Christ and Paganism

 

Before I came to faith in Jesus Christ when I was fifteen I became aware of a sect that maintained that the only true and faithful Christians left on the planet were those who belonged to their group.   It was difficult not to be aware of them.   They would periodically come knocking on everyone's door, armed with literature "proving" their distinctive doctrines, hoping to find someone who did not spot them coming and pull the drapes down before they arrived, and try to convert him.   I am referring, of course, to the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, better known as the Jehovah's Witnesses.  These disciples of Charles Taze Russell and Judge Rutherford, have revived the ancient heresy of Arianism (the idea that Jesus is not the Eternally-Begotten Son of God, co-equal and co-eternal with His Father and the Holy Ghost, as orthodox Christians believe, but a lesser divinity, the first created being) and blended it with a strong millenarianism (they have set dates for the Second Coming numerous times in the past, all of which have come and gone).   They are frequently designated a "cult" by evangelical watchdog groups who use this term to refer any Protestant separatist sect that deviates from Creedal orthodoxy in some way with regards to the Trinity or the Person of Christ.   One of the ways in which they consider themselves to be superior to orthodox Christians is that they don't celebrate Christmas - or Easter, any other holiday, or even their own birthdays.

 

Shortly after coming to faith I received literature from another such sect, the Worldwide Church of God, founded by radio preacher Herbert W. Armstrong.   They too rejected the Trinity and orthodox Christology, although at a later point they apparently recanted all of this, embraced sounder doctrine, renamed themselves, and joined the National Association of Evangelicals.   This had not yet happened at the time I am alluding to.   I first recognized that there was something off about their doctrine by the fact that they, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, had a major problem with Christmas.

 

I have, ever since, been strongly inclined to doubt the orthodoxy of anyone who professes a fervent Christianity but who attacks Christmas.   I am aware, of course, that there have been some to whom no specific error with regards to the Trinity or Christ can be attributed who rejected Christmas.  Oliver Cromwell is the most obvious historical example, but as Cromwell was a self-righteous Pharisee, a boorish Philistine, and a vile, treacherous, regicide who ruled as a tyrant over the people he had deprived of their lawful king through murder, this hardly raises my esteem of Christmas rejecters.

 

I have a colleague who is like this.   Pretty much every time Christmas and Easter roll around, he insists upon pestering me with annoying questions about why we are celebrating "manmade" holidays like Christmas and Easter rather than the ones God ordained in the Law.   No matter how many times I have explained to him that God ordained the holidays in the Pentateuch for a specific nation - Israel - and the New Testament is absolutely clear on the fact that the Church is not bound to keep the Old Testament feasts, that people are not required to become Jews in order to become Christians, and that the Church is free to set its own holy days (the practice of having a special assembly of the Church on the first day of the week, Sunday, in commemoration of the Resurrection, rather than the seventh, Saturday, the Sabbath of the Old Testament, is already in evidence in the book of Acts), it never seems to penetrate and he persists in thinking that he is like Jesus admonishing the scribes and Pharisees for setting God's commandments aside for manmade traditions.

 

The most recent such episode involved him trying to get me to acknowledge that Christmas was a "pagan" holiday.   While my response was to explain to him that the Church had already begun celebrating Christmas on December 25th before Aurelian proclaimed the Feast of Sol Invictus on the same date in the third century, and to get irate at being forced to have this same conversation over again, it occurred to me later, after I had cooled down, to contemplate what he and those like him think the word "pagan" means.   

 

Judging from the way such people use the word it would seem that they think "pagan" describes everything pertaining to the religion and culture of Gentile nations prior to their evangelization, that this consisted 100% of "manmade tradition", and that anything brought into Christianity from this source is an impurity that should be expunged because the Jewish tradition was the only pre-Christian tradition to have anything in it that was of God.

 

The irony of this point of view is striking.   Consider the passage in which Jesus denounces using man-made traditions to set aside God's commandments.   You can find it in the fifteenth chapter of St. Matthew's Gospel, the first twenty verses, and in the first twenty-three verses of the seventh chapter of St. Mark's Gospel.    Who did He address these words to?   Were they Gentiles?   Were they ethnic Jews who had abandoned Judaism to worship in the temples of the gods of Greece and Rome?

 

No, they were the Pharisees, a sect of Second Temple Judaism.   They were the sect, as a matter of fact, that was most rigid about keeping the Torah (the Law), insisting upon maintaining Temple-level purity in every aspect of ordinary life, which is where they were coming from in asking the question that promoted Jesus’ stinging rebuke.   More interestingly, they were the explicitly anti-Hellenistic sect.   Their origins go back to the immediate aftermath of the Maccabean Revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes, following his desecration of the Temple.   The flip-side to their insistence upon an ultra-rigid, formal, purity according to the Law was a demand for separation from all things Gentile and especially Greek.   They would have been the last Jews in the first century to have any appreciation for Philo of Alexandria.   In case the relevance of this has not jumped out at you, it was the sect of Jews who made it their crusade to keep Judaism unspotted from Greek influence, that were at the receiving end of the rebuke about substituting manmade tradition for God's commandments that is evoked every time someone takes issue with Christians celebrating the Birth and Resurrection of Jesus Christ in the absence of an explicit Scriptural command to do so.

 

It is interesting that the person who was most responsible for evangelizing the Gentiles in the New Testament period, St. Paul, was himself a former member of this sect and one who had been a particularly zealous Pharisee at that.  This same St. Paul is the one who brought the question of whether Gentiles needed to become Jews in order to convert to Christianity to the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem in the fifteenth chapter of Acts, and then became the foremost champion of the answer he received, which in short, was no.   It is a prominent theme in several of the epistles he would later wrote, and the main subject of one of them, the epistle to the Galatians.   In addressing the Stoics and Epicureans at the Areopagus, St. Paul took an apologetic and evangelistic approach that is the exact opposite of the “only Jews have ever had the truth, you goyim know nothing” approach that might be expected from someone with his Pharisaic background.   He borrowed their own shrine to the "Unknown God" to preach the True and Living God to them, even applying to Jehovah, lines the Greek poets had addressed to Zeus.

 

I shall have more to say about St. Paul in a moment.  First, I would like to briefly return to Oliver Cromwell, or rather than the Puritan movement of which he was a representative and leader.   These were the forerunners of all of these sects that object to traditional Christian feasts and festivals as “manmade” and “pagan” as well as of political liberalism (their party in Parliament developed into the Whigs) and leftism (the Jacobins, who perpetrated the French Revolution, and became the template for all subsequent leftwing revolutionary movements, including the Bolsheviks, themselves took their inspiration from the Puritan revolt against King Charles I in the English Civil War).   The most extreme – theologically – of them, also objected to the conventional names of the days of the week and of the months.   The grounds, of course, were that they take their names from pagan deities (Wednesday, for example, takes its name from Wotan or Odin).

 

If the Puritan reasoning were taken to its logical conclusion we would have to throw out the New Testament.   Repeatedly, the authors of the New Testament, writing in Greek, the lingua franca of the time, referred to the place the Old Testament calls Sheol as Hades.  It occurs mostly in the Synoptic Gospels and Revelation, although it also appears in the second chapter of Acts where it is used to render Sheol in quotations from the Psalms in St. Peter’s address on Pentecost.   It was the obvious word to use – Hades in Greek thought, like Sheol in Hebrew thought, was the underworld, the land of shadows, where the spirits of the departed went.   Where did it get its Greek name, however?

 

The answer is that the Greeks named this place after the god they assigned to rule it.   In Greek mythology, when the Olympians, the third generation of gods, overthrew the Titans, the second generation, the sons of Kronos who had been ruler of the Titans, divided the world between themselves, with Zeus taking the sky, Poseidon the oceans and Hades the underworld.

 

If it is wrong for Christians to call the fifth day of the week Thursday after Thor, then it must also have been wrong for the Apostolic writers of the New Testament to refer to Sheol by the name of the Greek god who got the short end of the stick.  Apparently the Apostles were not as fastidious about avoiding names with pagan associations as the Puritans would later be.   It follows from this that neither was the Holy Ghost Who inspired their writing.

 

Nor is this one isolated example.  A related one can be found in St. Peter’s second epistle, the second chapter, fourth verse, where he uses a verbal form of Tartarus to refer to the fallen angels being imprisoned.   Tartarus, in Greek thought, was originally the place where Zeus imprisoned the Titans, and later came to take on the idea of a general place of punishment for the wicked dead (Sisyphus and his stone, Tantalus with his ever-out-of-reach grapes, etc.)   St. Peter is obviously using it in a sense that corresponds with the original meaning of the term.   Although this is much rarer in the New Testament than Hades – St. Peter’s is the only use of the term, the abyss or bottomless pit that appears in St. John’s Revelation is a reference to the same concept or place – it is an example of a concept borrowed from Greek thought that does not really have a strong close equivalent in Hebrew thought, except perhaps Dudael, which was originally the place in the wilderness where the scapegoat was thought to end up, but in later Jewish thought a general prison for evil spirits, a usage not found in any of the books regarded as canonical by both Jews and Christians (it can be found in the Book of Enoch which, although quoted by St. Jude in the New Testament, is not considered canonical by the mainstream of either Judaism or Christianity, although the Ethiopian sects of both religions place a very high value on it).   The Greek name of this place, like Hades, comes from a god, one whom the poet Hesiod, Homer’s contemporary, assigned to the oldest generation of gods that preceded the Titans in his Theogyny.

 

Incidentally, or not, the word we generally use in English for both places or concepts is also the name of a pagan deity, Hel or Hela, the Norse goddess of death who ruled the underworld and was the daughter – not sister as in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – of the god of mischief, Loki, although it is debatable whether the Norse named the realm after the goddess or the other way around.

 

Again, it is quite evident that the authors of the New Testament did not share the Puritan – or Pharisaic as it would have been called in their day - notion that borrowing words and even ideas and concepts from the Greeks and Romans somehow compromised the purity of God’s revelation.  

 

Let us return now to St. Paul.   In the first three chapters of his epistle to the Romans, he makes clear the distinction between special and general revelation, both of which come from God.   He does not use these terms but the concepts are plainly there.   General revelation is how God reveals Himself to all people everywhere in His Creation.   This is what he is talking about when he writes in the first chapter:

 

Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; For God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.  (vv. 19-20)

 

Later, in the third chapter, he writes that the advantage of Jewishness was chiefly that “unto them were committed the oracles of God”.   This is special revelation, God speaking to people through His prophets with a specific message.

 

Note that the distinction is made in the context of an indictment against all people, Jews and Gentiles both, as sinners.   The Gentiles are rebuked in the remainder of the first chapter for turning away from the Creator to worship created images and for the moral decay that accompanies such idolatry, and the Jews are rebuked in the second chapter for the hypocrisy of glorying in having received God’s Law without obeying it, all of which comes to a head in the  general indictment “for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” which is immediately followed by the Gospel proclamation that we are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus”.  

 

One of the implications of this, that the nations have received the general revelation of God in Creation and Israel His special oracles, but that both have fallen into sin and that Jesus Christ is the Saviour Who brings the freely offered redemption of God to both, is that Christ is the fulfilment of both special and general revelation.

 

C. S. Lewis had clearly thought through this implication.   In response to the argument, common among anthropologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the Gospel message of the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ was merely another version of the dying and resurrected god – the corn king – that appears in many mythologies as a symbol of the death and decay of fall and winter being replaced by the renewing of life in spring, he argued that whereas in pagan mythologies the myth was a symbol of the reality that was the natural phenomenon, in Christianity the natural phenomenon was the symbol of the greater reality to be found in the death and resurrection of Christ, and that thus Jesus, by fulfilling the symbol meaning pointed to by the natural phenomenon to which the pagan myths pointed, was the ultimate fulfilment of the myth.   This and other related arguments can be found in the essays of his which were collected into God in the Dock.   It is a subject that was particularly meaningful to him in that it was J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson’s challenge to him to consider the Gospel as a “true myth” that brought him to faith in Jesus Christ.   Among the most relevant essays are “Myth Became Fact” and “Miracles”.   In the latter, which argues that God is always at work in the world in natural processes in ways we have become so accustomed to that we fail to see God in them and that the miracles recorded in Scripture consist basically of God doing the same things but “at a different speed and on a smaller scale”, revealing the Agent Who is at work in the ordinary processes.    In this essay Lewis wrote:

 

God creates the vine and teaches it to draw up water by its roots and, with the aid of the sun, to turn water into a juice which will ferment and take on certain qualities. Thus every year, from Noah’s time till ours, God turns water into wine. That, men fail to see. Either like the Pagans they refer the process to some finite spirit, Bacchus or Dionysus: or else, like the moderns, they attribute real and ultimate causality to the chemical and other material phenomena which are all that our senses can discover in it. But when Christ at Cana makes water into wine, the mask is off. The miracle has only half its effect if it only convinces us that Christ is God: it will have its full effect if whenever we see a vineyard or drink a glass of wine we remember that here works He who sat at a wedding party in Cana. Every year God makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase, and men, according to the fashion of their age, say “It is Ceres, it is Adonis, it is the Corn-King,” or else “It is the laws of Nature.” The close-up, the translation, of this annual wonder is the feeding of the five thousand. Bread is not made there of nothing. Bread is not made of stones, as the Devil once suggested to Our Lord in vain. A little bread is made into much bread…When He fed the thousands He multiplied fish as well as bread. Look in every bay and almost every river. This swarming, pulsating fecundity shows He is still at work. The ancients had a god called Genius – the god of animal and human fertility, the presiding spirit of gynecology, embryology, or the marriage bed – the “genial bed” as they called it after its god Genius. As the miracles of wine and bread and healing showed who Bacchus really was, who Ceres, who Apollo, and that all were one, so this miraculous multiplication of fish reveals the real Genius.

 

One of the books that C. S. Lewis claimed as a major influence on his own thought was G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.   Originally published in 1925 as a sort of response to H. G. Wells’ The Outline of History, it consists of two parts, the first of which gives a sort of overview of the pre-Christian history of the world, the second part of which looks at Who Jesus Christ was, and overall demonstrates why materialistic, rationalistic, and evolutionary accounts of both man and Christ such at that proffered by Mr. Wells are unsatisfactory. Throughout the book Chesterton presented mythology and philosophy as existing in a seemingly irreconcilable tension in pre-Christian paganism.   In the fifth chapter of the first part, “Man and Mythologies” he writes that “All this mythological business belongs to the poetical part of men” and proceeds to explain why a scientific account of mythology will miss the point completely, because it is all about imagination and the aesthetic point of view of the artist.   For Chesterton, as later for Lewis, mythology did not represent an inferior form of theology, because it was not of the genus theology at all: “A man did not stand up and say ‘I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,’ etc., as he stands up and says ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty’ and the rest of the Apostles’ Creed.”   In the chapter that follows this he begins the degeneration of mythology into superstition, black magic, and devil worship, noting that contrary to what is often assumed this was characteristic of civilizations grown decadent rather than primitive societies embarking upon civilization.   He then switches gears to discuss the Philosophers, who sought absolute and abstract answers to ultimate questions, and into which category he places not just people like Aristotle, but the founders of Eastern philosophical systems usually thought of as religions, such as Buddha and, especially Confucius.   In the fifth chapter of the second part, entitled “The Escape from Paganism”, he returns to the theme of this tension and maintains that in Christ and His Church, the mythological and philosophical are brought together and reconciled:

 

The Catholic faith is the reconciliation because it is the realization both of mythology and philosophy.   It is a story and in that sense one of a hundred stores; only it is a true story.   It is a philosophy and in that sense one of a hundred philosophies; only it is a philosophy that is like life.    But above all it is a reconciliation because it is something that can only be called the philosophy of stories….To sum up; the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of man offered salvation by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring tendencies of the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most certainly never satisfied together.   It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.   That is why the ideal figure had to be a historical character, as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical character.   But that is also why the historical character had to be the ideal figure; and even fulfil many of the functions given to these other ideal figures; why he was at once the sacrifice and the feast, why he could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the rising sun.

 

The position taken by Chesterton and Lewis could be summarized as this: Jesus Christ is the true and ultimate fulfilment of pagan mythology and philosophy just as He is the true and ultimate fulfilment of Old Testament Judaism.   Those who have inherited the Puritanical spirit of Oliver Cromwell, as he in turn inherited it from the Pharisees of old, will howl their outrage over this suggestion and claim that it is unscriptural, but it is implicit in St. Paul’s account of general and special revelation in the epistle to the Romans and explicit in his address to the philosophers of Mars Hill.   Obviously, this does not constitute an endorsement of the idolatry, immorality, or philosophical errors of paganism, all of which St. Paul rebuked.   After all, saying that Jesus was the fulfilment of the Old Testament hardly constitutes an endorsement of the arrogant ethnocentrism of the Pharisees, much less the errors of the other sects of first century Judaism.  

 

For all those who believe in Jesus Christ, as the Son of the True and Living God, equal to the Father and the Holy Ghost, Who became truly Man while remaining fully God in order to redeem all of mankind, and to fulfil all that God had revealed before through general or special revelation, there could hardly be anything wrong with celebrating either His birth, as narrated to us in two of the Gospel accounts, or His triumph over all of mankind’s enemies – sin, death, the devil, and hell – in His glorious Resurrection as told in all four of the Gospel accounts.   To claim that the celebration of either of these is “pagan” is absurd.   Yes, Christmas falls close to the winter solstice, as do the festivals of lights of all sorts of other religions such as the ancient Roman Saturnalia, the Hindu/Sikh Diwali (technically this falls about a month earlier but close enough) or, for that matter, the Jewish Hanukkah (which the Gospel of John records our Lord participating in even though it is “manmade”), but this is hardly grounds for objection.    The Book of Genesis says that God put the sun, moon, and stars in the sky for “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” and so it is hardly surprising that the different religions that arose out of the basic need to worship that God placed in human nature at Creation would often have festivals at the same time of year.   Ironically, those who dismiss Christmas as “pagan” are themselves guilty of what they accuse others of.   Pagan, in the Latin tongue, meant rural, rustic, and peasant.   It was a snobbish term by which the sophisticated, urban, elites of ancient Rome dismissed simple country folk.   If there was anything the Church borrowed from ancient Rome that it ought not to have it was this term with its associations of contempt for those who live on farms and in villages.