when theology becomes idolatry
“Every concept formed by the intellect in an attempt to comprehend and circumscribe the divine nature can succeed only in fashioning an idol, not in making God known.” - Gregory of Nyssa, “Life of Moses” -
Our ideas about God are only meant to direct our attention toward God, who is always greater than our ideas.
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Thank you for this quote. It is a good reminder for me as I can often drift toward seeking to know God in order to define or control him vs. to relate to him as Person and Abba.
Too right Mick. and I have to remind myself of this allllll the time!
…indeed, thank you
…almost every encounter I had yesterday with developing leaders is finding their “theology” being shaken because of the ideas that have been worshiped, rather than relationships, beginning with the Triune, being the core focus. How easy to tell God what to do and when to show up and how to come through so that “then” who, where, what God is. Keep writing and speaking, Alan, as your soulish wisdom is a gift to our world and to the Kingdom.
At first glance, Gregory’s point is well-taken, but…
…is there not a place to love God with our “whole mind” (which, I assume, involves applying our intellect to perceiving the divine nature at some level)?
My guess is that it has a lot to do with motive. Do I want to apprehend the divine nature intellectually in order to love and worship God more wholly, or out of a desire to control it, manipulate it or create an idol that fits me best?
I think it’s man’s natural desire to “see” God which drives us to constantly speculate, thus creating well-intentioned, but still false idols of a God in our own mental image. But God is faithful to reward those who diligently seek him.
I take the message of that quote to mean “Don’t allow that idea of God to harden into dogmatism, and certainly don’t gild it”
Bill…no doubt we must worship God with our mind. But rationality is also one of the biggest causes of hubris. Intellectual pride and arrogance tries to control God by locating him in an idea, or set of ideas. God is not an idea and can never be contained or described by ideology. We must add othopathy (right feelings) and orthopraxy (right actions) to the equation of orthodoxy (right thinking)
Too right GiGi
Believe me, I’m sympathetic to what you are trying to communicate, however, to be fair, God is an idea, just like you are.
I have never met you, but I have an idea of who you are from reading your book and your blog and so on. I would be foolish to say that my weak ideas about you DEFINE you or are the last word, but what’s the alternative? To try to empty my head of all ideas of you until we both “know even as we are known” in glory?
My ideas about you have brought me to the place where I “feel” certain ways about you (mostly good, by the way!). I know I shouldn’t worship those feelings or try to use them to manipulate you into giving me something I want, but is there not something worthy about trying to get the best ideas about you that I can out of respect and affection for you as a brother, a thinker (obviously), and an influence on my life?
Now, I have met God (at least in the puny way any human can claim to have done so). I believe. Having done so, I am required, if I wish to mature in my faith at all, to actually intellectually develop my ideas of God (having met Him only INCREASES that need). I think you would agree that history demonstrates that having poor ideas of Him is far less preferable to having rich ideas of Him though (and I think this is your point) even our richest ideas are about about as all-inclusive as a pill bug meditating on a supercomputer.
To be sure, God is not JUST an idea, and I humbly bow before that reality. But I think it is a mistake to pit the other “orthos” against loving God with our thinking. I must, as a human being, use my intellect to actually think about (develop ideas about?) God or else what does loving Him with my mind mean?
Hope this makes some kind of sense, and thank for letting me exercise my head and heart in responding to what you kicked off in your post.
This may be semantics, but I think it’s important to note that a revelation of God is not dependent on our ability to mentally unwrap him. That is the basis of dogmatism, because in order to ascend higher to reach for more knowledge, we have to create a base that we consider to be “fact”. And there have been many “facts” over the course of church history that have been well-intentioned, well-researched, and still false.
Revelation is instead the opening of our minds and hearts to what God is choosing to “reveal” of himself in a particular moment.
This is not inconsistent with loving God with our minds. According to 1 Corinthians 13
, the definition of love includes (among other things) patience, trust, hope, and perseverance.
Personally, I think we’ve traditionally taken the passage about “heart, soul, mind and strength” wrong. It is not that at one moment we are choosing to worship God with our minds and another with our strength or heart.
I think it’s more like how our physical body works in that any action we do requires the engagement of our brains, heart and muscles. We don’t have to think “brain - activate my nerves/muscles”, “heart - pump enough blood to fuel my muscles”, “muscles respond to the brain”. We are new creatures in Christ, we have a new heart, and our minds are being renewed day by day. Any action we now take in God’s name instinctively engages our heart, soul, mind and strength.
Bill,
If I may, what is “mind”? We understand, at least I’m assuming “we” to be 21st century folk, the mind to be what is stuck between our ears. Another obvious statement, but 1st century folks wouldn’t have necessarily understood that to be the case. So, what does it mean to love God with all of your mind if mind is more than what we perceive it to be?
Peace.
Dan
Mmmm… I think I might agree attempts to “circumscribe” God end in idolatory… but attempts to comprehend the divine nature (and explain it) have been attempted by Christians over the centuries… in the case of the apologists, with evangelism and defence of Christianity in mind.
There IS a danger in hubris, and as a theology student myself, I know it is all too easy to focus one’s attention on understanding theology rather than knowing and obeying the Lord.
Augustine, one of the most influential thinkers of Christian history, adds the cautionary note to those who exercise their minds in study about God:
On Christian doctrine: Book II, Chapter 6, 8.10. After these two steps of fear and piety, we come to the third step, knowledge, of which I have now undertaken to treat. For in this every earnest student of the Holy Scriptures exercises himself, to find nothing else in them but that God is to be loved for His own sake, and our neighbor for God’s sake; and that God is to be loved with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the mind, and one’s neighbor as one’s self— that is, in such a way that all our love for our neighbor, like all our love for ourselves, should have reference to God.
GiGi and company:
It is exactly about semantics, but that’s okay (first definiton of the word “semantics” from Merriam Webster online is “the study of meanings”). And, as Dan Lowe points out, it would be good for us to be clear about what we mean by the word “mind” (and what was meant by the word “back then”).
So here’s what I mean: the mind is something like the processing center that works with both physical and spiritual realities — the visible and invisible. The mind can percieve things that are mystery and conceptual, i.e.: the “super” (beyond) natural. But it can also manage data from the five senses, etc.
A sound mind, in my opinion, bridges the invisible, conceptual, “feeling” world to the rational, objective, observably physical world and gets them “talking to each other” between our ears (to borrow Dan’s phrase).
That’s why I think Scripture recognizes that the natural world reveals things about God and even praises Him, but the Bible also asserts that He is super-natural, beyond nature (including what the mind can conceive and quantify) and not bound or defined by it. I think it’s a “both-and” not “either-or” deal.
I’m glad Janet is a student of theology in the apparently formal sense. I am glad she is reading Augustine and the gang and really thinking deeply about God. Alan warns that rationality is one of the biggest causes of hubris — true enough. But rationality is also one of the biggest causes of sanity — especially concerning faith.
I guess I want it all. I want a solid, chunky “rational” center to my faith that is orthodox and able to be communicated with clarity. And, I want an “edge” to my faith that presses me into the “wild places” of God and the mysteries of the Spirit and the Kingdom. I just think it gets a little freaky when the edge becomes the center and the center becomes the edge.
Thanks again, everyone, for sharing your thoughts
did someone of you read “The Fidelity of Betrayal” or “How (not) to Speak of god” by Peter Rollins?
He is grappling with some of the issues raised above and though I can’t say I understood correctly what Rollins did want to say I have been able to understand that ms understanding of god is in constant need of questioning. Not by means of destroying my understanding, But rather of recognizing the limits of both what I need to hold dear and what I have to forsake in order to not build an Idol.
Does that make sense?
Greetings from germany by the way, Alan!
Björn
I love I Corinthians 8
: Konowledge puffs up, but love builds up. If any one loves God, this one is known by God.
First of all, Bjoern: over at my blog, Christians in Context, Norm Jeune did a chapter by chapter review of The Fidelity of Betrayal, and Rollins responded to each post. Norm is quite even-handed and fair (Rollins repeatedly says so himself), but also has some pretty strong stuff to say. Give it a look.
Regarding the discussion at hand, I think the whole thing is a little funny. First of all, if I’ve got my church fathers right, wasn’t Gregory of Nyssa one of the 3 major Cappadocian fathers who made Trinitarianism synonymous with orthodox? So whatever he has to say about theology and knowledge, it certainly cannot be that the whole thing is worthless.
Further, note that Wes mentioned that God is Triune, that GiGi appealed to a particular interpretation of 1 Cor. 13
and a particular definition of the quite important and disputed concept of “revelation,” and that everyone here is coming to the table (or the blog, as it were) with particular ideas about the nature of God vis-a-vis the nature of reason. Should we relate to God as Father and Abba? And if so, why? And what do we even mean by that?
Point is, the question for Christians is not whether or not we will do theology, but whether or not we will do intelligent (and worshipful, humble, drenched-in-love-for-others-and-God) theology.
We’re all doing theology, and if you can find me a Christian theologian that anyone actually reads who will come out and say that s/he has God completely figured out, then I’ll be the first to detract from that person. But dare I say that many of us are so focusing on God’s incomprehensibility that in terms of His knowability, we’re punting on first down, so to speak.
Hi
I don’t know why, but I luv this particular topic.
I am a very rational person. But this whole God-thing seems totally alien to me. I cannot think the way some people talk about God like He is their buddy or pall or somethin. Like: ‘Then God told me this and God told me that…”
I think I was a christian a long time a go and then lost it somehow. It seems everyone talking about God is just using their one framework, and each theological framework has it’s own vocabulary. The one group is using spirit, the others are talking a bout the kingdom, while some is using “missional” alot.
The more I got to work among christians, the less I like the church. At one stage my life was really just floating, (and I don’t know if that has changed,) but then I got involved in this church culture. I’m so glad I’m out of it. Believing in God just to jump into heaven realy feels like selling cookies to small children and tell them it is headache pills. Now that I stopped doing the chritian stuff, it doesn’t feel any different inside me like when I went to the cell group meetings. The numb feeling is still there.
How do I know there is something or someone out there? How do I know He cares/is a personal Being? How do I worship something if I don’t know how? What do I do? Do I get on my knees and say ‘n few nice thingies, or do I sing or is God a thought in my head? How would anybody know if it is me creating something, or talking to something that I fabricated, or Someone out there?
What will happen to me if I cannot connect with it? Would I die and burn in hell, or would I still be able to see my budhist buddies?
You guys seem wise. Maybe someone can help me here.
I posted on this last year - it’s a really interesting line of thought: http://www.futurechurch.co.za/item/clarity-vs-mystery-how-theology-can-become-idolatry/
…and developed more thoughts here: http://www.futurechurch.co.za/item/when-theology-what-we-say-about-g-d-becomes-idolatry-an-object-more-important-than-g-d - sorry, too long a comment to post here!