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So our ancestors who believed in multiple gods weren't wrong?
The bible literally says that the pagan gods are a) real and b) demons. The traditional Christian position would be that there is no difference between Asatru and satanism, not that Asatru is hilarious larping ridiculousness.
I heard that before the late middle ages, there were no real witchhunts, because the official position of the church was that only god had true ‘magical powers’ – the devil, or other gods, could only create an illusion, make it appear a certain way, not actually change the world. Therefore, witches were incapable of siccing an illness-curse on a mule, or making it rain, despite their best efforts, and so they had to be let go. It is only later, in the course of the fight against heresies like the waldensian and albigensian, that the dominican preachers sent to reconvert them imputed these powers to heretics (famously, the first-ever representation of a woman on a broom was not a witch, but a waldensian heretic). Do you know anything about this change in doctrine?
Witchcraft was a normal religious crime regulated by the inquisition in Catholic Europe, similar to blasphemy. Thus you had very few witchburnings in eg Italy, Spain, etc, and lots of them in Germany. Blaming witches, werewolves, etc for crop failures or bad weather in front of a (Catholic)ecclesiastical court tended to result in the accuser being flogged.
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The Abrahamic tradition indeed allowed and allows for missionaries to tell pagans that the ‘gods’ they worshipped existed in some metaphysical sense, but were vastly inferior to the God, yes. Nevertheless, since many if not most pagan traditions had an ultimately powerful God or interrelated concept of an infinite being in some ways analogous to omni- qualities of the Christian god (still extant in eg. Hinduism), it is categorically incorrect that Christianity allows for a world in which all pagan gods are real but just less powerful than the Abrahamic God and/or more malicious than him.
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No; Christianity has always (until very recently and only in the West) understood that there are many, many gods, divine beings, whatever you want to call them. Our conception of 'monotheism' is incredibly anachronistic and silly. I'm unaware of any monotheistic religions.
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"I believe that in the huge mass of mythology which has come down to us a good many different sources are mixed—true history, allegory, ritual, the human delight in storytelling, etc. But among these sources I include the supernatural, both diabolical and divine. We need here concern ourselves only with the latter. If my religion is erroneous, then occurrences of similar motifs in pagan stories are, of course, instances of the same, or a similar error. But if my religion is true, then these stories may well be a preparatio evangelica, a divine hinting in poetic and ritual form at the same central truth which was later focused and (so to speak) historicized in the Incarnation. To me, who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St. Augustine, the anthropological argument against Christianity has never been formidable. On the contrary, I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man. " C. S. Lewis, "Religion Without Dogma?"
You really do have a CS Lewis quote for all occasions. I respect a man who delivers on promises like that.
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As a fanatic for stories, a fan of the best SF stories, this resonates heavily with me.
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Not according to the Christian tradition!
This seems like a massive oversimplification. I’ve been exposed to a fair amount of Orthodox content, including by people with whom I’m in direct contact, and they all seem to be in lockstep agreement that the pagan “Gods” were in fact demons — they use that word over and over — to whom their worshippers were giving profane worship. It seems like the Orthodox mostly don’t directly blame those people for being so fooled, especially as Christ had not yet arrived to spread the good word, nor do the Orthodox apparently believe that such “demons” were (or are) purely malevolent beings. But it seems pretty clear to at least Orthodox Christians — unless I’m somehow misunderstanding their words — that pagans who believed their Gods were supreme and benevolent beings were totally mistaken about the true nature of the beings which they worshipped.
This is the traditional teaching in all branches of Christianity; the fundamentalist opposition to yoga is based on it(Hindu gods being, well, pagan deities).
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Fair enough!
Scripture itself is not exactly simple on this, but it does refer to "gods" (depending on your translation, and including, yes, associating them with what might be translated "demons" or the like) and there's a very long tradition in Christianity (and Judaism) of contrasting God with the other gods not by virtue of being more real but by virtue of being superior - more powerful and benevolent than the gods of others. This is somewhat muddied by mocking idols as being powerless, but there are a number of passages in both the Old and New Testaments that do give credence to the idea of other spiritual beings that are worshiped as gods, so - walks like a duck, talks like a duck - arguably fair to call it a duck!
I grant you that there is a difference in association between "DEMON" and "GOD" but it seems to me like your Orthodox friends and the pagans agreed descriptively on what was being worshiped by pagans (very powerful spiritual beings). I will admit to not being an expert in pagan belief systems, but I am unaware of any pagan pantheon where the gods were "supreme and benevolent" in the sense that we view the Christian God. In the mythologies I am aware of, the gods fight each other, have differing values, typically do not serve all sects or people groups equally (or want to, they often seem to have their own little cults of devotees rather than aspiring towards some sort of universal status), and as I recall often seem to have stumbled into their powers through violence or subterfuge (instead of having them by right as an un-created Creator) and sometimes do things that are ~evil to humans because they can. Now, obviously you have people who say this is also true of the Christian God, but it seems to me there is a big difference between the self-story of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition and the self-story of the various pagan gods. In fact - and I think there is supposed to be fairly decent evidence for this textually, although, again, not my area of expertise - in many ways the Judeo-Christian self-story of God (at least in Genesis) seems set up as a refutation of the claims of other gods - a "setting the facts straight," if you will.
Now, Christians believe that only one God should be worshiped. Thus whatever the characteristics of any other entities, if you worship them you are mistaken about their true nature. But I think one could still call entities that had the characteristics of the "gods" of various mythologies "gods" fairly, even if in the Christian theological framework they were not the One True God who was owed worship.
TDLR; to the question, I would say that Christianity has no problems with the pagan gods being real but it does have a problem with them being worshiped.
And Christians consider pagan "gods" to be very different from the true God, in that they are creatures acting only due to God's (temporary) self-restraint vs. being the creator of everything and ground of existence itself.
Yes. But my recollection is that pagan gods are often (typically?) also not the Creator of everything and the ground of existence itself.
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