Baal Worship Ancient and Modern

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Quotations

The logic of an idea, once it has gained a foothold in the human psyche, has a tendency to work itself out with a relentless consistency to its ultimate con-clusions even among men of disparate cultures who have little or no contact with or knowledge of each other, but more especially so where that idea is widely accepted by a community—unless it is effectively challen-ged. And so it has been with sacerdotalism and prelacy, which even the Reformation was not able to expunge entirely from the minds of Christian men, and so the wretched harvest produced by these ideas began to grow once more before the dust thrown up by the ploughing of the Reformation had settled on the ground. And this is all the more remarkable because, as Max Weber pointed out, “every consistent doctrine of predestined grace inevitably implied a radical and ultimate devaluation of all magical, sacramental and institutional distributions of grace, in view of God’s sovereign will.”

— Stephen Perks,
The Christian Passover:
Agape Feast or Ritual Abuse?, p. 46

The Officials of the Roman Empire in time of persecution sought to force the Christians to sacrifice, not to any of the heathen gods, but to the Genius of the Emperor and the Fortune of the city of Rome; and at all times the Christians' refusal was looked upon not as a religious but as a political offence.

— Frances Legge,
Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity,
Vol, I, p. lvi.

The history of Eastern Christianity under the rule of Islam has already been written. The story is a depressing one. The history of Western Christianity under the rule of Islam has yet to be written. Whether it will ever be written may well depend on how seriously the Church in the West takes the Great Commission in the next few decades and on whether the zeal and self-sacrifice of Muslims for their jihad can be matched by the zeal and self-sacrifice of Christians for the Great Commission - indeed, whether Muslims, with their zeal and self-sacrifice, can be converted from jihad to the Great Commission.

— Stephen Perks,
"From Jihad to Great Commission"
in Christianity & Society, Vol. VIX, No. 3

Thursday

Jul282011

ISBN: 978-0-9522058-6-9

In the period following the death of King David the people of Israel became deeply entrenched in a syncretistic form of religion that fused elements of the worship of Yahweh with the ancient fertility cults of Canaan, identifying Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with the pagan god Baal. This corrupt form of worship, which predated the monarchy but had again become ingrained in the religious practices of the people following Solomon’s own example of idolatry, lasted up until the exile. Reforms instituted by good kings barely touched the religion of the people, whose cultic practices operated at the syncretistic folk-religion level, not in terms of the religious practices of the temple and the priesthood established in the Mosaic law, which was frequently forgotten, at times even completely lost. In large part it was this corruption of the worship of Yahweh that precipitated the Babylonian captivity. What lesson can twenty-first century Christians learn from this period of biblical history? Are there any similarities, at any level, between the mind-set of the ancient Hebrews of this period and the world-view of modern Western society that can help us to understand the spiritual blindness that overwhelmingly dominates modern Western Churches? This essay seeks to provide answers to these questions and thereby provide some guidance for the way out of the present spiritual and moral failure that is leading to the ruin of contemporary Western society.

Author: Stephen Perks

Paperback | 37 pages | £3.50 plus postage | ISBN: 978-0-9522058-6-9

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