Without God, Without Creed, Part II

In Baal We Trust

We continue our series upon the causes of modern Unbelief in the West.  The redemptive context is that the first Christendom has fallen, being replaced by materialism, atheism, and secularism.  This represents a divine curse upon God's people.  The Bible makes it very clear: when God's people turn away from Him, He will bring the curses (and not the blessings) of the Covenant upon them (Deuteronomy 28).  Being given over to the hand of Unbelief is one of those curses. 

James Turner, in his important book, Without God, Without Creed: the Origins of Unbelief in America argues that Christendom began to apostasize and disobey (thus, preparing for the triumph of secular atheism in the twentieth century) at the end of the seventeenth century.  At the time it appeared to be a small matter.  But it provoked God to wrath and eventually tore down Christendom.  It had to do with beginning to assert the autonomy or independence of the creation from the Creator.  Turner writes:

The victory of mechanism was far from complete around 1690, but the tide was clearly running in its direction.  A new conception of the universe's operation formed.  Although God's constant attention sustained the whole cosmos, He no longer took personal charge, as it were, of every detail.  Instead, He commanded His creation to obey regular rules.  Scientists interpreted physical events as nature's response to these divine commands; natural "laws," they said, "governed" the universe.
Turner, op cit., p.16.

The new conception, then, was that God was in charge of the "big things", but delegated the smaller details and no longer was He thought to have control or personal charge over them.  Now at this point no longer can we legitimately use the name "God" to denote this new deity--for new deity it was (something which Turner maybe does not see, or at least does not make clear).  More accurately, it was an ancient deity revived--it was an idol god, manufactured according to the mind of man.  The West was no longer speaking of the God revealed in the Scriptures, but of an idol-god conceived by fallen, sinful men.  The new delegating god, who no longer had complete personal charge of every atom in the universe, was a revival of ancient Baalism. 

Now, of course, this idolatrous conception of a limited and implicitly finite deity is everywhere denied in Scripture, which reveals that not only had all things come into existence out of nothing by the very Word, the command of God, but that all things are sustained and continued by His command.  God's personal upholding and faithful sustaining of the creation in every part is celebrated as a cause of worship and adoration of His glory (Psalm 33:6-12; 36:5-9; 89:8-13; 93:1-2; 119:90,91, etc).  Thus, the conception of a god who did not have personal charge over His creation came from devious, fallen, sinful, human beings, not from God's self-revelation.  It was an idolatrous conception and, thus, angered the Living God.  The sins of Ahab and Jezebel were once more rising in Israel. 

For the record, the orthodox formulation of the doctrine of  Providence is summarized in the Westminster Confession of Faith:

God the great Creator of all things doth uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence, according to His infallible foreknowledge and the free and immutable counsel of His own will, to the praise of the glory of His wisdom, power, justice, goodness and mercy.  (WCF 5:1)

To speak of natural "laws" as if the creation was independently operating from God necessarily required that an idol had been substituted for the Living God.  The implications were pervasive and far-reaching.  Turner again:

This idea of natural law put a greater distance between a more impersonal God and His creation.  A clearer distinction now separated the realm of law from the realm of grace, "natural" from "supernatural". . . . (T)his kind of thinking about God's relation to the world did not halt at the boundaries of natural philosophy.  Students of history and society were simultaneously reassessing God's rule and coming to similar conclusions.  There, too, in a desacralized understanding of the working of human societies, God's actions acquired greater regularity and impersonality as he began to operate through secondary causes akin to natural laws. . . .

Thus, roughly speaking, the modern study of history saw the light.  The ultimate result, slowly accomplished, was to wrench history writing out of a theological framework and install it in a secular one.  Less often did writers interpolate human events into God's eternal plan of salvation.  More often did they view the vicissitudes of kingdoms and republics, ancient and modern, as the timebound outcome of human ambition and scheming and eventually of cultural, social, and economic forces as well.
Ibid., p. 16f.

 Theologically, we can express this another way.  Because the true and Living God is infinitely transcendent above and beyond His creation, He therefore is infinitely immanent within His creation.  Infinite transcendence, to be true, requires infinite and total immanence.  This is precisely what the Westminster formulation, cited above, confesses.  When in the later seventeenth century men within Christendom began to deny the infinite and absolute immanence of God within the creation, they also necessarily had to deny His transcendence.  They were left, not with the God of the Scriptures, but an idol god and an idolatrous religion. 

If you grant just one atom, or just one one sub-atomic particle of one atom, independence from God, you will have denied the God of our fathers.  Whatever god you do acknowledge will be an empty idol.  The curses of the Covenant ineluctably follow.