Idols Old & New
S. M. Hutchens on the Second Commandment
When our Lord took Peter, James, and John, to a high mountain, there to be transfigured before them, appearing with Moses and Elijah in the shining garments of heaven, Peter, ever the impulsive disciple, suggested that three shelters be built in their honor. And so Peter, who appears so often in the Gospels as a kind of generic man who doesn’t understand the things of God, demonstrates in his action a fundamental and natural human trait: the desire to house the divine, to hold and domesticate, as it were, his god by at once honoring him and establishing him within something of his own making.
On the mount of transfiguration, Peter’s offer was refused by the voice of God, with the instruction that rather his Son should be heard and obeyed. It was the same command, now elaborated on with regard to the housing of the divine Son, that had been given on Mount Sinai years earlier:
You shall not make for yourselves graven images, of things in heaven, or of things in the earth beneath, or of things in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them, nor serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.
It is not that God does not dwell with his people, or inhabit things that are made by man, for he occupied a temple, and was later incarnated in the womb of a human mother. Rather it is that the visitations of God are ordained by God himself, and are our own only in the cooperation of obedience—of which Peter, in his fit of pious enthusiasm (always to be mistrusted!) needed a sober reminder. Idolatry is not simply making our own gods, but principally in the presumptuous seizure of the prerogatives of God himself. We can only make a god by becoming a god ourselves, a god not as we were intended to be, but a monstrosity—which self-made gods always turn out to be. Very well, we say, and think of things that don’t tempt us. Kipling wrote, “The ‘eathen in ‘is darkness bows down to wood and stone.” But we don’t. We may be living in a post-Christian world, but even the post-Christians, with their crystals, mantras, and spirit guides, are as post-pagan as we are in this regard. The modern world by itself removes us two or three steps from the idols of wood and stone, and so we may safely regard such commands as useful signposts on the road to a higher conception of God to which all of us in this part of the world have attained—right?
The more serious-minded Christian will feel uncomfortable disposing of the commandment in this way, will assume that idols are a problem with him, and will start looking for them, frequently turning up graven images everywhere. Calvin said that the human heart was a veritable factory of idols. We sense this is true and will find them in everything that attracts our devotion, especially everything that we are tempted to love inordinately—our cars, our homes, our career ambitions, even our wives and children. All these we admit to being good in themselves, but are disquieted because we perceive them as drawing us from what we suspect is closer to the heart of God. At this point the sermon usually ends with an admonition to do better, we entertain a fleeting desire to become a monk or something, but settle for the resolution to spend less time polishing the car and more time in prayer. All this is good, but it does not strike the center, for it does not take proper account of either our real problem with idolatry nor the seriousness of the heathen, whose idol is not really analogous to ours. The heathen’s idol may not be something he loves at all, but it is precisely what the commandment describes it as being: a man-made thing recognized as sacred, and that he bows to and serves. It is to him the earthly portal to the numinous, to the unseen world he knows to be larger and stronger than the visible one, to the forces he cannot see or manage that see him and control his life—his birth, his death, his harvests, his wars, all that he is.
It is clear to the earnest idolator that he is not his own man and that he has no power in the world but that given by something greater than himself. In this sense his understanding is true, and he may be drawing near to the one true God. He has made the idol not necessarily because he likes it—beauty is less important than appropriateness of form—but in piety, and godly fear that the powers he serves may be held there and propitiated, that they may incarnate themselves at this meeting place he has made for them, and so show him their grace and favor. The idol represents a bargain with the spirit world, that at this place I will give it honor, and in exchange have a petitioner’s rights. Modern man is not as pious as his primitive counterpart. He has no idol but himself. This was the discovery of the Enlightenment, that, as Alexander Pope said, the proper study of mankind is man. So man has spent the last 500 or so years examining himself most intensely, and with increasing respect. It is himself that he honors, seeks to satisfy and propitiate. If there is any numinous world to approach, it is not outside himself, but within, self-defined, and it is there he seeks the solace of the universe as mediated through his own heart and mind. The outside world, which once contained the gods, is now simply a thing, a large field of objects in which he is the ultimate force.
What cannot be controlled now, will be someday, for with science and technology all things are possible—at least, who can say they are not? God or the gods must fit themselves into the cracks between our expanding knowledge and control, for it is clear that wherever our knowledge and control has extended, no God has been found. This is the situation with the old agnostic scientism. In the week I write this, Carl Sagan died. He was a notable scientist who believed in the universe, but not in God. When he looked at the starry heavens, what he saw looking back at him was not their Maker, but the mind and eye of Carl Sagan. The mind and eye of Carl Sagan, he believed, were made by the universe. The question of how such things could arise apart from the actions of a Maker greater than the universe made no sense to him. The universe is all there is, and the universe devolves upon the man who stood before it not as Maker, but Interpreter. Nor did he understand that the power of interpreting is the same as the power of making, and that in taking upon himself this power, he was making himself God. A small but effective god, whose worship consisted in hearing and obeying the desires of his own heart.
In a sense, however, Dr. Sagan was a representative of an old school that will lose its grip on the world as its members, bored with a self-defined and self-controlled existence, begin to summon wild spirits that don’t answer to their science. It is not the primitives, but the avant-garde, who are beginning to rediscover the gods—the extraterrestrials, the spirit guides, the wise, unembodied voices, the reincarnations of ancient beings who bear ancient wisdom. The gods (whom the Christians call demons) are beginning to show themselves, to take their places in the natural world, in the universe in which there still isn’t a God—just invisible beings that we didn’t know about before. They are not yet frightening, nor do they show themselves yet as particularly powerful. Just knowledgeable and anxious to help. We are still in control of our own destinies, and the gods are here to aid us, not to cast us back into the worship of benighted pagans, but to supplement our knowledge with theirs to bring in a new age where the material power of science and technology is combined with truly spiritual knowledge and control. What could be less relevant to the new age than the rumblings of the grouchy, old, Hebrew sky-Father that we should not make idols and worship them? We just wish to fulfill our destinies as human beings.
What has happened to us here in the West, not just the scientists and new age mystics, but the common man as well, is that we have apostacized. It is not as though we were pagans who were, by the grace of God, more like ignorant children than adults confirmed in rebellion. We are in a different category—of those who have made the Faustian bargain, who have been offered chaste knowledge of God and turned away from him, of the sort who are warned in Scripture that from that turning away there shall be no return. The greatest sign of this is that the idol we have turned to, the idol of the Self, is the most like the one true God, for it is made in his image. The idolized self is the most plausible and deceptive of all idols.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more on the ten commandments from the online archives
31.5—September/October 2018
The Secular State Without the Decalogue by James M. Kushiner
more from the online archives
31.1—January/February 2018
on Taking the Measure of the Deserving & the Undeserving Poor by Martin Bordelon
23.5—September/October 2010
The Loss of a Christian Understanding of Virginity Is Pure Tragedy by Eleanor Bourg Donlon
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
