syncretism and idolatry

     Though there is only one God and only one true faith, that taught in the Bible, the apostate world (Rom. 1:18-25) has always been full of religions.  The age-old urge toward syncretism (the assimilation of one religion's beliefs and practices into another) is still with us.  Indeed, it has been revived in our time through renewed attempts to unify all religions and through persistent amalgams of Eastern and Western ideas that rise and fall in popularity.
     The pressure to compromise is not new.  After entering Canaan, Israel was constantly tempted to absorb into the worship of Yahweh the Canaanite worship of fertility gods and goddesses, if not to make images of Yahweh Himself-both practices being forbidden in the law (Ex. 20:3-6).  The spiritual issue was whether Israel would remember that the covenant God was all-sufficient for them and that He claimed their exclusive allegiance, making the worship of spiritual adultery (Jer. 3; Ezek. 16; Hos. 2).  This was a test the nation often failed.
     Syncretism was widespread in the Roman Empire during the first centuries of Christianity.  Polytheism was rife and all manner of mystery cults flourished.  Early Christian teachers fought diligently to keep the faith from being assimilated to Gnosticism, a kind of theosophy that had no use for Christ's Incarnation and Atonement, since it saw the root problem of man as ignorance rather than sin.  Neo-Platonism and Manichaeism also saw the way of salvation manly as a matter of ascetical detachment and escape from the physical world.  Christian resistance to these movements was successful, and the classic formulations of the Trinity and the Incarnation in the creeds are a permanent legacy of these struggles. 
     Scripture condemns all idolatry as evil.  Idols are mocked as delusive non-entities (Ps. 115:4-7; Is. 44:9-20), but they nevertheless enslave their worshipers in blind superstition (Is. 44:20).  Paul adds that demons operate through idols, making them a spiritual menace (1 Cor. 8:4-6; 10:19-21).  Biblical warnings against idolatry (e.g., 1 Cor. 10:14; 1 John 5:19-21) need to be taken to heart in the post-Christian Western culture, which is prepared to fill the spiritual vacuum that people feel by embracing religious syncretism, witchcraft, and experiments with the occult.