You hit the stone wall

This collision, however, is not due to the missionaries’ lack of tact (though they were doubtless bold) or to a pagan propensity for rash violence (though there was doubtless bloodlust); rather, its deeper basis rests ultimately in the theological affirmation of the break between God and the cosmos. For to affirm that God has “created heaven and earth” is, in Luke’s narrative, simultaneously to name the entire complex of pagan religiousness the character of ignorance. Pagan religion, regardless of the specific differences engendered by time and locale, knows only the cosmos; it does not know God.—World Upside Down, page 50