Idolatry is incredibly popular in the Church, incredibly
popular.
Perhaps the most prominent example I am seeing all over
the place is the churches that venerate at best, but actively align with and even idolize at worst, the nation of Israel. The devotion of many modern evangelicals
to this secular and godless nation is remarkable, and in some cases borders on
the relic worship of the ancient Church. Those who will fly the star of Remphan[1] (Acts 7:42-43, c.f. Amos 5:25-27)
next to the cross are numerous in the Church. But this is only one example of a
much larger problem, it would be unfair to single this out as the only example
in the Church.
Some idolize wealth or the wealthy. I heard someone say
once that they could not go to a church where the pastor was renting his house,
because this spoke to them that God was not blessing their household. But Jesus
had nowhere to lay his head (Matt. 8:20), and I have known many faithful men of
God, some of them dedicated and godly pastors, who had very few pennies to
their name, and did not own a home. There have been countless such men of God
in history. Our Lord calls us to be willing to sacrifice, and this can look
very different for different Christians in this world, yet God is still
blessing them. To tie home ownership, or wealth, to being such an important
metric of God’s blessing is to place money on too high a pedestal, for many it
is truly is an idol.
Some Christians idolize power and the powerful and align
themselves with this or that political party. Not because the current candidate
represents Christian and Kingdom values, and is going to combat the evil elites
who oversee our modern western nations, but because they are with team green or
team blue[2]…wait this is the 21st
century, so it is team red or team blue. It is disturbing how little
discernment some Christians have, just because a politician is wearing the
right political colours, or the wrong ones. Some of these Christians are blind
to criticism of this, and in fact become rather hostile to anyone who does criticize
this. Yet did Jesus side with the Pharisees, Sadduccess, or Essenes, the
dominant political/religious parties of his day? Of course not, and he was
willing to receive anyone into his fold from any camp that repented of their
evil ways, and he held everyone to the same standard of truth. But this team
choosing can become a real idol.
In the conservative evangelical world intellectualism is
another idol. This can manifest in a variety of ways; credentialism,
associationism (being associated with the right class of people, rather than
the right quality of people), sycophantism; that is seeking to be approved by
the right cultural elites, an over emphasis on conceptual theology, rather than
practical theology, and in many other ways. Idolatry can strangle the Church in
many forms.
Then there is literal Icon worship, literal-old
fashioned-straight-out-of-the-Old-Testament-handbook-of-what-idolatry-looks-like,
kind of idolatry. This is not unheard of at all in today’s world, and occurs
both in Protestant and Non-Protestant denominations. Here is something
interesting about this phenomenon recorded by Charles Oman in his work The
History of the Byzantine Empire,
“Image-worship and
relic-worship in particular had developed with strange rapidity, and assumed
the shape of mere Fetishism. Every ancient picture or statue was now announced
as both miraculously produced and endued with miraculous powers. These
wonder-working pictures and statues were now adored as things in themselves
divine: the possession of one of them made the fortune of a church or
monastery, and the tangible object of worship seems to have been regarded with
quite as much respect as the saint whose memory it recalled. The freaks to
which image-worship led were in some cases purely grotesque; it was, for
example, not unusual to select a picture as the godfather of a child in
baptism, and to scrape off a little of its paint and produce it at the ceremony
to represent the saint. Even patriarchs and bishops ventured to assert that the
hand of a celebrated representation of the Virgin distilled fragrant
balsam. The success of the Emperor Heraclius in his Persian campaign was
ascribed by the vulgar not so much to his military talent as to the fact that
he carried with him a small picture of the Virgin, which had fallen from
heaven!
All these vain beliefs,
inculcated by the clergy and eagerly believed by the mob, were repulsive to the
educated laymen of the higher classes. Their dislike for vain superstitions was
emphasized by the influence of Mahometanism on their minds. For a hundred
years the inhabitants of the Asiatic provinces of the empire had been in touch
with a religion of which the noblest feature was its emphatic denunciation of
idolatry under every shape and form. An East-Roman, when taunted by his Moslem
neighbour for clinging to a faith which had grown corrupt and idolatrous, could
not but confess that there was too much ground for the accusation, when he
looked round on the daily practice of his countrymen.
Hence there had grown up
among the stronger minds of the day a vigorous reaction against the prevailing
superstitions. It was more visible among the laity than among the clergy, and
far more widespread in Asia than in Europe. In Leo the Isaurian this tendency
stood incarnate in its most militant form, and he left the legacy of his
enthusiasm to his descendants. Seven years after the relief of Constantinople
he commenced his crusade against superstition. The chief practices which he
attacked were the worship of images and the ascription of divine honours to
saints—more especially in the form of Mariolatry. His son Constantine, more
bold and drastic than his father, endeavoured to suppress monasticism also,
because he found the monks the most ardent defenders of images; but Leo's own
measures went no further than a determined attempt to put down image-worship.
The struggle which he
inaugurated began in a.d. 725, when he ordered the removal of all the images in
the capital. Rioting broke out at once, and the officials who were taking down
the great figure of Christ Crucified, over the palace-gate, were torn to
pieces by a mob. The Emperor replied by a series of executions, and carried out
his policy all over the empire by the aid of armed force.
The populace, headed by the
monks, opposed a bitter resistance to the Emperor's doings, more especially in
the European provinces. They set the wildest rumours afloat concerning his
intentions; it was currently reported that the Jews had bought his consent to
image-breaking, and that the Caliph Yezid had secretly converted him to
Mahometanism. Though Leo's orthodoxy in matters doctrinal was unquestioned, and
though he had no objection to the representation of the cross, as distinguished
from the crucifix, he was accused of a design to undermine the foundations of
Christianity. Arianism was the least offensive fault laid to his account. The
Emperor's enemies did not confine themselves to passive resistance to his
crusade against images. Dangerous revolts broke out in Greece and Italy, and
were not put down without much fighting. In Italy, indeed, the imperial
authority was shaken to its foundations, and never thoroughly re-established.
The Popes consistently opposed the Iconoclastic movement, and by their denunciation
of it placed themselves at the head of the anti-imperial party, nor did they
shrink from allying themselves with the Lombards, who were now, as always,
endeavouring to drive the East-Roman garrisons from Ravenna and Naples.
The hatred which Leo
provoked might have been fatal to him had he not possessed the full confidence
of the army.”[3]
Opposition to praying to, or venerating Icons, venerating
Mary, and opposing the Popes of Rome, are generally thought of as Protestant
criticisms of Catholicism, but this rejection of blatant idol worship has a
long history in the Church reaching back into ancient times.
It is not hard to see why. The Ten Commandments tell us
straight up,
“1 And God spoke all these
words, saying,
2 “I am the Lord your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
3 “You shall have no other
gods before me.
4 “You shall not make for
yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above,
or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 You
shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous
God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the
fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing steadfast love to
thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Ex. 20:1-6).
This commandment does not leave any wiggle room here, but
find such wiggle room the Church often has in history. Which is remarkable, so
much of the ministry of the Old Testament prophets was dedicated to challenging
the idols of Israel and Judah, and even though this was their faithful duty, they
were often hated for it. The Baals and Asherah’s were popular in ancient Israel, and
one thing that people forget is that at times the Israelites were seeking to
represent the God of heaven through their Icons; their statues and idols. So
this idolatry ran deep and even took a veneer of orthopraxy on some occasions. It was almost a futile attempt for the prophets to attack these idols, and even still today in
the nation of Israel one of the most ancient symbols of one of these chief false
gods, who goes by many names, is the symbol of their nation,
25 “Did you bring to me
sacrifices and offerings during the forty years in the wilderness, O house of
Israel? 26 You shall take up Sikkuth your king, and Kiyyun your star-god—your
images that you made for yourselves, 27 and I will send you into exile beyond
Damascus,” says the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts” (Amos 5:25-27,
emphasis added).
“42 But God turned
away and gave them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is
written in the book of the prophets:
“‘Did you bring to me slain
beasts and sacrifices,
during the forty years in the wilderness, O house of
Israel?
43 You took up the tent of Moloch
and the star of your god Rephan,
the images that you made to worship;
and I will send you into exile beyond Babylon’” (Acts 7:42-43, emphasis added).
The open worship of idols died off in some measure after
Israel return from Babylon, but it did not disappear, and Jesus and others
criticized the leaders in Israel in the New Testament for worshipping false
gods. This example here is from Stephen, the deacon. Idol worship was powerful
and popular in ancient Israel, and those who criticized it were much more
likely to be persecuted than heeded. For every Josiah or Hezekiah, there was
countless Ahabs. Some like to credit ancient Israel with the invention of
monotheism, but the reality is that the majority of ancient Israelites were never
monotheistic. Even Aaron set up an idol when Moses was gone for too long on the
mountain. Monotheism was something God was trying to teach Israel, not
something Israel was trying to teach the world.
But this penchant for idolatry continued into the age of
the New Covenant Church, as is evidenced by the efforts of Leo the Isaurian to
try and stamp it out in the early medieval era. This made him very unpopular, and future Byzantine
historians, who supported the veneration of Icons, did not reflect on his reign
very favourably because of his goal of getting rid of Icon worship. We
Protestants see in him a kind of kindred spirit, he even went after Mariolatry.
But his people fought against him, the Popes fought against him (which doesn’t
surprise many of us), the monasteries fought against him. If he had not had the
full support of the army because of his victories against the Saracens, he
might have been removed from power by various conspirators.
Idolatry is incredibly popular, and incredibly hard to
stamp out. Leo had the power of the Byzantine Imperial throne behind him, and
the full support of a large section of the Church leadership, and the army, and
he faced incredible backlash and opposition. The reason for this is that people
come to identify with their idols. They see in their idols something of
themselves, something that speaks of their identity and their values, and all
that they see as good, and they see an attack on their idols as an attack on
themselves. This is why there is such an irrational reaction among many, even
prominent Christians, over what is happening in Israel, because many of these
Christians identify with Israel, they see in it the hand of God, and they perceive criticism of it as an attack on themselves and their God, when it is nothing of the sort. This is also why many Christians have strange views about money, because it is their master
and they worship it. This is why when you criticize whatever idols otherwise
very rational people worship, they respond in incredibly irrational ways at
times. That which we hold to emotionally we struggle to think about rationally. It is part of our nature.
Calvin once said that the human heart is a factory of
idols, this means that all of us fall into idolizing things, whether sports,
movies, movie stars, singers, etc. This cannot be denied. But this should not
stop us from pulling down the obvious idols that we see. One way that we can
identify an idol is when somebody is willing to compromise on many of their own
values and beliefs to defend it. Or to put it another way, when they are
willing to be thoroughly inconsistent with how they view one thing, as compared
to others. Or, when an otherwise incredibly rational person gets incredibly
emotional when something is challenged. Sometimes this is just because they
have not thought through an issue clearly, and they default to an emotional
response. Other times it is because you have hit an idol in their hearts, and
this makes people reflexively upset and defensive.
All Christian leaders should be perceptive enough to
identify idols, and bold enough to challenge those who worship them. But don’t
expect thanks for doing so, if you are going to criticize something that people
are emotionally invested in, some of those people will hate you for it. After all, the
human heart is a factory of idols, and idols lead people into unchristian
behaviour.
List of References
[1]
Many Christians are not aware of the pagan roots of the Star of David, even
though many Israelis are aware of this themselves. Below is a short explanation of the
origins of this star, going only so far, of course, we know that the Bible
tells us the origin of the association of this star with ancient Israel, it was
a symbol of their rejection of God. https://blog.nli.org.il/en/star-of-david/
[2]
These were famous sporting teams in the ancient Eastern Roman Empire, that
often got involved in political and religious matters.
[3] Oman,
Charles. The History of the Byzantine Empire: From Its Glory to Its Downfall (pp.
97-99). e-artnow. Kindle Edition.
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