A Story of Augustine and White Slaves of Kent
Historical Background in How to Deal With the Rising Tide of Paganism
Howdy!
The winter season has come a little early here to South Carolina. We had our first frost last week and there was snow spotted in the mountains on the last day of October. It’s currently 38 degrees as I type. As a young man I loved cold weather and relished the blessings which came with it, mainly skiing and ice skating. However, as I have grown older summer has become moreso my favorite time of year when it comes to temps and times. Being warm has its privileges. Yet it is the closing of the calendar when the fun holidays start ringing their bells. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year each have their unique place. The feasting festivals following the harvest and the battening down that was necessary for our ancestors in the winter months has not failed to continue in our less compartmentalized culture.
Those of us with northern European blood descend from folks who likewise enjoyed celebrations as the days grew shorter and colder. In fact much of what we think about when we consider pre-Christian Europe has our minds drawn towards Yule, the Solstice, and the darkness of the barren trees and wind-swept snowy moors of yesteryear. Before Columba, Patrick, and St. Olaf worked the gospel in the hearts of the men and women of the British Isles and the pagan lands of Scandinavia all of our people offered their sacrifices to Odin and the faeries, particularly as the sun set until spring. One of the things gathering steam in our own day is a growing attachment to the old gods. While contemporary Americans dabbling in such don’t have quite the gumption to go all the way with their re-adoption of the old ways (no one is slicing the heads off bulls in the middle of Fort Mill yet) there is no question that many are seeking to be reattached spiritually so that they kind of find something they feel lacking in suburban Christianity. For our prayer and worship help today we are going to begin to get into the why question, and the where. It’s important that if our desire is to warn and retrieve those wandering into the clutches of false deities that we understand where that call comes from, so that it can be replaced with truth.
Jonathan Skinner, an English Baptist minister, wrote a book about eighteen years ago entitled, The Rise of Paganism, which capably sought to answer this query. At its foundation the problem comes from the lack of spiritual depth at offer in the Church. In Skinner’s England this means that the vicars don’t have answers for the problems at hand because they have given themselves over to the world’s testimonies. People seeking the answer to the why questions have been left with solutions that sound no different than the psychological humanism they are unintentionally or not running from. So rather than seek the God of a Bible they have never read nor been confronted with they go back to something older, and not really in full sincerity. The rise of paganism is not as serious as it sounds because it entails a whole smorgasbord of grab-bag beliefs. Folks take a little bit of Native American spirituality, Celtic ways, and old Germanic folk-tales mixed with incense and booze and call it a lifestyle when all it represents is a grasping in darkness and believing in whatever you pull out. They fulfill Solomon’s proverb, “The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know over what they stumble.” I say this not to mock or belittle, but to deal honestly with the vast majority of what passes for paganism in our day. I once heard Carl Trueman describe “Celtic Christianity” as bored Glaswegian housewives looking for something to do with their time. Yet there is more real here than meets the all-seeing eye.
Part of our problem in conceptualizing these things is that our pagan ancestors were in fact worshipping something real. Their gods were as genuine to them as Christ is to us. They were communing with spirits who did actually do things for them in ways we cannot comprehend because we’ve been told not to believe it. A consistent message in our series over the last several months was that demonic activity is the authentic work of the devil to deceive and destroy. While pharaoh’s sorcerers may have been shocked to see their staffs turn to snakes and the witch of Endor flummoxed as an actual ghost appeared that does not make their existence any less actual. We misunderstand our blood kin if we think they just came up with names for things they didn’t comprehend and called them gods.
The Devil was at work in their rituals and in their festivals. They saw what they saw and devoted their lives to what they knew to be sensual true.
Augustine of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory I, came to the Anglo-Saxons, as the story goes, because the pope had seen fair-haired slaves for sale at a Roman slave auction moaning to their gods for relief and his heart was moved with compassion for the lost souls of Britain. His hope was that through this evangelistic mission the men and women of the north might come to know the salvation offered in the gospel. As this Augustine went to the isles he was met with a king named Æthelberht of Kent, whose wife, a Frank, we are told by the venerable Bede happened to already be a Christian. Given freedom to proselytize the message preached was simple. All men are dead in sin and in need of a redeemer, who is none other than the Son of God Himself. The gods of the woods and sky are no match for this God, who made the heavens and the earth in a word, and who requires not the help of another.
In effect what Augustine offered them was substantive. He did not proclaim a message which was merely an improvement on what they already had, but was categorically different in every way from what the Anglo-Saxons believed in their own religion. The scene is important as we get into more deeply what paganism is and what it has to offer, that so much of the modern church does not. We must take pagans at their word. We must know what they teach and why. The people of the true and living God must then respond not with more moral therapeutic deism, but with the power of the Word become flesh. A gospel which is man’s faith wearing Christian garb can bring no victory. But good news made real in a felt Christ is the answer to this generations desire for authentic, real, and life-altering news.
Here’s a word to close:
https://www.reformation21.org/blogs/rebirth-of-the-gods-the-normal.php
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church