Idols of the Intellect

I'm about halfway through Tertullian in my complete through-reading of the Church Fathers, and about to start the treatise called "Against Hermogenes" with the subtitle "Containing a refutation of his opinion that matter is eternal".

As I've been reading the Fathers' arguments against the opinions of various heretics which, to us now, seem patently absurd, I've had a growing recognition of the overall nature of the ancient heresies and their modern counterparts. That is, that they all have this in common: that they are attempts to "reconcile" the things taught by Scripture and Apostolic tradition with the conventional assumptions of their day, and to make them more palatable to themselves and others. So, in the first three centuries of the Church, what we had was a continual stream of men trying to fit Christianity into the box of Greco-Roman philosophy and polytheism, and avoid the offense and embarrassment of embracing the silly Jewish superstition that there was only One God. That way, they could take the best of the New Gospel, but hold on to their intellectual and emotional attachments to their old ideas, ideals, and idols.

And in modern times, pretty much all "contemporary" theology, that is modernist, post-modernist, higher critical, liberal, etc., amounts to the same thing. Except our idols are idols of pure intellect, rather than of primal polytheistic paganism. Rationalism. Empiricism. Materialism. Scientism. All the goddesses of the Enlightenment.

But what struck me today, and prompted this post, is another example of how the Bible and the Apostolic teaching was right all along, and the greatest and most respectable minds of the world wrong. Look at that subtitle again. "Containing a refutation of his opinion that matter is eternal". You see, that both Scripture and the Church (in its orthodox teaching) have always held that matter is created and temporal. Yet the great minds of the classical world, and again the great Scientist minds of post-Enlightenment Scientism, held firmly that matter was eternal, and treated anyone who said otherwise in the same mocking, dismissive derision with which they currently treat those who question Darwinism or believe any form of Creation or Intelligent Design. But then in 1965, cosmic background radiation was "accidentally" discovered, proving beyond reasonable doubt that the universe was not in fact, static and eternal. Now, of course, the Scientismists claim that theory as their own. But at the time it blew all their conventional theories out of the water, and completely redefined their understanding of the universe.

And here is Tertullian, looking down on us from 200 AD, and Moses standing beside him, from 1600 BC, saying, "See, I told you so."