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Bellator Christi Three Dangerous Forms of Modern Idolatry
By Tony Williams on November 20, 2024
By: Brian G. Chilton, M.Div., Ph.D. | November 24, 2024
Idolatry is a dangerous and sinful problem for individuals.
Then skeptics might possibly be reasonable to delay obeying the evangelists command to repent and believe the gospel, until they can be reasonably sure the evangelist hasn't created his own idols. Otherwise, you would be telling us to base decisions about our eternity upon the word of a possible idolater. But if the evangelist's possible idolatry cannot be anything sufficient to justify delaying to accept his gospel theology, then such idolatry probably isn't sufficiently important in the context of the church to justify your article on it.
The act of idolatry places emphasis on a person, place, thing, or concept on the same or higher level than God.
So when Christians find the words of anybody in the NT outside of Jesus to be at the level of God (i.e, God-inspired speech or writing), they are idolizing that author. Even if you could show that Paul's theology was "correct", you could never show that his epistles were inspired by God. And yet all of today's Christians in your conservative of fundamentalist group cannot even hardly imagine any of Paul's NT writings lacking divine inspiration.
In many ways, as I have often said, idolatry is adultery against God. Just as adultery is the act of a spouse cheating on his or her marital partner, likewise, idolatry essentially cheats on God by placing something greater than Him.
I learned from the Calvinists that if anybody cheats on God, its because God wanted them to. When you say my spiritually dead condition doesn't prevent me from recognizing heresy, the Calvinists will say spiritual death as taught in the NT is not merely metaphorical, but literal. At that point I can justify delaying to further consider what you have to say until the Calvinists and Arminians obey 1st Cor. 1:10 and stop having divisions, i.e., the sort of divisions that cause Christians to claim to follow different Christian teachers who teach opposite to each other.
The Word of God thoroughly warns against the sin of idolatry throughout its illustrious pages. The sin of idolatry made it into the Ten Commandments. When idolatry occurs, a person is consumed with whatever becomes the object of worship. And seeing that God is the source of goodness and love, anything other than God will wind up being a grave disappointment.
That fails to explain why many Christians didn't find it a disappointment to leave the faith. You will say they only left a black and white fundie and false form of Christianity, but if the cosmos ever declared your imperfect theories to be true, I didn't get the memo.
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Huxley viewed these three modern idolatries as “a much more insidious and pernicious form of idolatry”[1] than many others. The three forms of idolatry that Huxley warns about are technological idolatry, political idolatry, and moral idolatry.
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With modernity, it is often assumed that technology will save humanity in various areas. For sure, technological advances have extended life expectancy by offering better healthcare. Nonetheless, idolatry comes when people place more value on their devices than God. The psalmist declares, “Some take pride in chariots, and others in horses, but we take pride in the name of the Lord our God. They collapse and fall, but we rise and stand firm” (Ps. 20:7–8, CSB).
But since you cannot make a case that "spiritual" concerns are more important than "earthly" concerns, there is no unreasonableness in a person merely because their lives are completely earth-centered and exhibit not the slightest concern about the afterworld.
POLITICAL IDOLATRY
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In the same way, we must ask ourselves if we have reached a point where we trust in our organizations, alliances, and parties more than God. That is not to say that we should not stand for what’s right. However, Hezekiah and his confrontation with the prophet Isaiah should remind us that ultimately our trust and reliance should be in God rather than political entities.
I find that to be completely useless banter: Of course all members of the American Center for Law & Justice or the Moral Majority will say they are trusting in "god", but it would be easy enough to show that they are trusting no less in their political party too. The fact that trusting god is not sufficient to get anything done is proven by the fact that trusting god can be sufficiently accomplished solely mentally...and yet any fool recognizes that Republicans can look forward to losing in politics if they don't couple their trust in "god" with their purely earth-centered efforts in American politics. Christianity is very stupid for fostering the type of irrationality that credits business success to god, when the indisputable empirical facts sufficiently explain that success. If you purchase a candy bar at a store, you are a fool if you give god credit for causing that business transaction to succeed. Just like if you run an apologetics ministry on the internet and you gather a few fools who regularly donate to your cause, there's no more reason to pretend "god" caused them to donate than there is for thinking the tooth-fairy caused them to donate. If you have freewill, this logically precludes giving god full credit for your successes. God did not make the decision to start the business. YOU did. God's back does not hurt if you dig ditches to earn a living. YOUR back hurts. Giving God credit for all your successes foolish because all Christians do it, and yet you'd be quick to insist that in many cases, it wasn't god who caused some ministry to gain popularity. Any fool can see what the proximate, immediate and ultimate causes for Christian success are in this world. An invisible entity working behind the scenes in mysterious ways in another dimension is NOT it.
MORAL IDOLATRY
Lastly, Huxley warns against moral idolatry. Moral idolatry can involve one’s reliance on one’s ethical ideals and interpretations of morality[7] rather than God and transcendent ethics. This can include a person’s reliance on their own ethical standards to give them hope, happiness, security, and significance.[8]
There is nothing to argue against here because even assuming the bible is the inerrant word of God, there's plenty of evidence that God does not give infallible moral guidance to any Christian who has lived in the last 1900 years. God never clearly answers for any Christian the question of whether they should get married, have kids, buy a gun, which exact church to attend, where exactly their theological beliefs could use some correction or sharpening, whether they should vote for a secular leader, spend their savings on questionable things like tithing, or which strangers to help, whether to speak against or remain quiet about a church leader that appears to be unqualified for office, etc, etc. At the end of the day, the faith of the Christian who makes decisions about these matters, is absolutely blind. You may as well tell yourself that after paying to Abraham Lincoln about marriage and noticing a few coincidences over the next two weeks, you have faith that Lincoln wants you to marry a certain someone. It doesn't matter if such thinking would edify you, that doesn't mean it must double as a reasonable proof that Lincoln was truly guiding you. Extreme Pentecostals think God wants them to act like unhinged lunatics, and African Bushman think the local witch doctor's "curse" is somehow "real".
It could be argued that Job’s friends were guilty of moral idolatry since they trusted in their own interpretations rather than God. This could be one of the reasons why God did not accept their responses to Job.
But today there is no such thing as a Christian trusting in "god". All they can do is trust that their own interpretations of biblical doctrine are what the human biblical authors intended.
Additionally, it could be said that many of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day were guilty of moral idolatry, as well. They trusted in their own interpretations of God’s Law rather than seeking the truth of God’s Word and trusting in the God Who gave the Law.
That is nothing but empty rhetoric, and they would probably have responded that they properly trust in God and show it by constantly concerning themselves with the scriptures and with how the scriptures are to applied to Jews when occupation by Romans forbade them from living out the Mosaic theocracy to its full intent. When today's Christians act upon their interpretation and application of biblical words, they do nothing different than the Pharisees, who would easily argue that they never add anything to the scripture, they merely show what scripture "requires".
Likewise, many in today’s church are militantly divided into numerous denominations and focus on various styles of worship, to the point that other variants are seen as unChristlike or even heretical. At some point, we must ask ourselves if such a devotion to denominationalism may, in some part, make us guilty of moral idolatry.
And this gives the skeptic another excuse: shouldn't he worry about the possibility that the evangelist is guilty of moral idolatry? The only reason you don't want to say "yes" is because if you said "yes", then obviously the skeptic cannot be rationally expected to reach reasonable certainty on the evangelist's or apologist's moral status before God in two seconds. If then the skeptic does what is right and investigates such a question, well, that's gonna take a few days at least, likely longer if the "apologist" is some anonymous fool on the internet. Since he cannot be rational to seriously consider the theology of a possible moral idolater until he can evaluate the evidence for and against, it is not rational to expect him to "accept Jesus" during that period of investigation. Although this is consistent with Frank Turek's infamous statement that "Maybe God doesn't want an unbeliever to get saved right now", most fundamentalists would bristle at this and insist the skeptic never has an excuse to delay getting saved. They are wrong: the stupid person is not the unbeliever who insists on delaying a decision until they can evaluate the relevant evidence for and against any Christians qualification to preach the gospel. The stupid person is the unbeliever who thinks the generalized agreements of the various conflicting denominations about Jesus and the gospel make the basic truth sufficiently clear to justify god in holding the unbeliever accountable to immediately "get saved". That is stupid because even if we confine the analysis to just the Trinitarian camp, Trinitarians disagree with each other about "essential" doctrine. For example, John MacArthur did not cause a storm of controversy within the Trinitarian camp because most of them thought Lordship Salvation was a non-essential. He created that storm because he thought Lordship Salvation was the only way to get saved, and his Trinitarian opponents made it an essential issue by accusing him of teaching the false gospel of legalism. Their agreements with each other that Jesus was God and bodily risen from the dead, do not mean that sincere confession of Jesus' deity and his bodily resurrection are all that is necessary to "get saved". MacArthur's Trinitarian opponents have no problems with these essentials...yet they continually warn the church and unbelievers away from what they perceive to be a legalistic gospel that is incapable of saving anybody.
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May we all place our full devotion and trust in the God of creation. Because it is only in Him that we ultimately find our meaning, purpose, and value.
A very useless pep talk since every Christian in creation guilty of any of these forms of idolatry could easily argue that by prioritizing politics or morality, they are in fact responding to these matters as God wants them to.
