SIGNIFICANT QUOTATIONS:
“There is no longer a
Christian mind. It is a commonplace that the mind of modern man has been
secularized. For instance, it has been deprived of any orientation towards the
supernatural. Tragic as this fact is, it would not be so desperately tragic had
the Christian mind held out against the secular drift. But unfortunately the
Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and
nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. It is difficult to do justice in
words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the twentieth-century
Church. One cannot characterize it without having recourse to language which
will sound hysterical and melodramatic.”
“There is no longer a Christian mind. There is still,
of course, a Christian ethic, a Christian practice, and a Christian
spirituality. As a moral being, the modern Christian subscribes to a code other
than that of the non-Christian. As a member of the Church, he undertakes
obligations and observations ignored by the non-Christian. As a spiritual
being, in prayer and meditation, he strives to cultivate a dimension of life
unexplored by the non- Christian. But as a thinking being, the modern
Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion - its morality,
its worship, its spiritual culture; but he rejects the religious view of life,
the view which sets all earthly issues within the context of the eternal view
which relates all human problems - social, political, cultural - to the
doctrinal foundations of the Christian Faith, the view which sees all things
here below in terms of God’s supremacy and earth’s transitoriness, in terms of
Heaven and Hell.”
- Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should A
Christian Think? Ann Arbor: Servant Books 1963, 3-4.
Secularism
“With the
decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, a new kind of mentor
emerged to fill the vacuum and capture the ear of society. The secular
intellectual might be deist, skeptic, or atheist. But he was just as ready as
any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs. He
proclaimed from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and
an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this
self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors.
He felt himself bound by no corpus of revealed religion. The collective wisdom
of the past, the legacy of tradition, the prescriptive codes of ancestral
experience existed to be selectively followed or wholly rejected entirely as
his own good sense might decide. For the first time in human history and with
growing confidence and audacity, men arose to assert that they could diagnose
the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects: more, that
they could devise formulas whereby not merely the structure of society but the
fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better. Unlike
their sacerdotal predecessors, they were not servants and interpreters of the
gods but substitutes. Their hero was Prometheus, who stole the celestial fire
and brought it to earth.”
-
Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, New York Harper and Row, 1989, 1-2, as
cited by George Grant, Trial and Error: The American Civil Liberties
Union and Its Impact on Your Family, Brentwood, TN: Wolgemuth & Hyatt,
Publishers, Inc. 1989, 115, 116.
“In our day
the religion of Christ is facing a crisis such as it has not faced, probably
since the days of Constantine. By that I mean that up to this time the Church
has been engaged in a kind of civil war, in which a Christian idea has battled
with a misunderstanding of a Christian idea or in which sect has fought with
sect. None of the great heresies of the first sixteen hundred years of the
Christian era denied the existence of God, but they had misconceived the notion
of the Trinity, the nature of Christ, the nature of Divine Grace, and the
mission of the Church. In the last four centuries the conflict was not so much
of idea and idea as the conflict of sect and sect. Today we are faced with
something entirely novel, We are engaged now not so much in what might be
called a civil war, but we are confronted with ‘an invasion,’ that is, a force
of ideas that is as strange to traditional Christianity as Christianity was
strange to Paganism. This new invading force is New Paganism.
“New
Paganism may be defined as an outlook on life that holds to the sufficiency of
human science without faith, and the sufficiency of human power without grace.
In other words its two tenets are: Scientism, which is a deification of the
experimental method, and Humanism, which is a glorification of a man who makes
God to his own image and likeness.
. . . the New Paganism differs from the old in this, that whereas in
ancient Greek Paganism the spiritual and the material were confused; in the New
Paganism they are divorced, God from the cosmos, and after the divorcement has
been accomplished the New Paganism “immediately throws away the better half and
lives worse with the other half. That is why today there is religion without
God, Christianity without Christ, and psychology without soul. From this point
of view, the old Paganism was preferable to the New, for at least it
acknowledged the necessity of some power above man, even though it was only a
household God.”
- Wilbur M. Smith, Therefore
Stand. Natrick, MA: W. A. Wilde Co., 1945, 267, with quotations from Fulton
J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels. New York: 1941, 325-328.