So What?

Idolatry 22: Does Father Christmas Matter?

In this post I want to return to the figure of Father Christmas and to ask whether our idolatry matters. 

Who believes in Father Christmas?

Father Christmas is the god of consumerism.  This god is deeply rooted in Christian and pagan imagery.  Although it cut loose a long time ago, it still retains those associations, especially in the image of Santa Claus.

Not all people who believe in consumerism are obvious worshipers of this god.  People from non-Christian religious traditions, who don't celebrate Christmas, are probably not influenced so much.  Consumerism is an ideology which presumably influences a far wider group of people than Western Americans and Europeans.  However, this is the culture that has generated both consumerism and the image of Father Christmas and at some level image and practice reinforce each other.

My guess is the United States and UK are the most excessive users of the Father Christmas cult.  Other countries in Europe seem to be less excessive in their observance perhaps because in some countries traditional observances have withstood the consumerist onslaught better than Britain and America.

It is perhaps not too surprising that the last two states to be world powers, now in decline, feel the strongest need to have an annual season of excess. 

What drives the cult?

I have already pointed out it is the market.  A bad Christmas (by which they mean the weeks leading up to Christmas) can be very damaging for retailers and the economy.  When did we last have a bad Christmas? 

Very early on, we are told prospects are gloomy. Then, as Christmas approaches, at some point everything turns around.  At some point the magic of Father Christmas kicks in and everyone realises that (a) we might as well go into debt to have a good Christmas, and (b) if we don't get out there soon everything will be gone from the shops.

So, the economy gets an annual jump start and people are encouraged to continue spending whether or not they have money to spend for another year.

Does any of this matter?

As I write, the Copenhagen climate change talks are happening.  Where is the leadership?  I have never known any time when there has been a political will to reduce sales.  The idea we might have to reduce our consumption and make do with less is unthinkable. 

It is a disaster that this summit took place during the Christmas season.  There is no way the interests in consumerism are likely to loosen their grip on the world's resources at the best of times.  To choose the time of year when their spirituality is celebrated and strongest is a bad omen.

It seems we have created a world for ourselves we cannot escape from.  It is impossible to imagine a world with shortages.  (With the exception of course of much of the past and most of what we call the developing world.)

The waste, the pollution, the exploitation of the planet are all consequences of our inability to stop consuming.  We bolster this with whimsical stories and false bonhomie.  The problem is we do not know how to stop.

Idolatry 20: Is the Universe Conscious?

How do you genuinely not know God?  The knack apparently is to set aside everything we know about God, except for God.  This is the teaching to be found in The Cloud of Unknowing , which is an example of the insights Christian mystics have made.  Here is a passage quoted in the Wikipedia article at the end of the above link.

Our intense need to understand will always be a powerful stumbling block to our attempts to reach God in simple love [...] and must always be overcome. For if you do not overcome this need to understand, it will undermine your quest. It will replace the darkness which you have pierced to reach God with clear images of something which, however good, however beautiful, however Godlike, is not God.

It might also be worth reading the following post in my other blog , which covers several others saying similar things.

We lack the language to express these things and even words we think of as certain can loop around with unexpected meanings.  Take the word materialism.  This can be used in two ways that are relevant to our interests.

It is used by atheists who believe the universe is made of matter, and spirit does not exist.  I have discussed this in my other blog, starting here .  Just one example of what I mean.  Belief in a material universe includes belief in nothing.  Is it possible to imagine nothing?  I don't mean the number zero, or what we say is in a box after we've emptied it but absolutely nothing.  Have a go, imagine it if you can.  There would be no space and no time.  Just about possible; the problem is we are conscious beings and our consciousness is always present.  What if there is no such thing as nothing?  What if there is always consciousness?  Atheists don't believe in God; why can't theists not believe in nothing?  Come on, there is no evidence whatsover for the existence of nothing, how could there be?  The materialist atheist has to concede ultimately there is no more a priori reason for the atheist position as there is for the theist.

The recent atheist campaigns have drawn Christians' attention to their a priori assumptions.  I welcome this and have claimed atheists are angels .  But is it not reasonable to ask atheists to do the same and re-examine theirs?

We all create our own realities.  Everything we perceive has been filtered by our senses and our brains.  We cannot conceive of nothing without using our conscious minds.  We cannot conceive of anything at all without our conscious minds.  We are saved from solipsism because at some point we encounter other minds.  We might fall in love with one or more of them or we might hate or fear them.  All this is in our minds.  Somehow, our institutions are created by our minds together and so we collectively create our institutions.

This is the other meaning of materialism.  It means to understand the spiritual entities described in our religious stories as creations of our collective consciousnesses.  We lose control because we cannot know all the contributions made by all who are involved.  All of this fully engages our attention from an early age, it is formed by the stories we are told, eg of Father Christmas. 

And God?  Somehow God is the reality beyond all this, a reality that enables us to see clearly.  Perhaps all things are held in God's consciousness.  We encounter God, on the interface between the material world and consciousness.  Consciousness is as fundamental as the material universe, it is only through consciousness we know the material world at all. 

Idolatry 19: Why Atheists are Not Very Good at Atheism

In my last post , I referred to a passage from Philippians.  Here it is in full:

Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,

but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.

And being found in  human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death

- even death on a cross.  (NRSV, Phil 2:5-8)

The Greek verb, translated as 'emptied' in the third line, kenosis is usually understood as self emptying.  We can see in this very early hymn the clarity with which people saw the incarnation.  It is an emptying of all power, and at each stage, more power is lost.

The question Christians should be posing to atheists is not whether they should believe God exists, but whether they are serious about the non-existence of God.

Christian mystics know that to find God, we have to lose God.  To rigorously discard every idol, every illusion we have about God, is extremely difficult.  Atheists seem to have an image of God based upon certain fundamentalist traditions.  This parallels very much the unnoticed assent we all make to consumerism by our supposed unbelief in Father Christmas.  Our denials count for nothing but self-deception unless we change the way we live to one not controlled by the ideology of consumerism.  So, if you have an idolatrous image of God, it matters little whether you believe in it or not. 

This false image of God, colours atheists' statements, so their attacks on liberal Christians sound very similar to fundamentalist attacks on liberal Christians.  Indeed, the first target of fundamentalists is always their co-religionists.  Their false God dominates their perceptions as much as it dominates the perceptions of atheists.  The issue is not about belief in God, it is about false images of God.

I do not count myself as a liberal theologian.  The problem is any Christian who is not fundamentalist is counted as liberal by both fundamentalists and atheists.  Neither will listen, both are convinced they are right and there is nothing further to be said on the matter.

It is not about picking a new image of God to not believe in.  It is about rejecting all images of God.  But to do this requires the path of the mystics.  Real atheism is a Christian activity.  It is not a matter for arrogance, it is hard work to genuinely not know God.  I will explain this further in my next post.

Idolatry 16: The Trinity

When I trained as a local preacher in the early eighties, we were warned against preaching about the Trinity because it is too difficult.  My experience over the years, has been to find it is an inspired doctrine, even if it is not really scriptural.  I will answer two questions, pointing out some ways in which Christians can create idols out of misunderstandings of the Trinity.  What do we mean by persons?  Why are there three persons?

What do we mean by persons?

Tertullian  was the first theologian to develop the idea of the Trinity.  He used the word person, which is derived from the Latin per sonar, which means 'through sound'.  This derived from the ancient Greek theatre, where the actors used large masks.  One actor might play several roles using different masks.  The mouths of the masks acted as amplifiers, and so for those in the audience seated on the back row their primary experience of the theatre was through sound, something like a radio play. 

So, the three persons of the Trinity are like masks worn by God.  We cannot know the God behind these masks just as we would not recognise an actor behind the Greek masks.  Each mask, however, is a valid way of knowing God.

For some people this explanation might take the paradox out of the Trinity.  People love to ask how one person can be three.  (The divine unity behind the three persons is not a person and so there is no way we can know it.)  They use analogies of ice, water and steam, or the egg shell. white and yolk.  These things are willful confusion.  I don't find any paradox in the image of an actor behind three different masks so long as we understand we cannot walk around the back of the mask and meet the actor.

Take a look at the first photo.  Who is it?  Is it David Tennant or is it The Doctor?  There is a story that early in his time playing The Doctor in Dr Who, someone approached David and greeted him.  David didn't know who it was and she eventually realised she had met Christopher Ecclestone, David's predecessor in the same role.  She was seeing the character and not the actor.  This is how we see the persons of the Trinity.  Those who see David Tennant in the photo are seeing the actor behind the character.  I suspect few people will recognise the actor in the second photo.  His name is Norman Painting.  No?  He played, until he died a few weeks ago, Phil Archer in the BBC Radio soap, The Archers.  He played that role for about 60 years.  I suspect some readers might know his name but have no idea what he looks like.  Many more would recognise the voice of Phil Archer. 

We know Phil Archer through sound and there is no way we would confuse him with Norman Painting.  So, we know God directly through the Trinity, and not some other God behind these three persons.  We can only know God through the three persons. 

Why are there three persons?

If there were only one person rather than three, there would be no issue.  The person and the God behind the person would be one and the same.  The problem here is the tendency to absolutise God, according to our own standards of power.  So, God is immortal, omnipotent, omnipresent, all knowing, etc.  Is this what God is like or how we would like God to be, someone immense and powerful but perhaps more favourably disposed to us than the local despot?  This is an image of God which appeals to those who believe kings have divine rights and that wielding of political power is all important.  Many Christians are believers in this single god, a god who bears no resemblance whatsoever to the Christian God.

Other Christians are dualists.  This is a very comfortable and stable belief that there are two equal gods.  One is usually seen as good and the other as evil.  Satan is of course the name of this other god.  What people don't understand is that Satan diminishes God, God is no longer all in all if part of him has been taken away and called evil.  Satan is an idol and it is shameful so many Christians believe in this character, created entirely to apportion blame to enemies and away from oneself.  A dualist worldview pervades modern politics as well as Christian fundamentalism.  Both divide the world into good and evil and project the evil onto their enemies 

Another dimension to this is the tendency of some atheists to project evil onto religion.  OK, so you don't believe in Satan, good.  No one should; Satan is a lie.  But you do believe religion is an unmitigated evil?  So, how exactly does that distinguish you from the Christian fundamentalists?  Don't tell me its because they hate atheism.  Fundamentalists hate my variety of religion just as much as you do.  The difference between atheism and fundamentalism seems a bit academic from where I'm sitting.

Three persons work because they upend dualisms.  A Trinity will always be off-balance, stepping on one another's heels.  They have to learn to anticipate each other's moves, to dance around each other.  The Trinity incorporates and absorbs the evil depicted by believers in Satan.  I will explain what I mean in my next post.

Idolatry 15: Scripture

This is the first of three posts exploring how Christians substitute false gods for God.  I should emphasise from the outset that I will not be covering every instance of this kind of spiritual sleight of hand.  Neither am I asserting all Christians believe these things. 

I should add that many of these beliefs are normal for Christians to hold during their faith journey.  For many Christians, extreme beliefs held at one stage mellow as experience leads them into deeper reflection on the beliefs they hold to be absolute.  It is a common experience over a lifetime of faith, to return to certain beliefs in new ways, as faith develops.

Some Christians make an idol out of Scripture, by claiming it is inerrant.  There are many ways of reading and interpreting scripture and some are better than others.  Inerrant beliefs are not the only way to interpret scripture, they are one way amongst many.  The problem is those who believe their interpretations are inerrant, believe they are the only way of understanding scripture.  They will speak of the plain meaning of scripture and find it hard to believe what seems plain to them might not be at all plain to others.  Of course, the belief that scripture has  plain meaning, itself needs examination.

Karen Armstrong in her recent book, The Case for God , makes a distinction between logos and mythos.  The former are those beliefs, like science, which can be derived from observation of the world.  Mythos is revealed beliefs.  These are derived from the interpretation of scripture.  To confuse the two is an error in logical typing.  Fundamentalism treats scripture as logos and believes it is true in the way scientific observations are true.  In Christian history, this approach to interpretation is unique to fundamentalism and began during the last century.  Atheists also treat scripture as logos and deny the reality of mythos. 

So, what is scripture about?  It is a witness by many people to their experience of God.  That's all it is.  However, there is more to add.  It is worth looking at Walter Wink's trilogy of books  about the powers.  What follows is derived from his work.

Scripture may appear to be about all manner of things spiritual and we easily forget the witnesses to God were writing about things both real and spiritual.  Usually we have no problem agreeing about the reality of the everyday material world.  There is also a spiritual world and it is equally real.  Some witnesses write in terms of angels and demons.  These stand for the more difficult reality the witness describes.

That reality is human institutions.  At the time of the New Testament, people believed every institution, eg a nation or a church, had an angel.  When the institution ceases to exist, so does its angel.  What they meant was interactions between people can take on a life of their own.  These interactions might be relatively healthy or relatively unhealthy.  Broadly, a demon is an angel that is unhealthy.  These institutions then exert real influences over us, and mostly we are not aware of them. 

Sometimes people talk of institutional sin, and some are quick to deny it exists or to play down its influence.  Actually, there is no other type of sin, our behaviour is influenced at all times by institutions.  We read scripture and pray to help us see these influences and find actions we can take to be free of them.

Idols are the images we make of these real institutional powers.  So, we depict consumerism as Father Christmas , for example.  These idols are seductive because they lead us to something we perceive to be real.  However, they also lead us to false conciousness of these things.  The role of faith is to help us to become aware of our idols and to substitute healthier images for them.

Idolatry 7: Celebrity

Surely, celebrity is just a bit of fun?  We all have our favourite actors or musicians.  It's natural to admire them for their talent.  I'm sure it is but talent is not at all that celebrity is about.

There is an industry dedicated to celebrity.  Celebrity is manufactured, primarily through images of celebrities.  It is easy to make an idol of a living person.  The earliest Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire because they refused to worship the emperor.  There have always been personality cults of one type or another.

Celebrity images are lovingly reproduced in full colour magazines and television programmes.  These pictures are touched up in various ways to reflect an ideal of what a celebrity should look like.  These images are false representations of the person depicted.  Indeed, celebrities have little control of their images; the images are in the control of the media.  When a celebrity fails to meet this ideal, that too is exploited.  People will pay to see celebrities who are drunk or misbehaving in some way.

Part of the false images of the celebrities are the stories told about them.  Often these stories are made up to sell media.  Or else they are manufactured on reality TV shows.  The lives of celebrities are similar to the lives depicted on soaps.  For some soap stars, it is difficult to tell what is happening to the actor from what is happening to their character. 

Of course, everyone knows the world of celebrities is manufactured.  Perhaps.  But here's the point.  How do we know that Old Testament idolaters did not know their idols were manufactured? 

These images work at a subliminal level.  We are not conscious of their power precisely because we know they are manufactured.  We may tell ourselves this person has talent, whilst another has none and has just been hyped.  It doesn't matter what we think.  The message that we receive under the radar is about the way to live in a consumer society.

Idolatry 5: Classic Idolatry in a Postmodern World

I will be making the case that classic idolatry is alive and well in our postmodern age.  Whilst I appreciate the view there are no longer any grand narratives, I am also suspicious of it.  Is it that there are no longer any grand narratives, or that we choose to overlook them?  It may be true the old grand narratives are no more but it does not follow there are no grand narratives.  Plato reports Socrates as saying 'the unexamined life is not worth living'.  The invitation to examine our lives is an invitation to step into another world, quite different from the one we think we know.

The first thing to do is to clear up some possible misconceptions about classical idolatry.

First, the prohibition of idolatry in ancient Israel, took place in a political context.  It is likely the concept of God developed from arguing that many local gods were each a manifestation of one God.  These local gods had idols and many worshippers transferred their allegiance to the one God, worshiped through their local idol. 

The Israelites were also known as Hebrews, a word which originates as a social rather than ethnic designation.  Often the idols would have been controlled by political elites, the one God was a movement of the nomad, the marginalised, the dispossessed.  Later we see the focus shift to the dominance of a temple elite. 

This complex history is fascinating and we need to take care not to confuse its vagaries with the deeper concern beneath the politics of the time.  What is important is the way our idols form our lives in the present.  We do not need to believe the nations surrounding ancient Israel were evil because they worshiped false gods.  Our task is to identify our own false gods and understand why they are so dangerous.

Second, I am not writing about bonkers sects.  There is no end to the bonkers things people believe in.  In this series of posts I am not concerned with debunking bonkers beliefs.  Plenty of writers have had great fun doing this but it does not concern me here.

Third, a discussion of idolatry carried out by a professed Christian is likely to raise the suspicion that the aim is to question other faiths.  This is not my intention.  The best way to settle this for the present is to say you will see in later posts, I do not see Christianity as exempt from the dangers of idolatry.  One way or another all faiths have to struggle with this issue.

In this series I will explore how idolatry works across the generality of Western society.  Once this is complete, it may be possible to engage with atheism in a constructive debate.  Atheists may be suspicious of what I write and so they should be.  If we take idolatry seriously we should all be radically suspicious.

What I hope to do is to show how idolatry is very much a part of our world.  Indeed, we make idols out of many abstract concepts but I want to show how so many of our idols are material, not far from the graven images in the second commandment  and described in Psalm 115 .

Idolatry 4: The Classic Idol

Next I turn to one of several Old Testament descriptions of idols.  At the time it might have seemed legitimate to mock those who worship idols.  But how much was down to rivalries between Israel and other nations, rather than a concern for a right relationship with God.  Remember the concern was always for the nation rather than individuals.  Did marking nations as idolatrous justify war with them?  Or did it explain why they invaded Israel?

Our God is in the heavens; he does whatever he pleases. 

Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.

They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see.

They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell.

They have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk; they make no sound in their throats.

Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them.  (Psalm 115:3-8; NRSV)

This is about physical idols; idols you can see and touch.  It is customary these days to say all manner of abstract things can be idols, such as money or celebrity.  I will explore this view later. 

The mockery is based on the question, why worship something that is not alive?  It exists alright but it is dead matter.  It has no capabilities whatsoever (unlike the God of Israel).  We need to pay attention to this because we need to be careful we don't project our own fears onto the writers and first readers of these texts.  This passage shows they are capable of distinguishing between what is real and what is not.  They make a real distinction between what is capable of many things and what is capable of nothing.

Atheists might wish to argue that the God is verse 3 is also an idol, a figment of the imagination.  They might be right and I will explore this view in a later post.  But the point is this passage does not allow such a simplistic dismissal of their ability to discern between what is real and what is not real. 

If they are able to see that material idols are not real, why assume they cannot discern that their God although not material might also not be real?  Why should they believe that material idols are false but that an imaginary God (as some atheists would have it) is true?  Why couldn't they see they are both idols? 

There are only two possible explanations.  Either this is an attack on people of other faiths, rubbishing their gods, or they had genuinely perceived something about the nature of reality.

Perhaps the last verse is a clue to what they perceived.  They make a distinction between those who worship idols and so are like them, unable to do anything of their own volition, and those who worship God and so somehow share in God's freedom.  (Compare the last verse with the first.)

At this stage, I will not take this any further except to note that before we jump to conclusions we should heed their warning about what happens to those who worship false gods.  As a further warning, this video shows what happens when you mess with idols.

 

On the Nature of Repentance

The Greek word for repentance, metanoia, means we turn around, away from what is not of God, towards what is of God.  The problem is we tend to think of repentance as turning away from sins we conceive of as crimes. 

But we need to understand those things not of God, not as crimes but as principalities and powers .  We are invited to turn away from those things which hold us captive.  Certainly, activities we commonly hold as sinful such as murder or covetousness can hold us captive but so can many other things.  As we buy into the second best worlds of the principalities and powers, we imprison ourselves.

Those who are unemployed for example, are often faced with an overwhelming sense of being sidelined.  They believe their  unemployment is their own fault.  Gradually, healing might come through a realisation that society is to blame.  Later still, they may see how they were at fault for accepting the idea they were personally to blame.

Terrible things happen to all of us and we turn them into prisons for ourselves.  Repentance is breaking out of our own prisons, realising that we are personally responsible for sins not only against others but also against ourselves. 

When someone commits a serious crime, such as the murder of a child, it is almost as if they commit two crimes.  In addition to the crime itself, there is also a spiritual crime, a crime against the surviving victims.  They are held captive by grief and often a desire for vengeance.  Of course, these desires cannot be met for all sorts of reasons and so they can be nursed for many years.

Whose fault is this self-captivity?  Without a doubt it was originally the perpetrator of the crime.  But who is responsible many years later?  The perpetrator might be dead.  Release can come only with the recognition that I am my own gaoler.  Blaming the other reinforces the shackles I have forged for myself.  Ultimately, the call to repentance is a call to take responsibility for my life.

To see someone who has not been able to forgive and let go is never edifying.  Sometimes we see the opposite, someone who is able to forgive a terrible crime, sometimes very soon after it is committed.  This is never unfeeling, it is always a great generosity of spirit which happens despite ongoing and real pain.

Sporting Life is the real villain in Porgy and Bess.  Whilst Porgy and Crown fight over Bess, he insinuates himself into her life using her drug addiction.  Unlike Crown, he lacks self-awareness and so awareness of the humnaity of the other.  In this extract he tempts Bess to come with him to New York.  Unfortunately, I have been unable to find an extract from a performance of the opera.  This is the best I could find out of an indifferent pick of on-line recordings.

What Sin Is

Hopefully you are persuaded that sin has nothing to do with the 10 commandments or sex  .  But you might ask what is it do with?  There is a debate about whether there is such a thing as institutional sin.  How can institutions be sinful, it is people who are sinful?  Well, actually no.  The truth is all sin is institutional.  But of course this needs to be unpacked.

We need to understand human institutions have a temporal and a spiritual dimension.  The temporal are those aspects you bump into, shake hands with or bow down to.  So, an easy illustrative example would be a king.  A king has a kingdom, a throne, castle with banqueting halls and dungeons.  The problem is none of these or anything else the king possesses will earn him the obedience of his subjects.

However, if the subjects believe the king, or better still the kingdom, is good and so ordained by God, they will generally do as they are told.  This is broadly the spiritual aspect of the kingdom.  Notice, it happens because the kingdom takes up residency in the heads of the people who live in it.  This applies to the king, his subjects and in fact their enemies too.  This is what Paul means by powers and principalities.  There is in the view of Christians one ruler who is not divinely ordained but is in essence divine.  Our calling is to know God and this means repeatedly unseating an unending procession of powers that seek our allegiance, often in very subtle ways.

The reason we do this is because we have a natural instinct to put our own survival first.  Whatever is out there that promises to earn our allegiance, will be placed at the centre of our lives.

This is known as idolatry and I intend to write a series on this theme during advent (for reasons which will become apparent).  Even something which seemingly has nothing to do with the powers is filtered through our distorted vision of what is right.  I fall in love, the way I express that love is through my sinful nature.  I learn from the media.  I buy valentine cards.  I buy loads of things.  Today we live in a consumer society, so our lives are expressed in terms of consumerism.

That's enough for now but it gets much more difficult as I will explain next time.  For now, remember it is the sin that is the problem, not the sinner.  God loves sinners because he can see the person captured by all the crap. 

I've always been fascinated by the character Crown in Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess.  He is one of the villains (I'll tell you about the other next time).  Crown is a brutal man and a bully.  This song A Red Headed Woman makes the Choo Choo Jump its Tracks is an example of his style.  He sings this in the middle of a prayer meeting during a storm.  He boasts that he and God like to fight.  But he is the one who is prepared to go out in the storm to rescue the men in the boats.  He is lost but on his return he is murdered by Porgy because of the power he has over Bess.  He is a man who is impossible to love and yet you can see he might be loved by God.  Not so the other villain.  (Click on the picture to hear the song.)