Neo-Pagan?

My seminary alma mater, Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana, publishes a quarterly magazine called For the Life of the World. In its January 2007 issue, the magazine contains articles that address how the search for meaning in North America has resulted in an infiltration of Eastern religious forms and practices into Christian churches, Zen Buddhism in particular. Also noted is the increasing interest in the occult and New Age, even among Christians. Any of these religious practices, or anything that contains any semblance of seeking "the God within" seemed to be grouped under the label of "Neo-Pagan" or "post-modern". Of course, things are easier to handle and criticize when labeled. As very typical of this theological institution, and I say this affectionately, the answer to these challenges (or any challenge, for that matter) is doctrine and more doctrine.

What the articles fail to examine are fundamental questions: Why is there so much meaninglessness in our society? Why is there such a thing as "post-modernism"? What have been the cultural tides that have brought us to where we are today? All they seem to say is, "Houston, we have a problem, and here's how to fix it." Usually the "fix" that is offered is a retreat to moderism and Enlightenment paradigms: Us vs. Them, Good vs. Evil, Orthodoxy vs. Heterodoxy, Conservative vs. Liberal, etc.

The articles correctly point out that the Gospel of Christ Jesus comes to us externally, or from without, and touches and grasps the heart. God finds us, and never vice versa, and resides by His Spirit in the deep recesses of our hearts. But the problem is that many people have lost their hearts, hence the loss of meaning. What seems to us as the search for God (which is what it's usually called) is really the search for one's own heart. That's why so many people complain of intellectual assent to church dogma accompanied by trouble making the connection with the heart. Christ is already there through the Means of Grace, but there is no map to "there".

Can the church find ways to facilitate people's search for their hearts and allow them to explore very innate aspects of their being? I sure hope so, because if we do that then people will begin to bear fruit unto Christ not because they have to, or even because they get to, but because they want to!

That is why I encourage people to stop trying to be religious (taboo to the modernist), and even stop trying to be spiritual (taboo to the post-modernist), but be honest instead (something that could be done by the modernist and the post-modernist).