Without God, Without Creed, Part III

Man In Charge

Christendom lies broke and the temples of Baal are flush, svelte and in charge.  So it has come to be in the West.  Unbelief dominates the culture; the only kind of "Christian" faith tolerable is one which assumes from the outset that its God is finite, limited, a creation of needy minds.  Recognition of Christianity--when it occurs--in the West amounts to nothing more than a piteous condescension to a puerile superstition of yesteryear.  Christians are regarded as those with nothing more than a simplistic nostalgia for the past.    

Now when this kind of massive shift occurs in religion--from cultural dominance to subservience--devotees of the new god readily conclude that the old god, the now redundant and replaced god, was impotent and weak.  The Scriptures testify to this.  When Elijah was on Mount Carmel, he taunted the self-lacerated prophets of Baal by lampooning the weakness and powerlessness of  Baal.

And it came about at noon, that Elijah mocked them and said, "Call out with a loud voice, for he (Baal) is a god; either he is occupied or gone aside (to the latrine), or is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and needs to be awakened."  So they (the Baalists) cried with a loud voice and cut themselves according to their custom with swords and lances until the blood gushed out of them.
I Kings 18: 27,28

Foretelling the  collapse of Babylon, the prophet Isaiah mocks the gods of Babylon: Bel and Nebo. 

Bel has bowed down.  Nebo stoops over.  Their images are consigned to the beasts and the cattle.  The things that you carry are burdensome; a load for the weary beast. 
They stooped over, the have bowed together; they could not rescue the burden, but have themselves gone into captivity.
Isaiah 46: 1-2

 Mocking a former culture's deity is inevitable when that culture succumbs and fails.  So it is with the Living God.  Once again, the Scriptures make clear that this is the inevitable outcome.  When Moses pleaded with God not to destroy Israel when they turned to idols, he reminded God of what the rest of the nations would say if Israel were destroyed.  They would conclude that the Living God was weak and impotent and was treacherous and untrustworthy because Israel had perished in the desert.  (Deuteronomy 9:27-28)

So, in our generation in the West, the Living God--the God of Christians--is mocked on every side and in every conceivable way because Christendom has collapsed.  There is no fear of God before the eyes of Unbelief in our day.  But what we must never lose sight of is that this terrible situation has come about, not because God is actually unfaithful or impotent, but because His people, our forefathers in faith, substituted an idol god for the Living God.  It has taken four hundred years for this feckless treachery to flower fully into the crumbling of Christendom in the West.  It is not God who is impotent, but we who have been unfaithful.  His holiness and His justice and His jealousy for His own Name that have lead to our subjugation and Christendom's collapse, to our being placed under the curses of the Covenant, as He long ago warned. 

As the Apostle Paul so aptly put it: if God did not spare the natural branches (the Jewish people) but cut them off for the unbelief, what do you think He will do to you, the unnatural grafted branches,  if you, like them, turn to Unbelief and idols? (Romans 11: 20,21)

By the end of the seventeenth century it was being argued that the universal testimony of Scripture was not right--that the God of Christendom in fact was not intimately involved with nature, but that the world ran itself by means of impersonal natural laws.  In the eighteenth century, belief in this new idol-god spread rapidly as the natural world was seen as operating according to its own autonomous powers--which perforce limited, controlled, conditioned, and subjugated the idol-god (still called "God", mind you).  It was suggested that all reasonable, thinking people would naturally hold to this view of God-as-Baal. 

Here is the young James Boswell on his conceptions of this new god, formulated to conform to human ratiocinations:

Yes, the universal eye perceives everything in the universe.  But surely, the grand and extensive system employs the attention of God, and the minutiae are not to be considered as part of his care; at least, we are not to presume that he interests himself in every little accident.
Cited by James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p.39.

Clearly, Boswell must have already concluded that the Lord Jesus was quite wrong when He spoke of the lilies of the field, the hairs of one's head, and sparrows. Belief in Baal was entirely more reasonable and rational--and uplifting, to a thinking man.

God-as-Baal was superannuated to the House of Lords; the creation became the House of Commons, running under its own steam and rules, the real locus of power and authority.  Naturally, this paradigm shift required the theologians within the Church to rework the doctrine of God into something more fitting to the Baal they had substituted.

As Newton was deified, so the temptation was great to Newtonify the Deity.  If science and rationalism had raised questions about God and unsettled belief, then what more logical response than to shore up religion by remodeling it in the image of science and rationality.  Accordingly, many spokesmen of the church--theologians, ministers, lay writers--enthusiastically magnified the rationalizing tendencies already apparent within belief, increasingly conceived assurance of God as a matter of the intellect and the grounds of belief as rationally demonstrable.  So easy was it to slip into this way of thinking that many of the rationalizers of belief only half-realized that they had in fact made a choice--and never really stopped to consider its implications.
Tuner, ibid., p.49

A god conceived, defined, proven, approbated by, and subjugated to human rationalizing is an idol, pure and simple.  Baal was now on the throne in the churches of England and the nascent United States.  God's erstwhile servants had done this thing.   

Accompanying this was a re-definition of "belief" and "faith".  This redefinition is still widely held in conquered Western Christendom to this day.  Increasingly "belief" was seen to be something "confirmed by testimony", by rational argumentation and evidences.  Turner again:

As early as the 1660's the Anglican Latitudinarian theologians,  notably sympathetic to the new science, had exalted reason at the expense of revelation.  The most eminent of them, Archbishop John Tillotson, was very widely read in the eighteenth century; indeed, novelists and poets aside, was probably the well-read American colonists' most popular author.  Without denying the authority of Scripture, Tillotson treated nature as a more basic divine revelation and turned reason loose to find the grounds of belief in the natural world. In a similar spirit, divines increasingly treated Scripture itself as a kind of historical data, analogous to the facts of nature, rather than as the living voice of God.  The Bible in such hands imparted proofs rather than personal faith, words rather than the Word.  Ibid., p. 50.

Here it is most blatant.  Rationalism in full throat.  The Scriptures to be subject to human ratiocinations.  God likewise.  Jonathan Mayhew, pastor of Boston's fashionable West Church from 1747 to 1766 warned his congregation against believing until they had all considered and weighed the evidence and proven the matter to their own satisfaction.


"Belief" is something intellectual, rational.  "Faith" is something else.  Previously, when God-as-Baal was not worshipped and enthroned, belief and faith were interchangeable.  Now, they were broken apart.  Belief was a rational acceptance of abstract propositions; faith was personal trust.  In this context, intellectualised belief was more foundational to society and to humanity; faith was an optional extra, an add-on.  Such things are an inevitable outcome when God's people conceive of  the creation independent of the Creator. 

When Satan tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden, his opening gambit was to change their narrative of God.  "Sure God exists, but he is not like A, rather he is like B."  His end game was to lead mankind to atheism--a complete denial that God, any god, exists at all.  At that point, mankind would have changed from being God's image bearers to "useful idiots".  Substituting Baal for the Living God was just the first step.

So it was with the dismantling of Christendom.  Asserting the independence of the creation from the Creator was the first step.  Then came the insistence that human reason and rational faculties were a higher authority than the Word of God Himself.  Rationalized natural theology was where it was at.  This was the stage reached by the end of the eighteenth century.  The years of the nineteenth century saw an attempt to re-work and re-make the idol god once again.  This, before the final storm broke and Western culture suddenly transformed from formal adherence to Christendom, to atheism.

Our next post will deal with the changing face of Baal, the re-invention of the idol in the nineteenth century.