One advantage of having only 9 credits as a senior in college is being able to choose some classes that I want to take. I chose Interpersonal Communication and Contemporary Philosophy. Where IPC is a great class and I have learned a lot already, Contemporary Philosophy has officially blown my mind.
Today we discussed conceptual idolitry which is essentially puting a concept of God in the place of God. This didn't sound all that bad until I realized the implications were pointed at everything I know (or knew). Is my understanding of God an idol that seperates me from the true God? When I pray, do I pray to the God that I have been taught to know...that I have developed through out the years? How can I worship God if the god I worship looks more like my creation of god than God. What words can I say to worship him? The language I use to describe God is inadequate...when what I seek to describe is unfathomable can words do any thing? Maybe silence is more appropriate than making God fit into language (much less my small knowledge of it). Its like trying to use words to describe the Holocaust. You can't. Anything word you could think of would not do it justice. There are none.
So we looked elsewhere to find some hope...and find that even C.S. Lewis this amazing Christian author and evangelist wrote that everything he "knew" of God was a house of cards and when it came down to it (the death of his wife) the house blew over. However, instead of constructing new concepts of God I could try to test and break down the skewed ones. Yet...in the process I create more conceptual idols of God..and not really God. This probably doesn't make as much sense as it does to me, this is partly because I suck at explaining things, and partly because this stuff is soo deep and it is so world shattering.
Anyways, back to the confusion. At this point in the class we took a break and let the unsettling stuff be unsettled. It felt shitty but before I knew it we were back to it. Having never spoken in Contemporary Philo yet this year, I was very hesitant to ask the huge question weighing me down: What then can we do? How can we know God with out making an idol out of the image we create? yet...my stuper must have been pretty obvious because he called on me. I asked and he responded.... that the best we have is the Experience of Liberation from the conceptual gods we create. The best we can know God is the experience of getting rid of our false gods. This journey or movement of liberation is the part where we get the best sense (or whatever word you want to use) of God (yet I hesitate to say that for fear of starting over at the beginning ((again)) ).
Ok, I have probably made no sense to anyone but myself here. So let me try it one more time.
The whole problem here is that we think we know God....We think we have him all figured out and we can explain all these things about him....but when we think like this.....we have made this image of God an Idol which seperates us from the true God.
3 comments:
Hey Chad, good post. I haven't taken Contemporary Philosophy, so I don't know if I have the tools to think about this in the right way, but I have a couple of comments anyway. I'll probably sound like a bumbling idiot, but oh well.
First, I don't think that it's necessary to know God fully in order to sincerely worship him. In other words, just because our concept of God may be incomplete, I don't think that necessarily implies that we're worshiping a different God. We know that no one can fully know God in this life (God does not show his face to Moses, because "no one can see [His] face and live" (Ex. 33:20)). So, even though no one can fully experience God's glory and live, we still have people in the Bible who worship God (in an unidolotrous way); for one example (of many), David worships God in his psalms.
However, I do think that we have to be extremely careful that we don't let our concept of God get in the way of our understanding of the true God. It's for this reason that we need to come to the Scriptures with the utmost humility, making sure that we don't superimpose our concept of God on the God that is revealed to us there. I think R.C. Sproll was the one who said something along these lines: "If you come across something in the Bible that you don't quite agree with, there are two options: either God has to change or you have to change." I probably slaughtered that quotation, but I think the idea is the same.
Another thought. Though I think I know Lori pretty well, chances are there are things I don't know about her. Does that mean that I don't love her? No. I can love her without knowing every single detail of who she is. It's not like I'm loving my concept of her - when I find something else out about her, I love her the same (if not more). Now, if I found out that my concept of her was completely mistaken; if she was an alien from another planet trying to get me to trust her so that she could take me away to her fellow aliens and use my body to fuel their spaceships; then I would say that it was my concept of Lori that I loved. Perhaps it's the same thing with God. Though our concept of God is incomplete, we know enough about him through the Bible to know that he is completely worthy of our praise and worship (inadequate as they may be). When we do come to a greater realization of who he is, and when our concept of Him is enlarged, we are even more awestruck by his greatness and his absolute worthiness of our praise, and our love for him grows greater still. However, if our concept of God is way off (e.g. if we reject the notion that Jesus was God), then I think it becomes idolotrous. But if the God we worship is the God of the Bible, I think that we are worshiping unidolotrously.
About the language thing... Even though language is inadequate, I don't think that we should eliminate it from our worship. David used it in his psalms, from which we can infer that it is an appropriate way to worship. As you said, words don't do it justice; but they help us praise God in the best way that we know how, even though that praise is highly inadequate.
Anyway, thanks a lot for the post. It's been on my mind all day. Like I said, I might sound like an idiot; if anyone can see that I'm full of crap in something (or everything) that I've said, feel free to let me know...
Kyle,
Thanks for the post. What you wrote resonates with what I have been thinking since I posted it.
Also. Have you ever read - A Grief Observed - by C.S. Lewis ? He talks about how the more time that passes from when he saw his wife last the more distant she became to him. "like snowflakes-like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night-- flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end" (i'll bring it when I come)
I see similarities of this to the Pharasees in Jesus day. They built up all these traditions and held them higher than God himself, then... Jesus came.... and destructed many of the traditions they held, and their false concepts of God. He said (essentially) "if you do not know me, you do not know my father who sent me".
I the main thing I am getting at is that we cannot be content in thinking we have God pin-pointed in scripture... because he is still revealing himself to us today. If we do not let him continue to reveal himself to are we still pushing him away (in some sense) even though we really do want to worship him?
Honestly, I don't think He is going to hold it against us if we are truly humble when we worship Him, but its something to consider.
Chad, I'm looking forward to your visit this weekend. I've never heard of A Grief Observed...sounds interesting.
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