Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Death by broadmindedness

Kevin DeYoung provides another great Chesterton quotation. This one from The Everlasting Man describing "...the dangers of syncretism, inter-faith mumbo-jumbo, and making Christianity just another acceptable myth...."
The Theosophists build a pantheon; but it is only a pantheon for pantheists. They call a Parliament of Religions as a reunion of all the peoples; but it is only a reunion of all the prigs. Yet exactly such a pantheon had been set up two thousand years before by the shores of the Mediterranean; and Christians were invited to set up the image of Jesus side by side with the image of Jupiter, of Mithras, of Osiris, of Atys, or of Ammon. It was the refusal of the Christians that was the turning-point of history. If the Christians had accepted, they and the whole world would have certainly, in a grotesque but exact metaphor, gone to pot. They would all have been boiled down to one lukewarm liquid in that great pot of cosmopolitan corruption in which all the other myths and mysteries were already melting. It was an awful and appalling escape. Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realise that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions. (The Everlasting Man, 178).
DeYoung, Restless, and Reformed: One Lukewarm Liquid in that Great Pot of Cosmopolitan Corruption

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