restless reformer

Update: Michael just linked this sermon by William Willimon on Christmas in the Empire, which touches on many of the same themes of this post.

Ever since I’ve been a Calvinist, I’ve been told that the sovereignty of God is the most comforting doctrine imaginable. I’m not feeling the comfort. I know it’s not very pious of me, but the book of Job brings me no comfort. It scares the hell out of me, really. If I’m looking for some kind of consistency, some sort of steadfast rock on which to base my whole life in the ever-changing world we live in, how do I find that in a God who might destroy my life and put me through misery just to give it all back again at the end and teach me a thing or two about his freedom to do whatever he wants?

I’m not feeling the comfort.

Israel’s problem with idols seems so distant to us, and in many ways, it makes the Old Testament inaccessible to readers who don’t have a doctorate in OT theology. The whole thing just seems silly and primitive. They thought statues they had made with their own hands were their gods. How idiotic.

And modern-day attempts to link OT idol worship to the television set (or any other parallel) fall pretty flat. I don’t think my TV is god. I watch it once, maybe twice a week. Even people who have the thing on every night can’t connect with the criticism that the TV is their idol, because they’ve never offered it a burnt offering or bowed down in front of it.

This is where the prophets confront my problem of not finding comfort in the unpredictable God. The reason the Israelites sought other gods was because they were supposed to be reliable. This god will take care of your agriculture. This god will fight your wars for you. This god will make you have babies. But the predictable gods were powerless to really do any of these things.

They were powerful, however, at maintaining the standard sociopolitical environment. Since idol-gods were transactionalists, the people with the power had supposed backing to their threats, and as such, were capable of maintaining an oppressive status quo. The predictable god who is not a god at all, but a piece of metal or wood, is a tool in the hands of oppressive empires.

The idols of today are idols of ideas. One might even suggest that we’ve replaced idols of wood and stone for words on a page and the images conveying ideas on the TV screen. “God bless America,” America is a “Christian nation,” and other similar statements are idolatrous ideas, primarily in the way in which they maintain certain ideals and definitions put forth by the politicians who would like to remain in power. The belief implicit in “America as Christian-nation” is that to say anything against the policy of the “Christian” American is to be “against God.” So silence is encouraged by Christian-America rhetoric; after all, we don’t want to oppose God.  As it pertains to war, you’d have a hard time finding anyone who said it better than Dylan.

This brings us back to the freedom of God. Despite what God might deem necessary for Job’s life or mine, without the unpredictable God, we have the empire-affirming, oppressive god. And Yahweh is not that kind of God. Ultimately, I can grasp and desperately pray for a faith in God’s wisdom and loving purposes for me, especially when I look at Jesus, if He decides to allow Job-like calamity. What is worse than loving, wise, and sovereign God who may ask me to suffer for a time is a god who is nothing more than a tool of oppression in the hands of politicians. If God is not free - even unpredictable - he is oppressive and against a large portion of humanity based solely on things like race and class.

The free God did provide a solid foundation: rather than being the banner for the politics of oppression, he became the oppressed, loved and befriended the oppressed, and then died for all. I suggest that the paradox of the freedom of God and the servanthood of Christ provide the ground of comfort and rescue both from ourselves and from the oppressive ideological idols of our day.