Re: [asa] D'Souza vs. Hitchens - Surrending the debate

I agree with Jim when he says, "...By...stretching the definition of "idolatry", we may have lost something of its essential meaning." Specifically, we've lost its OT meaning. Idolatry in the OT had little in common with "washing your car on Sunday morning instead of going to church." Rather, it was the act of deliberately surrendering oneself to one or more persons simply for the pleasure of it. Worship is fundamentally a sex act. Those persons were demons passing themselves off as wooden poles or calves or other idol forms. Instead of surrendering themselves to God, the Jews surrendered themselves to gods, to demons.

If it were not so, why would God have reserved his deepest and fiercest condemnations for such sin? Condemnations of Jeremiah 2:20-25 and Ezekiel 16 & 23 have no equals for truculence in the Bible. The destruction of Ephraim and the exile of Judah (Hosea's terms) were God's necessarily severe means of separating his people from their idolatrous cravings. God's acts of discipline succeeded: Jews ever after strictly shunned idols and thereby became accessible to his Messiah.

Lesser human failures to give God his due are idolatry only by distant analogy.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Jim Armstrong
  To: ASA
  Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 9:25 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] D'Souza vs. Hitchens - Surrending the debate

  Nope, I assume those "names" of God are the particular people's way of assigning a verbalizable identity to the one they recognize as the Author of Creation, not just an abstract concept.

  Regarding "God's self-designation": I am not a Hebrew scholar, but I read that in Jewish thought, a name is not just an identifying label, but is more an expression of the essence of the named, something descriptive of its character and history. So when Moses asks God to disclose his "name", he is not really asking, "What should I call you?". Rather he is asking more like, "Who are you, what are you like and what have you done?" Just to go one step further, what kind of a name in the conventional sense is one that you will not use in the conventional sense, as is the case with Jewish practice of not speaking "God's self-designation"?

  I know that there is also a widespread practice of stretching the notion of idolatry to cover things we do that may not be in strict compliance with our stewardship instructions, or may be time/resource wasters. But I take the narrower (and dictionary/encyclopedia definition) view that unless those activities involve worship per se, they do not constitute idolatry. I do not know how one can remove the notion of worship from idolatry and have it remain idolatry. It then fails the most basic of definitions of idolatry. Surely the KKK's burning cross is no object of worship, but a desecration.

  It seems to me that by (with the best of intentions) so constantly stretching the definition of "idolatry", we may have lost something of its essential meaning. It is certainly possible to speak of idolatry in hyperbole, and perhaps that is just what Ezekiel and Calvin have done to make a point. But, where in fact is the (essential) worship component in what one might label idolatrous under such circumstances? If it's there, it may be idolatry. If not, it's more probably just just crappy stewardship.

  I would think we would want to be careful not to diminish the element of worship by pushing it into the background through persistant use of a truncated definition of idolatry.

  Or so it seemeth to me.

  Blessings JimA [Friend of ASA]

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Received on Thu Nov 1 06:48:24 2007