All the Old Gods

All the old gods haven't gone away - they've just changed their names a bit.

There's a line which I hear quite a bit when we talk about idolatry - something like this. "In the old days, idolatry was much more obvious because you'd worship Thor or Jupiter or someone. But now it's harder because it's much more subtle."

I've been thinking about that a bit over the last few days, and I disagree.

In Roman times, for example, you'd worship Bacchus, god of wine in two ways. One was going to the temple of Bacchus, and the other was partying and eating lots of food and drinking lots of wine and getting drunk. Except often what you did when you visited the temple of Bacchus was parting and drinking.

Or you'd worship Venus, goddess of sex, in two ways. One was going to the temple of Venus. And the other was ritualised pursuit of sex for its own sake. And sure enough, at the temple of Venus there were loads of ritual prostitutes who "helped" people seek sex.

I think we do exactly the same today, except without naming the gods. We still worship Bacchus, and Venus, and others.

Plato's Academy, in many ways the prototype for the university, was built around a temple to Athena, goddess of wisdom (known to the Romans as Minerva). And in the same way, a lot of people at universities today still worship her.

We worship the old gods whenever we pursue sex, drunkenness, wisdom, knowledge, sporting prowess, fitness, anything, for its own sake or for its own enjoyment rather than for God's sake. As St. Augustine wrote:

He loves Thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake.

And one of the great things about Roman religion was that it wasn't fussy or exclusivist. It was perfectly happy with people worshipping Bacchus one evening and Venus another, then taking a trip to the temple of Athena. They weren't fussy about what the gods were called, and were happy to identify them with foreign equivalents. They were fine with people worshipping whatever and whoever they wanted, as long as they let them get on with their own business and devotion to their own gods.

And where other cultures were happy to go along with that, Rome just tended to assimilate them because of its greater cultural output and power.

Where the problems came for Christians was that God claimed exclusive allegiance. Christians could not just go to the temple of Venus for a quick fix of casual sex and then go home as normal. They couldn't burn incense to the emperor when they started claiming their place in the pantheon. And they said that other people should abandon their worship of all the old gods, which was seen as far too exclusive.

Sound familiar?

Brazil 9 - Football / Futebol / Idolatry

My host (and some of his family) very kindly took me to see a football game the other day. It was Santa Cruz v Campinese in the Brazillian 3rd division. Tickets, by the way, cost about £10 for a good seat, or about £2 for a standing place.

Santa Cruz seem to be a lot like Manchester United, except without the money and Sir Alec. In other words, they used to be successful, but have dropped two divisions in the last two years and are most notable for having the largest stadium in this bit of Brazil (though some of it is being refurbished, and other bits are closed due to having been trashed) and for being very nasty to opponents, often using Hell-type imagery.

This is the so-called "Inferno Coral", where the hardest-core fans stand. Note that in Portuguese, "Inferno" means "Hell". Lots of songs about doing nasty things to their opponents... Lots of drums, jumping, and waving big flags too. At times the whole area looked like a living organism, because everyone was jumping to the beat of the drums.

This is the top worn by many in the Inferno Coral. Note the loving attitude it displays to his fellow man. The snake, by the way, is the emblem of the club, but it doesnt't usually carry guns. Note how incongruous the state flag (at the top, with the cross and the rainbow) looks, just like Christians wearing a Man Utd shirt...

Lots of food and drink was available, some of the more conventional kind (crisps, popcorn, etc.) and some of the less conventional kind. This, for example, is raw sugar cane, which is meant to be sucked on, then spat out. Given the local industries, maybe eating so much sugar is simply a patriotic thing...

At half time, the score being 0-0, the players and officials went off. Please note the following security features:

• There are very few (if any) stewards in the crowd
• There is a deep moat between the crowd and the pitch
• On the other side of the moat, there are policemen with big dogs
• The referree has police with riot shields guarding him while he goes down his tunnel

After the break, Campinese scored with a free-kick.

But shortly afterwards, Santa Cruz were awarded a penalty. Full marks to the penalty taker for being cheeky. He stopped most of the way into his run-up, pointed something out to the goalie, then kicked the ball into the net while the goalie was distracted. The crowd went wild.

One of the good things about being in a different culture is that it gives me a good opportunity to reflect on my own. This was a regular Brazillian third division match, and they treated it like a cup final. Here, football often seems so clearly to be a matter of worship. And that got me thinking about England...

Is the reason that there are so many more women than men in church in England (and in Brazil) linked to the fact that so many men worship sports?

What does it mean to support a football team? If Liverpool and Man Utd swapped 60% of their players over a period of a few years, why would I still support Liverpool? Is it because what is actually happening is worship (however half-hearted) for something underlying what actually goes on on the pitch?

Has sport provided us with a new pantheon of gods to worship, except where there is continually more information to process so that people don't get bored?

I can see that it can be right and good to enjoy watching people use the skills God has given them. But if supporting a football team is fundamentally about worshipping a non-physical entity, can a Christian consistently do it?

I know there's various reasons why people support the teams they do - attachment to roots, glory seeking, and so on. But they all seem like bad reasons to me.

So often we wrongly interpret the first commandment to say "You shall have no other gods before me" - i.e. "Make God number 1". But that isn't what it actually says. It actually says "You shall have no other gods before my face." It's commanding a complete absence of other gods, not just them being taken down to numbers 2, 3 and 4.

Why do people not see (a la Isaiah 44) that football is something people invented, and therefore it cannot be worthy of our devotion?

Why is it that the people at the top of the game (players, managers, etc) don't seem to show anywhere near the level of support or loyalty that the fans do? Answer - because they know it isn't worth it. For them it's a business - a way of making money.

Hopefully, it's kind of obvious I'm still wrestling with this question. Just to show how inconsistent I am, here's a photo of me with the European Champions' League Trophy...

And here's a good cartoon from Dave Walker on the subject.

Icons

I don't like labels when they become an excuse for rejecting other people and their views without thinking about them, which they often are. But sometimes labels are useful because they identify certain common characteristics. For example, my background is strongly conservative evangelical, and us conservative evangelicals are just about starting to realise that we don't have to overreact against what some Roman Catholics believed in the 1500s any more.

One of the aspects of old Roman Catholic culture that we reacted strongly against was the use of images - it's pretty clear that some of what they did went much too far towards idolatry, and it's also pretty clear that some of the response has led to some evangelicals being more theoretical and anti-visual than Jesus (for example) was.

One thing that struck me when I started discussing the issue of icons with Orthodox people was that some of their justifications seemed fine. For example, it is obvious that in Christian doctrine, Jesus is God, and Jesus was visible. Therefore, if someone had taken a photo of Jesus, the result would be an accurate (but by no means exhaustive) picture of God. (It's just as well no-one did, otherwise we'd probably be worshipping the picture or anyone who looked vaguely like it.) And then you get to thinking about interesting questions such as "What does the Incarnation mean for the prohibition of images?"

You also get use of icons which seems to be quite similar to the later Western phenomenon of Christian biography - icons as a kind of devotional biography for a non-literate culture, leading to a focus on God because of the life of the saint involved.

Of course, there's plenty of unhelpful stuff associated with icons too. For example, the icon pictured is Rublev's famous icon of the Trinity. It's meant to have all kinds of deep significance. But to my (horribly uncultured) mind, its main significance is that it makes the Trinity look like three women with dodgy necks. That suggests that maybe Rublev had been reading too much Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory of Nyssa was a famous theologian and bishop in the late 300s AD, who argued that the reason his understanding of the Trinity didn't imply that there were three gods was that actually it was incorrect to say "three men" because all men had the same essence.

In other words, I am asserting that Rublev emphasises the threeness too much at the expense of the oneness of the Trinity, and that for me at least that makes it difficult to appreciate the other clever bits of significance in the icon. [It's worth adding of course that lots of people can and do find Rublev's icon helpful, but the use of imagery often introduces unwanted ambiguities, which some people then see as the main point.]

Taking the other side for a moment, consider this argument. If in your church, over on a side wall, there was a little photo of Jim Elliot, (or Luther, or Calvin) with a five line biography underneath and something saying "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose", (or equivalent), with no candles or kneeling or kissing or anything, would you think that was potentially helpful? Probably, yes. Would I see anything objectionable in it? Probably not, no. Certainly as a kid, I'd have found it interesting and thought provoking.

If you accept the Jim Elliot / Luther / Calvin example, the issue over use of images isn't a black-and-white one. Instead it's a question of how best to use images in worship. How do we work with a heavily visual culture, avoiding the danger that says that God isn't concerned with the physical, yet at the same time avoid the danger of idolatry? That's a better question...

Cult of Mary, Cult of Scripture, Cult of Self

The good is often the enemy of the best.

I grew up learning not to trust any kind of religion that prayed to Mary. But the respect for Mary started completely innocently. At the time of the Nestorian controversy, roughly AD400, the big question was over the relationship between Jesus as human and Jesus as divine. Calling Mary "theotokos" or "Mother of God" was an important way of saying that Jesus as human was the same as Jesus as divine - the two descriptions were talking about the same person. And where stuff about Mary has been helpful in history, it has been helpful because it has pointed to Jesus. As soon as Marian devotions lose their Christ-centred-ness, they end up heading rapidly towards idolatry.

It's exactly the same with some of the cult of personal experience in modern charismaticism. In Worship As You Like It?, Sotirios Christou points out the vast proportion of modern charistmatic songs that are about our experience of God rather than about God himself. One example of this would be the chorus of "There is a louder shout to come" by Matt Redman.

O what a song we'll sing and O what a tune we'll bear;
You deserve an anthem of the highest praise.
O what a joy will rise and O what a sound we'll make.
You deserve an anthem of the highest praise.

The chorus is primarily praising our future response to God rather than God himself. And there is a place for considering our own experience to point to Jesus. But as soon as our experience of God becomes central rather than God himself, then we're back into idolatry, just like with Mary.

The same is true of the way many evangelicals treat the Bible. The Bible is all about God, and about how he has revealed himself to us, supremely in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus is God's supreme revelation, not the Bible.

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.
Hebrews 1:1-4, ESV

Once again, in the way that we treat the Bible, there is a danger of the focus slipping off God and onto his word. And when that happens, that's idolatry. The word exists to point us to God.

I guess what I'm saying can be summed up roughly like this:

Whenever there is something good, something worthy of respect, something God uses to point to himself, there is a danger that we take it and we worship it instead.

Shechem, Abimelech, Baal-berith

I was reading the particularly unpleasant Judges 9 this morning, and a minor detail struck me. Most of the plot of Judges 9 takes place in Shechem.

Now Shechem comes up quite a lot in the early bits of the Bible. It was the site of a rather painful episode in Genesis 34, where the prince of Shechem rapes Jacob's daughter so some of his sons take revenge.

But it was the site of a lot of good things too. It was where God had appeared to Abraham for the first time after he reached the Promised Land (Genesis 12:6-7). It was where Jacob's family finally rejected idolatry (Genesis 35:4). It was a city of refuge, where someone could flee to to avoid blood feuds and get a proper trial (Joshua 21:21).

But most importantly, it was the site of Joshua's final speech and public farewell in Joshua 24. It was where the people promised solemnly to obey God even though Joshua said they couldn't.

Then Joshua said to the people, "You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the LORD, to serve him." And they said, "We are witnesses." He said, "Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your heart to the LORD, the God of Israel." And the people said to Joshua, "The LORD our God we will serve, and his voice we will obey." So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and put in place statutes and rules for them at Shechem. And Joshua wrote these words in the Book of the Law of God. And he took a large stone and set it up there under the terebinth that was by the sanctuary of the LORD. And Joshua said to all the people, "Behold, this stone shall be a witness against us, for it has heard all the words of the LORD that he spoke to us. Therefore it shall be a witness against you, lest you deal falsely with your God."
Joshua 24:22-27, ESV

Then we come to Judges 9. Judges is a remarkable demonstration of how God's people keep on needing to be saved, and throughout the book their saviours get less and less conventional, and morally more and more compromised, and the people cry for help less and less. And right in the middle, we get Judges 9 and the story of Abimelech. Normally in Judges, the people need saving from some foreign invaders. In Judges 9 they need saving from their own ruler – Abimelech. I could go on about the story for ages, but I just want to focus on one tiny detail.

The story is set in Shechem – the town of the covenant (covenant in Hebrew is berith), where less than 200 years before there had been a sanctuary of the LORD (Yahweh). Now, what is the main religious institution there? The temple of Baal-berith – Baal of the covenant. Their problem wasn't that they'd all suddenly gone apostate and all decided to become Muslims or Canaanites. It wasn't that there had been lots of immigration of Baal-worshippers. The temple, in the town of Yahweh's covenant, was to Baal of the covenant. It was a process of syncretism. They had blurred the worship of Yahweh and the worship of Baal. They'd taken what they knew to be true about God, and mixed it with what they wanted God to be like, or what the Canaanites around them said God was like until in the end they couldn't tell the difference between the true God and false gods.

And it struck me that there's so much danger of us doing the same. Yes, sometimes it's obvious, like when someone claims to be 100% Muslim and 100% Christian. But sometimes it's smaller. Like when we take ideas from society about what God is like and mix them up with the truth until we can't tell the difference. Does God really punish sin? Does Jesus really claim to be the only way to God? Does following Jesus really mean dying to ourselves and making ourselves nothing so that Jesus can be everything to us? Does God really value humility more than entertainment, or love more than soundness?

Are we really following the God who has revealed himself, or are we following our own ideas or someone else's ideas about what he should be like?