You are basically arguing that it is good to be a putz pagan Catholic and follow whatever the priests say because supposedly like Gandolf in a fiction novel they have magical powers. I don’t see how you can get away with calling yourself Reformed in any sense of the word. What the church needs is not a re-paganization (one of the most blasphemous ideas I’ve ever heard) but a Restoration. That is, a true application of Sola Scriptura, to abandon church tradition COMPLETELY and follow Scripture alone. The reason that Protestantism limps around with one foot in the grave and has since the very beginning is that it never was willing to actually APPLY Sola Scriptura. Until it does that, it is twice dead, plucked up by the roots. Thank God for the church of Christ which follows Sola Scriptura.

I will give you the full context of the Voegelin quote above. Sorry, you asked for it.

Voegelin is riffing off of the opening chapter of the 1966 Dutch Catechism which reads: “This book begins by asking what is the meaning of the fact that we exist. This does not mean that we begin by taking up a non-Christian attitude. It simply means that we, too, as Christians, are men with enquiring minds. We must always be ready and able to explain how our faith is the answer to the question of our existence.”

To this, Voegelin writes:

[BOQ]

The passage, though wanting in polish, is philosophically very much to the point. Its well-intentioned clumsiness sheds a flood of light on the difficulties in which the churches find themselves today. Note above all the difficulty the church has with its own believers who want to be Christians at the price of their humanity. Justin started as an inquiring mind and let his search, after it had tried the philosophical schools of the time, come to rest in the truth of the gospel. Today, the situation is reversed. The believers are at rest in an uninquiring state of faith; their intellectual metabolism must be stirred by the reminder that man is supposed to be a questioner, that a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a “good Christian” but is a questionable man. And we may supplement the reminder by gently recalling that neither Jesus nor his fellowmen to whom he spoke his word did yet know that they were Christians—the gospel held out its promise, not to Christians, but to the poor in spirit, that is, to minds inquiring, even though on a culturally less sophisticated level than Justin’s. Behind the passage there lurks the conflict, not between gospel and philosophy, but rather between the gospel and its uninquiring possession as doctrine. The authors of the Catechism do not take this conflict lightly; they anticipate resistance to their attempt at finding the common humanity of men in their being the questioners about the meaning of existence; and they protect themselves against all too ready misunderstands by assuring the reader they do not mean to “take up a non-Christian attitude.” Assuming them to have carefully weighted every sentence they wrote, this defensive clause reveals an environment where it is not customary to ask questions, where the character of the gospel as an answer has been so badly obscured by is hardening into self-contained doctrine that the raising of the question to which it is meant as an answer can be suspect as a “non-Christian attitude.” If that, however, is the situation, the authors have good reason to be worried indeed. For the gospel as a doctrine which you can take and be saved, or leave and be condemned, is a dead letter; it will encounter indifference, if not contempt, among inquiring minds outside the church, as well as the restlessness of the believer inside who is un-Christian enough to be man the questioner. The Chatechism’s intent to restore the inquiring mind to the position that is his due, is a sensible first step toward regaining for the gospel the reality it has lost through the doctrinal hardening. Moreover, however hesitant and tentative it may prove in the execution, the attempt is a first step toward regaining the life of reason represented by philosophy. Both Plato’s eroticism of the search (zetesis) and Aristotle’s intellectually more aggressive aporein recognize in “man the questioner” the man moved by God to ask the questions that will lead him toward the cause (arche) of being. The search itself is the evidence of existential unrest; in the act of questioning, man’s experience of his tension (tasis) towards the divine ground breaks forth in the word of inquiry as a prayer for the Word of the answer. Question and answer are intimately related one toward the other; the search moves in the metaxy, as Plato has called it, in the In-Between of poverty and wealth, of human and divine; the question is knowing, but its knowledge is yet the trembling of a question that may reach the true answer or miss it. This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking of the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer, is the life of reason. The philosopher can only be delighted by the Catechism’s admonition to make “faith” accountable in terms of an answer to the questions about the meaning of existence. Question and answer are held together, and related to one another, by the event of the search. Man, however, though he is truly the questioner, can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible. The gospel, to be heard, requires ears that can hear; philosophy is not the life of reason if the questioner’s reason is depraved (Rom. 1:28). The answer will not help the man who has lost the question; and the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer, as the authors of the Catechism have seen rightly. It will be necessary, therefore, to recover the question to which, in Hellenistic-Roman culture, the philosopher could understand the gospel as the answer. Since the question concerns the humanity of man, it is the same today as it ever has been in the past, but today it is so badly distorted through the Western deculturation process that it must, first, be disentangled from the intellectually disordered language in which we indiscriminately speak of the meaning of life, or the meaning of existence, or the fact of existence which has no meaning, or the meaning which must be given to the fact of existence, and so forth, as if life were a given and meaning a property it has or does not have. Well, existence is not a fact. If anything, existence is a nonfact of a disturbing movement in the In-between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death. From the experience of this movement, from the anxiety of losing the right direction in this In-Between of darkness and light, arises the inquiry concerning the meaning of life. But it does arise only because life is experienced as man’s participation in a movement with a direction to be found or missed; if man’s existence were not a movement but a fact, it not only would have no meaning but the question of meaning could not even arise.

[EOQ]

Hope that helps folks understand EV better and also better understand where I’m coming from in discussions like these.

Thus, I think it can fairly be said that Voegelin considered the merits of Christ to be that Christ was “the answer” to the fundamental question of human experience. Voegelin was not an evangelist for the answer, however, because in these late days, he considered the project of recovering “the question” to be primary. Beyond that, things get murky.

And in fact, I agree with you quite a bit here. The Isaiahic prophecy is a prefiguring of Christ as our shield and how we are to receive Him; it stands between the compact pagan-istic “sympathetic magic” and the fully differentiated pure utilitarian transactionalism.

In other words, there is a danger of derailment in both directions here: the return to sypathetic magic of some forms of Romanism on the one hand and the advance to the disenchanted materialistic flattening of therapuetic deism on the other hand. There are also combinations of these derailments, as when compact magical thinking is linked with materialistic technical ends. This is what Lewis was writing about in That Hideous Strength.