Six Faces of New Paganism

Tim Challies @ http://www.challies.com is reviewing Bruce Waltke’s Old Testament Theology. He shows how culture’s refusal to acknowledge the creator necessarily leads to the anti-God worldview so apparent in society around us.
“Christians now live on a mission field with worldviews that besiege the message of ethical monotheism.” He says that this new paganism has six faces and one proceeds from the one before it.

1. The common worldview of the Western world since the time of the enlightenment has been materialism.

2. There is an implication to materialism.

3. Determinism, which understands reality as mechanical and without inherent value.

4. Secularism is a political or social philosophy that embraces each of these “-isms”—materialism, empiricism and determinism.

5. Secular humanism is a system or mode of thought or action in which human interests, values and dignity are predominant.

6. Post-modernism or New Ageism marks what is really a return to old-fashioned paganism, though with a distinctly modern twist to it.