Idols of the Heart and "Vanity Fair"

At last, David Powlison's masterful article, Idols of the Heart and "Vanity Fair" (PDF), is online! This is one of his works to which I frequently return and which I've long wished was available on the net so others could readily access it. It's a profound, practical look at the relevance of the recurring biblical theme of idolatry for understanding motivation. Here's Powlison's introduction:

One of the great questions facing Christians in the social sciences and helping professions is this one: How do we legitimately and meaningfully connect the conceptual stock of the Bible and Christian tradition with the technical terminologies and observational riches of the behavioral sciences? Within this perennial question, two particular sub-questions have long intrigued and perplexed me.

One sort of question is a Bible relevancy question. Why is idolatry so important in the Bible? Idolatry is by far the most frequently discussed problem in the Scriptures. So what? Is the problem of idolatry even relevant today, except on certain mission fields where worshipers still bow to images?

The second kind of question is a counseling question, a “psychology” question. How do we make sense of the myriad significant factors that shape and determine human behavior? In particular, can we ever make satisfying sense of the fact that people are simultaneously inner-directed and socially-shaped?

Reading this article will help you understand why C. J. Mahaney credits Powlison with being the "living guy" from whom he's learned the most about sanctification and Elyse Fitzpatrick, in Idols of the Heart, thanks him for reconfiguring her thinking about idolatry. (HT: Monergism.com)

Korea's Shameless Shamans

From a fascinating article in today's New York Times about the revival of shamanism in Korea:

There are an estimated 300 shamanistic temples within an hour of Seoul’s bustling city center, and in them, shamans perform their clamorous ceremonies every day. They offer pigs to placate the gods. They dance with toy guns to comfort the spirit of a dead child. They intimidate evil spirits by walking barefoot on knife blades.

“We used to do our rituals in hiding,” said Ms. Yang, who performs two or three rites on a busy day. “Our customers kept it secret from even their own relatives. Now we have no shame performing in public. I can hardly take three days off a month.”

Korean shamanism is rooted in ancient indigenous beliefs shared by many folk religions in northeast Asia. Most mudangs are women who say they discovered their ability to serve as a mediator between the human and spirit worlds after emerging from a critical illness. They believe that the air is thick with spirits, including those of dead relatives, a fox in the hills behind a village, an old tree or even a stove. These spirits interact with people and influence their fortunes.

So when tradition-minded Koreans are inexplicably sick or have a run of bad luck in business or a daughter who cannot find a husband, they consult a shaman.

Its syncretistic and cultural flexibility is credited with the practice's longevity:

“In our latest survey, we found 273 categories of gods venerated by Korean shamans. If you look into the subcategories, you find 10,000 deities,” said Hong Tea-han, a professor at Chung-Ang University in Seoul who researches shamanism. “Korean shamanism is a great melting pot. It never rejected anything but embraced everything, making endless compromises with other religions and social changes. That explains why it has survived thousands of years.”

There are shamans who venerate Jesus, the Virgin Mary, even Park Chung-hee, the late South Korean military strongman. Under the pro-American military governments of the 1970s, there were shamans who took Gen. Douglas MacArthur as their deity. When MacArthur’s spirit possessed them, they donned sunglasses, puffed on a pipe and uttered sounds that some clients took for English.

A Few Quick Thoughts on Love, Fear, Marriage, and Idols

Inactivity here definitely hasn't been due to a shortage of things on my mind. If anything, the opposite is true.

The following thoughts were generated in a recent conversation I had with a young man questioning what it means for him to love his wife. At the close of our meeting he asked if I'd mind sending him a bullet point list of the main ideas we covered. In hope that others might also benefit, here's an edited version of my correspondence to him:

• Loving someone involves seeking their good where goodness is defined by God. The essence of sin is to ignore and/or reject what God calls good and to operate as though I or some other creature is the ultimate judge of what is good or evil.
• Fear of how someone might respond to my actions can greatly hinder my capacity to love them appropriately (i.e., according to the need of the moment). For example, love in some instances requires correction. But if my heart is captivated by the desire to avoid conflict, to be well-liked, to avoid rejection at all costs, etc., I will not risk correcting another for their sake but will selfishly serve my own desires.
  
• When my actions are motivated and determined more by how I think someone else will react to me than by a desire to do what is pleasing to God, then I have made an idol out of that person. Their estimation of me means more to me than does the Lord's and functionally I am worshiping, serving, and trusting in them in place of the true God.

Shortly after you left my office I picked up a book that many years ago brought greater clarity to my own thinking about the above issues. It's called Encouragement: The Key to Caring by Larry Crabb and Dan Allender. The following paragraphs profoundly struck me and pretty much encapsulate the above points:

Whether the cause of fear is major rejection or mild discomfort, the final solution is the same: I must be willing to hurt (greatly or minimally), to suffer loss (be it everything or a few moments of social ease). Only when I accept what I fear, resolving that I am willing to endure whatever may happen, will the fear lose its power (1 John 4:18). The perfect love of Christ provides me with what I need to face my fears. In Christ I have a relationship I cannot lose, a relationship sufficient to sustain me if all others fail. I have an unbreakable safety net beneath me as I venture across the tightrope of involving myself in other people's lives.

When I declare myself, by an act of will, to be willing to lose all human relationship (approval, recognition, love, etc.) if obedience to God requires it, I will be freed from the entanglement of fear. And only when I am freed from the fear of losing a relationship will my motivation approach the reality of love. When I encounter an embarrassed stranger in Sunday school or a close friend who is seriously mishandling his problems, my words will have the power to encourage if they are prompted by love. Notice the paradox: To love a person, I must be willing to lose my relationship with him. Dependently holding onto anyone or anything but God is, in its final form, idolatry. Idolatry is at root a fear of the wrong god.

Interview with Elyse Fitzpatrick

Lydia Brownback asks author and biblical counselor Elyse Fitzpatrick about women, sin and sanctification, and two of her books - Idols of the Heart and Because He Loves Me: How God's Love Transforms Our Identity and Life (part 1 | part 2). (HT: Justin Taylor)

"It Begins in the Mind"

This week's Kairos Journal update includes the following quote from A. W. Tozer on the origin and progression of idolatry:

Let us beware lest we in our pride accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration, and that civilized peoples are therefore free from it. The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him. It begins in the mind and may be present where no overt act of worship has taken place. “When they knew God,” wrote Paul, “they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.”

Then followed the worship of idols fashioned after the likeness of men and birds and beasts and creeping things. But this series of degrading acts began in the mind. Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous. The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

Perverted notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear. The long career of Israel demonstrates this clearly enough, and the history of the Church confirms it. So necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards declines along with it. The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God. - A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (San Francisco: HaperCollins, 1961), 3-4.

Reviving Lust and Idolatry

A few weeks ago, on Justin Taylor's recommendation, I listened to a sermon by C. J. Mahaney on James 4:1-2 called "Cravings Underlie Conflicts" and I encourage you to do likewise. It was very timely as I'm team teaching an adult class at our church using a video series from Peacemaker Ministries on biblical principles for resolving relational conflict and that week the lesson, "Conflict Starts in the Heart," focused on the same passage.


Both Mahaney and Ken Sande (President of Peacemaker Ministries and author of The Peacemaker) discuss how our interpersonal struggles emanate from intense desires or lusts that captivate our hearts and become substitutes for God. Sande describes the process by which a desire, even for something which is good, can progress into an idol. Desire becomes demand. When those around me fail to meet those demands, I judge them and resolve to punish them in some way. This might be through overt anger or some more subtle expression of displeasure that we display until our demands are met.


Biblical counselors frequently employ the concept of idolatry to answer questions about what motivates us to act in certain ways but not all find this satisfying. Jim Beck, for example, professor of counseling at Denver Seminary, characterizes biblical counseling in the following manner in a paper he wrote on the importance of integrating psychology and theology:

It only appears, we are told, that the Bible does not address issues such as anorexia, paranoia, or panic attacks. If we dig deep enough into the teachings of Scripture we will uncover the true underlying causes of even the most recent of diagnostic categories. By “probing the unfathomed depth and breadth of Scripture”.... biblical counselors can find relevant material for every human struggle. They accomplish this feat in large part by reductionistic strategies that collapse most all psychogenic pathologies to some form of idolatry.

Beck insinuates that biblical counselors exaggerate the part idolatry plays in our behavior. Of course, it would be overly simplistic to boil all kinds of emotional, behavioral, and relational problems to idolatry. But Beck's comments make me wonder. If biblical counseling is charged with making too much of idolatry as an explanatory category, cannot the opposite charge be made against so much of what goes on in the name of Christian counseling? Why is such a recurrent biblical emphasis so glaringly absent from so much popular Christian literature about the nature of our problems?

In preparation for the class I'd be leading I turned to an article by David Powlison which I consider one of the most thorough treatments of the subject of lust that I've ever come across. (Incidentally, Mahaney cites Powlison as the "living guy" from whom he's learned the most about indwelling sin and progressive sanctification, John Owen being the "dead guy" who's taught him the most about those subjects.) I first came across it about ten years ago when it appeared as a chapter ("How Shall We Cure Troubled Souls") in The Coming Evangelical Crisis: Current Challenges to the Authority of Scripture and the Gospel, edited by John Armstrong. A more recent and somewhat revised version appears as Chapter 8 ("I Am Motivated When I Feel Desire") in Powlison's book Seeing With New Eyes: Counseling and the Human Condition Through the Lens of Scripture.

Powlison notes that while "lusts of the flesh" (sometimes called cravings or pleasures) is a summary term for the divine diagnosis of what is most wrong with us, the understanding of "lust" held by most Christians is both narrow and shallow:

...the term "lust" has become almost useless to modern readers of the Bible. It is reduced to sexual desire. Take a poll of the people in your church, asking them the meaning of "lusts of the flesh." Sex will appear on every list. Greed, pride, gluttonous craving, or mammon worship might be added in the answers of a few of the more thoughtful believers. But the subtleties and details are washed out, and a crucial biblical term for explaining human life languishes. In contrast, the New Testament writers use this term as a comprehensive category for the human dilemma! It will pay us to think carefully about its manifold meanings. We need to expand the meaning of a term that has been truncated and drained of significance. We need to learn to understand life through these lenses, and to use these categories skillfully (Seeing With New Eyes, p. 148).

To support his claim concerning the centrality of "lust" to understanding motivation and bad behavior, Powlison offers a brief sampling of New Testament passages:

For example, 1 John 2:16 contrasts the love of the Father with "all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life." (See also Rom. 13:14; Gal. 5:16-17; Eph. 2:2 [actually, v. 3]; 4:22; James 1:14-15; 4:1-3; 1 Peter 1:14; 2 Peter 1:4.) This does not mean that the New Testament is internalistic. In each of these passages, behavior intimately connects to motive, and motive to behavior. Wise counselors follow the model of Scripture and move back and forth between lusts of the flesh and the tangible works of the flesh, between faith and the tangible fruit of the Spirit (p. 148).

As I've noted before, I am persuaded that a major contributing factor to our unfamiliarity with the biblical language of lust is the fact that we have become more conversant in the language of need as taught by secular psychological theorists. Our self-understanding has been largely shaped by views depicting our essential problem as being emotionally and psychologically unfulfilled as opposed to being captives of our cravings. Sadly, some of the most effective tutors in the language of psychological needs are Christian authors.

Related: Justin Taylor's Five Lust Languages?

Characters in Search of an Author

"In the redemptive-historical interpretive tradition of the Reformed churches, Scripture is a cumulative, God-directed narrative. Its successive acts (creation, fall, redemption and future hope) comprise a cosmic drama in which all persons, whether consciously or not, are players...

"...seeing Scripture as a redemptive-historical drama implies...that all persons are 'characters in search of an author,' that is, fundamentally worshiping beings who, if not committed to the one true God, will inevitably end up revering some substitute within God's creation--material goods, social status, political power, personal pleasure, or even art and scholarship."  --Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. "Five Uneasy Questions, or: Will Success Spoil Christian Psychologists?" Journal of Psychology and Christianity 15 (1996): 150-160.

One Nation Under God (As I Understand Him, Her, It, Etc.)

In response to yesterday's ruling by a California federal judge that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools is unconstitutional, Joe Carter traces the concept of civil religion back to atheist philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and notes the irony that so many Christians appear to be committed to it. He reminds us that

There is a vast and unbridgeable chasm between America’s civil religion and Christianity. If we claim that “under God” refers only to the Christian conception of God we are either being unduly intolerant or - more likely - simply kidding ourselves. Do we truly think that the Hindu, Wiccan, or Buddhist is claiming to be “under” the same deity as we are? We can’t claim, as Paul did on Mars Hill, that the “unknown god” they are worshiping is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Pledge is, after all, a secular document and the “under god” is referring to the “Divinity” of our country’s civil religion. Just as the pagan religion of the Roman Empire was able to incorporate other gods and give them familiar names, the civil religion provides an umbrella for all beliefs to submit under one nondescript, fill-in-the-blank term.

Our God is a jealous God and is unlikely to look favorably upon idolatry even when it is put to good service. While we should be as tolerant of “civil religion” as we are of other beliefs, we can’t justify submitting to it ourselves. That is not to say that we can’t say the Pledge and think of the one true God. But we should keep in mind that this fight isn’t our fight and the “god” of America’s civil religion is not the God who died on the Cross.

Al Mohler offers similar thoughts in his commentary, Is the Pledge of Allegiance Unconstitutional?:

Christians should be careful to think clearly about the Pledge of Allegiance and the current controversy. Secularists like Michael Newdow represent the hard edge of ideological attacks upon all expressions of theistic belief in the public arena. The truth is that the courts have allowed and driven a constriction of religious liberty such that any public reference or acknowledgment of the beliefs common to vast millions of Americans is now considered to represent an unconstitutional establishment of religion by the government.

All this puts believing Christians in a difficult position. After all, the Court has ruled that symbols and references to a divine being are allowable only insofar as those references point to no specific deity. Beyond this, the courts have ruled that the only permissible reference to deity is a reference that so reduces the definition of deity that it appears difficult for all but the most ardent atheist to object.

Because of this, Christians must not defend the presence of the word "under God" in the Pledge as a direct reference to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--the Triune God whom Christians worship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. At best, the presence of this language in the Pledge and similar expressions on the nation's currency represent an acknowledgement of a power higher than the State itself and the nation's dependency upon that power for its safety and well being. Nevertheless, a decision from the Supreme Court that would require the removal of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance would represent a disastrous imposition of official secularism as the nation's public commitment.

It does seem that we're between a rock and a hard place -- civil religion that tips its hat to a vague, non-descript deity on one hand and state-sanctioned secularism on the other. No follower of Christ finds the latter appealing but we have to watch against siding with the former because of its perceived utility in advancing (or at least sustaining) politically and socially conservative goals. In his excellent book Political Visions and Illusions, David Koyzis identifies two principal reasons why conservatives are likely to profess Christianity. The first is that they genuinely believe that its teachings are true. The second is because of the large part Christianity has played in Western cultural heritage. "For those conservatives who are Christians for this reason," he writes, "the issue of the truth of the faith is secondary to the social utility of its ethical teachings."

Some friends and I are reading John Piper's Pierced by the Word. We were all stopped in our tracks by this sentence: "God will not be used as currency for the purchase of idols." Civil religion, while it may use the word "God," sacrifices biblical truth on the altar of a political ideology.