The Fall and Rise of Idolatry

Philosophers’ Noisy Talk

In the fourth century AD, Athanasius (one of the great early church fathers) described the impact upon idolatry from the time of Christ’s coming down to his day (circa 325AD).  He argues that the coming of Christ amongst men drove out superstition and idolatry in the Roman Empire and the Mediterranean nations.

Idolatry amongst the Gentiles was real, pervasive, and local.  Every town had its shrines and deities.  Athanasius witnessed the decline and decrepitude of the established religion of idolatry.  But what caused it?

When did people begin to abandon the worship of idols, unless it were since the very Word of God came among men?  When have oracles ceased and become void of meaning, among the Greeks and everywhere, except since the Saviour had revealed Himself on earth?

When did those whom the poets call gods and heroes begin to be adjudged as mere mortals, except when the Lord took the spoils of death and preserved incorruptible the body He had taken, raising it from among the dead?  Or when did the deceitfulness and madness of daemons fall under contempt, save when the Word, the Power of God, the Master of all these as well, condescended on account of the weakness of mankind and appeared on earth?

When did the practice and theory of magic begin to be spurned under foot, if not at the manifestation of the Divine Word to men?  In a word, when did the wisdom of the Greeks become foolish, save when the true Wisdom of God revealed Himself on earth?  In old times the whole world and every place in it was led astray by the worship of idols, and men thought the idols were the only gods that were.  But now, all over the world men are forsaking the fear of idols and taking refuge with Christ; and by worshipping Him as God they come through Him to know the Father also, Whom formerly they did not know.

The objects of worship formerly were varied and countless; each place had its own idol and the so-called god of one place could not pass over to another in order to persuade the people there to worship him, but was barely reverenced even by his own.  Indeed no! Nobody worshipped his neighbour’s god, but every man had his own idol and thought that it was lord of all.  But now Christ alone is worshipped, as One and the Same among all peoples everywhere; and what the feebleness of idols could not do, namely convince even those dwelling close at hand, He has effected.  He has persuaded not only those close at hand, but literally the entire world to worship one and the same Lord and through Him the Father.

Again, in former times every place was full of the fraud of the oracles, and the utterances of those at Delphi and Dordona and in Boeotia and Lycia and Libya and Egypt and those of the Kabiri and the Pythoness were considered marvellous by the minds of men.  But now, since Christ has been proclaimed everywhere, their madness too has ceased, and there is no one left among them to give oracles at all. . . .

And what is one to say about the magic that they think so marvellous?  Before the sojourn of the Word, it was strong and active among Egyptians and Chaldeans and Indians and filled all who saw it with terror and astonishment.  But by the coming of the Truth and the manifestation of the Word it too has been confuted and entirely destroyed.

As to Greek wisdom, however, and the philosophers’ noisy talk, I really think no one requires argument from us, for the amazing fact is patent to all that, for all that they have written so much, the Greeks failed to convince even a few from their own neighbourhood in regard to immortality and the virtuous ordering of life.  Christ alone, using common speech and through he agency of men not clever with their tongues, has convinced whole assemblies of people all the world over to despise death, and to take heed to the thing that do not die, to look past the things of time and gaze on things eternal, to think nothing of earthly glory and to aspire only to immortality.  [Athanasius, On the Incarnation.  Translated and edited by Sister Penelope Lawson.  (New York: Macmillan Publishing House, 1946.), p.75ff.] 

Idolatry still exists in places around the world.  But when the Christian Gospel of Christ takes hold, idolatry is the first and abiding casualty.  The reverse is also true: if a civilisation rebels against the gentle yoke of Christ, it is not long before superstition and various idols make a comeback.  Consider how many “scientists” have become reverently superstitious about Evolution, seeing its hand, influence, control, and explanatory power everywhere.  Consider how our Most High Priests of scientism gravely propound an infinite number of parallel universes to warrant the complexity of the one in which we live.  For Stochasticity to have a chance of producing such an exquisitely balanced and fine tuned universe, there must needs be an infinite number of other universes where the emergence of life is impossible or has failed.  These nonsenses and contradictions are uttered most gravely and reverently by the most superstitious of all.

The Delphic oracle–the alleged voice of Apollo himself–was a charlatan’s purse (and at root everyone knew it).  It survived for so long because of the wilful credulity of those who needed such things to make some kind of superstitious sense of the world. The coming of the Gospel eradicated that need.  But deny or ignore the Gospel and gross ignorance soon makes a return.

The distance between our modern superstitious scientists and the devotees of Delphi is less than a cigarette paper. 

Means of Grace

Breaking Down Paganism

Tertullian on church charitable capacities at the beginning of the Third Century, AD.

“There is no buying or selling of any sort of things of God.  Though we have our treasure chest, it is not made up of purchase money, as of a religion that has its price.  On the month day, if he likes, each puts in a small donation; but only if it be his pleasure, and only if he is able; for there is no compulsion; all is voluntary.  These gifts are, as it were, piety’s deposit fund.  For they are not taken thence and spent on feasts, and drinking bouts, and eating houses [as was the case in pagan religious meetings and temples], but to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls of destitute means and parents, and of old persons confined now to the house; such, too, as have suffered shipwreck; and if there happen to be any in the mines, or banished to the islands, or shut up in prisons for nothing but their fidelity to the cause of God’s Church, they become the nurslings of their confession.”  [Tertullian, Apology, Chapter 39.  Cited in Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: Harper One, 2011), p. 113.]

True Witness

A Clear, Pure Sound

Daily we are confronted with man’s inhumanity to man–whether it be the image of a baby flushed alive down the toilet in China, or killing late term aborted babies who survived the horror of the “doctor’s” ministrations, or the sectarian violence amongst Muslims in the Middle East, or a thousand other manifestations large and small.  It was the same in the Roman Empire. 

Against this tide of ethical degradation stood the Christian Church.  In the middle of the third century yet another plague struck, decimating cities.  The way Roman society treated the sufferers was deplorable, but expected.  Bishop Dionysius of Alexandria, writing around 250AD, described how the populace responded to the plague in that city:

At the first onset of the disease, they (pagans) pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treated unburied corpses as dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease; but do what they might, they found it difficult to escape. [Cited in Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest Religion (New York: Harper One, 2011), p. 115.]

No mercy.  No compassion. No charity.  That’s what happens where fear combines with widespread narcissism.  But why?  A significant contributor was the general understanding that the gods cared not at all about the human condition; that if they were to be any help at all they had to be bribed, and even then their response was often mercurial or dilatory. 

How did Christians respond?  Dionysius wrote a pastoral letter praising those who had nursed the sick, especially those who had sacrificially laid down their lives in doing so:

Most of our brothers showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another.  Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. 

Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead. . . . The best of our brothers lost their lives in this manner, a number of presbyters, deacons and laymen winning high commendation so that in death in this form, the result of great piety and strong faith, seems in every way the equal of martyrdom. (Ibid. p. 117)

Many Christians and churches over the years have wondered how the early Church grew from a handful of believers to where persecution ceased and Christianity became officially recognised by the first Christian emperor in 314. The question becomes more perplexing when we recall that there is very little evidence of evangelistic campaigns or systematic missionary efforts in the post-apostolic period.

One powerful influence must have been the testimony of Christians and believers living for Christ and extending love and mercy to their neighbours when disasters hit.  You don’t know how the bell will sound until it is struck. We can learn a great deal from our ancient fathers.    
 

Mysterious Ways

The Church is Always Maturing

Divine providence is a mysterious, yet wonderful business.  As the hymn writer put it, God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.  One of the great benefits of a close scrutiny of the history of the church is, in retrospect, to see God’s hand at work.

In the midst of the tumult or the vicissitudes it is usually very hard to discern what is going on.  Three hundred years later its possible to discern what the Lord was building.

Letter to Hadrian

The Christians

. . . . The Christians, O King, have found the truth by going and seeking for it. . . . They do not do to others what they would not have done to themselves.  They comfort those who wrong them and make friends of them: they labour to do good to their enemies. . . . He that has gives freely to him who has not.  If they see a stranger, they bring him under their roof and rejoice over him as if over their own brother: they call themselves brethren, not after the flesh but after the Spirit and in God . . . .

Aristides, Apology, 15 (to the Emperor Hadrian, c130AD)

Ancient Wisdom

Breaking and Re-Making the World

One of the conundrums surrounding the early Church is how the Gospel spread sufficiently powerfully to where Constantine established Christianity as the Empires official religion in the early 4th century.  Recall how Christianity was a persecuted religion, a radical minority belief during the second century.  Experts estimate that not more than two percent of the population were Christians by the end of the second century.

From the time of the apostles onwards until Constantine there are few records of any missionary activity, or celebrated missionaries.  Yet the Gospel spread and gradually began to make significant progress to where the Roman Empire became officially Christianised.  How did this come about?

A Revolution By Other Means

Violent, sudden and calamitous revolutions are the ones that accomplish the least.  While they may succeed at radically reordering societies, the usually cannot transform cultures.  They may excel at destroying the past, but they are generally impotent to create a future.  The revolutions that genuinely alter human reality at the deepest levels–the only real revolutions, that is to say–are those that first convert minds and wills, that reshape the imagination and reorient desire, that overthrow the tyrannies within the soul.

Christianity, in its first three centuries, was a revolution of the latter sort: gradual, subtle, exceedingly small and somewhat inchoate at first, slowly introducing its vision of divine, cosmic, and human reality into the culture around it, often by deeds rather than words, and simply enduring from one century to the next. 
[David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: the Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.183.]

The Christian Revolution

Turning the World Upside Down

When all is said and done, the pagan critics of the early church were right to see the new faith as an essentially subversive movement.  In fact, they may have been somewhat more perspicacious in this regard than the Christians themselves.  Christianity may never have been a revolution in a political sense: it was no a convulsive, ciolent, or intentionally provocative faction that had some “other vision” of political power to recommend; but neither, for that reason, was the change it brought about something merely local, transient, and finite. 

The Christian vision of reality was nothing less–to use the words of Nietzsche–a “transvaluation of all values,” a complete revision on the moral and conceptual categories by which human beings were to understand themselves and one another and their places within the world.  It was–again to us Nietzsche’s words, but without his sneer–a “slave revolt “from above,” if such a thing could be imagined; fir it had been accomplished by a savior who had, as Paul said in his Epistle to the Philippians, willingly exchanged the “form of God” for the “form of a slave,” and had thereby overthrown the powers that reigned on high. 
[David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: the Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 171.]

Cosmic Warfare, Part II

The Exhilaration and the Scandal

The early Christians understood they were involved in a cosmic battle between the forces of evil–forces which were personal, albeit finite, yet much more powerful than they–and the newly enthroned King of all kings, the Lord Jesus Christ.  They understood that when they were converted to Christ out of paganism both they and their households were delivered from captivity to Satan to a captivity to Christ.  But captivity to Christ meant untrammelled goodness and blessing; it meant abundant, eternal life. 

Modern Christians, deeply influenced by the prevailing secular materialism of the West, tend to gloss over expressions in Scripture which teach just such a cosmology of redemption.  David Bentley Hart summarises the biblical perspective of the cosmological battle:

We today are probably somewhat prone to forget that, though the early Christians did indeed regard the gods of the pagan order as false gods, they did not necessarily understand this to mean simply that these gods were unreal; they understood it to mean that the gods were deceivers.  Behind the pieties of the pagan world, Christians believed, lurked forces of great cruelty and guile: demons, malign spirits, occult agencies masquerading as divinities, exploiting the human yearning for God, and working to thwart the designs of God, in order to bind humanity in slavery to darkness, ignorance, and death.

(T)o renounce one’s bonds to these beings was an act of cosmic rebellion, a declaration that one had been emancipated from (in the language of John’s Gospel) “the prince of this world” or (in the somewhat more disturbing language of II Corinthians) “the god of this world.”  In its fallen state, the cosmos lies under the reign of evil (I John 5:19), but Christ came to save the world, to lead “captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8), and to overthrow the empire of those “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers” (Colossians 1:16, I Corinthians 2:8, Ephesians 1:21, 3:10) and “rulers on high” (Ephesians 6:12) that have imprisoned creation in corruption and evil. [David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009),  p.113f.]

In our materialist culture such biblical expressions tend to be viewed as metaphorical or hyperbolic, or even superstitious.  Even faithful Christians these days tend to parse them into referring to personal struggles against sin.  It is uncomfortable to believe in such a biblical cosmos in a time of vaunted scientism.  The more platonically influenced amongst us would artfully see reference to politics, the state, or the realms of coercion.  All the while we reveal thereby how subtlely we have drunk at the wells of Unbelief and how we have been conformed to the mould of our secular materialist world. 

When we succumb to such temptations, however, we diminish the power of Christ’s redemption itself–something which Paul prayed ought not happen to the Ephesian Christians (and, therefore, to us who are their descendants) in Ephesians 1: 17-23.  We also miss the exhilaration of the divine call to battle. 

Again, given the perspective of our age, we can scarcely avoid reading such language as mythological, thus reducing its import from cosmic to more personal or political dimensions.  In so doing, however, we fail to grasp the scandal and exhilaration of early Christianity.  These thrones and powers and principalities and so forth were not merely earthly princes or empires (though princes and empires served their ends); much less were they vague abstractions; they were, according to Jewish Apocalyptic tradition, the angelic governors of the nations, the celestial “archons”, the often mutinous legions of the air, who–though they might be worshipped as gods, and might in themselves be both mighty and dreadful–were only creatures of the one true God. 

It was from the tyranny of these powers on high that Christ had come to set creation free.  And so the life of faith was, for the early church, before all else, spiritual warfare, waged between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of this fallen world, and every Christian on the day of his or her baptism had been conscripted into that struggle, on the side of Christ.  From that point on, he or she was both a subject of and a co-heir to a “Kingdom not of this world,” and henceforth no more than a resident alien in the “earthly city.” [Ibid.]

Without fail, the kingdoms of this world would progressively become the Kingdom of our Christ (Revelation 5:9,10 & 11:15).  Christians were enlisted into the armies of the Lord of hosts to see it come to pass. 

Cosmic Warfare, Part I

Spitting at the Devil, Swearing Allegiance to Christ

The cosmic implications of baptism have been sadly occluded in our modern times.  This is a grave weakness in our contemporary understanding of the Christian faith.  Secularism has demoted and devalued the cosmic invisible realities in the mind of many Christians.  Even as the Bible speaks of the “powers of the air” and traces their demonic connections, we are more comfortable with material causes and effects. 

David Bentley Hart describes the ritual of baptism in the early Church–how it enacted the real cosmic battle and drama.

Whether brief or protracted, however, the period of one’s preparation for baptism could not conclude until one had been taught the story of redemption: how once all men and women had labored as slaves in the household of death, prisoners of the devil, sold into bondage to Hades, languishing in ignorance of their true home; and how Christ had come to set the prisoners free and had, by his death and resurrection, invaded the kingdom of our captor and overthrown it, vanquishing the power of sin and death in us, shattering the gates of hell, and plundering the devil of his captives. . . .

Ideally–again, making allowances for variations in local customs and for the unpredictability of particular circumstances–one’s baptism would come on Easter eve, during the midnight vigil.  At the appointed hour, the baptizand (the person to be baptised) would depart the church for the baptistery, which typically housed a large baptismal pool or (if possible) flowing stream.  There, in the semidarkness of that place, he or she would disrobe and –amid a host of blessings, exhortation, unctions and prayers–descend naked into the waters, to be immersed three times by the bishop, in the name first of the Father, then of the Son, and finally of the Holy Spirit. . . .

Perhaps the most crucial feature of the rite, however–at least, for understanding what baptism meant for the convert from paganism–occurred before the catechumen’s descent into the font: . . . he or she would turn to face the west (the land of evening, and so symbolically the realm of all darkness, cosmic and spiritual), submit to a rather forcibly phrased exorcism, and then clearly renounce–indeed, revile and, quite literally, spit at–the devil and the devil’s ministers.  Then he or she would turn to face the east (the land or morning and of light) to confess total faith in, and promise complete allegiance to, Christ. 

This was by no means mere ritual spectacle; it was an actual and, so to speak, legally binding transference of fealty from one master to another. . . . In thus turning one’s back upon, rejecting, and abusing the devil, one was also repudiating the gods to whose service one had hitherto been indentured, and was doing so with a kind of triumphant contempt; in confessing Christ, one was entrusting oneself to the invincible conqueror who had defeated death, despoiled hell of its hostages, subdued the “powers of the air,” and been raised up the Lord of history. 
(David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009], p. 112,3.)

It is sadly ironic that the dispossession of the Devil over the Western nations as the Gospel spread was replaced by a more subtle and malevolent lie–to the effect that the Devil does not exist at all, but was a fairy-story to frighten children and the illiterate. 

This was a foolish error that the early Church could not make.  In every town and in many groves in the countryside, ubiquitous altars to pagan gods confronted Christians daily of the Devil’s presence.  Repeated public celebrations, festivals and rituals, complete with sacrificial meals, structured the monthly calendar.  The common person was beholden to these beliefs, festivals, and ritual for life itself–for much of the commerce, labour, trade, and economically sustaining work revolved around the gods and their devotion. 

In our days, civic concern and public money may be devoted to facilities such as sports stadia and spectacles such as Rugby World Cups.  Public officials and government justify the expense as “creating wealth” for all.  Fortunately, our economies represent two millennia of divine blessing and so we easily see through the faux promises and public waste.  But in the Roman world of the first and second centuries most economic activity revolved around the gods and acts of devotion.  The population was in thrall to the demons. 

Thus, when a person became a Christian, the Church took seriously the biblical precept that he has passed out of the kingdom of darkness and entered the kingdom of light.  The rituals of baptism reinforced this truth.  Whilst not approbating the particular rituals (which aped pagan practices far too much for our liking and went way beyond biblical prescriptions) it nevertheless remains essential that we recover the Christian truths of the cosmic realities of death to the world and of new life in Christ.  Those realities turn around being delivered from a malicious master and being bound over as a bond-servant to the Lord Jesus Christ; of escaping and rejecting the kingdom of darkness and enlisting in the Kingdom of our Lord; and of being sworn as a fellow soldier in the armies of the Lord.