Unification Theology And The Cross of Christ

by Bryce Pettit, Centers For Apologetics Research

The most universally recognizable symbol of Christianity is the cross of Jesus Christ. For believers it represents the love of God, a love that would not even spare heaven's most precious treasure.  For most of those outside the faith it represents an absurdity, and for the Jews, a blasphemy.  No other doctrine of Christianity divides believers from unbelievers like the cross of Christ.

There is a story that well illustrates this point, albeit with humor.  A woman bought a set of audio cassettes for her young son. dramatizing the life of Christ.  He was fascinated by the person of Jesus, his life, his miracles, and so on.  But when the tape started to describe Jesus' crucifixion, the boy became very upset.  He crossed his arms, stuck out his lower lip, and pouted. His mother happened to walk into the room at this time and noticed how upset her son was.  She asked him what was wrong and he said, "I don't like what they did to Jesus, nailing him to that cross." His mother explained to him that by dying on the cross Jesus could forgive all of

The Pagan Revival

Our post-Enlightenment age, for all its devotion to a purely mechanistic worldview that dismisses spiritual reality as superstition, has been unable to check the rebirth of ancient faith and ritual that never completely died out. Although suppressed for hundreds of years in Western civilization, ancient paganism is enjoying a resurgence among many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who are rejecting their nominal and ineffectual attachments to Christendom. The development of an entirely pagan culture in our postchristian world now spans the globe and encompasses an innumerable variety of primitive and contemporary alternative spiritualities found represented in many ancient civilizations. Our secular society views these developments with a relativistic indiffference while the Christian Church now finds itself once again confronted by the same type of alien gods and goddesses that challenged it in the first three centuries.  

The forms these pagan spiritualities take are many. Perhaps the most well known in  the U.S. are the advances of the Wiccan and the Pagan movements, drawn from a variety of traditions ranging from the Celtic to the Egyptian. Other kinds of ethnic paganism such as Voodoo, Santeria  and Palo Malombe have always been in existence among devotees who are members of the Afro-Carribean cultures that flourish in largely urban settings