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Competing Christian Myths



While we’re on the topic of Christianity & Wicca, I thought I’d share one of the Amazon reviews for the book Christian Wicca: The Trinitarian Tradition. This to me is especially telling in regards to the state of modern Christianity:

There may be such a religion as Christian Wicca, but it is neither Christian nor Wiccan. The two are mutually incompatible and simply cannot be combined.

Why is this? because the gods of the Wicca celebrate the physical realm exclusively and concentrate on what you can bring into it, and the god of the Christians celebrates the heavenly realm exclusively and concentrates on how you can bring yourself into it. You cannot practice both together, as they are based on conflicting ideologies. YOU CANNOT HAVE THEM BOTH AT ONCE.

Any reliable theologian with an actual degree from a real, accredited school of higher learning will tell you that this is true. Anyone who tells you the opposite is probably trying to sell you something…

This to me seems like an inaccurate depiction of both Christianity and Wicca. The funny part though is that the author of this seems to be a Christian - based on their reference to “reliable theologian”. Which is funny in and of itself, because the rendition of Christianity they’re providing is theologically very unsound. Correct me if I’m wrong, but in the early Church, wasn’t there a big stink made about this very issue for hundreds of years? It was finally settled when they decided that Jesus was both fully-God and fully-man. He’s supposed to unite both realms fully and equally.

I wonder if this person’s warped understanding is indicative of a much larger trend within Christianity today. Have people given up on the humanity of Jesus in favor of an exclusively Platonic Heaven image? Clues to that effect might be found in the popularity of the Rapture myth, in which faithful Christians are literally lifted out of their clothes into Heaven. They leave behind cars and planes driverless to crash into one another. It’s a myth about the futility and purposelessness of the mechanistic material universe, isn’t it? Then we have the counter-myth percolating steadily through the culture: that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, and maybe even had kids. This myth seems to shift the balance back towards the center, emphasizing the fully-man (or perhaps fully-woman) aspect of the Godhead.

I wonder where this dichotomy, this new Christian dialectic will ultimately lead both the religion itself and the culture at large. I wonder if Jesus, Magdalene and children will become the New Holy Family, and if the wedding bed will become the new Nativity scene ritually displayed and re-enacted by believers everywhere.







5 Reader Responses

  1. psicosm Says:
    October 2nd, 2005 at 2:07 pm

    Personally, I’ve felt that Christianity has been slipping into a Manichean suspicion of the body and the material world since the Reformation. Protestants, with their exclusive concentration on faith opposed to works, distanced themselves further and further for Catholicism’s sacramental view of the natural world. Catholicism of course, while sacramental in theory, has suffered from time to time throughout its history an Augustinian fear of the body which it’s just now starting to shed.

    I imagine this is a bigger problem for Western Christianity than Eastern.

  2. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 2nd, 2005 at 2:21 pm

    Excellent point. I wrote a pretty detailed article about that very same thing a while back.

    http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/08/03/faith-vs-works/

    I think this is a really fascinating topic.

  3. channel null Says:
    October 2nd, 2005 at 2:43 pm

    Have you ever looked into feminist theology? It’s interesting in that it tends to fall into three camps: God-is-a-woman, we-should-celebrate-god-as-both-male-and-female, and the goddess-restorationist camp, which I’d say can be subdivided into a Goddess-only and a Goddess-and-Horned-Man camp. I can’t remember any of the big names behind these, though, except Starhawk; it was a single class session about three years ago. One of the arguements Xian feminist theologians tend to make is that JC incarnated as a male because it’d be necessary for the time he came into being, a woman couldn’t have risen to his status.

    YOU CANNOT HAVE THEM BOTH AT ONCE.

    It’s completely irrational to suggest that there’s this invisible place we all go up in the sky. If you think that’s okay, I’d say it’s okay to have both at once.

  4. bill m. Says:
    October 2nd, 2005 at 8:45 pm

    What about taking communion and supposedly eating the body of Christ?
    I thought the whole idea was to ‘have them both at once’.

  5. Jordan Stratford+ Says:
    October 3rd, 2005 at 1:12 pm

    The poster is, as you said, ignorant not only of both Christian theology and the Wiccan world-view, but of THE basic principle of of western religion, that of the the Incarnation.

    Both Christianity and Wicca are “western” (broadly speaking) expressions of a basic Truth, that magic / divinity is real, and affects / indwells the material world. Through either supplication or manipulation, this relationship can be employed to the benefit of the practitioner.

    (side note: it’s a pet peeve of mine that “manichaeanism” has come to mean in popular usage the view that the “flesh evil spirit good”, which is a ghastly misrepresentation of the teachings of Mani. I know the dictionary supports this, it just seems wildly unfair.)



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