbols to stimulate kindred spirits”. There are increasing signs that when it comes to main-line churches in Australia; to what they believe and how they relate to secular society, they are divided. One part seeks to uphold historic Christian revelation, while others in the name of progress, adopt a culture-conforming, gospel.

The rich message of the cross is replaced with a consumer, Gnostic feel-good-message. In an attempt to be progressive and acceptable, “the relevant church is sowing the seeds of its own irrelevance and losing its identity to boot. Neo-paganism does not mean no religion at all. It means a different religion”.

 

The Gospel and Neo-pagan Culture’: Carl E. Braaten, Robert W. Jenson, Either Or, Eerdmans, 1995.

Reviewed by E.A. (Ted) Curnow, 2017.