“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”
— Matthew 5: 43-45
In the course of my life I have known many self-proclaimed Christians who are thoroughly versed in the doctrines and dogmas not only of their own denomination but of all other Christian denominations as well. They may even be well-trained in academic theology, with advanced degrees up to and including the Ph.D. in that subject. Nevertheless, I know more than one such person who, faced with a personal loss such as the death of a close family member to suicide or atypical medical conditions, declare themselves to have become atheists. If there were a God, they argue, no such thing would have been permitted to occur. Therefore, they conclude, there is no God.
Whenever I have encountered such individuals, I have wondered what their current disbelief says about their former belief. That is, what must have been the idea of God that they held all along, such that such personal tragedies could lead to their abandonment of their formerly professed belief?
The God in whom they once believed surely could not have been the God of whom the Gospel of Matthew speaks in the verses given above, who sends both sun and rain upon the righteous and the unrighteous alike. That God, as another passage in Christian scripture (Acts 10:34) says, is no respecter of persons — nor, therefore, of the professed “beliefs” that differ among persons.
A God who would love only those who professed propositionally correct beliefs would not be God at all, at least not any God who was no respecter of persons. Such a God would really be no more than an idol—a sort of universal innkeeper who treated some quests well, and others abominably.
Auschwitz ovens
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The fight against idolatry, which is the central issue of prophetic teaching, is at the same time a fight against narcissism. In idolatry one partial faculty of man is absolutized and made into an idol. Man then worships himself in an alienated form. [. . .] But while the concept of an indefinable and indescribable God was the negation of idolatry and narcissism, God soon became again an idol; man identified himself with God in a narcissistic manner, and thus in full contradiction to the original function of God, religion became a manifestation of group narcissism
— Erich Fromm
Who’s an idolator? The child writing letters to Santa Claus as Christmas nears? Or the self-styled evangelist preaching hate in the name of God?
To anyone whose vision is even minimally clear, the answer is obvious at a glance.
In 1846 Søren Kierkegaard first published his Concluding Unscientific Postscript to his earlier — and, with all the irony dear to Kierkegaard, far shorter — Philosophical Fragments. In a widely known analysis therein, Kierkegaard offered an upright, doctrinally meticulous, Danish member of what Kierkegaard called Christendom as one example. In contrast, he gave the example of a simple, unlearned idol worshipper who may have had all his theology wrong but who adored his idol with all his heart, in full awe and self-abandonment. Which of the two truly worshiped God? To Kierkegaard, it is obvious that the true worshipper is what the haughty Danish member of Christendom would surely condemn as an idolator.
What matters is to worship, that is, to be in awe and wonder before the holy. Where such worship is, there is God; and there, in such worship, is no idolatry. The idolator, in truth, is neither the innocent child writing to Santa Claus nor the so-called pagan bowing down in honest worship before some statue.
The idolator, in truth, is the upright member of Christendom, so proud of himself in his righteousness.
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[. . .] instead of preaching faith, people preached faith in the faith and stunted religion while ostensibly enlarging it.
— Adolf von Harnack
Where God is, there are no idols; and where idols are, there is no God.
Wherever worship occurs, God is there. Kierkegaard, for one, knew that — and said it in his way, whereas I am given to say it in my own way, as I am doing in this post.
When doctrine becomes the object of devotion, devotion is no longer worship of anything sacred. Indeed, it ceases to be genuine devotion at all any longer. It becomes, instead, a way of distancing from everything holy, a denial of holiness. Such strict doctrinal adherence substitutes self-aggrandizement for devotion, fostering illusion wherever it can.
Those who preach such false devotion blaspheme against the holy. They take the name of God in vain. Having broken that commandment, they proceed to break all the rest. They even call such arrogance humility, robbing that word, too, of its meaning.
May we turn aside all such false preachers and their idols! May we persevere in our devotion to the holy—whatever form or personification the holy may take for us in each of our lives! May we hold firm to our faith that God is everywhere, whereas the idols of false prophets are nowhere!
When we wake from our dreams, all such idols will be dismissed as no more than the phantoms they are. We will come alive to the utter irrelevance of them all.
