When did people stop believing in the old gods like Greek and Norse? Did the Vikings just wake up one morning and think ”this is bullshit”?
In: Culture
I would argue that the Greek and Roman pantheons were never believed in, in the same way that Christianity is believed in. Christianity is a faith based on specific historical claims about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and it has produced a series of creeds and confessions that lay out precisely what Christianity believes to be true. Greek, Roman, Norse, and other myths belong to a different category entirely. They have no creeds, no confessions, and no catechisms. Their adherents would have been puzzled by the suggestion of such a thing. Their “faith” such as it was, existed in a different frame from their philosophy, which co-existed fairly happily but remained separate. (You might see something similar today in the practice of Shinto, for instance.) Christianity was the first faith to put the two together and give us theology.
I’m not sure if this is an original thought to him, but G.K. Chesterton elaborates on this at length in one of his great works, *The Everlasting Man.* (You can easily find it as a free PDF, and can just jump to the part where he starts discussing “comparative religion.”)
Incidentally, this is part of the reason that the line used by folks like Dawkins in debating Christians is mistaken: “You’re also an atheist when it comes to Zeus and Thor and Baal, I’m just an atheist for one more god than you.” It’s a category error. There was never anything like Jewish monotheism, until Christianity which consummated it (Jews would disagree). And there hasn’t been anything comparable since that hasn’t somehow descended from Christianity.
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