This may seem like a strange or irksome question. I understand why. But it is a particularly relevant and pertinent question. My interest here is not to attract interest or to razz anyone. That being said, I am interested in counteracting a commonplace proclivity of ours to accentuate certain particularities of God that attract our attention or idiosyncratic interests that we tend to promote beyond all others. This tendency is a pitfall that we often succumb to without intending to. All the more reason to maintain an honest and humble cognizance of such a 'blindspot'.
It was God, after all, that forbad idolatry in the first place (Ex.20:4). The Decalogue is clear on that point. It is imperative we understand that the first two commandments fittingly preserve God's place as "the Lord your God" (Ex.20:2). He will not tolerate any form of ignoble usurpation. God made it unequivocally obvious that He is a jealous God that will not tolerate any substitute. In conjunction with the giving of the new tablets, imminently after the 'golden calf' debauchal, the Lord our God reasserts His jealousy by way of amplification. Instead of remarking, "I the Lord your God am a jealous God" as He did in Ex.20:5b He vociferously states, "for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God." (Ex. 34:14)
Well then, how is it possible to idolize God? First we must recognize that the antiquarian idol worship of antiquity, particularly germane to the O.T epoch, is not the idolatrous worship of our day strictly speaking. Then, idolatry precipitated carved figures and hand crafted images more or less.This represented more of a reduction of metaphysical speculations to inanimate statues. This was the product of a irreverent religous spirit.
Idolatry takes on different expressions in our day post Renaissance and Enlightenment. It takes on shades of autonomy and the characteristics of self gratification devoid of metaphysical interest for the most part. Present day idolatry is very much an existential practice that revolves around corporeal (physical) cravings in a much different way. This is indicative of a reverent irreligous spirit.
As Christian's who worship the Lord our God, as revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ, we must guard against incorporating existential idolatry into our spheres of worship. Our idolatry rears its ugly head in how we worship the Lord our God. The tendency within Christendom is to aggrandize certain features of Gods being or to gravitate to certain attributes of His nature. This is exhibited when we 'amen' aspects of a sermon that highlights God's mercy while failing to 'amen' sermons that magnify His justice. Or we sing the songs that praise His 'forgiving grace'' while failing to sing the songs celebrating His 'electing grace'.
This idolatry is also seen in how we read His revealed word. When we gravitate to passages that accentuate the responsibility of Christians in sanctification while glossing over or ignoring the role of the triune God in sanctification for instance. The former 'in isolation' promotes moralism, legalism and self-righteousness while the latter 'in isolation' promotes passivity, anit-nomianism and quietism. This is especially true within the dialectic of grace/law and election/free-will.
The Psalmist described idols as the 'work of human hands' in Psalm 115. He goes on to say, "they have mouths , but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell. They have hands, but do not feel; feet but do not walk, and they do not make a sound in their throat..." Now pay attention to the effects of idolatry..."Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them." (Psalm 115:4-8)
This has application for Christian idolatrous worship. For example when we worship Gods justice exclusively and hand craft a God of justice stripped of mercy the tendency is to not 'hear', 'taste', 'see' or 'feel' God's mercy and compassion because all those capacities are governed by blind, deaf, tasteless and apathetic justice. The opposite is equally true. When we worship God's mercy exclusively the tendency is to not 'hear', 'taste', 'see' or 'feel' God's justice because all those capacities are governed by blind, deaf, tasteless and empathetic mercy.
It is idolatrous to tout one or even two attributes of God's being to the exclusion of all other revealed eternal qualities. Such worship confuses God's unity, eternality, majesty,simplicity etc. This practice invariably idolizes God and reduces His attributes to the things worshipped rather than God which actually renders aspects of God to be demi-gods which is more indicative of gnostic-mysticism.
While there are those within Christendom who have mistakenly used the formulae of 'history' as a central motif that dictates their theological postulations and presuppositional templates, (cf. Pannenberg and Cullmann) history is inarguably and unavoidably a testament to divine handiwork and prerogative.
Recorded history, while being resplendent with static historical datum and facticity, gives credence to the reliability of the Christian claims that Christ is the historically incarnate figure that palpably manifests and interprets GOD (John 1:18) in the spatio-temporal sphere of human existence and phenomena. This can be seen beyond the assertions of biblical nomenclature as special or particular revelation.
Natural philosophy itself attests to the incarnational Christ event. Obviously, this would not be technically true, for none of the philosophical systems mentioned below would support such a claim. But it is actually true in that natural philosophy burgeoned and developed along historical lines in a way that necessitated the incarnation, albeit unwittingly. It was an unavoidable inevitability. The historical incarnation was the natural outcome of natural philosophies trajectory. Without being cognizant of the progressive implications of their cumulative postulations, their postulations actually presupposed the Christ event.
Systematized philosophy finds its ostensible origin, as a deliberate discipline anyway, with the Ionians of the pre-Grecian society and cultus. The cosmology that emerged was a naturalistic one that precipitated, by and large, from the arcane and naturalistic cosmogonies that predated it. Inferences drawn from nature predominated the philosophical milieu (see the Homeric and Hesiodic cosmological landscape). As Frederick Copleston S.J. has written, "in the period of philosophy's childhood it was Nature as a whole which first occupied their attention"
It would appear that the primary interest within the naturalistic pursuit was in ascertaining the essence of things. The early Ionians such as Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Anaximenes were pursuant of a singular unifying 'essence'. The Pythagoreans, while personifying a distinctly scientific spirit, gave credence to a "hearth of the Universe" or an identifiable, yet, nebulous "One'. Heraclitus, who was intent on asserting the constant flux of phenomena, maintained that "Reality is One". This unifying pursuit was a pervasive one that all philosophical schools intrepidly sought although through different methodologies..
What is more, the Pythagoreans committed concentrated interest in and indeed popularized the 'mystery-religion' cultus. This praxis assigned a veritable exclusivity to its claims which was bolstered by the metaphysical, immaterial or incorporeal 'essence' of whatever school of thought it espoused. This mystery-religion dialectic was one that had been reverberating throughout the rational thought life of the aforementioned schools and beyond their periods culminating ultimately with the Roman religious milieu.
The naturalistic pursuit of a metaphysical 'essence' coalesced with the "mystery religion" cultus at a nexus of historic proportion; a nexus that interestingly enough is marked by the incarnational Christ event!!
Stoicism was the premier philosophy during that nexus. It represented a fascination with the ethical applications of the foregoing within individual life an accordance with the "Divine Will". This invariably gave rise to the pursuit of union with the divine 'essence' or the metaphysical "One". Stoicism, though, had no answer for this pursuit considering that it demanded a theoretical and practical separation from the corporeal/physical while the real "Divine Will", the only 'One" (which they were seeking) was making His way into the corporeal/physical world. Moreover, the Gnostic empire, which was very much compatible with Stoicism in many respects, was also a force during that epochal landscape.
These later philosophical advances were outcomes of antecedent Neo-Platonistic underpinnings. The latent Neo-Platonic thought that was still reverberating with its pursuit of an 'ecstatic union' with God dovetailed with the Stoic and Gnostic obsession with 'mystery religion
The mytho-historical preoccupation combined with the mystical interest of naturalistic philosophy actually proved to be a catalyst of sorts for the 'super-natural' and historical incarnation. Without realizing it exponents of natural philosophy substantiated the viability of the GOD-MAN...JESUS CHRIST through their own assertions and categories. Though that teeming philosophical landscape was not the cause of the historical self-revelation of the incarnate God-man, Jesus Christ, it certainly was not an accidental phenomena that was without Providential use.
In any account, what the aforementioned philosophical practitioners left to the language of myth Father God established and actualized in the language of historic fact through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The same Christ who Paul locates the 'pleroma' of Gnosticism (Col 1:19) in and who Paul locates the 'secret' of Stoicism in (Phil.4:12). What those systems could not recognize by their own admission through their 'rational dialectic' (irrational dialectic actually) Paul was locating in Christ.
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