PART ONE: HOW CHRIS WRIGHT AND GK BEALE POSE QUESTIONS TO WHICH THEOLOGY HAS NO MEANS OF RESPONDING
A reflection on human sin and brokenness is always the first stage in any missional presentation of the Christian faith. Read C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity. So, anyone intending to ‘preach the gospel’ in today’s world would do well to consider what they will say about ‘sin’ in its contemporary manifestations. In the words of Chris Wright, author of Mission of God: ‘If our mission is bringing good news into every area of human life, then it calls for some research and analysis as to what exactly constitutes the bad news’.
The impressive ‘research and analysis’ in these books leads to the clear conclusion that the essence of sin, now as in the past, lies in our human propensity to idolatry. For any evangelist or apologist of the Christian faith, they therefore pose with some urgency a question of great practical concern: What are the prevailing forms of idolatry in the world of today?
Our writers attempt an answer. Sadly, the seriousness of their research and analysis up to this point now seems to desert them. There is a pathetic disproportion between the long weighty chapters devoted to the theological discussion that produces the question and the few desultory pages in which they attempt an answer.
From the point of view of evangelist/apologist it is as if a builder had brought a truckload of materials to my front door, and left me with the job of constructing the house!
Am I seeking in the wrong place?
Perhaps I’m being unfair. As Wright himself states, at the beginning of his first book, the principal aim of The Mission of God is not practical but theological. Its concern is not primarily mission but with establishing a radically missional reading of the grand biblical narrative.
All this is true. And yet … the practical necessity of re-framing our understanding of sin in terms of idolatry IS stressed by Wright as a major – perhaps the major – implication of his analysis of the grand biblical narrative. So the reader is naturally disappointed when the task of combined biblical and sociological analysis which Wright himself claims to be the proper outcome of his study is conducted in a few desultory pages and in a manner that will strike the reader, by comparison with the earlier analysis of biblical narrative, as so inadequate in scale, so superficial, and so lacking scholarly basis or deeper insight that one is astonished the author could have content to leave the matter there.
I propose to do two things in this blog. First, demonstrate, on the basis of the exposition of Scripture developed by Wright and Beale, that idolatry DOES offer the appropriate framework in which to characterize the sinful human condition as it manifests in today’s world, and so foreground the business of ‘naming the powers’ as the most urgent task confronting today’s Christian apologists. Second, reveal how far the treatments of this question in books by Wright and Beale fall short of the task, and indicate some of the minimum requirements that would have to be met for any characterization of contemporary idolatry to pass muster.
That the problem of idolatry really IS the practical take-home message of The Mission of God is indicated by a return to the theme in Wright’s 2020 book, Here are Your Gods, which reproduces large parts of the earlier 2006 text in somewhat emended form, and using that as the biblical basis for a more extended, though not more successful, attempt at ‘naming the powers’. Wright’s earlier book is frequently cited by another recent study, G.K. Beale, We Become what we Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry which also finds in the grand narrative of the Bible the basis for a characterization of contemporary sin as idolatry. As with Wright’s book, there is a regrettable disproportion, both in length of treatment and seriousness of analysis, between the sections devoted to Canaanite cults and supposedly idolatrous practices of today. Again we have the impression of an enormous and pressing question that emerges like a Kraken from the exegetical depths only to expire in a train of bubbles.
Why contemporary idolatry is the most pressing question for apologetics
So, why does a missiological reading of the biblical narrative necessarily foreground the question of idolatry? To understand this we need to say something more about what Wright means by a ‘missiological’ hermeneutic.
Broadly, Wright argues that behind any missional imperative upon the Church, or the people of Israel, for that matter, lies something missional in the very reality of the Godhead. God (i.e. the God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition) is, above all, a God who wills to be known – and to be known as He truly is: that is to say, as unique and sui generis, as sovereign, and as having no rival. Knowledge in this sense (i.e. of God) is central for Wright. This knowledge is the stake of a cosmic struggle in which God Himself is engaged. It involves the rightful assertion of God’s own sovereignty (i.e. the glorification of his Name), but also the good of the (human) for whom ‘knowing God’ is the ultimate blessing.
This characterization of God as one who wills to be known, is pursued first through the story of the exodus where His action ‘with outstretched arm’ is accomplished to the end that His people ‘may know’; and also, as Wright points out, that their enemies ‘may know’ – though to their cost. Later, however, the same characterization is pursued in the story of Israel’s exile and return – this time at a deeper and more complex level where the spheres of God’s favour and of His judgment cease to be defined in such black and white terms. What emerges now is a God who wills to be known as sovereign etc., not just by His chosen people, but by the ‘nations’ (i.e. all mankind); moreover, who wills to be known salvifically by them, through the operation of His word, not, like Pharaoh, simply through an act of judgment; moreover, who wills to be known through the intermediary of a people, to whom he has blessed with that word, not just for themselves, but so that, their witness to the word, may, in turn, become a blessing to the nations and so share God’s purpose. In short, ‘the Bible renders to us the story of God’s mission through God’s people in their engagement with God’s world for the sake of the whole of God’s creation.’ (p.51)
Thus, we arrive at something very much like the great commission of Matthew 28 but without leaving the Hebrew Scriptures! And, of course, this is precisely Wright’s point. The Church’s mission is not just a command laid upon Jesus’s followers to carry the news of his salvific death and resurrection to the world (though it is that, of course). And it doesn’t arrive ‘out of the blue’. The great commission is but a more developed expression of that ‘will to be known’ that characterizes God’s engagement with mankind throughout earlier biblical history, and an emanation of God’s very Being. This God’s ‘chosen people’ are being invited to participate in, so as to render themselves a source of blessing for themselves along with whole of creation.
So much, then, for Wright’s missiological perspective. Why does it impose a construction of human sin and brokenness as idolatry?
Consider the nature of what, by his very nature, God wills mankind to ‘know’: most fundamentally, that He is sui generis, sovereign, without rival. Wright is surely correct to observe: ‘there is a confrontational, polemical dimension to this affirmation’. ‘That He is sui generis’ implies the rejection of the idea that ‘God’ is just a kind of ‘god’; similarly, ‘that He is sovereign’ the rejection of any idea of that He might not be in absolute control, and ‘that He is unique’ that there might indeed be other such beings. Moreover, if God wills mankind to ‘know’ Him as He is, then that knowledge cannot be self-evident, but requires wresting us from a preceding state of ‘ignorance’. It follows from the knowledge that God wills to impart what the character of that ignorance must be. The affirmations respecting the Godhead allow us to descry – even as they seek to exorcise – a world of many gods where none reign supreme. So, if we accept Wright’s missiological reading of the grand narrative of Scripture, the practical implications for our evangelism are clear. In the words of Wright: ‘If the conflict between the living God and His Christ, on the one hand, and all that human and satanic effort erects in the form of other gods and idols, on the other, constitutes the great cosmic drama of the biblical narrative, then our mission must involve us in that conflict with idolatry …. ‘
The obvious question here is: if the construction of sin as ‘idolatry’ is so obvious, why we should have needed Wright et al. to reveal this to us. If, however, we consider what distinguishes Wright’s approach to the question of how we construe ‘sin’ to other approaches, there is something that stands out. Wright begins with the greater biblical narrative, with exodus, exile, and the gospel narratives, with the positive dimension of how God reveals Himself through history. It is only subsequently and within a hermeneutic frame constructed on this global basis that he returns to the first stories of Genesis in order to explore the more negative dimension of that ignorance from which God wills the nations to be wrested – the counterpart of the knowledge that has already been defined. This approach is counter-intuitive and reverses the more normal interpretative practice in that it views Genesis from the ‘later’ perspective of subsequent books rather than beginning at the beginning. From this perspective, the sin of Adam is seen as the first act of idolatry.
Wright’s approach is correct, as are his conclusions – and for two reasons. First, because his conclusions reflect the Bible’s take on itself, as well as the understanding of early traditions – Christian and Jewish. Consider, for example, St Paul in Romans:
Ever since the creation of the world his (God’s) eternal power and divine nature,invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So, they (mankind) are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being, or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles. Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the boat God for a life and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.
Second, because he doesn’t mine the Adam and Eve story for psychological and sociological meanings it doesn’t contain.
The Bible focuses on God and his calling of his people to knowledge of Himself. The negative dimension of ignorance and idolatry only really enters the picture at the point where idolatrous practices have become a concern for God’s people – in Egypt, that is to say, under the Pharaoh. Prior to this, the narrative of Genesis foregrounds the call of individuals and families, and their response. To the extent that idolatry figures at all, it is largely as a distant horizon in the shape of the cultures out of which Israel has been called, sketchily evoked in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah and the blood and violence of the nations from Cain to Noah. The story of Adam and Eve is clearly aetiological. In the schematic starkness of its obviously mythological intention there is little evidence of concern with real-life manifestations of human sin. We would not conclude from the story that gluttony was the greatest human temptation. That is where we should probably leave any attempts to psychologize or sociologize this brief narrative.
Needless to say, Wright draws out the idolatrous implications of Adam’s attempt to ‘know’ not with God’s knowledge, but with a ‘knowledge’ of his own. ‘Therein lies the root of all other forms of idolatry: we deify our own capacities, and thereby make gods of ourselves and our choices and all their implications.’ G.K. Beale offers a useful survey of later Jewish sources ‘that viewed the sin of the golden calf to be almost equivalent to the notion of Adam’s original sin.’
Naming the Powers
I conclude that the construction of sin as idolatry is pretty much imposed by Wright’s missiological reading, as is the evangelical need to engage the world through unmasking the powers.
The problem for Wright and Beale is that the Bible, while imposing this task on us, does not provide us with adequate tools for its accomplishment. First, because the powers and principalities that confront Christians today are no longer the gods of antiquity. Second, because the Bible’s interest in pagan religious practices rarely extends beyond the moral problem of Israel’s engagement with them. There is certainly no attempt to understand such phenomena in their own terms, to explain what they are, or what role they play in the lives of those who practise them. Consequently, the Bible has little to say that would help us discern their existence in the very different cultural context of today.
However, Wright is determined to extract whatever he can. A fairly long and careful analysis of relevant biblical passages leads him to the conclusion that while gods may be associated with demons they are properly best understood as, primarily, ‘the work of human hands’. On this basis, he proceeds as follows: ‘If we are in large measure responsible ourselves as human beings for the gods we create, then it is worth looking at the way the Bible portrays the process. What are the things we tend to manufacture our gods from?
Answer: things that entice us (heavenly bodies); things we fear (death, the sea, the evil eye); things we trust (financial and military security); things we need (fertility; material security).
In the later book, Wright narrows his focus to three prevailing sources of idolatry: 1. the state; 2. Mammon; 3. the ‘self’.
My first reaction to Wright’s approach here is to quote C.S Lewis who somewhere states (in relation to heavenly bodies, I believe) that the question of what something IS cannot be reduced to the question of what it IS MADE FROM. The gods are evidently constructs of the collective imagination; they are therefore not reducible to objective things in the world. To say, like G.K. Beale, that Baal IS fertility is like saying that a monetary currency can be adequately described in terms of the metal from which it is composed and the form into which that metal is cast.
The idols mentioned in the Bible, like Baal or Dagon, are the objects of the religions of neighbouring peoples, and, as such, they are the focus of cults. If those cults bear any resemblance to those of societies investigated by social anthropologists today, then a number of things can be said. First, that such religious cults will be inseparable from social and political ties that constitute the communal identities of their respective observants. Consider, for example, how the cult of YHWH is described by the Bible itself as constitutive of the people of Israel, and fundamental to the identity of every Jew. What we have here – i.e. the role of a cult in the constitution of a people – constitutes a sociological fact quite independent of whether or not YHWH happens to be regarded as the one true God. There is no reason to suppose that what is true sociologically in the case of the cult of YHWH of Israel – namely the role of His cult in the constitution of His people – will not also have been equally true in the case of Chemosh of Moab, or Milkom of Ammon. Indeed, such is a conclusion to which we are forced by practically every socio-anthropological study of archaic religion ever undertaken.
Second, such cults, with their specific myths and rituals, shape the cosmologies that give meaning to the everyday world of their devotees. Indeed, it is this fabric of common meanings, often tightly indexed to specific structures of kinship and alliance, which render them their place in the world that they share with their co-religionaries. Consider, once again in the case of Israel, how the narratives of Genesis and Exodus, and the practices and aetiologies in which they are enmeshed create a moral and metaphysical world through which the lives of God’s people derive sense and meaning. Here again, in regard to meaning-giving function of religious cosmology, we are up against a sociological fact that is independent of whether, in any specific case, the cosmological suppositions of a correspond to some criterion of objective truth. And, here again, there is no reason to suppose that a comparable meaning-giving function would also have belonged to the cosmologies of the Moabites or Ammonites.
None of this is evident from the Bible, because the Bible does not, by and large, interest itself in the worldviews of neighbouring religions, which it dismisses – no doubt rightly – as empty and immoral.
But if we want to discern phenomena in today’s world that are comparable Caesar worship or to the cults of ancient Canaan then we need to look beyond the basic material from which from which idolatrous cult is manufactured. That admittedly is no doubt the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow – which is why it can be deduced from the Bible. Rather, we will need a full understanding of the generic phenomenon – idolatrous religion – in order to be able to apprehend its manifestation in the very different world of today. That is something we will NOT find in the Bible. A good place to start, however, might be ethnographies by social anthropologists, and anthropologically-informed studies by specialists of ancient religion. In particular, social anthropology, I would suggest, can offer us the possibility of catching a side-ways glimpse of ourselves as we might appear in the eyes of another. And that may be as close as we human beings can come to a consciousness of the ideologies that shape – or threaten to shape – our own thinking.
Leaving aside the wider question of how social anthropology could help us in the task of discerning the powers and principalities, I think we already have some preliminary indications of the kind of phenomenon we are looking for – sufficient, for example, to rule out most of the possibilities mentioned by Wright and Beale. It will, for a start, be something ideological, or perhaps, we should say, ideational. A global belief-system that shapes the institutions of secular life, that grounds forms of community while giving religious meaning to secular lives.
Something like communism would certainly fit the bill – such as it existed in earlier twentieth-century Soviet Union, and still thrives in the People’s Republic. However, I seriously doubt Wright’s later suggestion that the ‘state’ constitutes such an idolatrous object, at least in the contemporary West. For certain small groups, maybe. But it is enough, for example, to sniff the rancid air of American civil religion (Marvin & Ingle, The Cult of the Flag) to be reasonably convinced that most of our populisms are not religious in that sense. For the great majority, the post-Enlightenment state has continued to constitute, with some notable interruptions, a more workaday, and largely unhallowed, arrangement whereby the business of government is conducted. The course of this gradual process of ‘disenchantment’ has been well charted by Milbank, Pabst et al.. Suffice it to say that, partly owing to the development of Christianity itself, the post-Enlightenment ‘nation state’ is far removed from the genuinely politico-religious entities that had previously governed the fate of humanity since the Neolithic age.
Wright’s other two suggestions – Mammon and ‘the self’ – have little about them, at least as they are described in Here are Your Gods, that would identify them as obvious candidates for religious status. Yes, no doubt some non-Christians are materialistic and selfish; but equally large numbers who are most certainly not, and yet find their place, and make meaningful sense of their lives, within a world that is outspokenly non-Christian.
The question remains: how is that world to be characterized in religious terms? Wright and Beale leave us without a convincing answer.
PART TWO: CAN WALTER WINK HELP US ‘UNMASK THE POWERS’?
Wow! Thank you! I continuously wanted to write on my website something like that. Can I include a fragment of your post to my blog?