I've not read Hislop. I've read the Church Fathers and the Saints and reject Protestantism per se.
Ok, that's good to know. I'd feel bad if I put together some thoughts and only ended up wasting your time.
I just read the Wiki page on Hislop; while I haven't read any of his works I am familiar with his line of argument - namely the association of the Catholic faith and practices with paganism. I do not find this line of argument compelling or threatening to what the Catholic Church actually is, but if you find it a compelling argument against Catholicism, then please present it as you understand it, and I will share my thoughts.
In brief, I will say that we have to understand that Christ is Truth, and that anything that is true belongs to Him. If we suppose that anything that existed in the world prior to Christ must be false, then, indeed, any connection between Catholicism and the pagan world would be just cause for criticism. But can we really suppose that there was nothing good or true in the world prior to the Incarnation? I know many Protestants have their belief in "total depravity" after the Fall, but frankly I find this view to be impossible unless one adopts a pagan understanding of evil. The pagans would say that evil has its own principle, its own being, its own representatives, etc. But this could only be so if there were some eternally existing Evil One, an "anti-God" like the Zoroastrians and Manichees believed. For it could not be that God could create a principle of evil, for God is all good and what He makes is only good. Therefore all being is good. And therefore evil can only be a privation of being. This is a necessary understanding of evil from the Christian perspective, as far as I'm concerned, based on the understanding of God that Christians have - unless we are talking about heretics who would deny God's omnipotence or omnibenevolence or His sole claim to being uncaused, but I don't think you deny these divine attributes.
And so if being is good, then any notion of total depravity is incoherent, for unless something good in man's created nature remained after the Fall, there would be no man at all!
And if even Fallen man has some good, insofar as he has being and is still called to God as his final end, then Fallen man is still capable of creating good things. And this applies to the pagans as to anyone else. And so if there are certain artworks, or technologies, or archetypes, or philosophies that pagans produced, that has some good, then it is totally allowable that Christians would incorporate these good elements into their lives and their communities. Plato and Aristotle, while pagan, both had many true ideas which helped shape Christianity. To claim that nothing pagan could be touched, on pain of delegitimizing the faith, would be to say that Christianity was not in fact a synthesis of Hebrew theology and Greek philosophy, but was rather merely a continuation of the Hebrew tradition - but this denies the very victory and mission of Christianity! Christ established a new and eternal covenant, a final covenant that brought all peoples into the fold, Jews and Gentiles. It was a victory over paganism, which is why the Cross (a Roman torture weapon) was made our symbol, and Rome was made our seat; not because we are pagan, but because we have triumphed over the pagan. What is the Resurrection if not a defiance of the Cross? By remembering the Passion, we don't celebrate the pagan, we celebrate our victory over the pagan (and death itself)!
Of course it incorporated what was good from all traditions - and discarded what was bad! You referenced people smarter than us who have discussed this - there are certainly many in that category. But I would argue that the number of years, and therefore the total selection of smart people to be thinking about these things, is much more expansive within the full Christian tradition, than is to be found in a relatively modern offshoot of that tradition.
Are we really to suppose that the real Christians slapped themselves on the foreheads 1500 years after Christ's resurrection and realized that all Christians always and everywhere had been doing everything wrong for 1500 years? Are we to imagine that there were no "smart people" within this span of 1500 years, more proximate to the historical events in question, and comfortable with the knowledge that the Church was conformed to the expectations of reason and the teachings of Scripture?
To suppose that the Protestant form of worship - typically, coming together and listening to one man with no connection to the Apostles give his opinions on Scripture - is superior to the liturgy of the Church, which has successfully directed the minds of all the faithful to things divine for centuries, is simply not a serious claim to me. But I am always open to arguments to the contrary.
I do think most Protestants are guiltless, insofar as they are born into traditions that are founded on the arguments of men smart enough to formulate such arguments, without having truly delved into the implications of such arguments. How could they? People have lives to live, families to support - we don't have the time to personally familiarize ourselves with every factoid of Church history, every detail of Christian dogma, every page of spilled ink of polemics and apologetics - all the more reason to suppose Christ would have established not just an abstract Church, but a hierarchical one with Apostolic succession and a solid doctrinal tradition, a Church that the faithful would have sufficient reason to believe in, so that they, like the eunuch, could rest assured knowing that Christ had chosen an Apostolate to clarify and teach.
We clearly have very different definitions of Christianity. I can find no room for fusion of man's philosophy and God's perfect Word in a plain reading of the Bible. The New Testament is a perfectly completed fulfillment of the Old Testament, not a synthesis of Hebrew and Greek philosophy forming a new system. That's the gnostic form of Kabbalism.
Hislop's charges against the foundation of the Catholic rituals are not superficial or related only to the trappings and decorations. It would be worth a read on your part. My understanding is that the parallel fallen system of worship set up as an alternative to the worship of the one true God that was in place at the Tower of Babel has simply been renamed and reskinned throughout history and found its most powerful incarnation in the Catholic church and that the doctrines and ritual adopted along with the pagan trappings are not just incidental but incompatible with the worship of the God of the Bible. But Hislop presents it far better than I ever could.
Are we to imagine that there were no "smart people" within this span of 1500 years, more proximate to the historical events in question, and comfortable with the knowledge that the Church was conformed to the expectations of reason and the teachings of Scripture?
We are to suppose that these "smart people" were hunted down and killed and the historical records controlled accordingly. The wars between the Catholic church and her vassal kings and groups such as the Waldenses who held to the purity and simplicity of the Scriptures are exceedingly well documented. Why would the Catholic church suppress and oppose the plain reading of the Scriptures by the layman if the system of ritual was compatible with the teachings in the Old and New Testaments?
To suppose that the Protestant form of worship - typically, coming together and listening to one man with no connection to the Apostles give his opinions on Scripture
We are called to be Bereans. I listen to men read and teach the Scriptures. And I seek the Scriptures myself to see what is incompatible. I don't set any man's interpretarion and tradition above what I can plainly read.
For it could not be that God could create a principle of evil, for God is all good and what He makes is only good. Therefore all being is good.
This is probably going to end up at the root of our disagreement. How can all being be good when the Scripture tells us that, no man is good, and that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked? Claiming that "all being is good" is a central tenet of the gnostic hermeticism of Babylon. It's contradictory to a plain reading of the Bible and yet your tradition leads you to adopt it.
The Catholic church claims superiority through age and I find both claims to be false. The pure, simplicity of the Gospel story is presented in Genesis, repeated throughout the Old Testament, and fulfilled in the New Testament. As Jesus proclaimed on the cross it is a finished work and it does not need man's philosophy to interpret or change it.
You claim that God would not leave us without a system set up to interpret His Word for us. I maintain that His Word needs no such mediator and that He left us with a faith that can be plainly understood by anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.
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