In order to make good Christians, we must first make good pagans

[Ananias]

C. S. Lewis, in a letter to a friend:

"So much for the present situation. About remedies to the question is more difficult. For my part I believe we ought to work not only at spreading the Gospel (that certainly) but also at a certain preparation for the Gospel. It is necessary to recall many to the law of nature before we talk about God. For Christ promises forgiveness of sins: but what is that to those who, since they do not know the law of nature, do not know that they have sinned?…Moral relativity is the enemy we have to overcome before we tackle Atheism. I would almost dare to say ‘First let us make the younger generation good pagans and afterwards let us make them Christians.'"

What was true in the middle 20th century when Lewis was writing is even more the case now. Moral relativity is a symptom of a deeper malady: the inability of most Western people to grasp metaphysics of any kind, much less Christian natural law. The humanists trumpet that the Enlightenment drew everybody closer to the Rationalist ideal, but this is false. The modern embrace of "science" is a shallow cargo-cult kind of belief: airplanes and cellphones and computers might as well run on magic for all that common people truly understand of them.

The human race has elected (seemingly without exactly meaning to) a tiny technologically-savvy elite to do their thinking for them. But this elite is overwhelmingly atheistic and humanistic and is thus essentially incapable of transmitting metaphysics in any meaningful sense. They can tell you what and how all day long, but they cannot -- and will not ever -- be able to tell you why. It's not that no one cares what is "true"; it's that they don't know what is true. Many will reject the notion that there even is such a thing as "truth". Or worse still, that "truth" is different for every single person on earth, and depends entirely on personal situation and circumstances. Telling them that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life will only confuse them until they know what truth is (and isn't).

In the end truth is the only important concept, and Christianity is perhaps the purest distillation of this concept. But to accept Christianity one must have, at minimum, a pagan's understanding of a metaphysical reality to even grasp the fundamental concepts. An atheist is literally deaf and blind to this reality.

So I think effective Christian outreach must proceed on an understanding that preaching the Gospel may not be enough at first. Many of the lost will need to be completely reoriented away from the stunted, shallow, hyper-literalist world they inhabit before they can even conceive of the truth of the Gospel.

 

[public hermit]

Many of the lost will need to be completely reoriented away from the stunted, shallow, hyper-literalist world they inhabit before they can even conceive of the truth of the Gospel

How might this reorientation be accomplished?

 

[dzheremi]

Well yeah. People long before C.S. Lewis recognized this, so I doubt it is a very modern phenomenon. See, for instance, St. Basil of Caesarea on the edifying use of pagan literature. St. Basil recognized (as St. Justin Martyr had before him, and surely others) that there is a metaphysical problem to be dealt with that places roadblocks in the way of receiving the Gospel, hence he writes (emphasis added):

Do not be surprised if to you, who go to school every day, and who, through their writings, associate with the learned men of old, I say that out of my own experience I have evolved something more useful. Now this is my counsel, that you should not unqualifiedly give over your minds to these men, as a ship is surrendered to the rudder, to follow whither they list, but that, while receiving whatever of value they have to offer, you yet recognize what it is wise to ignore.​

+++

This concerns the reception of knowledge, and the problem is as you've stated that there are very few people equipped to do their own thinking. Call it the zeitgeist or whatever you wish, it is distinctly disfavored these days that anyone should learn anything from the ancients, either Christian or not (though to the extent that they are presented as sources of wisdom, it is socially favored in the west that they not be Christian, as the west has a kind of oikophobia whereby what is from outside is better, and what is 'native', if it is even appropriate to call anything that anymore, is uniformly bad).

Pair this with a renewed interest in reimagined/reconstructed ancient, pre-Christian religions and of course foreign religions like Islam or Buddhism (to the extent that most people have any interest in religion at all), and you get this exact situation: pagan mindsets, but without even the necessary foundation to see the wisdom in the likes of St. Basil or C.S. Lewis (since at least in St. Basil's time it was customary to receive a classical Greek education alongside Christian catechism), as they have not been trained by their newly-adopted pagan metaphysics in how to think, and of course the idea that anyone or anyone should train people smacks of heavy-handed religiosity. But they are nevertheless being trained not any less than we are, just with far shakier foundations due to the persistent inability of modern western societies to cope with truth. (Thanks, Foucault et al.)

 

[Ananias]

How might this reorientation be accomplished?

I generally approach it in this way.

Me: "Do you love your mother?" (Or wife, child, etc.)
Unbeliever: "Sure I do!"
Me: "How do you know?"
Unbeliever: *confusion*

Do you love your mother because she does things for you? Or do you love the things she does for you? Do you always love her, or just sometimes? Do you ever get angry at your mother? Frustrated? Do you even hate your mother? (Some people do, or claim to.) Can love and anger, even love and hate, exist in you towards the same person at the same time? If so...how does that work, absent some kind of metaphysics?

What this illuminates is the concept of love, and what it means. There is no such thing as a literal definition of "love" -- it is wholly a metaphysical concept. Trying to nail it down to a literalist, rationalist, non-metaphysical definition ends up with a transactional relationship based on mutual benefit (i.e., I love my mom because she feeds me and buys me clothes and puts band-aids on my scraped knees; she loves me because I carry on her genetic legacy). This isn't love as nearly everyone understands it, but this is where atheists almost inevitably end up.

The same thing happens when you discuss concepts like honor and virtue. There is no literal definition for these concepts; they are necessarily metaphysical. They cannot be expressed in a meaningful way absent metaphysics.

So you work on getting an atheist to accept that concepts like "love", "honor", and "virtue" are true but not literal. These concepts have no direct reference to material reality; they are not merely (or even at all) social constructs or cultural habits of mind. These concepts exist in all human cultures the whole world over (albeit not with the same meanings). We can argue meanings as a second-order discussion, obviously, but the primary discussion has to be on the necessity of metaphysics in any discussion of "truth".

Once the seeker accepts metaphysical concepts like "love", "virtue", and "honor" as truth (whether in the Christian or merely pagan sense), you can then move on to actual Christian theology.

 

[Ananias]

But they are nevertheless being trained not any less than we are, just with far shakier foundations due to the persistent inability of modern western societies to cope with truth. (Thanks, Foucault et al.)

Well, sure. Thomism in the RC church is heavily based on Aristotelian philosophy; there is quite a lot of the Stoic philosophy simmering in the epistles of Paul (whether intentional or no). Platonism, especially the notion of perfect forms, prefigures Christian notions of the perfection of the Godhead. But as a Christian I argue that God worked even through the pagans to prepare the ground for Jesus Christ.

The main problem with post-modern "philosophy" is that it isn't philosophy at all (philo = love, affinity; sophos = wisdom). The post-modernist critique of modernism is that nothing is "true" or "correct"; it's all just an individual internal dialectic that exposes itself in power struggles with other individuals. This is the very core of the modern intersectional feminism movement, in fact. It's not that we disagree on what certain words or concepts mean (i.e., what truth is). The post-modernist simply rejects the whole notion that there is such a thing as truth. Post-modernism rejects philosophy (whether ancient or modern). This is a particular legacy of the Marxist "Frankfurt school" academics (though ultimately more Hegel than Marx in my opinion).

So if you want to bring this sort of person to Christ, your first task must be to prepare the mental soil and clear out the post-modernist trash.

EDIT: Tightened up the text a bit.

 

[Ananias]

@dzheremi, your Tertullian quote was very well chosen, because Tertullian apprehended a danger in reading the pagan philosophers. That is to say, knowing what is real spiritual food and what isn't. The ancient sages all had wisdom to impart, but unwary students are led into serious error if they imbibe pagan "wisdom" without a teacher nearby. I treat pagan philosophy the way I would treat a loaded gun: a necessary tool in some situations, but incredibly dangerous in untrained hands.

 

[dzheremi]

That wasn't Tertullian; that was St. Basil of Caesarea. It's just hosted on the website tertullian.org.

 

[Gole]

I generally approach it in this way.

Me: "Do you love your mother?" (Or wife, child, etc.)
Unbeliever: "Sure I do!"
Me: "How do you know?"
Unbeliever: *confusion*

Very salient on the personal level, but I think the question public hermit asked is broad and should be answered broadly as well.

I can't speak to when it started, but when I was growing up 30-40 years ago, there was a movement of Christians away from operating in secular areas. I'm not saying it started then or that it ended. I am only saying that is when I became aware of it. The points to underpin or justify this move away from the secular was that "we are supposed to be in the world, not of it," "Satan is g-d of this world, and we shouldn't have anything to do with it," or my personal favorite "Being in the world will draw you away from G-d." Various scriptures were used to support these views. They aren't hard to find with a search engine.

The problem is that when we withdraw from the secular and cloister amongst our Christian schools, hang with our Christian friends, and only support Christian things, and then we are no longer salt and light to the world (Matthew 5:13). We are no longer a preserving agent in the world. We are no longer illumination to those living in darkness. I say this to no-one's condemnation except my own.

The solution:

• We have to live lives of service to all, believers and non-believers alike.
• We must be prepared to make a sound defense of our faith to those who do not know us or our faith
• We must be prepared to go into fields and make a defense of our faith without just screaming "John 3:16" at someone.

There is, without a doubt, more, but this is a start.

 

[Ananias]

That wasn't Tertullian; that was St. Basil of Caesarea. It's just hosted on the website tertullian.org.

I'm a dummy -- not only did I fail reading-comprehension, I've got my Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers right on the bookshelf! (This tells me I need to go back and start re-reading the Fathers.)

 

[Ananias]

I can't speak to when it started, but when I was growing up 30-40 years ago, there was a movement of Christians away from operating in secular areas.

There was a book published way back in 1993 by David F. Wells called No Place for Truth that was basically a critique of Evangelical Christianity, and its (apparent) abandonment of actual theology in favor of what we might call "Christian theater". A large part of this book is a criticism of the post-1960's American Christian experience (Evangelicalism specifically, but all Christian churches more broadly). It deals with the rise of "charismatic" Christian expression, the retreat from "intellectualized" Christian faith, and the meteoric rise of the "seeker friendly" movement that was more about making Christian worship performance rather than teaching. All you have to do is read the hymnals from the 1920's and the 1990's to see where things were going...

Wells is basically saying that American Christians traded in Jonathan Edwards for Elmer Gantry.

There is truth in this critique (more than is comfortable, honestly) but it misses an important change: the decline of missionism as local outreach. Protestants have remained fairly zealous about foreign missions, but their dedication to missionism at home waned. I suspect this waning is due to the increasing secularization of American and Western culture, which I described earlier. Christians simply lost the ability to speak to secular Americans, and so reverted to a "pull" model (bring them into a circus tent and show them a spectacle!) rather than the "push" model (go out among them and make disciples).

We are now living through the effects of 50+ years of this kind of evangel(ical)ism: people who are only lightly-connected to their churches, and have almost no knowledge of actual Christian theology. (Seriously: ask your average Christian in the pews to explain the nature of the Triune Christian God. I can almost guarantee you that the answer will be heterodox if not outright heresy. That it comes from ignorance rather than malice almost makes it worse.)

Christians -- Protestants, Roman Catholics, or Eastern Orthodox -- need to re-embrace catechism and teaching of theology in a serious way. Getting the people in the door is only the first step, not the finish line.

 

[Tolworth John]

Trying to see a tree in a wood can be difficult.

What society needs more than anything else is Christians doing there jobs as Christians, according to the strictest understanding of the ten commandments that Jesus taught us.

How else are Christians going to stand out and start to change the world.


To make this clearer, we literally should not be stealing our employers time, paper, ink, electricity etc and we should be known for how we love even the most unlikely people, customers etc.