The Death of Idols

Edit:  When discussing a "theology of the cross," "the cross" is shorthand for the entire story of Jesus, from OT anticipation to birth to crucifixion, resurrection, and glorification.
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I read this post over at Theology Out of Bounds, in which the author makes the case that monotheism (asserting the existence of only one god) is unbiblical.  He argues that the faith of Israel and of the early church was not so much monotheistic as it was monolatrous (monolatry: serving only one god regardless of the existence of others).  It reminded me of a passage from Oswlad Bayer's Theology the Lutheran Way and I thought I'd walk through it a bit.

Bayer is talking about the relation of philosophy (especially natural theology) to biblical theology and the attempt to unify them by what he calls "justifying thinking."  The attempts to do this can go two ways.  First, as in the case of the medieval scholastic theologians, it can start from abstract, general, rational truths derived purely from logic and try to end up with Christianity.  This approach starts with something like the god of Plato (omnibenevolent, omniscient, immutable, omnipotent, etc.) and moves to show how the god of the Bible is this god.  It tries to build a foundation of logic and then add revelation on top of it.  The second approach is more recent and finds proponents in Bonhoeffer and Barth.  This method begins with God's self-revelation and works from there to arrive at abstract, general, rational truths.  To Bayer, both of these approaches suffer from the same flaw: they both sacrifice the concrete revelation of God for the sake of general, abstract truths.

The temptation to engage in justifying thinking is especially strong for a systematic theologian, for this kind of thinking develops the idea of a "unity" of reality.  Justifying thinking is preoccupied with the desire to mediate and reconcile all things. It is driven by the compulsion to demonstrate that every individual and particular thing is based on something general...

As humans, we are driven to justify ourselves, both with our thinking and our actions.  By trying to find something that unifies human endeavors with God's revelation, we look to justify ourselves before God in our thinking.  It's not really any different than the person who acts morally in order to earn their way to heaven.  It's all part of the same motivation: Sin.  Sin causes us to try and show ourselves to be worthy, rather than accepting the entirely free gift of God.  This has to be eliminated, and the only way for that to happen is through the cross.  We have to die to ourselves.  God has to kill the "theologian of glory" (the person whose theology is captivated by the need to reserve some glory for humanity) to leave the "theologian of the cross" (the person whose theologies of glory have been broken and who realizes that all remains is the cross).

Insofar as metaphysics is justifying thinking, which is in league with morality in the sense of justifying action, it is put to death by the passive, donated righteousness of faith. The person who is reborn a Christian and a theologian through the word of the cross and is a "theologian of the cross" says what a thing is: "A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls a thing what it actually is. (Heidelberg Disputation)" Why is that so? People by nature have their own natural idea of God, in which they flatten everything out to make it fit the concept of the One, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. But the theologian of the cross has had that false idea of God shattered through painful disillusionment.

The death of the old self therefore also means that our illusion of a totality of meaning is destroyed, even if it was only hypothetically anticipated. Humans have a deep-seated need to engage in justifying thinking. But the theologian of the cross recognizes in this the "thinking and striving of the human heart," which is radically evil (Gen. 6:5 and 8:21). In its justifying thinking the human heart is a "fabricating" heart that constantly produces and projects images in the mind, idols, on which we hang our hearts, archetypes, prototypes, hopes of happiness and success. Each of us has such images on which we hang our heart, which the heart itself has produced. Therefore, Calvin, luke Luther, says that the human heart is an "idol factory."

And there it is: the conception of God as "the One, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good"-- this is an idol created by the human heart!  The search for a "totality of meaning" which can incorporate both our human reasoning and divine revelation (even if it is based in Christology, as in Barth) is just a symptom of our "fabricating heart!"  When we talk about the "one God" in the sense of monotheism, we gloss over the way he is presented in scripture.  The "God" of philosophy ends up usurping the God of revelation.  Bayer gives an example of this in the translation of God's name:

...this question was raised by the Greek form of the Hebrew name of God in the [Greek translation of the Hebrew Scripture].  God's name in Hebrew has a verbal form that can be taken as a reliable promise that God is freely present with us: I am/will be who I am/will be (Exod. 3:14).  [There is no real tense in Biblical Hebrew, so 'ehyeh can mean both "I am" and "I will be."]  However, in Greek this dynamic is lost and the divine name is petrified into the self-predication of an absolute being: ego eimi ho on [lit. "I am the one who is" or "I am the being"] (where "on" is the word in Greek metaphysics for "being").

In Greek thinking, immortality, the absence of emotion and its accompanying impassibility (apathy), all belong to being, pure and simple, to being itself.  However, where the biblical texts are taken seriously, there will be a grave conflict with Greek metaphysics and ontology.  The event described in Hosea 11:7-11 is ontologically unthinkable.  Ancient metaphysics rejects it as mythology because it cannot abide the thought that there is a "coup," a change in God himself.  Here God is not identical with himself; he is not consistent with himself: "...My heart is changed within me, I am full of remorse. (9) I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal...."

Clearly, there is a strong tension between theology and philosophy that we cannot minimize or even try to harmonize.

When we think in terms of metaphysics, of some abstract, rational reality behind the presented reality, we are in danger of forgetting that God is a "living God" and not an abstract ideal.  God is not some generic "being" or  abstract emotion; he is a personal, living and active God, and he does things we hate.  To shield ourselves from this terrifying God, we create theories to set up idols so that we can have control.  Essentially, we set up gods that are lesser than God so that we can leave some room for our own freedom, our own morality, our own justification.  We can't help it.  We are in bondage to Sin and so we can't let God be God.  The only answer to this is the word of the Cross: the promise of death and new life, freely given by a God who we can't control and who won't submit to our quest for a "totality of meaning."  The theologian of glory must die so that the theologian of the cross can be raised.