Edmond La B. Cherbonnier
In A Handbook of Christian Theology ed. by M. Halverson & A. A. Cohen, World Publishing Co., 1958, pp. 176-183.
Few biblical terms are more widely misunderstood than the concept of idolatry. According to popular interpretation, it is merely an exaggerated symptom of primitive exclusiveness. Arnold Toynbee, for example, regards the ancient Hebrews as simply more stubborn than their neighbors in clinging to their particular war god. In his view, idolatry was a term of abuse applied to the "out-group," and especially to anyone who dared abandon narrow, tribal loyalties for a more broadminded attitude.
The trouble with this conception is that a careful reading of the Bible does more to confound than to confirm it. It can scarcely make sense of the prophet's strictures against national pride as itself a form of idolatry. Nor can it account for the continual chastisement of Israel by her allegedly chauvinistic God: "You only have I known of all the peoples of the earth: therefore will I punish you for your iniquities" (Amos 3:2).
Instead of examining its biblical context, Professor Toynbee's definition superimposes upon idolatry some of the favorite clichés of the twentieth century. Its original meaning derives from a very different world of thought. It is not necessarily out of date on that account, however. Since truth is not bound by time or place, idolatry, like any other concept, ancient or modern, can be judged by its contemporary relevance.
The definition of idolatry as "the worship of a false god" presupposes an understanding of the word "god." The Bible uses it as a strictly functional term. It stands for that point of reference, external to himself, which serves the individual as both his criterion of truth and his standard of value. For a child, his parents usually function as his god. The Bible further contends, however, that having a god is by no means a phenomenon of childhood alone. On putting away the gods of his youth, the adult does not become godless; he merely substitutes one object of worship for another. The Bible never charges a man with being irreligious. It conceives the human being as "worshipping animal" who necessarily has some object of primary allegiance which functions as his guide to truth and his norm of conduct. Though free to adopt the god of his choice, no man is free to avoid this decision. Every attempt to do so turns out to be not a renunciation but an exchange of gods.
At the suggestion that he worships a god, the man of the world is incredulous. But the absence of a label need not alter the contents of the package. In fact, some enterprises are more successful when anonymous. The gods of the twentieth century are simply more sophisticated than graven images of wood and stone. Baal and Moloch have learned to masquerade as the various "-isms" and "-ologies" which compete for modern man's allegiance.
Nor do they always require the incognito. A surprising number of moderns openly acknowledge that they have in fact exchanged the biblical God for another. One of today's reigning deities was recently paid the following public homage:
Men bet their lives on it [science] as they do on other gods, and on the record, it functions no less divinely than any other . . . "God" is no less fitting an appellation for this [science] than for any that churchmen so name and require laymen to bet their lives on, worship, and adjure. (Horace M. Kallen, Democracy's True Religion, p. 10.)
Science, of course, is by no means the only deity to which modern man has looked for deliverance. Today's pantheon is as liberally populated as those of Greece and Rome.
Its patrons provide case studies in the effect of idolatry upon the individual. If a man's character is the reflection of his values, and if his values are derived from his god, then the kind of person he becomes depends directly upon the object of his worship. As the psalmist puts it:
Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not . . . They that make them are like unto them; so is everyone that trusteth in them (Psalm 115).
If a man is made in the image of God, then the key to personality is religion. It would consequently never occur to a biblical author to write either the biography of a man or the history of a nation apart from a thorough account of their respective gods.
The religion of science, for example, leaves its trademark upon its devotee in the form of that humorless, fact-centered literal-mindedness which so readily lends itself to caricature. The same inner logic is at work in another modern cult, that of deified democracy. Explicitly embraced as their religion by numerous intellectuals, it casts its followers in the mold of an undistinguished mediocrity, without style or manners. Carrying "democratic equality" beyond the political sphere, where it properly belongs, into the whole of life, they tolerate no distinction between the superior and the inferior. Under the dominion of this god, the cultivation of a fine sense of discrimination and taste, once recognized as the very spice of life, threatens to become an un-American activity.
Of course, a person need not confine himself to a single god. But he who tries to divide his ultimate loyalty also splits himself. No longer integrated about a single center, his personality becomes equivocal and ambivalent. In its extreme form, this phenomenon is known clinically as schizophrenia. Its diagnosis, in biblical terms, is polytheism.
This biblical analysis provides an easy explanation of the frustration most people have experienced in arguments over moral questions. If a man's moral values are the consequence of the god he worships, he will never change them without first changing gods. Until he does, all criticism of his standards will appear to him as treason.
That a man's god is the keeper of his conscience is beautifully illustrated by Communism. A book by six former Communists demonstrates how this movement, point for point, fits the biblical definition of religion. Bearing the significant title The God That Failed (Harper, New York, 1949), it gives a vivid, first-hand account of the way in which this idol washes not only the brain but also the conscience. Lenin spoke for all its victims when he declared that had he not purged his own closest comrades he would have been guilty of treason to his ideals. He thereby revealed that the cleavages which divide the world are too deep to be resolved by moral indignation. Now, as in ancient times, they represent a battle of the gods.
If the abstract deities of modern times are less crude than their predecessors, they have demonstrated no less a capacity to visit destruction upon believer and unbeliever alike. The consequences of idolatry, not content with their damage to the individual personality, find expression in physical destruction as well. This is nowhere more evident than in the worship of the German nation, openly preached by Heinrich von Treitschke and subsequently put into practice. This fearsome deity not only molded the Nazi character, not only hypnotized the conscience of the world's most scientific nation, but, with its mystique of war, exhibited the same appetite for human sacrifice as the pagan gods of Babylon.
The destructive consequences of idolatry provide the touchstone by which the Bible distinguishes the true God from impostors. At this suggestion that one religion is true and the others false, the modem reader recoils in horror. Like Professor Toynbee, he has been conditioned to respond to any such claim with cries of "intolerance" and "bigotry." But this is hardly the kind of reaction which befits a scientific age. When the prophet invokes the distinction true and false, he is merely applying the same principle with which science has so successfully combatted dogmatism. The scientist's basic premise is that, under specified conditions, a given question may have millions of false answers, but only a single true one. Far from encouraging dogmatism, this distinction between true and false enables men to resist claims of infallibility, whether advanced by church, political ideology, or intellectual doctrine. Yet, by a curious inversion of logic, the very principle which prevents authoritarianism in science is thought to promote it in religion. To maintain that there is but one true God among a host of pretenders raises in people's minds the specter of inquisitions and witch hunts.
Some contemporary theologians have been so frightened by this mistaken charge of bigotry that, in their zeal to avoid it, they take a position which ironically enough can lead straight to it. For, in their haste to agree that it is impossible for one religion to be truer than another, they deny that Christianity finds corroboration in either reason or experience. Christian loyalty is a leap in the dark, closed to tests of any sort. It is completely gratuitous and, therefore, in the last analysis, arbitrary. Such theology is consequently more open to bigotry than that which acknowledges an objective criterion by which it can be refuted. And it is the open acknowledgment of just such a criterion which the God of biblical theology demands.
The prophets of the Old Testament were not afraid of being refuted by either experience or reason. The Bible is not a collection of dogmatic fulminations and unverifiable pronouncements, but a book of evidence. Far from exhorting men to believe what they cannot see, it taunts them for their veritable genius for not believing what they do see: "Ye have eyes to see but do not perceive; ye have ears to hear but do not understand" (Is. 6:9). The prophets challenge false gods and their worshippers to a trial of strength, and invite them to choose their own weapons.
The victor will be determined on the basis of performance. The true God is He who actually accomplishes what His rivals only claim to do. All gods provide the individual with a standard of truth, reality, and goodness, upon which to base the day-to-day decisions of ordinary life. He who entrusts himself to a false standard therefore flies in the face of reality. His behavior will resemble the drunkard's in its incongruity with the facts of life. Hence the prophet's derision:
Every man is brutish in his knowledge, every founder is confounded by the graven image. For his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them. They are vanity, and the work of errors. In the time of their visitation they shall perish (Jeremiah 10:14, 15).
The idolater has been duped by a promise which only the true God could fulfill. Having bet on illusion instead of reality, he is sure to be confounded. In the end his idol will visit him with the exact opposite of what he had expected. Two recent books provide dramatic illustration of this thesis as it applies to two of America's favorite idolatries, the cult of individualism and the cult of sex.
Individualism, of course, is one of the watchwords of America. From pioneer days to the present, it has been invoked as an infallible guide to economic, political, and even moral decisions. One would therefore expect America to be the incubator of strong, independent personalities. Yet studies by Erich Fromm and David Reisman indicate unmistakably that we are fostering instead a mass-produced citizenry whose greatest desire is to emulate, whose greatest fear is to deviate, and whose greatest skill is to be all things to all men. Most recently William Whyte, in The Organization Man, has detected one of the strongest pressures for the rubber-stamp mentality in that bastion of free enterprise, private industry itself. While consciously doing obeisance to the god of rugged individualism, the American corporation often dictates to its executives their taste in dress and automobile, their choice of friends and clubs, and even their ethical and political views. Exactly as the prophet would have predicted, the more desperately individualism is pursued as a good in itself, the more it is belied by the facts.
A similar fate is in store for the worshipper of sex. Americans are so notorious for exploiting it at every opportunity, from art to advertising, that one might expect to find them oversexed. Psychologists have long suspected that the opposite is the case. The façade of sensationalism, they contend, is a screen for sexual failure, the daydream of people who betray by their fantasies what they have failed to achieve in fact. The prodigies recorded in the Kinsey Reports do not suggest fulfillment, but rather a frantic groping for the right combination. A contemporary theologian, Robert E. Fitch has diagnosed this ironic phenomenon in his The Decline and Fall of Sex. Analyzing the treatment of sex in such so-called "daring" and "honest" books as Peyton Place and Bonjour Tristesse, he finds not vitality but tedium, not joy but cynicism, not exaltation but degradation. The hero is the person who goes through with it as an act of fidelity, even of sacrifice, to Aphrodite. Promising its followers salvation through sex, this god destroys their capacity to enjoy it.
As a man repeatedly barks his shins upon these recalcitrant facts, he may see through the duplicity of his idol, and recognize that he has been the victim of a "god that failed." Like any intoxicant, however, idolatry has an element of the vicious circle about it. Since he cannot recant without loss of face, the idolater resolutely fortifies himself against the rude awakening. This inability to come to terms with reality, of course, is one of the surest symptoms of neurosis. It reaches an extreme in philosophers like Nietzsche and his followers, who pride themselves on the "courage" to believe in illusion, who scorn success and who court catastrophe. This willful blindness underlies the prophet's description of idolatry as the "primordial stupidity."
In addition to this self-deception, however, there is also a touch of pathos about idolatry. Its victim has also been duped. In St. Paul's words, "When ye knew not God, ye were in bondage unto them which by nature are no gods" (Galatians 4:8). More often than not, these gods are able to deceive a man by appealing not to his baser instincts but to his sense of goodness. Science, democracy, patriotism, and the rest are all creative in the service of God. Only when permitted to usurp His place do they run amuck. Most idolatry is thus not simply the fruit of sheer perversity, but of good intentions gone wrong. The idolater may even set an example of sincere and courageous devotion. The biblical analysis enables one to sympathize with his bewilderment when his self-sacrificing exertions boomerang.
The final arbiter between gods is pragmatic: the true God is He who keeps His word. But it is also objective: the true God can fulfill His promises only because He is the Lord of all reality. The biblical writers tell of a God whose promises to men far exceed those of the most extravagant idol. They also invite men to behold the mighty acts by which He fulfills them. The prophet summons every idol to a trial of strength, secure in the confidence that "God is not mocked."
Bibliography
Abraham J. Heschel, God in Search of Man. Claude Tresmontant, Essai sur la Pensee Hebraique. G. Ernest Wright, God Who Acts.