Wolfe as Heretic

John Watkins · 19 May 2010, 20:52 · from 2010-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 16:52:26 -0400
Subject: (urth) Wolfe as Heretic
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTimLwNxi6IP8i3U2kS-WWE6ZssHBN9_pcVc9qUC0 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <SNT123-W43FBDA10A167D2011AE70CFE20 at phx.gbl>
	<4BF3F69D.5060501 at gmail.com>
	<AANLkTil6l0l0u4Tolr-BIjc-P7obU49S2pmW9vvTLzeN at mail.gmail.com>
	<AANLkTimLwNxi6IP8i3U2kS-WWE6ZssHBN9_pcVc9qUC0 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTil8LwWs12N9_k6dH6VStAgtML223zcJoSdaxwcE at mail.gmail.com>

Chesterton in The Everlasting Man took a pretty firm position that the
Phoenicians/Carthaginians were devil-worshippers.  I can't recall if he took
a more charitable position on other pagan deities.

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 4:45 PM, James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> wrote:

> I made a mess of Paul's quote, let me try again:
>
> "Paul's opinion was that: "Idols are NOT truly divine and what is offered
> to them does not do any good.. But the gentiles sacrifice to demons,
> not to God." (1 Cor 10:20)
>
>  On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 3:43 PM, James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Church Fathers did not in general make a point of saying pagan gods
> didn't
> >> exist. I don't think any considered them divine, but instead of angelic
> >> nature, though either fallen or miscontrued by their worshippers.
> >
> > For pagans, the difference between divine and merely "higher" is
> > probably splitting hairs. It is only an important difference for
> > monotheists.
> >
> > Paul's opinion was that: "Idols are truly divine and what is offered
> > to them does not dow any good.. But the gentiles sacrifice to demons,
> > not to God." (1 Cor 10:20)
> >
> > He was glossing from Deuteronomy: "They sacrificed to demons, which
> > are not God. Gods they had not known, gods that recently appeared,
> > gods your fathers did not fear."
> >
> > Wolfe differs in accepting that the ancient gods might not always be
> > malevolent, but potentially even good. He might have received this
> > from (or had it confirmed by) the Anglican C.S. Lewis who said almost
> > the same thing. (And in "That Hideous Strength" he portrayed the gods
> > Venus and Mercury as powers not positively aligned to the rebellious
> > Lord of Earth,) This all sounds like something Chesterton might have
> > opined, but I can't find anywhere he did.
> >
> > But then again, CS Lewis's view of pagan gods portrayed in "The Last
> > Battle" is certainly at odds with Paul's. So maybe it is all
> > heretical.
> >
> > The Fathers and the Biblical Prophets seem to have all agreed that
> > sacrifices to these powers is without practical value. This is
> > different from Latro's world.
> >
> > Is it heretical to believe that that magic (defined as prayers and
> > sacrifices powers who are not God) *works" even if you believe it is
> > something that is wrong or hurtful to do? .I met a Christian erstwhile
> > fortune-teller who said it definitely did work for him. But he wasn't
> > a theologian and his opinions on the source of its efficacy were more
> > like Paul's than Wolfe's; so, I guess that doesn't really prove
> > anything.
> >
> > I suppose we'd have to drill down farther into what Wolfe truly
> > believes and how strongly he believes it to know if he's a heretic or
> > not. Put him on the rack.
> >
> > J.
> >
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100519/1adfd47c/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net