The Aztec Empire

I read someone claiming that the supposed dis-em-hearting of so-called human sacrifice in the Aztec temples was actually heart surgery as misunderstood by the barbarian, backwards Christian conquistadors.
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/6581/aztec-sacrifice.html
Now I am an open-minded person, and have come across a lot of anti-Christian critiques in my time (my latest being someone who referred to Welsh missionary activity in India as a "mind-**** utilizing the God-man delusion"), but this one took me by surprise.
Lately it has occured to me that the real challenge to Christianity today isn't "secular humanism" or "atheism" or all the traditional suspects. I don't really even think Islam qualifies - Islam is collapsing under the pressure of rock and roll- wait till the higher critics get ahold of the Koran. The real alternates today are New Age theories involving higher powers that "seeded" our planet. Von Daniken is a good example. And what I mean by this is that they really do offer an alternate view of the cosmos that makes some kind of sense. They don't deny God outright. They just re-write the Bible to be more "enlightened".
The website on the Aztecs was this kind of angle - very convincing, and appealing to a modern Christian apostate, which is always where the real threat comes from. Not from yesterday's demon, but the idea that is half-Christian and "makes sense" to the generation apostasizing.
All of which is to say that Christian theologians have their work cut out for them. These pressures from modernity caved in our Ark, and the pressures of post-modernity may very well flood it. Simply opposing Scripture to these various worldviews won't work, especially when these worldviews actually use a great deal of Scripture as evidence for their own position. Sola Scriptura will have to be re-interpreted, updated, and made into new wineskins, without destroying the essential theological content or dishonoring the truth of the revelation of God. As the controversy over Karl Barth's neo-orthodoxy demonstrates, doing this won't be easy. Fundamentalism, even Calvinist Fundamentalism, will not work in any systematic or cultural way. Christians are going to have to understand evolution, UFOs, post-modern sociology, and languages better than their opponents. Fundamentalism accomplished a lot. A fortress theology managed to shore up a battered church and rally troops within the inner keep. Pouring boiling oil down on the attackers, we held until they gave up and lifted the seige.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalist
Now it's time to sally forth. All the wide world is before us, and Providence our guide.
The task of our generation is to sift a great deal of material in a very short time, deciding which is absolutely contrary to Scripture, which is balderdash right out of its own right, and what we can use to make sense of the world. The Catholic Church is doing exactly that right now under Pope Ratzinger and the Nouvelle Theologie. They are retreating from tradition for tradition sake into a more Protestant, individual, existential understanding of what faith means, which incorporates doubt as a handmaiden to theology.
If we Presbyterians are to have any voice in shaping the new America, let alone the New World, we will have to follow suit with painful and difficult changes of our own.
No one is suggesting we abandon Scripture. In fact, many of the changes we need to make are lying latent and hidden for us to carefully find and understand with prayer.
It's just that our holy Book turned out to have more holiness and more knowledge than we could have ever dreamed of, much like the Author Who inspired it, the Maker Who thought it first, and the Redeemer it points towards.
Here is one person's very eloquent statement of a traditional, yet new, theology:

Let me restate the issue in the way I have tried to elaborate over the past few years. Europe's decline, I have argued for some time (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/front_page/ED08Aa01.html) stems from a national or racial corruption of Christianity. My issue with, for example, T.S. Eliot is the identification of Christianity with culture, that is, tradition -- the German term Ueberlieferung is more exact. Christianity, though, is the enemy of all tradition and all nationalism, for its premise is the creation of a new people into whom Gentiles are re-born as children of Abraham (Matthew 3:9). It is the mortality of the peoples, their inevitable extinction, to which Christianity provides an answer: a new people, a new life. That is why American Christianity (including its evangelical exports such as Pentecostalism, the world's fastest growing denomination) are Christianity's great success story. America has no culture, no tradition; it is a fresh start and a new people. I do not mean that only America (or similar entities such as Australia) can accomplish this, only that the American model of a new people provides ideal conditions for Christianity, and that this is borne out by events.OrthyDoxy suggests that Americans seek out the Orthodox Church because of its traditions. I do not dispute this, although I do not know a great deal about Orthodox converts in the US. There is a great search for authenticity in the U.S., where commercial culture overflows the landscape and offers nothing but anomie. But authenticity and Christianity are different concepts, and in in a key respect incompatible ones. Christianity derives from an event, not a tradition. The event is the resurrection of the crucified Christ. In Christian terms this fulfills the promise of the Hebrew prophets -- but that promise also was an event, a voice like a great horn out of a smoking mountain. Tradition is a process, cultivated over time; revelation is a single, blinding event that changes everything.Traditional society has died, as it must, and cannot be revived -- nor should it be. Traditional European Christianity -- what Kierkegaard derisively called Christendom -- had to founder on the conflict between Christ and Siegfried (as Franz Rosenzweig put it). Barth says the same thing in Dogmatics I/2 when he contrasts "religion" with faith. That is why I have written (with a bit of polemical exaggeration) that the tent-meeting is the natural home of American Christianity.By the way: I do not like Fiddler on the Roof (to answer Ehud's question) because the first number is entitled, "Tradition!" If it were, "Revelation!", I would feel differently.At the end of the day there is no authenticity. The Jews are not authentic. They were wandering Arameans until God led them out of Egypt, slave-rabble that they were, and gave them the revelation of Mt. Sinai. The Christians are not authentic: they have no country, no language (who was it who said that the native language of the NT is "translation"?) -- they have the Kingdom of Heaven, populated by a new people, the graft of the gentiles onto the trunk of Israel. Whether the RCC or another Church actually constitutes the People of God is a controversial point that I do not wish to debate here.My concern is that some converts to Orthodoxy -- and I ask this question with all due respect and with limited knowledge -- may be looking for authenticity at the expense of revelation. That said, you should be aware from all that I have written that I hold in the greatest esteem individuals and institutions from a wide range of denominations and faiths, and consider myself an enemy of all sectarian prejudice. I have not published on the subject of Orthodoxy because I do not know enough about it. These are questions among friends.

The Catholics and Orthodox have all the thinkers. We really need to make up some time. But, then again, perhaps in our own way, faithfulness has meant more than relevance, in the last century. Still, our hour is coming, and now is.
To return to my point - even if the Aztecs were an advanced civilization which barbaric Christians misunderstood, brutalized, and buried forgotten, even then, especially then, Christ is King. Only if He is not risen is He not. But there are more things in heaven and earth, under Him, than are dreamt of in our philosophies...

Gottingen Goose Girl

/http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~harry/Photos-Europe-2004/photos-Pages/Image16.html

Back when Europe was truly Europa (beloved of Zeus and transmogrified to protect her from her jealous enemies), and universities were universities, and men were men were men were men (and they thought nothing of vicious, fratericidal war every generation), little traditions like this still flourished, amazingly enough, in the heart of the devestation: Germany.
Germany was annihilated multiple times in her existence.
Germany matured relatively unhampered during das Mittlealter, combining Tuetonic barbarism secured at the Battle of Teutoburger Wald (the Prussian heathern) with Charlemagne's hallowed remains at Salzburg and the new city of Aix-la-Chappelle (Aachen where Alcuin taught) with Roman fringe civilization at the Lime forts (like Cologne). Then cam the Reformation.
The first phase was the Thirty Year's War, which depopulated Germany. Intermittent plague and famine helped, which was endured during the Middle Ages as well.

http://www.radio.cz/en/article/41652 (White Mountain, Battle of)
http://www.radio.cz/en/article/41652 (Thirty Years War)
They also managed to stave off the Turks, as well as participate in some Crusades. They were blessed with immunity during the Viking raids, but had had many last minute, leftover Dark Age migrations such as the Magyars.

Germany survived the Reformation as a welter of related, princely states, until the Reunification
under Bismarck, so long opposed by Richelieu's policy. Germany overnight became a juggernaut, a nascent threat that quickly united both England and France (longtime enemies) into staunch allies. Germany was the China of the early 1900s. Young, strong, and looking for more resources and land.

Ultimately, it ended rather poorly. There was no Golden Age of Europe. Europe had been at each others' throats for centuries, including the brutal Hundred Years War, culminating in the Napoleonic Chaos (everyone thought), only to relapse finally into the First and Second War to End all Wars.
With Germania Triumphant in Europe, it quickly became apparent that Medieval Europe and Augustine's City of God was (unltimately) an untenable idea. The wonderful dream of TS Eliot's Christian culture had ended at Verdun, Auschitz, and Stalingrad. The great experiment was over.
The successor to this experiment is America. We have yet to see if we shall succeed at outfoxing the devil where our ancestors succeeded. It is ours to do or to die, to roll the dice, and to endeavor to avoid the tragedy of Europe, ancient, medieval, and modern.
The tragedy of Europe is that she is more peaceful now in her degeneracy than in her glory.
The Angst of Germany can be traced mercilessly and ineluctably in her poetry. First comes Von Logau's "Authority can shut down all the churches, but never the church in a man's conscience." A very Lutheran position. Then comes Klopstock's "Does not God now keep silence, withholding His guidance? And can you alone, terrible silence, save us?" This is the Weimar Golden Age of Goethe, who is himself an exception to the rule of secularism opposing Faith. Until finally, you have the terrible prophecy of Georg Heym's Der Krieg (1911) - Aufgestanden ist er, welcher lange schlief... (He is uprisen, who has long slept...)
One could look long and hard to find a more modern and more perfectly tragic nation, as well as a more intelligent and Christian, than Germany and her twin Austria. Baron Ledhin blamed it on Luther at first, and then Protestant liberal democracy. But the fault lines go deeper than that. It is up to us to read the bones in order to steer America upon her maiden voyage.

Saint Theodulph

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14579b.htm
It took the new invaders of Europe very little time to go from being barbarians to endeavoring to live out the Gospel. We still sing this gentleman's song:http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/a/g/aglahonr.htm (I believe that names ending in
-ulph were Gothic).
Here is the Latin version:http://romaaeterna.web.infoseek.co.jp/liber1/lu0586.html
Rhyme was a medieval addition to poetry, brought over from the Celts and the Saxons and really created by the monks, who, I suppose, found it easy to rhyme in Latin. In any case, they kept metre. And the new style didn't suffer at all in this:
http://www.franciscan-archive.org/de_celano/opera/diesirae.html
The Dies Irae is not only the credo of the Early Middle Ages, it is a beautiful piece of poetry, exemplifying the fact that rhyme, even an abundance of ryhme, is no bar nor detriment to the inner freedom of the idea.
This hymn by Saint Theodulph is a processional hymn, part of the old, abandoned Church calendar. We either need a new one, or go back to the old, Ah reckon! Our calendar is that we have no calendar, much like our liturgy!
One has to wait to the Reformation hymns of Rinckhart and Luther to read something like this.

Coming up: The Ineluctable Decline of Germany in Poetry and Hymns

Manliness

Many Christians today undervalue and underemphasize the masculine virtues (and overtones, excesses, and even vices). One ofthe things the Communists worried about after the 1917 revolution was subverting Germany, and their pamphlets (captured by American army forces helping the Whites) mentioned "destroying the ruggedness of the people" as the first goal. Gramsci argued something similar when he recommended liquidating Christian philosophy and ethics in America, prior to socialization.
The New Bible translations reflect this prejudice. In I. Cor. 6:9, Saint Paul lists who will inherit the kingdom of God. The new translations make it out as, not "effiminate", but "immoral" or "perverts". But that isn't the word used, and besides, there is another noun which covers that idea in the same list. Saint Paul was literally saying that girlie men won't make it into the City of God. The word is MALAKOI, when applied to men, means "soft". This is the usage in Plato's Republic, as well as the decrees against the Lydians.

This post was taken in summary from a Boy Scout post board, Poster MK9750. It was so good, I saved it, and agree with it wholeheartedly.

Ilmenau

http://www.ilmenau.de/englisch/histo_eng.htm
One of Goethe's best poems was written here.