Getting an Inkling about Romantic Christianity

I’ve been stimulated to do some research by seeing how powerfully the emergent church movement is sweeping through evangelical churches.

My first encounter with the influence of the emergent church was listening to a CD from the 2005 Mount Hermon Christian Writers’ Conference. The speaker, a representative of Word Publishing, was measuring Christian growth by comparing it to the movie The Matrix while at the same time exalting a book I hadn’t read called Blue Like Jazz. I was appalled to hear his enthusiasm for what seemed at the time like the kind of paganism I used to be involved in.

Around the same time, I also read a book by Brian MacLaren called A New Kind of Christian. Again, I was appalled by his approach and disturbed by his use of C. S. Lewis, and also by the interconnections with the Episcopal Church. For example, the hero of MacLaren’s book is a black man named Neo, like the hero of The Matrix, who’d gotten away from Evangelicalism and was enthusiastically embracing the Episcopal Church. I watched the video The Matrix and again was floored. This video was teaching paganism with a very few Christian associations. For instance, the heroine’s name was Trinity.

I was especially disturbed by all the associations with the Episcopal Church—especially its “renewal” form, which I had been involved with for many years through a variety of Episcopal churches on both the East and West Coasts and also by going to Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Pennsylvania. TESM was a really mixed bag, both a blessing and a trial. And I encountered two factors there that I also saw in Brian MacLaren’s book: the diminishing and relativizing of Scripture, and the exaltation of the occult and certain kinds of syncretism. For example, TESM’s pastoral psychologist was a Jungian. (Born to a Lutheran pastor, Carl Jung was a Gnostic psychiatrist who rejected Christianity and embraced many different kinds of pagan practices and philosophies in the guise of therapy. For details, see Richard Noll’s excellent book, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, Princeton University Press, 1994. Noll lectures at Harvard.)

And of course C. S. Lewis was unquestionably a major influence at Trinity and upon me.

While I was pondering all this, I found a Web site called Christianity and Romanticism (http://ic.net/~erasmus/RAZ38.HTM). I was startled to see a whole different aspect of Lewis and learn that he was really part of a definite intellectual and religious movement definable, at least in part, under the description Romantic Religion or Romantic Christianity. Lewis was part of a literary group called The Inklings – also part of the same movement – that met in his college rooms. He attributed to the Scottish writer George MacDonald the “baptism of his imagination” before he became a Christian.

This of course led to my attempt to read MacDonald’s books, Phantasies and Lilith, which according to Lewis were supposed to show his Christian imagination, but I was so repelled by the all-too-familiar images from the years I had indulged in occult paganism and witchcraft that I couldn’t stand to continue. (Read about my life at http://www.logosword.com/ministry.htm.) For example, the title Lilith comes from an occult myth of the first wife of Adam, who was a witch. [Read the whole corrupt story at http://gnosis.org/lilith.htm under Chapter 10: Adam's Helpmeets (Excerpt from The Hebrew Myths by Robert Graves and Raphael Patai (New York: Doubleday, 1964), pp 65-69.)]

“Romantic Christianity.”

Now I was on my way, feeling strongly called to study this thing called Romantic Christianity. What did it really mean, theologically and practically? I knew something about the Romantic Movement that took place primarily in Germany from the late 18^th to the early 19^th centuries, but I had no idea that there was any connection with contemporary events, especially involving these what seemed like “idols” of the Church—Lewis and Tolkien.

I managed to find a reference to a book called Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien by R. J. Reilly (University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1972). As I read through it, I began to see how very different this Romantic Religion is from Biblical Christianity and that what I was seeing was also very different from the popular view of what the Inklings were really like. (The Inklings were the literary group that C. S. Lewis belonged to for many years. They included Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and J. R. R. Tolkien.) Tolkien was a Roman Catholic; the other three were members of the Church of England, also known as the Anglican Church.

A strong and interesting connection with all this is that I received my Master of Arts in Religion in Church History from Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry where there was a great emphasis on the history of the Anglican Church. The Church is very unique as it contains in one body almost every factor that can be seen in other churches worldwide. For instance, there is liberalism (called “the broad church” within Anglicanism), and Evangelical Anglicans who are Calvinists, and Anglo-Catholics, who are very much like and very focused upon Roman Catholicism and, to a smaller extent, Greek Orthodoxy.

With my background in church history, I began seeing certain patterns as I explored Romantic Religion. For instance, C. S. Lewis was an Anglo-Catholic, which made him very close theologically and ceremonially to Roman Catholicism. He believed in purgatory, which people erroneously conclude was one of the doctrines of all of Anglicanism. This is definitely not true, but it is a tendency that Anglo-Catholics have because they look to the Middle Ages and its theology as the archetype of Christianity. In fact, they didn’t start using the word “priest” for Anglican ministers until the late 1800s, when the Anglo-Catholic movement came in with its high ceremonial practices.

Thus, I began to see a very different picture of the influence of Lewis and the other Inklings upon Evangelicals. I began to see that Romantic Religion has much to do with the creation of idolatrous images in and by the imagination that are then given the worship due only to the Holy Trinity.

This is not to say that the imagination is evil in itself; it is a gift of God. It is like the hand. The hand can do wonderfully constructive things, and the hand can also hold a sword to kill someone. God gave us the hand; it’s up to us how we use it. There are godly uses of the imagination, but using it in the wrong way, even unintentionally, to create something that is then honored and worshipped, is horribly destructive and violates the First Commandment.

(Our booklet Visualization, Imagination, and the Christian examines and contrasts Christian imaginative meditation with occult visualization. http://www.logosword.com/pub_orders.htm.)

My next blog will include more quotes from the book Romantic Christianity and the writers he looked at. These quotes will show how really different Romantic Christianity is from Biblical Christianity and help show Lewis’s position in this stream.

“Just as the Enlightenment god of Reason was eternal and omnipresent, the Romantic interior deity of Imagination was everlasting and infinite.”

—The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition by James A. Herrick (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), p. 87.

Mere Syncretism

Comments on recent trends in the Body of Christ

In recent times, unity has become a powerful theme, both in the Evangelical Church and in the culture. Although such attempts at unity have occurred for centuries in philosophy, politics, and the history of Christianity, the search for unity has been increasing in the last hundred years or so.

Some of the latest trends in Evangelical Christianity appear in the movement Evangelicals and Catholics Together, Promise Keepers, The Purpose Driven Church, and the “emergent church conversation.” As I reflect on these and other movements, I see trends toward both a good and true unity and trends toward false, syncretistic unity. I am calling the false unity (or the attempts at false unity) Mere Syncretism. (Syncretism is the combining of religious elements that don’t fit together, such as Christianity and Buddhism.)

I’m afraid though that this title, Mere Syncretism, will lead to some controversy because assaulting a cherished image can arouse anger and rejection. Obviously it's related to C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. How dare I even hint that there could be anything Lewis wrote that is the least bit questionable? As a new Christian, I thought C. S. Lewis was more authoritative than the Apostle Paul.

However, I am not going to try to figure out his complex personality. Instead, I want to look at his teaching through his nonfiction and fictional writings, as well as through those writers he considered his friends and companions—including Tolkien, Barfield, and Charles Williams. That’s because I believe a lot of the theology and practice in current movements toward unity—especially the “Emergent church conversation”—echo some of Lewis’s theology and spirituality. This blog will not just be devoted to Lewis, however, even though his thinking is an important element in these movements.

What is real Biblical unity among Christians? And does Lewis’s teaching reflect such unity? Can we really depend upon it as a basis for unity among modern Christians? Is it, in fact, truly “mere Christianity”? Or is it a mixture of religious theology, philosophy, spirituality, and practices?

My wife and I were personally involved in “mere syncretism” for many years before becoming Christians, and after becoming Christians we attended many churches where these ideas were very influential. I also attended a seminary that was in the center of this stream of ideas.

This blog will examine these questions by looking at the history of Christianity along with theology and philosophy and comparing it with the teachings of Scripture.

Welcome aboard.