IDOLATRY TODAY

The last issue dealt with the urgent need for Christians to have an alternative consciousness today. One aspect of an alternative consciousness is our attitude toward idolatry. Emphasized as deadly and forbidden in the Old Testament and solidly forbidden in the New, idolatry is a topic that, for whatever reason, seems rarely present in the consciousness of Christians today. So this issue will discuss it.

Idolatry in Eden

The story of the fall of the human race in the persons of our first parents is normally seen as a matter of disobedience. God had told them not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Tempted by the devil through the serpent, they took of the fruit and ate. Thus they disobeyed the clear rule and plunged the race, and the creation, into the confusion and death which sin entails for humans. The Genesis passage does not mention idolatry, but it will be worth our while to look at it again to see if we have missed something.
In the late spring of 1945, as World War II wound down, Thelma and I, with our young son, Norman, boarded the Swedish ocean liner, the Gripsholm, at Bombay in India to return to the States. There were 600 missionaries on the ship, (which meant that the bar tender quickly ran out of soft drinks but nothing else). At a Bible class one day on board, I listened to an old friend and later seminary classmate, Norton Sterrett, as he explained the story of the fall. What he said has proved thought provoking and valuable in the years since then.
Genesis 3:6 reads like this, "When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate." (New American Standard Version). Norton suggested that the three-fold appeal of the tree, under the influence of the talking serpent, should be looked at as follows:

The fruit of the tree offered:

Something to enjoy  =  Pleasure
Something to possess  =  Possessions
Something to be  =  Wisdom

As one thinks of temptation in the rest of the Bible, these three aspects continue to turn up. Jesus experienced three temptations in the wilderness after His baptism. (Matthew 4:1-11). The first was an appeal to terminate His long fast by turning a boulder into bread and eating it. This would have been a pleasure. The second was a suggestion that the wise way to be sure of the allegiance of the Jewish people would be to perform a miracle as a sign of his being the Messiah. This was a temptation to be something. The third was the promise of possessing all the kingdoms of the world if he would just bow and worship Satan. 1 John 2:16, in defining the world in its fallen state, sums it up with "the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life." These are not from the Father, but from the world. They are also remarkably parallel to the three-fold temptation of Genesis 3:6: pleasure, possessions and power.
We may wonder why these things are not good for us. Pleasure, possessions and power are surely creations of God with which the creation is invested for our benefit. But they are meant to come to us from God through the creation. The problem in the Garden was that Eve and Adam attempted to take them from the creation itself in rebellious independence from God. They left God out of the loop. They forgot that what they sought could only come from God by way of the creation. To attempt to get pleasure, possessions and power from the creation itself was to put the creation in the place of God. And that is exactly what idolatry is. When practiced, it does not provide what we reach for, but plunges us into the servitude of the evil one.

No Idols Today?

Idolatry bulks large in the Old Testament. It was the ultimate cause of the captivity of the Israelites to the Assyrians and the Babylonians. In the New Testament it is severely forbidden. Today it does not enter into the ordinary outlook of western people. What has happened to drive it from our consciousness?
Probably the major factor in this change has been the influence of the Enlightenment. As Newbigin has pointed out, "enlightenment" is a deeply religious word. Jesus professed to be the light of the world. Buddha was called "The Enlightened One." The Enlightenment altered the religious consciousness of western people, including their awareness of idolatry.
As the 1700's drew to a close with the remarkable developments of the early scientific revolution, western people came to feel that they had escaped from the darkness of the religious superstitions of the Dark Ages and had become enlightened. The scientific discoveries of human reason seemed to have opened the door to revolutionary possibilities for the race. Heaven and hell no longer seemed so important. Perhaps it would be possible for the race to create its own utopia on earth without waiting for the new heavens and earth spoken of by Christianity.
Science, however, dealt only with things, which could be measured, and with the power of human reason. Angels could not be observed. Miracle did not conform to the natural laws being discovered by science. Animals and humans that had been idolized in the past were now to be understood only on the basis of the scientific method. So idols disappeared from human consciousness along with angels and miracles. A new worldview, limited to what could be scientifically demonstrated, took over.
Associated with this change, and largely unrecognized by the church, came involvement in what could be called the two truths trap. Spiritual things were moved into a category of their own. In them, Jesus could be the truth for Christians. But in ordinary things, the truth was discoverable by human reason through the scientific method, and no religious revelation could be allowed to interfere there. Truth was strictly whatever human reason discovered. Since ethics and morals are not open to scientific analysis because they are not measurable, they were sidelined into the emotional area. Ultimately this came to mean that there were no absolutes either in truth or in morals. Any person could have any morals that appealed as long as they didn't hurt someone else. The result has been the loss of any consensus in the West as to truth and falsehood or right and wrong. There may be some connection between this development and the assertion of Zbigniew Brzezinski, in Out of Control, that wars, holocausts and genocides have killed approximately 87,000,000 people during this century. We do not seem to have succeeded in creating an earthly utopia!

Modern Idolatry

Neither have we eliminated idolatry. We have simply changed the names of things and thus convinced ourselves that they are no longer idolatrous. It may prove worthwhile to identify some of the forms in which created reality functions today as a surrogate god and thus perpetuates the powerful influence of idolatry.
The October 7, 1996 issue of Christianity Today carried a fourteen-page article by Rodney Clap entitled, "Why the Devil Takes Visa." The sub-title was "A Christian Response to the Triumph of Consumerism." In writing this essay, Clapp was picking up on an understanding frequently found among thoughtful observers of modern society. Walter Bruegemann, as quoted in the last issue, says that today's church, evangelical as well as liberal, "is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act...our consciousness has been claimed by false fields of perception and idolatrous systems of language and rhetoric." (The Prophetic Imagination," p. 11-14). Consumerism is one of the most powerful of the modern idols.
Clapp traces the disappearance of home manufacturing to the development of the industrial revolution. But then the factories became powerful enough to manufacture more goods than people needed. So advertising was developed as a way to get people to desire more things. The computer, a powerful instance of modern technology which can also be an idol, has made it possible for stores to keep track of inventory in new ways as available articles have proliferated. In a section entitled, "The Deification of Dissatisfaction," Clapp says, "...consumption as we now know it, is not fundamentally about materialism or the consumption of physical goods. Affluence and consumer-oriented capitalism have moved us well beyond the undeniable efficiencies and benefits of refrigerators and indoor plumbing. Instead, in a fun house world of every-proliferating wants and exquisitely unsatisfied desire, consumption entails most profoundly the cultivation of pleasure, the pursuit of novelty, and the chasing after illusory experiences associated with material goods." The echo of the pleasure, possessions and power offer of Genesis 3:6 is impossible to escape here.
The problem with idolatry is that it always crushes those who serve it. If we will not be subject to the living God, then we will surely be subject to some aspect of creation instead. The neutral freedom promised to Adam and Eve in the Garden was a bald-faced lie. A society committed to consumerism instills and deepens certain ways of thinking in its people. A culture must have a certain character in its people in order to sustain and deepen what that culture conceives to be the good life. So Clapp, after mentioning Sparta and Aristotle and the kind of character they tried to instill in their people, brings the matter up to date in these words, "...twentieth-century America charged its public schools with the task of instilling the American way of life in their students." Consumerism has us firmly in its grip.
Another powerful modern idolatry growing out of the Enlightenment is naturalism, which Phillip Johnson calls "the established religious philosophy of America." (Reason in the Balance - The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education)..This is the view repeatedly expressed on TV by Carl Sagan in the words, "The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be." Naturalism holds that the scientific method provides our only way to learn the truth about the world we live in. It also holds, though this is not often explicitly explained, that facts are neutral. They make no moral or ethical demands on us as humans. They are useful if we understand them; that is all. The Biblical message that they are revelatory of God and therefore call on us for a fresh response to Him has been effectively sidetracked.
At this point modernity has invented a skillful and clever method of avoiding debate on questions like creation as opposed to evolution. Creation is said to be a religious view based on faith rather than on facts. Hence it has no place in public institutions like the schools. Thus rational argument about creation and evolution is excluded from the schools, not because it is impossible, but because anything religious is marginalized before debate begins. The dishonesty of this position is evident when we realize that naturalism is itself a religious philosophy, for it regards the cosmos as independent just as Christians regard God as independent. This is a very clever way to avoid arguments on creation.
A third modern idolatry, to terminate a list, which could go on for a long time, is selfism. One of the most important books to read in this connection is Paul C. Vitz, Psychology As Religion; The Cult of Self-Worship, Second Edition. Vitz first reviews briefly the major theorists of the twentieth century: Carl Jung, Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow and Rollo May. He shows how all of them, each in his own way, emphasize the importance of self-fulfillment or self-actualization. His conclusion is, "To worship one's self (in self-realization) or to worship all humanity is, in Christian terms, simply idolatry operating from the usual motive of unconscious egotism." (p. 128)
The consequences of selfism are widespread and destructive. One of the most important is the loss of community among people, even in the Christian church. Robert N. Bellah et al, in Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, demonstrated how, already in 1985, the popular emphasis on the self had robbed people of almost all concerns outside one's own individual development. The community ties of family, church and neighborhood had been effectively severed.
It is important to note that each of these idolatries fastens itself on a population by engendering in people a particular pattern of thinking. Like a pair of colored glasses, the thought pattern affects everything a person looks at. The deceitfulness of the assumption that human reason can infallibly discover the truth is evident here. The heart is stronger than the head in all of us, and the allegiance of our hearts to the true God or to an idol will control the direction of our reasoning. This is why Romans 12:1-2 says not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds.

The Captivity of the Modern Western Church

The problem for the modern western church is that, influenced by the two truths trap, it has come to think the way the secular world does without realizing that this involves a breaking of the first commandment against serving other gods. Warren A. Nord, in his recent book, Religion and American Education: Rethinking a National Dilemma, has observed this in our culture and expressed it as follows:

"No doubt the great majority of Americans continue to believe in God. But the great majority of Americans also lead largely secular lives and think about the world in largely secular terms. An intellectual wall of separation divides religion from our public culture; it is no longer obvious to most of us what difference our religious beliefs and traditions should make. We have privatized our religion as we have secularized our culture." (p. 61)

The seriousness of the situation can hardly be overemphasized. Most Christians would be scandalized, and irritated, if they were charged with idolatry. But not calling a thought pattern idolatrous doesn't make it any less idolatrous. If idolatry muted the witness of Old Testament Judaism and led to the captivity of both Israel and Judah, then idolatry in the modern church is probably the principle reason why the church is not more effective in its witness. The transforming power of renewed minds is pitifully lacking in modern Christianity. Another quote from Nord may help to clarify the depth of the problem: "Read literally, the ethic of Jesus conflicts with neoclassical economics as blatantly as the first chapter of Genesis, read literally, does with neo-Darwinian biology. (For some reason, however, there are fewer people who take Jesus literally than Genesis.)" (p. 300)
To explore the ways in which a Christian mind differs from the secular mind set which has fastened itself upon the church today would take more space than is available in this issue. That will have to be left for the next copy of "The Mind Field." Meanwhile, this essay has, hopefully, made clear the powerful presence and influence of modern idolatry.