Imposters of God

In the contemporary mind, idolatry is generally identified with pagan rites in ancient times or with primitive cultures today. Few modern people in the post-industrial societies of North America and Western Europe consciously acknowledge that they are idolaters. The term is certainly not part of our daily speech, nor do we commonly ponder the prevalence and present practice of idolatry among us.

Yet idolatry is pervasive in every time and culture, no less now than yesterday, no less in Washington than Gomorrah, no less among sophisticates than aborigines. Is the present idolatrous fascination with science significantly distinguishable from the adoration of fire and thunder? Recalling Hiroshima, or beholding the war in Vietnam, can any of us really believe that the cult in which war is the deity is any less militant here and now than in former times?

Indeed, it might be argued that contemporary Western humanity is more enslaved to idols than our supposedly less-civilized counterparts precisely because we are, presumably, less ignorant about the world in which we live and because our favorite idols are the familiar realities of daily life - religion, work, money, status, sex, patriotism.

All idols are imposters of God. Whatever its specific character, an idol is a person or thing or abstract notion enshrined as God. Idolatry is the worship of what humans have turned into such an imposter. In other words, idolatry means honoring the idol as that which renders the existence of the idolater morally significant, ultimately worthwhile. The idolater believes that virtue or worthiness depends upon the consistency, zeal, and appropriateness of the devotion, service, and elevation he or she accords to the idol. Thus Americans who have devoutly served the idols of respectability and status all their lives feel threatened in their very being when their children refuse to offer these idols the same worship.

IN THE THEOLOGY of the gospel, the event in which God gives and establishes the moral significance of human life in this world is often called justification. In radical distinction from idolatry, Christians confess that being justified is God's unequivocal gift to humanity summed up in Jesus Christ. The worth of a person's life is bestowed as the gift of God's wholly gratuitous love for humanity decisively manifested in history in Christ.

In this sense, without getting into the controversies of the Reformation, all Christians can speak of justification by faith rather than by works: of a justification at once personal and cosmic, both immediate and ultimate, not exclusive but ecumenical. This justification is unconditional; it is not modified by the aspirations or achievements of humanity. It is not the prize for any accomplishments and not the consequence of any sacrifices. It has nothing, as such, to do with piety or with keeping any laws. Undeserved, unearned, immeasurable, free and priceless, justification by faith is not essentially concerned with the issue of the faithfulness of humanity to God, but with the fidelity of God to God's self and to humanity, and thus with the faithfulness of men and women to their humanity.

According to Christ's gospel, justification cannot be attained by works of any kind. In contrast, idolatry essentially implies grasping after justification by works of one or another variety - obeying certain rules, pursuing certain values, carrying out certain activities or rituals, and so on. These thus become forms of tribute which people offer to what they have enshrined as idols, and so they become dehumanizing, death-dealing.

As Erich Fromm says in The Revolution of Hope:

....Idolatry, in the prophetic sense, [is] worshipping the work of one's own hands and hence making humanity subservient to things, and in this process becoming a thing itself. The idols against which the Old Testament prophets fought were idols in wood and stone, or trees or hills; the idols of our day are leaders, institutions, especially the state, the nation, production, law and order, and every human-made thing. The concept of alienation is the same as the biblical concept of idolatry. It is humanity's submission to the things of its creation and to the circumstances of its doing.

As Galatians puts it, all services rendered to idols are "works of the flesh," that is, works infected by death, works leading to death, not life. Thus the moral significance for their existence which people seek in idolatry turns out to be death. The supposed justified condition - like "security," "loyalty," "success," or whatever - which the idolater covets and pursues in his or her works is, in truth, a form of death.

The term "death" is being used here in the manifold connotations of its uses in the Bible: not only physical death but all forms of diminution of human life and development and dignity, and all forms of alienation of people from themselves and from one another and from God. Since idolatry of any kind demeans people, prevents them from becoming fully human, death is that which, under many disguises, idolaters really worship.

On the other hand, justification by faith means that the integrity of human life as a gift is radically affirmed. People are set free from enslavement to the work of their hands or mind to pursue their human vocations, to live and live more fully in relationship to themselves and other people and to the whole of creation.

THE ATTRIBUTION of justifying power to idols usurps God's singular office as the author of life; it denies God's place in the history of humanity in this world. At the same time, as just noted, it diminishes humanity by the violence it does to the human vocation. Moreover, it radically violates the true being of whatever is idolized: St. Paul speaks of "bondage to beings that by nature are no gods" (Galatians 4:8).

Idolatry thus defies God and dehumanizes people. But it also patronizes and so vitiates what is idolized. For example, where idolatrous patriotism is practiced, the vocation of the nation so idolized is destroyed. When money becomes an idol, the true utility of money is lost. Every idol, therefore, represents a thing or being existing in a state of profound disorientation.

In other words, idolatry is a manifestation of what, in Christian tradition, is called the Fall. All the tiresome controversies about the historicity of Genesis are quite irrelevant here. In fact they distract our attention from the cogency of the biblical description of humanity and of institutions and of all creatures as existing in a state of estrangement each from all the others, each suffering from a crisis as to identity.

The Fall thus characterizes this very day - or any other day - in the whole of human history - in terms of each person's radical confusion about who he or she is and the similar bewilderment of other beings and things about what they are. The Fall refers to the ubiquity of alienation between and among each being and all the rest.

The truth of this biblical insight does not rest only upon the authority of the Bible, however this may be understood. It is also empirically verified in every moment and in every circumstance in our existence: when illness assaults us or anger is vented, when a ghetto burns or a rice field is defoliated; wherever people practice idolatry and take imposters for God.

Thus the Fall is about the militancy of death's presence within all relationships in the reality of our present existence and in the history of this world. To speak of institutions or persons or other creatures as idols is to regard them in their fallenness - that is, in such grave disorientation that they are possessed by death. Idolatry is a worship of death in this sense and a concrete dramatization of the fallenness of these relationships.

In the "freedom wherewith Christ has made us free," Christians should be busy exposing idolatry in all its forms, restoring things and ideas to their true uses and functions in right relationship to one another and to human purposes. But first we need to recognize the idols which we ourselves, too, may unconsciously be worshipping.

William Stringfellow (1928-85) was a theologian, lawyer, and Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.

Reprinted from Imposters of God: Inquiries Into Favorite Idols, by William Stringfellow. Copyright 1969 National Office of Confraternity of Christian Doctrine. Used with permission.