paganism

The Olympic Vision: ‘My Way’

/ MurrayCampbell

The Paris Olympic Games began with the humanist anthem, ‘Imagine’ and closed with another, ’My Way’. 

This notion of a world where humanity climbs to the top of the Eiffel Tower (or Babel!) and no longer relies on God, is as common in France as the baguette. Indeed, the French Enlightenment has profoundly influenced how we look at the world today: secular humanism. 

Whereas Imagine empties the world of ultimate meaning, design and hope, My Way is the crooner’s funeral dirge. 

‘And now, the end is near

And so I face the final curtain

My friends, I’ll say it clear

I’ll state my case of which I’m certain

I’ve lived a life that’s full

I traveled each and every highway

But more, much more than this

I did it my way’.

French singer, Yseult, performed ‘My Way’ with gusto and fireworks, but the song is delusional. ‘My Way’ is a self-justifying way of looking back over life and saying, ‘yep, I screwed up, but at least I did it my way!’

Don’t misunderstand, I’m not an Olympic critic. I enjoy the Olympics as much as any diehard sporting fan. And watching the Green and Gold outdo the Red, Blue and White is kinda ‘slay’.

There was, however, a hubris weaving throughout the Games that tarnished the gold, silver, and bronze. The alkaline isn’t achievement and success, it’s Rousseau’s imagining that set the Olympic message from start to finish: secular humanism.

The humanist project is appealing for it hooks onto every aspiration for personal freedom and success. The dream is then set within the possibility of imagining no hell and heaven, and no religion too. It’s very French. It’s thumbing our noses at the establishment (whoever they may be), and a finger salute toward religion. Ironically, and as the Olympics have shown, secular humanism is as religious and worshipful as the Temple of Artemis and any local Mosque or Church across Paris.

Like the moon glistening over the Seine at midnight, the Olympic message is romantic… until you jump into the river. It is a myopic vision in these 3 ways.

The Backdrop

The backdrop to the Olympic Games is Venezuela, Myanmar, Gaza, Ukraine, and Bangladesh. Political and social unrest is found in English cities and Australian streets. Geopolitical tensions are so high that political leaders are not asking if there will be a global war, but when?

‘My Way’ just isn’t believable. Doesn’t the message feel somewhat empty when we look outside the Parisian bubble?

Tony Estanguet, President of the Organising Committee, presented this stirring offering at the Opening Ceremony,  

“Tonight you have reminded us how beautiful humanity is when we come together.

And when you return to the Olympic Village, you will be sending a message of hope to the whole world: that there is a place where people of every nationality, every culture and every religion can live together. You’ll be reminding us: it is possible.

For the next 16 days, you will be the best version of humanity.

You’ll remind us that the emotions of sport form a universal language that we all share.”

There is a smidgen of truth and goodness here. It feels kinda right. But then we see that the words are canvassed by imagining a world without God, and without ultimate justice and hope. It’s up to us and we can do it!

What’s the answer Mr Olympics? Sport unites?

I wonder how this resonates for those who can’t return home because of war or persecution?

The Backhand Swipe

The Olympic message also serves up a backhanded spin toward all those parts of the world who don’t buy into this self-human deification.  

I guarantee there are more than 3 athletes uncomfortable with the Imagine My Way vision of life, and more than 4 viewers. The message is a backhanded slap in the face to many people in the 2/3s world who don’t buy into humanism.  Today, much of the world is turning to the gospel of Jesus Christ and is looking at the West with weird fascination as they see celebratory pride in the midst of decline. It’s Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus. Except, Sisyphus is no longer pushing the boulder uphill it’s fast chasing him down the hill and yet strangely Sisyphus is shouting,  ‘Look at me, I’m free!’

There is an arrogance attached to the humanist project. It relies on hubris because humility requires depending on a source and foundation that is other. The ‘My Way’ syndrome can’t afford to accept the human condition and it relies on the notion that we won’t repeat the mistakes from the past.  And yet we do. Secular humanism has become a lame duck that employs all the boisterous noise of an Olympic triumph; mesmerising and leaving behind a truckload of debt. 

A Modern Heresy

A third way the Olympics is short-sighted is its failure to understand how secular humanism functions as a Christian heresy. It’s not a Monet original, it’s a third-rate copy.

Tom Holland, Glen Scrivener and others have effectively shown that the air we breathe in our culture is oxygenated by Christianity. The Olympics doesn’t derive notions of equality from thin air! Even our anti or post Christian beliefs are immersed in the teaching and person of Jesus Christ.

As Christopher Watkin notes, 

‘The most interesting migration of all concerns the secular itself. Claiming to have chased religion from its home, the secular has moved in and kept all the furniture. The secular is built on the assumption that there are two domains— the religious and the secular—and that one can grow as the other shrinks. As Tom Holland points out, this is a thoroughly and deeply religious idea, reaching back to Augustine’s notion of two cities. When secularism arrived on the scene it “came trailing incense clouds of meaning that were irrevocably and venerably Christian,” and the very idea of secularism witnesses not to Christianity’s decline but “to its seemingly infinite capacity for evolution.’

While trying to keep her love child in a backroom closet, secular humanism is courting a new friend from the depths of pagan Europe.

From Bacchus the Smurf crashing the Last Supper at the Opening Ceremony, to the ‘Hymn of Apollo’ that was set to music for the Closing Ceremony, neo-paganism is trending again,

‘I will remember, nor could I forget, far-shooting Apollo,

 whom gods tremble before as in Zeus’s abode he is striding—

 then as he comes up close to the place they are sitting, they leap up,

all of them, out of their seats, as he stretches his glittering bow back.’

Let’s leave aside the irony of thinking that it’s cool and inclusive to sing a hymn to fictitious gods, yet honouring the God who gives us breath and strength is anathema!  The repeated dipping into neo-paganism is more than acknowledging the Olympics’ story of origin, it’s looking into the murky Seine and needing to explain the world and provide a moral compass should Christianity be taken to the guillotine. It’s an impossible task of course, because without Christianity, all our best values lose their mooring.

Tom Holland exposes this forced marriage between Humanism and neo-paganism. He points out how the ancient gods of Greece and Rome, “cared nothing for the poor,” and “to think otherwise was ‘airhead talk”. 

It’s Christianity that changed everything and yet we want to sing ‘Imagine’ and ‘My Way’. It is Christianity that transformed the way we view the poor and the excluded. It is Christianity that gave rise to feminism’s first revolution in those early centuries AD. It is Christianity that altered the way society looks upon the young and the vulnerable. Any hints of moral goodness flowing through secular humanism has its roots in the very thing it wants to dismantle: Christianity. 

Because of this, perhaps ‘My Way’ was a fitting end to the Paris Olympic Games. The Olympic flame was snuffed out, its dying embers a sign of where ‘Imagine’ becomes reality.

Another Way

There were glimpses of a better way sneaking through the Olympics. There was Nicola Olyslagers at the Village, accompanying athletes from across the world on the piano in song and praise to God. There was the Fijian contingent in one voice proclaiming Jesus. Again, there was Nicola Olyslagers who chose to glorify God in her sport, 

“My worship may not be singing, it’s in my feet jumping over a bar”.

There is America’s gold medallist, Sydney Mclaughlin Levrone, 

‘What I have in Christ is far greater than what I have or don’t have in life…he has prepared me for a moment such as this. That I may use the gifts he has given me to point all the attention back to him”.

Hubris or humility?

Self-seeking or God-glorifying?

As the athletes flooded into the Stade de France for the final time, the music pumped out, ‘no time for losers’. Athletes swayed with arms raised to the heavens and shouting out, ‘no time for losers’.  Should we mention the 90%+ of the world’s Olympians who failed to medal in any event? And what of thousands more who failed to make an Olympic team?

Secular humanism is a temporary fix for the strong and successful. Christianity is the gospel for losers. The message of Jesus Christ is for those who have failed and lost and grossly miscalculated. This is the true Gospel of liberty and equality and fraternity because the onus and hope lays with  God and because this salvation is by grace. This message is about the God who came down and drew all the world’s evils and suffering and went to the cross.

As Jesus puts it (I’m mulling over these words before preaching this week)

‘I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.’

How?

‘“I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep and my sheep know me—just as the Father knows me and I know the Father—and I lay down my life for the sheep.’

We harvest what we sow

/ MurrayCampbell

A sensational photo is blowing chaff all over twittersphere. The tweet sent out by Union Seminary in Manhattan, pictures students praying to plants. No, your eyes are not deceiving you. The caption reads,

“Today in chapel, we confessed to plants. Together, we held our grief, joy, regret, hope, guilt and sorrow in prayer; offering them to the beings who sustain us but whose gift we too often fail to honor.

What do you confess to the plants in your life?”

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To be honest, I often ignore the plants in my life. In fact, I didn’t know I had plants in my life! Sometimes I step outside to admire a flower. I do enjoy the scent of springtime blossom and flowers. I mow the front lawn every other week. We have parsley, thyme, and mint growing in the back which we use for cooking. And I know how much our dog loves to wee on any plant he sniffs. But praying to a plant and begging for its forgiveness? I may not be the world’s greatest horticulturalist, but neither am I a fool.

Is this a serious tweet? Surely, this is a student-led prank? A fantastic imitation of Babylon Bee? Or, as someone suggested, had these students stolen a few of those green leaves for a pre chapel smoking ceremony? Are we meant to be following suit, and head down to Bunnings after work to buy a tree for prayer? Which tree? What kind of plant? Does it matter? Do the plants communicate with each other and pass on my deepest regrets? What about the tree that I cut down last year with an axe? Did I kill the Divine in a moment of nietzschean madness?

There is plenty of mockery being aimed at Union Seminary today. Some of it makes you laugh, for if we didn’t, one would likely weep. The absurdity of the original message is being matched by the Seminary today as they double down and attempt to explain why praying to your indoor garden is a great idea:

“So, if you’re poking fun, we’d ask only that you also spend a couple moments asking:

Do I treat plants and animals as divinely created beings?

What harm do I cause without thinking?

How can I enter into new relationship with the natural world?”

When Robin Wall Kimmerer spoke at Union last year, she concluded her lecture by tasking us—and all faith communities—to develop new liturgies by which to mourn, grieve, heal and change in response to our climate emergency.

We couldn’t be prouder to participate in this work.

And here’s the thing: At first, this work will seem weird. It won’t feel normal. It won’t look like how we’re used to worship looking and sounding.

And that’s exactly the point. We don’t just need new wine, we need new wineskins.

But it’s also important to note that this isn’t, really, that radical a break from tradition. Many faiths and denoms have liturgy through which we express and atone for the harm we’ve caused. No one would have blinked if our chapel featured students apologizing to each other.

What’s different (and the source of so much derision) is that we’re treating plants as fully created beings, divine Creation in its own right—not just something to be consumed.

Because plants aren’t capable of verbal response, does that mean we shouldn’t engage with them?”

“At first this work will seem weird”? You think? True to form, this theological progressive Seminary then rips a Bible phrase out of context and fills it with whatever nonsense it pleases. They then justify this practice by saying, ‘but many faiths do what we are now doing’. I guess they didn’t read those bits of the Bible were God warns his people, “Do not follow other gods, the gods of the peoples around you” (c.f Deuteronomy 6:4).

Given the reaction to Union Seminary, I suspect there are a few people in Australia today who are hiding behind a tree or bush, hoping no one notices that they too have a habit of talking to the environment, as though God is somehow radiating through the leaves and wind and the soaring pollen count on a Melbourne Spring morning. That’s the sad reality, there are people who believe in communing with nature, even believing that God somehow exists as part of the creation.

The Union Seminary website states

“Progressive theology has long taken shape at Union, where faith and scholarship walk together to be a moral force in the world. Grounded in the Christian tradition and responsive to the needs of God’s creation, a Union education prepares its students for committed lives of service to the church, academy, and society. A Union education develops practices of mind and body that foster intellectual and academic excellence, social justice, and compassionate wisdom.”

When an institution which identifies as being Christian allows weeds to grow, should anyone be surprised if they eventually begin to worship those weeds?

The Apostle Paul was familiar with pagan religions who turned the creation into objects of spiritual connection and worship.

“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” (Romans 1:24)

Progressive theology not only follows the trajectory of Romans ch.1, it embraces the trip with pride and staggering delusion. The tweet is imbecilic because false religion is asinine. It tries to grow around it an air of intellectual cogency and spiritual authenticity, but it’s nothing more than rose-scented air-freshener in a can that’s trying to conceal the pungent smell of the toilet.

We are all worshippers. All people worship someone or something. If we turn our backs of the God of the Bible we are required to created alternate spiritual objects to provide purpose and meaning in life. We would do well to revisit Romans 1, for just as western culture is returning to the sexual ethics of the ancient world, we are reconstructing theologies that belong to old time paganism. There is nothing progressive about liberal theology, it is filling a field with toxic weeds.

The theological principle is simple: you harvest what you sow.

“Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.” (Galatians 6:7)

Union Seminary’s journey into spiritual paganism has been gradual. I don’t think the faculty and students woke up one morning and decided that instead of worshipping Jesus, let’s pray to these plants. This is the result of decades of pruning back evangelical teaching and digging up orthodox doctrine. This is the outcome of appointing teachers who don’t really believe the Bible is the infallible word of God. This is the result of generations of theological experimentation and pining for cultural relevance.

While we may rightly ridicule Union Seminary, there is a serious warning here. If we don’t want our churches turning into prayer halls to shrubs and plants, and if we don’t want our children crafting idols out of creation, we need to make sure that we are doing the job of a faithful gardener. We need to ensure that our Bible Colleges have suitable gardeners who are using the right tools. There is only seed God gives, that is his word. There is only one seed which produces life, that is the Gospel of his Jesus Christ. Union Seminary deserved to be mocked, but are being diligent in our own fields?

Let’s not forget what Jesus says about those who sow weeds that congest and confuse, and that try to starve wheat of nutrience.

Then he left the crowd and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field.”

37 He answered, “The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. 38 The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the people of the kingdom. The weeds are the people of the evil one, 39 and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.

40 “As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. 41 The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. 42 They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Whoever has ears, let them hear.” (Matthew 13)