American Idols January 15, 2008
Posted by Zack in Connecticut , trackbackI haven’t been on the road full time visiting actual Revolutionary Christian communities for the past several weeks. It seems other considerations, such as earning a paycheck and having a place to live, have caught up with me a little bit.
However, I’m hoping to visit a different community for a week or so every 6 or 7 weeks, and do more in-depth writing about each one—what the community is up to, what I learn about the Bible and the Church from them, and stories of the people I meet along the way. Who knows…maybe it could become a Revolution in Jesusland book. Please suggest communities for me to include in this project! Post a comment or email me at info@revolutioninjesusland.com.
Meanwhile, I’ll keep bringing you the Revolution, which exposes itself intimately online on tens of thousands of blogs, church sites and sermon podcasts.
Today, check out Pastor Eric Stillman’s recent three blog posts on Idolatry. (Part I, Part II, Part III.) This is a major theme I’ve heard preached in dozens of churches. I always thought that Idolatry just applied to the worship of statues, etc…. But the Revolutionaries preach about an expanded meaning of Idolatry—and I’ve been surprised, in my own gradual reading of the Bible, that this is not a stretch at all, but is very blatantly there in both Old and New Testaments.
The expanded Idolatry means putting anything ahead of God in your life. Material possessions, prestige, sex, work, a business, a hobby…those are all frequent idols for American Christians these days. But what does it mean to put God ahead of all those things (none of which Christians are against)? It means you do what God wants. And you only enjoy those kinds of rewards when God intends you to enjoy them in the course of doing what he wants. But what does God want? That’s a BIG question, and it’s one that every community answers in the course of studying the Bible and deciding how to live it out.
Fortunately for the world, the Revolutionaries believe God wants Christians to serve the poor & oppressed, fix broken systems and other beautiful things.
Eric Stillman takes on that topic in a post that (not accidentally, I’m sure) immediately preceded the Idolatry posts. Stillman’s church is embarking on a two-year project to read and study the Bible cover to cover. As he explains in his post, they’ll be stopping every six weeks to devote church gatherings to testimonies about members’ struggles to live out the Bible. If you’ve always been curious how evangelicals can believe the Bible is true, and not resort to stoning adulterers, Eric’s post (called “Living out the Bible (except the part about stoning people…)“) can shed some light on that.
Comments»
I love your blog. I’ve long been involved in the evangelical church- from birth really. It’s great to see a perspective from the “outside”.
Keep it up.
I’d recommend visiting Vanderbilt Divinity School. It has a long history of progressive Christian action and scholarship.
Reba Place Fellowship, in Evanston, IL. They’re an intentional Christian community that just celebrated their 50th anniversary. Check them out at http://rebaplacefellowship.org/
Hi Zack -
I see enormous harm to our society from the idolatries that you mention. And yet here is another to consider.
I might ask whether one of the primary idols in America is the Bible itself, given the number of inerrantists among us. In my mind, idolatry traditionally takes something made by human hands, something intended to represent or help reveal divine realities, and then giving that human-made object (and its servants) the reverence due only to the Divine: attributions of perfection and completeness, unquestionable authority, devotion to the object itself . . . Since the advent of the printing press, and as literacy and access have spread around the globe, what better golden calf than an ancient book? Anglican bishop John Shelby Spong has used the word “bibliolatry” in his book, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love.
Among the Evangelical community in which I was raised, most members don’t even realize that in attributing perfection to the Bible, they are actually attributing perfection to the decision-making of the Council of Hippo Regis, a Catholic committee which made thoughtful judgements about which of the available Christian writings were more sacred than others. Nor are they aware that the decisions of this council were debated for centuries both among Catholic scholars and among the leaders of the Protestant Reformation.
We humans are oh-so prone to sanctifying our own fragmented, distorted, and oh-so human glimpses of what is real and good. To sanctifyprosperity or imperialism we put God’s name on our fears and desires. But in a more complex way I suspect we do the same by putting God’s name on the insights of our spiritual ancestors who saw, as we all must “through a glass darkly.”
Peace.