Tares in Protestantism

I once thought that
Rosicrucianism was confined to
those fringy ads in magazines advertising hidden power and knowledge,
but after studying it extensively, I’m seeing that it’s like tares sown
among the wheat of Protestantism. More and more amazing connections are
emerging between the ideas of Rosicrucianism and
hermeticism and the intellectual
life of contemporary evangelicalism.

One example is

Charles Williams, one of the Inklings and the dear friend of C.
S. Lewis, whom Lewis called the most holy man he ever knew. Williams was
a member for a while of the hermetic
Order of
the Golden Dawn in England, which was just a variation of

Rosicrucianism. The notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley led it for a
long time. Rosicrucianism is basically alchemy that is expressed through
literary symbolism, and it integrates all sorts of bizarre, occultic
themes, such as the
Cabala,
the hermetic teachings, neo-Platonism, astrology,

alchemy, mystery religions, Egyptian-Babylonian religions—you name
it.

Unfortunately, most Christian apologists, in
order to maintain the image of C. S. Lewis and the Inklings as wonderful
Christian intellectuals, ignore or rationalize these weird aspects of
their thinking and personalities. John Warwick Montgomery, for
example, spends a lot of time defending Tarot cards as useful for
Christians because Charles Williams thought Tarot cards were a symbolic
avenue to the divine. We spent years immersed in studying and using the
Tarot cards and other forms of divination when we were in the occult,
and they have absolutely nothing to do with Jesus Christ, the Bible, or
any biblical or godly truth. Charles Williams’ book The Greater
Trumps, is like a trip into an occult hell, and reading it is to
experience once again immersion into that weird world of the occult from
which Jesus rescued us. Sadly, Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. is
republishing Williams’ books. And—no surprise—Regent is a graduate
school in the Anglican stream.

Speaking of
Regent College evokes memories of our trip there over 15 years
ago when we were exploring the possibility of attending. What we
experienced was like a scene out of a novel. First we met with a
professor and his wife who seemed like they were up to their eyeballs in
Tolkien. We also met with the founder, John Huston, who treated us in a
totally impersonal manner and who, after we explained our ministry of
many years, dismissed it and told us that what we were really looking
for was spiritual formation (his big focus). Then we met J. I. Packer,
who staunchly defended psychology as a means of sanctification. So in a
way it is not surprising that Regent College would be republishing
Charles Williams’ novels. (By the way, we were so repelled by what we
encountered at Regent that we decided not to attend.)

Years ago these odd kinds of syncretism and
occultism remained more confined within the Anglican Church, with some
overflow into the Roman Catholic Church, but now, through the Emergent
Church movement, this

syncretistic or imaginative Romantic evangelicalism has spread
throughout the denominations to the extent that you would be hard put to
find any denominations without it, except perhaps a fundamentalist
Baptist church. However, interestingly enough, the original Bob Jones of
Bob Jones University was very positive about C. S. Lewis.

The only writings about Lewis by well-known
church leaders I’ve ever encountered that were critical of his work were
by

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones and

Dr. Cornelius Van Til.

So, the beat goes on.

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Index to articles by Richard and Linda Nathan

 See also


Warnings – How mysticism
& the occult are changing the Church

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©
2008 by Richard Nathan

 

Richard Nathan holds a Master of Arts in Religion in Church History and has
been a Bible and church history teacher for over twenty years. He wrote his
thesis on the debate over the inerrancy of Scripture in a historical
analysis. See Richard’s blog at
www.gloriousriches.blogspot.com for ongoing discussion about such trends
in Christianity as Romantic Christianity and the Emergent Church movement.

Visit
www.fictionplumbline.com for articles evaluating Christian fiction from
a biblical perspective.

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