Word watching 2 Pagan

Few readers can be unaware of the resurgence in recent years of paganism. The emergence of the Pagan Police Association demanding time off for pagan holidays has highlighted the fact. Consciously and unconsciously, men and women are seeking to fill the spiritual vacuum created by the general abandonment of Christianity with the old pagan beliefs once rejected by so many. If John Bunyan were writing his Pilgrim’s Progress today he might not write, as he did, of a cave where “two giants, Pope and Pagan, dwelt in old time; by whose power and tyranny” men “were cruelly put to death” nor that “Pagan has been dead many a day”. He might have something else to say about Pope too, but that is another matter.

Of course, many are using the word paganism in a technical sense – as referring to a vaguely definable nature religion. However, the word is often used more loosely in at least three other ways.

1. To describe religion outside Judaism before the coming of Christ.

2. To describe the religion of those who have heard the gospel and rejected it.

3. To describe the religion of those who have never heard the gospel.

The word itself has an interesting etymology. It comes directly from Latin and orginally meant rustic or peasant, a word that itself has the same roots. Both are ultimately from a word pagus, which referred to a rural district or to the countryside in general. That word itself is probably from pangere to fix, as in fixing a landmark to define an area or, possibly, from a Greek word in the Doric dialect referring to a fountain, as found in every village.

Pagans, then, could be villagers, or sometimes civilians as opposed to the military. Because Christianity first made its mark in the cities and towns, the main urban centres of the Roman Empire, it tended to be peasants, rural folk, country bumpkins we might say, who were the most likely not to have heard of Christ or to be unbelievers. From as early as AD 365 this secondary meaning of pagan began to be used. In his Decline and fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon says ‘Christianity gradually filled the cities of the empire: the old religion … retired and languished in obscure villages; and the word pagans, with its new signification, reverted to its primitive origin.’

Gibbon states that an important element in the rise of the word is that early believers dubbed those not in Christ’s army as ‘Civilians’ or Pagans as they had not taken the sacrament of baptism.

The word heathen, a Germanic word, seems to have similar roots. The dwellers on the heaths away from the towns were later again the slowest to accept the gospel. In the Middle English work Piers Plowman there is an explanation ‘Hethene is to mene after heth, And untiled earth’. It is fair to say that this explanation is disputed.

In Scripture there is no exact equivalent of these words. Rather words for the nations and for the Gentiles take on the meaning of heathen or pagan at times leading some translations to use such words. In Old Testament days the straight choice really was between the true God and the gods of the nations or pagans. Today we discriminate between nominal Christianity, Islam, Judaism and may be more, confining the word pagan to animistic beliefs, but the word also serves as a useful catch-all term for non-Christians found, sadly, both in rural and urban areas.