Without God, Without Creed, Part IV

The Necromancer is Back, and He is Cloaked in Morality

By the nineteenth century the church had so occluded the Gospel and the true faith with human idolatries that it was severely compromised.  This was true throughout Europe and the UK.  It was also true in the United States.

By making the creation autonomous--its own centre of authority over against the Living God--it was forced to "redefine" God Himself.  Like a Hollywood makeover, God was now conceived of as a localised authority--one centre of power alongside a host of others.  God was now unofficially an idol--a creation of human imagination and invention.  Baalism has returned to God's covenant people.  God became a localised deity, no longer the One Who was infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, goodness and truth.  He was no longer infinitely transcendent.  Consequently, He was no longer infinitely immanent in the Creation.  He was a demi-creature.

The outcome would be the same as had occurred in ancient Israel.
  Those who worship idols become like them. The dethroning of God meant the enthronement of Man. As a consequence, the true and Living God, Who is never mocked, would deliver the West over the curses of human autonomy, with the full complement of evils following in its train.  Christendom was to fall into the decay and detritus of a desolate and blasted Judean wasteland.

The way back, of course, is always repentance and humility before Him.  But that has not yet been seen.  So, expect more degradation and destruction to come. 

In the nineteenth century, Baal-as- god needed re-defining.  There had to be an appropriate place found for him within human culture.  Our now increasingly Baalistic culture had a ready solution.  Morality--or, more accurately, moralism.  The deity was conceived as being concerned primarily with doing good to man.

In reasonable [rationalistic] religion, God, like His human creatures, began to seem essentially a moral agent.  His morals, moreover, bore remarkable resemblance to human moral ideas.  This coincidence did not strike the enlightened as odd: it was indeed the whole point, for religion was to be made easy and open to human understanding.  A rational God would scarcely display a morality befogged in mystery, incomprehensible to the poor creatures commanded to obey it.  Therefore, the morality that reached perfection in God (and bound Him, for God could not contradict His own nature) seemed necessarily the same as the natural morality evident imperfectly by substantially to human beings. 
James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 71.

Now, at this point, some readers will be wondering what happened to the Great Awakening?  Surely the repeated and countless revivals in the United States put such idolatrous conceptions of the Living God to the sword.  Alas.  Not so.  Here is Turner's discouraging assessment:

Few victories have concealed so much irony.  Even while damning Deists, church leaders swallowed the Deist conception of a natural-law God.  Even while lauding the converted heart, they absorbed the maxim that belief in God rests on intellectual assent to a demonstrable proposition.  Even while preaching the blood of the Lamb, they devoured the Enlightenment's moralism and its God bound by human morality.
Ibid., p. 73.

Now to be sure there were some Elijah's who understood what was at stake.  One such was Jonathan Edwards, who understood who Yahweh truly was and is. However, Edwards was continually outflanked by fellow preachers and theologians who continued to believe in Baal, dressed up in the Messiah's clothing.  Turner again:

There was no escaping the fact, however much tactful words disguised it, that the God of Abraham and Isaac, of Augustine and Aquinas, of Luther and Calvin could hardly any more command credence from an alert twelve-year-old.  Well before 1790, the idea had fully formed that God acted in two distinct modes.  Although His spiritual governance remained immediate, personal and except in broad principles unpredictable, He managed His visible world through impersonal natural laws.  Fuzzy edges remained, but in general the supernatural had hived off from nature.
Ibid., p.77.

Inevitably--as always happens--autonomous Nature began to cut the cosmic Spiritual Governor down to size.  God's immanence was dismissed; His transcendence would follow.  (We, in New Zealand have seen this on display recently, with the twisting-in-the-wind explanations of the Christchurch earthquake.  Definitely not of God, we were told by the official clergy.  God is neither transcendent, nor immanent.  He is just a nice-to-have on the shelf--when we need a bit of saccharin comfort.) 

By the nineteenth century, the Church had decided where on the shelf it would place the new Baal-as-god.

Far from rejecting the moralism of Jefferson and Paine, Evangelicals Christianized it, charged it with new eagerness, and diffused it throughout the American middle classes.  By the 1820's and 1830's, morality had become central in most denominations and surged with an urgency lacking even in the self-improving drive of Benjamin Franklin. No longer the fairly restrained concern of an often cautious elite, moral improvement became the ebullient commitment of millions.

Evangelical morality insisted firmly on personal self-control  Behavior widely tolerated in the eighteenth century became immoral in the nineteenth.  Convivial inebriation gave way to temperance, even abstinence.  Bawdy tongues were hushed.  Sexual peccadilloes only once reprimanded became positively scandalous.  Had Lord Byron lived fifty years earlier, he would have raised eyebrows, but few mouths would have dropped open.  Purity, temperance, duty, diligence, and that archetypically Victorian virtue, earnestness, all were taken with new seriousness.
Ibid., p. 82f.

 The place for God on the shelf was that He was to give us moral laws to live by.  Serving Him was a matter of  becoming more moral.  In this context, where religious belief had to be approbated and apprehended by human reason first, there arose in the United States a sustained attack upon Calvinism.  Fervent preachers began to declaim it as an abhorrent religion.  Calvinism represented God as doing horrid things.  If we were to believe in God, first He had to conform to our notions of propriety and decency and morality.

The Victorian imagination, caught up in adoration of childhood, was peculiarly revolved by the idea of sending a helpless, innocent baby into eternal fire, and infant damnation became the pivot point for humanitarian assaults on Calvinism.
Turner, ibid., p. 91

The next generation that followed denied sin and eternal punishment all together.  The idol Baal-as-god was now remade to resemble the lusts and vain imaginations of the sinful human heart.  Idolatry represents the wishful and empty imaginations of the human heart; thus, worshipping idols results in men becoming like them.  The "deeper necromancy" is that all along man is idolising and worshipping himself.  The divine curse of universal atheism was now knocking at the door.

God was now expected to measure up to human standards.  Charles Finney wrote, "Religion is the work of man. . . . It consists in obeying God.  It is man's duty."  In such religion, God's chief emotional significance (though usually not formally His chief role in theology) often came to be that of the source, guarantor, and enforcer of morality.  And no distinction in kind made human moral standards inapplicable to divinity; in fact, divine morality came to be identified with, judged by, human morality.  We know God's "moral qualities" according to James McCosh, "by the analogy of man's moral sentiments."  . . .

Moralism thus reshaped conceptions of God's nature and purposes along lines much more recognizably human.  He became an underwriter of progress (His grace leading on to the millennium), a model of compassion. . . . This moralistic God did not hover faintly across some mysterious horizon but participated in the palpable realities of life.  He belonged to the naturalistic, not the transcendent, side of the divided God bequeathed by the Enlightenment.
Ibid., p.92, 94.

All this, of course, meant that the "Christian" religion was now fashionable.  But the Necromancer was back in Mirkwood and his spies were already paving the trails into Mordor.