Tag Archives: idolatry

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—Christian Ideals or Golden Calves?

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Deceitful Words

Almost every day I have to endure listening to non- or even anti-Christian meanings being poured into traditional Christian words. Even worse, I hear words whose meanings are determined by non- or anti-Christian contexts proclaimed as the height of Christian orthodoxy, piety, and virtue. This experience is as painful to me as I imagine Moses’s experience was to him as he descended mountain having heard the very voice of God only to discover that Aaron and the Israelites had made a golden calf and were worshiping it as the God who brought them out of Egypt (Ex 32). Today we have a multitudes of “Israelites” and plenty of “Aarons” within Christian circles who are only too happy to assimilate Christianity to the pagan culture surrounding it. And playing word games is one way of disguising the substitution.

Some Contemporary Golden Calves

Traditional Words Are Given Alien Meanings

Some years ago I had to study the works of some very liberal theologians. One theologian, Langdon Gilkey (1919-2004), kept using the word “salvation” in an odd way. He kept saying that there is salvation in all religions. What did he mean? Did he mean that the adherents of all religions would achieve what the New Testament offers as liberation from sin, death, and the devil? Do all religions lead to the arms of Abraham, to resurrection of the dead, to union with the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to eternal life in fellowship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? However as I kept reading I realized that Gilkey meant something quite different. He meant that all the major religions humanize, elevate, and spiritualize their followers in this life. These religions provide meaning, purpose, and identity. They create community, human solidarity, and ethical guidance. And this is what Gilkey meant by “salvation.” Jesus saves, Buddha saves, and Mohammed saves. They all make people better and happier.

Later in my historical studies, I discovered that retaining a traditional Christian word while shifting its meaning has been the strategy of liberal Christian theology from its beginning in around 1800 until today. In the liberal dictionary,

“Resurrection” means not that God raised Jesus bodily from the dead and that Jesus reigns as lord but that Jesus’s influence lives on and exercises a powerful force in the world.

“Atonement” is not about God actually changing the world through the death and resurrection of Jesus but about the positive impact of the teaching and example of Jesus.

The “Holy Spirit” is not the powerful presence of God witnessing to Jesus Christ and transforming people into his image but for all practical purposes is identified with the progressive spirit of the times.

“Justice” in the Bible means individual behavior that measures up to the letter and the spirit of God’s just laws. Today it has come to mean “social justice,” which is an agenda for reordering society toward equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Words with Secular Meanings Declared Christian

As examples secular/pagan meanings being imported into Christian churches and such parachurch organizations as Christian colleges I will examine the pervasive call for diversity, equity, and inclusion—aka social justice—in all spheres of modern society. As someone who lives and works in higher education—today’s literal counterpart to the mythical Pandora’s Box—I hear this triad invoked at least three times a day as a self-evident moral ideal. In the modern university you can blaspheme the Holy Trinity of Christianity or burn the American flag with impunity but questioning the axiomatic nature of diversity, equity, and inclusion is to commit the unforgivable sin and become subject to cancellation or termination (of employment).

Hence I am constantly amazed when I hear Christian people invoke diversity, equity, and inclusion as Christian ethical imperatives. They do this uncritically and seemingly without awareness of the radical political context within which this triad gains its meaning. In its secular context the triad sets the agenda for the fundamental reordering of society at all levels through political coercion, accompanied with violence if needed. Equity is not identical to the traditional ideals of equality before the law and freedom of choice; it is a condition within which equal proportions of society’s goods are distributed among different communities of identity—especially communities determined by race and gender.  Diversity means that the membership of every institution in a society—business, club, school, etc.—reflects proportionally the diversity of identity groups in society at large. Inclusion refers to the intentional effort to include sufficient representatives from every identity group contained within society at large, especially from those groups whom society tends to oppress, overlook, or marginalize.

Clearly, achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion at all levels of society cannot be left to meritocratic and free market forces or freedom of choice or speech. The interplay of these forces has always led and will always lead to lack of diversity, inequity, and exclusion. Left to themselves historical prejudices, natural affinities and competition always produce insiders and outsiders, winners and losers, oppressors and oppressed. Hence the government must position itself as a counterweight to these forces in service to the ideals of equity, diversity, and inclusion.

Next Time: Are equity, diversity, and inclusion Christian Ideals? Hint: The answer is no.

The Idol in the Cathedral

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The church faces challenges in every age and in every place. They arise from outside and inside, from rulers and from the people. Some strike a sudden blow and others develop slowly. In the moment, it is hard to tell which threats are superficial and ephemeral and which are profound and enduring. What we think is our greatest challenge may turn out to have been a passing fad and an issue we hardly noticed may prove to have been an existential threat. Only with historical hindsight can we discern with any clarity the difference between the two. But we live now, and have no choice but to use the wisdom we have to deal with the challenges we face.

What are the challenges confronting us today and which one is the greatest? Perhaps there is more than one answer to this question. The church exists throughout the world, and circumstances differ greatly from place to place. The greatest challenge for the church in Nigeria may not be the most pressing problem for the church in Russia or Iran or Canada. I cannot answer for my brothers and sisters living in Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America. I live in the United States of America, and since I live in the State of California it is even somewhat venturesome to speak as an American Christian. For the church in the United States is quite diverse. Even the city of Los Angeles is dizzyingly multicultural. Nevertheless, I would like to share my perspective.

Separating Religion and Personal Morality

Contemporary American culture separates religion (or spirituality) from personal morality, and contemporary Christians seem to be assimilating to that separation at a rapid pace. In my view, this move is one of the most serious doctrinal errors, even heresies, of our time. It is not unusual to hear people express warm personal piety, talk about the love of God and the grace of the Holy Spirit, celebrate Advent and Easter, and speak about the resurrection and eternal life but find it impossible to utter words condemning personal sins having to do with sexual promiscuity, jealously, greed, cursing, selfish ambition, filthy language, litigiousness, adultery, abortion, divorce, factionalism, envy, malice, lying, drunkenness, and many more (See 1 Cor 6:7-20; Rom 1:18-32; Gal 5:19-21; Col 3:5-11). The list of texts of Scripture that churches are embarrassed to read in the public assembly grows yearly. Why am I so concerned about this? Why is this my number one heresy? To answer these questions I need to remind you of something the church used to know but has forgotten.

Ethical Monotheism and Idolatry

The religion of the Old Testament is often called “ethical monotheism.” In stark contrast to the Canaanite and other religions contemporary with ancient Israel, the prophets of Israel taught that there is only one God and that God is perfectly righteous, having no evil impulses. Israel’s God demanded that his people practice personal holiness, justice, and mercy as a religious duty. But Israel always lived on the edge of reversion to idolatry and pagan indulgence. The classic example of this defection is found in Exodus 32:2-6 (See also 1 Cor 10:1-6):

“He [Aaron] took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.”

The union of personal morality and religious practice became central to the faith of Israel and the Judaism contemporary with Jesus and so passed into Christianity. The New Testament’s critique of idolatry is nearly always at the same time a critique of the idolatrous separation between personal morality and religion. The first chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans is an excellent example of the connection between pagan idolatry and immorality: The pagans, says Paul, “exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another” (Rom 1:23-24).

Invisible Idols

The pagan impulse to separate religion from personal morality is strong and ever present for the simple reason that, like water poured out, human beings always look for the easiest path and the broadest way. Self-indulgence is the natural ethics and idolatry is the natural religion of every human being. The advantage of idolatry is that we get to “have our cake and eat it too.” We can entice the supernatural powers to work for us at the bargain price of a few sacrifices and prayers while we pursue our bodily lusts and worldly ambitions. Idols do not care how we live our personal lives. They are lenient and indulgent and want us to be happy in our own way. After all, idols are imaginary gods we create in our own image.

Contemporary culture worships the idol of the autonomous Self, which must be given maximum freedom to pursue happiness in its own unique way and create its own authentic identity. Any attempt to impose on this self a moral code such as the one found in the New Testament is an outrageous sacrilege. Modern culture does not object to the idea of god as long as it is not the God of the Old or New Testament, the God for whom personal morality is a religious duty, the God who cares with whom you have sex, how you spend your money, what you think, and how you talk.

The Idol in the Cathedral

In my view, then, the church faces a stark choice with profound consequences. Will it remain faithful to the biblical view of God in which religion and personal morality are inextricably bound together or will it replace God with a pagan idol whose sole function is to sanctify our self-indulgent pursuit of pleasure?

To be continued…

Idolatry—The Carefully Guarded Secret of Contemporary Culture

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Perhaps there was a time when a catechism of the church could transition smoothly from discussions about what Christians should believe to how they should live. After explaining the doctrines of creation, atonement, sacraments, eschatology, and others, we could move right into morality, virtues and vices, duties and sins. But that time is long gone. Contemporary culture no longer holds presuppositions that make discussions of the Christian way of life understandable. And we have to face the unhappy truth that many people who think of themselves as Christian no longer hold them either.

The foundation and presupposition of biblical morality is God’s right and demand for our absolute loyalty:

“You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3).

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).

God is Creator and Lord, the beginning and end of all things. He gives all things their existence and purpose. God’s will is the law of existence. And those who know and acknowledge this truth seek to know and obey God’s will. They do not claim a right to direct their own lives. Instead, they follow Jesus’ example and say to God, “Not my will but yours be done.” Even the Son of God, who loved his Father and acknowledged his goodness and wisdom, had to obey his God. He renounced all independence and autonomy in relation to God. We should relate to God in love, joy, faith, and admiration. But true test of love for God is obedience, because obedience continues to do God’s will even against inclination, even unto death.

But contemporary culture unequivocally rejects this presupposition. This rejection has roots that go back 300 years in Western history and beyond that to the Old and New Testaments. Christianity asks each individual to establish a relationship to God characterized by faith and obedience. Ultimately each person is answerable to God alone for the way they live their lives. The individual enjoys freedom in relation to God, to believe or not, to obey or disobey. The 17th and 18th Century Enlightenment and the democratic movements that followed applied the Christian view of the God/individual relationship to politics to argue for greater individual liberty over-against the political order. God’s authority trumped human authority, and the individual’s obligations to God trumped the individual’s obligations to the state. Hence human governments have limited authority over the lives of citizens.

However over the past 300 years, the individual’s sacred obligations to God evolved slowly but relentlessly into the sacredness of the individual’s own autonomous self. After the rights of the individual in relation to the state had been established, people forgot the original basis of that freedom. The individual became his/her own god, the source of their own rights and dignity. God became superfluous. Contemporary gods and goddesses reverse Jesus’ statement of submission to his Father. They say,

“Not your will, but mine be done.”

The First Commandment has now been inverted to say:

“I shall have no other god but me.”

The Greatest Command has been rewritten to say:

“I am the Lord my God, me alone. I shall love myself with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my strength”

Many of our contemporaries knowingly or unknowingly reject the presupposition of all biblical morality, that is, that God should be obeyed in all things. Perhaps there is no more offensive and counter-cultural word than “obedience.” It strikes at the heart of the modern view of the sacred dignity and rights of human beings. Our absolute obligation to God has been transformed from the origin and foundation of human rights and dignity into their greatest enemy. Our contemporaries display an intuitive resentment and a knee-jerk rejection of any moral assertion that suggests submission to any will other than their own, even to God’s will.

A catechism of mere Christianity for a post-Christian, post-denominational culture will be ineffective unless it recognizes and exposes the modern divinization of the individual as the root of modern culture’s enmity toward the God of the Bible. Popular rhetoric of freedom, justice, individual rights, and tolerance is too powerful for immature and acculturated Christians to resist. Its power derives from its deceptive resemblance to Christian morality. Though it sounds vaguely Christian, it is actuality idolatry in its most original form: self-deification and self-worship.

The first and most basic premise of the Christian life is that we should passionately seek God’s will that we might obey him in all things, no matter what the cost.

When Religion Goes Wrong: God and the Modern Self (Part 3)

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In Part 2, we examined the anti-religious attitude of defiance. When we think of God primarily as power, especially unjust power, we feel a rising urge to defy. This urge is amplified in the mind of the modern self by its self-understanding as autonomous. If I am defined as a real person by my free will to do as I please, an all-powerful God looms a threat to my identity and dignity. But not every modern person is a Prometheus, willing to endure torture and destruction just to witness to the Power’s injustice. Even if we think of God largely as an undefeatable authority, most of us take another approach. I shall call that attitude subservience to distinguish it from submission, which is an act of faith and love. The subservient resist the urge to defy and give precedence to their desire to survive. Better a dog alive “to lick the foot of power” than a lion dead but defiant to the end.

Subservience is a religious attitude that views God as the inescapable law of reward and punishment, the ultimate source of blessings and curses. Ancient pagans worshipped the gods to secure their favor and ward off their wrath. Divine favor brings bountiful crops and fertile animals. Divine wrath brings floods and earthquakes. Subservient religion is religious worldliness, a science of the divine capriciousness. For people who think this way, God is part of their personal economy, a means to the end of wellbeing here and now. They may seem very religious, but it’s the world they love, not God.

Doubtless there have been a few pagan critics of subservient religion, but its earliest, severest and most radical critics are found in the Bible. The prophets of Israel, Amos, Isaiah and Jeremiah, warned their people against viewing temple worship and sacrifice as replacements for justice and mercy. They championed relating to God with inner devotion and ethical behavior. By criticizing idolatry they insisted on God’s transcendence over nature and his immunity from religious manipulation.

Jesus takes up the perspective of the prophets and radicalizes it even more, if that is possible. External acts of religion are empty and even offensive if not accompanied by a pure heart, that is, with wholehearted and undivided devotion. Hypocrisy is a mismatch between two parts of life, public and private or internal and external. One wishes to appear pious and morally upright for the worldly advantages such appearances give while retaining the “advantages” of a worldly life practiced in secret. Jesus condemns hypocrisy in the strongest terms, reminding us that God knows the secrets of the heart and sees what goes on in the dark.

Paul follows his Lord in demanding that we give our whole heart to God, become new creatures, be transformed in our minds and live by faith. Above all, he urges us to love. Heroic acts of self-sacrifice, stirring worship performances and great acts of generosity count for nothing—indeed they are displays of pride and hypocrisy—if not motivated and accompanied by love (1 Cor 13). Not to be out done by Paul, John helps us enter into God’s heart by reminding us that “we love because he first loved us.” If we see how much God loves us, we will love him back. And in loving him back and loving our brothers and sisters, we will experience his love from inside. In the Spirit, God’s love and our love become one heart and one spirit.

In his beautiful essay On Loving God, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) follows Jesus and his disciples Paul and John. Bernard outlines four stages of love beginning with pure self-love. Once life’s hard knocks teaches us that we need God and others we move to stage two, loving God for what he can do for us, that is, subservience. We enter stage three when we learn how beautiful God really is and how much he loves us, that is, we begin love God for his own sake. Ultimately, we must learn to love ourselves only in our love for God. Listen to Bernard as he struggles to find words to explain why we should love God:

“Could any title be greater than this, that He gave Himself for us unworthy wretches? And being God, what better gift could He offer than Himself? Hence, if one seeks for God’s claim upon our love here is the chiefest: Because He first loved us (I John 4.19). Ought He not to be loved in return, when we think who loved, whom He loved, and how much He loved?… In the first creation He gave me myself; but in His new creation He gave me Himself, and by that gift restored to me the self that I had lost. Created first and then restored, I owe Him myself twice over in return for myself. But what have I to offer Him for the gift of Himself? Could I multiply myself a thousand-fold and then give Him all, what would that be in comparison with God?”

Subservience is religion gone wrong. It views God from the outside, as a law or a power to which we relate in external acts because we must. It resists the Holy Spirit who wants to join our hearts to God’s heart, so that we live in his life and love with his love. In subservience…

“We…pledge to give God whatever God asks, but earnestly pray that God does not ask for too much. We want what God wants for us only when we want it anyway; we submit our wills to God in areas where we would prefer something else only because we must…[subservience] manifests itself in our lack of passion for God, in our inability to love God with our whole heart. We do not consciously think of God as a threat, but neither do we see God as our soul’s passion, the one thing for whom giving everything up is worth doing. We do not rise to the level of loving God for God’s sake (God, Freedom & Human Dignity, p. 63).

Note: This post can be used as a companion to Chapter 3 of my book God, Freedom & Human Dignity (“Subservience: The Religion of Idols, Hypocrites, and Hirelings”).

Questions for Discussion

1. Describe the subservient attitude in its distinctions and likenesses to defiance.

2. What are some modern forms of subservient religion? Explore some ways it can appear so deceptively like true religion.

3. What is the central feature of idolatry and how does it embody subservience?

4. What is hypocrisy and how is purity of heart its opposite? Give examples.

5. How do the Old Testament prophets and Jesus and his disciples understand pure and true religion; and how does this view of religion fit with their view of God and God’s actions?

6. Explain how Bernard of Clairvaux’s four stages of love progress from one to the other.

Next week we will examine the attitude of indifference.