C. S. Lewis notes in his Abolition of Man that there are at least three differences characterizing the modern period that are unprecedented in history. These are: 1) modern people generally do not fear the judgment of some divine being; 2) modern society is the first to deny that there was some sort of “Golden Age” (e.g. Garden of Eden) in the past from which we have fallen, believing instead a myth of Progress such that the past is deemed with suspicion by default and its inheritance regarded as worthless or even oppressive rather than treasured; 3) modern society is unprecedented in its abandonment of the quest to conform the self to an objective, normative order inherent in reality in favor of the drive to conform what is now believed to be an essentially meaningless reality of “raw material” to the desires of the autonomous self.

“A religion without ” enthusiasm ” in the old sense, reserved in its self-expression, calculated to reinforce morality, chivalry, and the sense of truth, providing comfort in times of distress and a glow of contentment in declining years; supernatural in its nominal doctrines, yet on the whole rationalistic in its mode of approaching God: tolerant of other people’s tenets, yet sincere about its own, regular in church-going, generous to charities, ready to put up with the defects of the local clergyman.”

Making, in Mi ton’s words “a broad, easy, inoffensive Passage down to Hell.”

Not strict deism. But I do wonder when Christianity turns into a generic moralizing creed, it’s basically a deism that presents itself as “Christianity.” It could be argued this IS and arguably has always been the default religion of most “Christians.” The MTDs don’t self identify as “deists,” but rather as “Christians.”

“I think there is much comparison to today, up to and including the need of the prevailing culture for child sacrifice.”

Continuing with your thought, I submit the following for consideration:

Thou shalt not lie with thy neighbour’s wife, nor be defiled with mingling of seed. Thou shalt not give any of thy seed to be consecrated to the idol Moloch, nor defile the name of thy God: I am the Lord. Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind, because it is an abomination. Thou shalt not copulate with any beast, neither shalt thou be defiled with it. A woman shall not lie down to a beast, nor copulate with it: because it is a heinous crime. Defile not yourselves with any of these things with which all the nations have been defiled, which I will cast out before you, And with which the land is defiled: the abominations of which I will visit, that it may vomit out its inhabitants. Keep ye my ordinances and my judgments, and do not any of these abominations: neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you. For all these detestable things the inhabitants of the land have done, that were before you, and have defiled it. Beware then, lest in like manner, it vomit you also out, if you do the like things, as it vomited out the nation that was before you.
–Leviticus 18:20-28

If those are the kinds of practices that brought down the wrath of God upon people who did not have the benefit of two thousand years of Christianity as we do, believers should not be at all surprised if God’s providence has major calamities in store for us who have no such excuse, since it seems that is what it will take to get our attention.

We even have our own contemporary version of copulation with animals. See:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0125_050125_chimeras.html

And of course, routinely taking the life of the innocent child in the womb would be the modern version of giving “thy seed to be consecrated to the idol Moloch.”

God’s inevitable judgment of us will really be His mercy far more than His wrath, His chastisements being the only thing that will get the attention of many who will otherwise be eternally lost.

While it’s a complicated issue, another fine demonstration was when, at the crescendo of the Maximalist/Minimalist archaeological debates in the 1990s, this was discovered.

Dever is frustrated by attempts to verify the Bible with the spade. “Nothing could be clearer evidence of the modern lack of faith than our… demands for archaeological ‘proof.’”

Verifying the Bible with the spade is not all that necessary for true believers, but it is very useful for non-believers who are considering Christianity’s plausibility, and for Christians who have come to doubt the plausibility of its
historicity due to their being “catechized” by those taking modern Scripture scholarship far more seriously than it deserves to be taken.

A noteworthy exception to this contemporary trend in Biblical scholarship is Professor K. A. Kitchen, “personal and Brunner Professor Emeritus of Egyptology and Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics, and Oriental Studies, University of Liverpool, England.”

That Kitchen’s demonstration of the plausibility of the Bible’s historicity is indeed a noteworthy exception is further discussed in a previous post appearing here:

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/08/25/first-links-08-25-11/

The Bible is definitely not something like Aesop’s Fables. It is not very useful fiction in that there is a moral to the story — a story inspired by God Himself — but fiction nonetheless. It is not that at all. This is because Christ is the “Lord of History,” and those portions of the Bible unanimously considered historical by the Church Fathers are just that. The Scriptures themselves allude Christ being the Lord of History:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

… in him we live and move and have our being. …

The omnipotent and omniscient God has and continually “writes” history through His Word, not in symbols on some material medium, but in real events and real people who live and move and have their very being in Him, His providence always taking into consideration the very real effects of our free will upon that history. The portion of that history commonly referred to as “salvation history” has been recorded by divinely inspired humans in what we call “the Bible.” It is silly to think the omnipotent God, through His Son, the Lord of History, needed to inspire those humans to make up fictional stories. He inspired them to record on a material medium the history He wrote the way He alone “writes” history — in real events and real people, its veracity being such that it is rightly called “God’s Word.”