PERSPECTIVErnAthens and Jerusalemrnby Thomas FlemingrnThe holiday season is responsible for some of modernrnAmerica’s most deeply felt traditions: cheap airiine ticketsrnon Christmas day, seasonal hymns like “Jinglebell Rock” andrn”Blue Christmas,” ACLU suits against the school Christmasrnpageant, and the Andy Williams Christmas special, for whichrnthe divorced Mr. Williams (one of whose wives killed her lover,rnOlympic skier Spider Sabich) had to hire actors to play the familyrnhe did not have.rnThe one holiday custom I kept religiously was to listen tornHerbert W. Armstrong of the Woddwide Church of God, whornever}’ vear came on the air to denounce Christmas as a paganrncelebration. Alternating between biblical quotations condemningrntree worship and news stories on the high rates of depressionrnand suicide, Herbert W. (or, before they quarreled, hisrnson Garner Ted) reveled in anti-Yuletide indignation. ThernArmstrongs were right about the Christmas blues. Even in thernbest of times Christmas can be depressing, if only because thernreality of Christmas present can never live up to the imaginationrnof Christmases past. But a few minutes of Herbert W.’srnself-righteousness were always enough to restore my good humor.rnI might have been born in the wrong century, but at least,rnI would reflect, I am not a British Israelite.rnI have never learned on what basis the British Israelites decidedrnthat the English are the lost tribes of Israel, but the condemnationrnof Christmas is all of a piece with fantasies aboutrnthe children of Israel. Within Protestantism, there has alwaysrnbeen a Judaizing strain that sought to purify Christianity ofrnsuch pagan vestiges as icon-worship and holy water. Yule logsrnand jack-o’-lanterns, good works and Aristotelian philosophy.rnEvery year at Halloween, I begin to think of myself as a persecutedrnminority. Here in the upper Midwest, our great Scottishrnholidav is boycotted by large numbers of Swedish and GermanrnCalvinists who mistakenly think themselves Lutherans. Thernsame people would be shocked by Herbert W. Armstrong’s attacksrnon the pagan German custom of worshiping evergreens,rnbut the’ condemn all the customs surrounding All Souls’ Dayrnand its eve as Satanism.rnWe ex-Anglicans (there are almost literally no believing Anglicansrnleft in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the UnitedrnStates of America), we ex-Anglicans have always taken a morernlatitudinarian approach to pagan survivals. More than once,rnC.S. Lewis twisted St. Athanasius into saying that Christ wasrnthe fulfillment of the highest aspirations of ancient paganisms.rnThe love He brought went deeper than Eros or Aphrodite, andrnin turning water into wine at the wedding of Cana, He revealedrnhimself as the true Dionysus. If, as all Christians believe,rnChrist was the Logos, the divine Word through whom all thingsrnwere made, then He was in the universe from the beginning, inspiringrnHebrew prophets and pagan philosophers alike.rnThere is a hymn (Episcopalian, of course) which, after expressingrnthanks and praise for the prophets, moves on to thernGreeks:rnEor Socrates who phrase by phrasernTalked men to truth, unshrinking.rnAnd left for Plato’s mighty gracernTo mold our ways of thinking;rnFor all who wrestled sane and free,rnTo win the unseen realit}’,rnTo God be thanks and Glory.rnSome Christians, believing that the Scriptures of the Oldrnand New Testament are a completely Hebraic compendium ofrnall that our Creator wants us to know, profess to be shocked byrnsuch language, and this tendency to obscurantism was pronouncedrnin many of the fathers of the eady church. “What hasrnAthens to do with Jerusalem?” asked Tertullian. In some of thernfathers, hostility to learning can be explained as part of theirrngeneral revulsion against pagan society; in others, they werernconscious of their own inferiority in engaging intellectual combatrnwith educated pagans. But even so erudite and polished arnwriter as St. Jerome felt guilty for his secular learning. Christrn8/CHRONICLESrnrnrn