In teaching about Paul's ideas of God being very close to us but we being unable to perceive it, I used the metaphor of broken hearts and dirty windows from John Prine’s song “Souvenirs” to talk about how sin has a distorted effect on our perception. I want to go deeper into this dynamic of blurring vision and breaking hearts by considering the idea of idolatry as used by the Hebrew prophets including Moses, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, as well as Jesus's apostle Paul. “Idolatry” seems like a quaint and ancient concept but is actually quite connected to contemporary ideas of distorted thinking, addiction, unhealthy obsessions, as well as the traditional language of sin and social injustice. If we define sin as the inability to realize and take delight in the presence of God, then we can begin to see why idolatry is such a big deal in the Old Testament. In the context of my overall assertion about Paul’s gospel, sin takes away our ability to trust that God delights in us, and reconciliation is not a matter of changing God’s perception of us, but rather a transformation of our perception of God.
I have to admit that for most of my life I haven't really understood the all the fuss about idols or idolatry. I've always thought idols were kind of harmless knickknacks. Aren't those little household gods that people would gathered around their hearths simply a quaintm ancient form of collectible figurines? Why do the prophets who speak on Yahweh’s behalf get so dramatic about idols? Why would a God get so upset and build a covenant on this idea of not having false gods? It seems to me like some of the commandments against stealing or lying or especially killing have much more importance than how you name your gods, how you picture them, how you adore them . But yet here we are, in the first few commandments about not having false gods, not making graven images or carved images, about keeping the Sabbath holy, we seem to be overly fixated on God's feelings, God's sensibilities. In fact, we read in Deuteronomy and other places that God is a “jealous” God. This can’t mean that Yahweh is an insecure or envious macho man. That doesn't quite fit with the idea of an infinite, eternally loving, all-powerful God. Why would God be concerned about the affections of a human being?
In Paul's second letter to the church community he had planted in Corinth, he says, “I feel a divine jealousy for you since I betrothed you to one husband to present you as a pure virgin in Christ. But I'm afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion.”
Paul's use of “jealous” is closer to the meaning that the Hebrew Bible might use in their word for jealous, which is “kanna”. A better denotation of the intended meaning than “envious” might be “zealous”, that is, “fervently devoted”, conveying the idea that God is so in love with God’s people that like a true human lover (like a parent, spouse, or committed friend) God only wants the best for the beloved, their growth, freedom, and joy, or as our quote from Irenaeus suggests, their becoming fully and truly alive doesn't want the loved one to suffer or be seriously hurt. When Paul is being somewhat solicitous in the letter to the Corinthians by saying that he's jealous for the people, he is saying that he is imitating the desire of God that they clearly recognize God's presence.
But let's go back to this whole idolatry thing. So, what is an idol? In the traditional sense of the word, an idol is an actual physical shaping of a god, or the worship of a natural phenomenon, or of an imaginative construct like a myth or an idea, or even a simple man-made objects that is fashioned to be an object of one’s primary commitment of attention and effort. In fact, idolatry exists when any of these items serves to replace or limit or control an infinite, transcendent, God.
This kind of idol worship is really based on a sense of extreme vulnerability, on a fear of death and of divine power over existence. As we can see in a lot of ancient mythology, especially the Greek stories of Homer and its echoes in Rome, the gods are can are selfish, impetuous. Capricious, and vindictive. The gods of Olympus do not love people, they use them. The relationship with mortals is punishment and reward. If the god has an attraction to a mortal, he or she simply take what they want from them. Rapacious, manipulative, and objectifying in the extreme, these gods are to feared, and dealt with with avoidance or abject submission,There doesn't seem to be any kind of meaning or justice or caring in the gods’ actions. In fact, the gods, as they're depicted, seem to have on them projected all the quintessential flaws and failings of human beings. To repeat, this vulnerability is based on a fear of divine power and of competition for what seem to be uncertain or scarce resources.
Idolatry focuses on taking a posture of subservience, or at least apparent subservience, of manipulation and negotiation, appeasement, even propitiation. Try to placate and please and in some way manage the will of the more powerful force, perhaps for the sake of good weather or other kinds of good fortune. This kind of idolatry, which is the heart of most pagan religion, signifies a fundamentally transactional, a quid pro quo orientation to all relationships. That is, not just to the idea of humans and the divine, but humans among themselves.
In a more contemporary sense, an idol is anything that receives excessive devotion, trust, importance, or attention in a person's life, surpassing the devotion to what they might consider sacred or the ultimate reality. So what's the trouble? Again, what's wrong with this kind of devotion? It seems potentially quite harmless, even often times quite productive.. But what both ancient and contemporary idolatries have in common is that they involve the denial of humanity's participation in the infinite. In a sense, idolatry, like a fetish or an addiction, is an attempt to quench an unquenchable thirst or fill an infinite emptiness. And in so doing, the idol helps numb or conceal a longing for the infinite, a longing for something more than we can imagine or see.
One of the great insights of Alcoholics Anonymous, the origin and model of 12-step programs for healing and recovery from addiction, is that one needs to let go of this kind of control, because realistic futility of any person's control to manage all of reality, in essence, the impossibility be be one's own god. Powerlessness over alcohol is evidence that this self-idolatry is unmanageable and doomed to failure and death. In his correspondence with Bill Wilson, the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung writes that we limit and destroy ourselves by thirsting for the wrong things. That is, addiction to alcohol is addiction to an intrinsic poison, a poison that takes away our power to choose but gives the illusion that we can either stop the pain or use the alcohol to manage our experience. To quote Jung's letter,
“an ordinary man not protected by an axiom above and isolated in society cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the devil. But the use of such words allows so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible. Rather than use this kind of very judgmental religious language, one that seems almost meaningless to many contemporaries." Jung continues, “I have acquired a point of view above the misleading platitudes that one usually hears about alcoholism. He says, you see, alcohol in Latin is spiritus, and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is spiritus contra spiritum.” Jung ends with a verse from Psalm 42, “As the heart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, oh God.”
Jung uses the metaphor of thirst to talk about a longing for an infinite fulfillment, a yearning for belonging and wholeness and vitality, a participation in infinite being. Many addictions, idolatries, and and inculturated habits limit our access to anything that is commensurate with our most important needs and meaningful desires. As dangerously, idolatry is a denial of our human limitations and the avoidance of the realities of our mutability, our change in suffering, our mortality. In Bill Wilson, Carl Jung's correspondent might say that it's not denial of our existence, the existence of or our need for a higher power. So that a delusion of control becomes a self-authored slavery.
The first three steps in Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12 Steps represent a movement from awareness of powerlessness to a surrender to a power beyond the self. The necessity of the move from denial to acceptance is depicted in Bob Dylan's song, “You Gotta Serve Somebody.” To quote one key verse and the refrain,
“you might be a rock and roll addict prancing on the stage.
You might have drugs at your command, women in a cage.
You may be a businessman or some high degree thief.
They may call you doctor or they may call you chief,
but you're going to have to serve somebody. Yes, you are.
You're going to have to serve somebody.
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord,
but you're going to have to serve somebody.”
In the inclination of a self to deny or ignore this dynamic, idolatry offers an apparent work around, ceding identity in an apparent obedience that masks a self-oriented willfulness . The result is voluntary dehumanization of oneself, a more manageable enslavement. This kind of self deception and reality blindness becomes devastating for society as the grasping to maintain an illusion of personal control is intrinsically isolating and is a catalyst for othering. We are expert, I assume it means, at labeling, grouping, and demonizing the other so that we might compete with them in good conscience, even perhaps justifying killing them by claiming their inferiority or their inhumanity.
James Baldwin, in his writing about bigotry talks about this kind of labeling, classifying others as intrinsically dehumanizing. In 1976, in an essay titled”The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin asserts,
‘identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of itself. In which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and sometimes discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.”
This metaphor of nakedness is a deliberate evocation of the story in Genesis of Adam and Eve. That after they grasp at control in their disobedience of God and eating the forbidden fruit that gives knowledge of life and death, they become ashamed and they try to hide themselves from God. In many ways, what we call idolatry is a similar type of hiding.
I think it might be easier to understand this dynamic of dehumanizing delusion in terms of another quote from James Baldwin, a famous sentence from his essay, “Notes of a Native Son.” Baldwin writes,
“Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves. The loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.”
Broadly speaking, group identity is a form of idolatry. What we name “othering” is a process of defining individuals or groups as fundamentally different and often inferior to a dominant group or the self. This creates an “us versus them” mentality. Othering often involves attributing negative stereotypes and characteristics to the other, resulting in dehumanization and marginalization. This can manifest in many forms, including racism, sexism, and xenophobia.
Idolatry, therefore, stems from and engenders a disconnection that numbs perception and hardens hearts, standing in the way of empathy and compassion. In the language of cognitive behavioral therapy, idols play into distorted thinking and human reactivity. Thus, a dysfunctional, destructive delusion of disconnection creates real fractures in a person, a family, and a society. Reconciliation, Paul’s katalasso, becomes a clarification of one’s perception of divine presence that can heal human beings and relationships
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