A Theology of Idolatry for the Twenty-First Century – Part 1

0:00Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. Santa Guston of Hippo famously wrote, You've made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until it finds rest in you. Like a gust in this search, can lead us to false gods. Today on Breakpoint, my colleague Michael Craven, dean of the Colson Fellows program, offers a theological reflection on idolatry. Here's Michael Craven. For nearly a thousand years, the gods ruled the Western world. Zeus, thundered from Olympus, Artemis drew pilgrims from across the Roman Empire. Apollo spoke through the Oracle at Delphi, Athena guarded cities beside and ruled the seas. Every village had its patron deity. Every household it shrines, and every season it sacrifices. The temples were magnificent, the festivals lavish, and the myths woven into every aspect of public life. Then they disappeared.

1:00Today no one offers sacrifices to Zeus. The temples remain as archeological treasures, visited by tourists rather than worshippers. What happened is one of history's most remarkable and least appreciated revolutions. Many assume Christianity simply gained political dominance under Emperor Constantine. But history tells a much more fascinating story. By the time Constantine legalized Christianity in AD 313, the church had already spread throughout the empire, despite nearly three centuries of persecution. It had won converts among the poor, philosophers, merchants, soldiers, government officials, and Rome's educated class alike. Even more telling, when the pagan Emperor Julian, known to history as the apostate, attempted to restore the old religion only a generation later, he failed. He had imperial authority, political power, and the ancient temples at his disposal. Yet he couldn't persuade the empire to return to its former gods.

2:01Why did a movement centered on a crucified Jewish carpenter succeed where centuries of pagan mythology and even Greek philosophy had failed? The answer is not that Christianity offered better myths. It offered reality. The ancient religions attempted to explain the world through stories of competing gods, whose passions, jealousies, and rivalries resembled those of humans. Greek philosophers recognized the inadequacy of these myths and sought deeper explanations. Plato sought ultimate forms, Aristotle reasoned toward an unmoved mover, the Stoic's prize virtue and rationality. Their insights were often profound, but they remained incomplete. Philosophy could ask life's greatest questions. It could not fully answer them. It could describe the good life, but it could not explain why every human possesses equal dignity. My evil exists or why history itself has meaning. Christianity entered that world with something entirely different.

3:02It proclaimed one eternal creator rather than a pantheon of competing gods. It explained why the universe is orderly because it is the product of a rational mind. It grounded human dignity, not in citizenship, wealth, strength, or usefulness, but in every person's creation and the image of God. It accounted for both humanity's grandeur and its brokenness through the biblical story of creation and the fall. It presented history not as an endless cycle of rise and decline, but as a purposeful drama moving toward redemption and restoration. Most astonishing, it proclaimed that the creator himself had entered history in the person of Jesus Christ. Not as another myth, but as a radical claim about reality itself. As C.S. Lewis famously observed, Christianity is myth-become-fact. The longings reflected imperfectly in pagan stories found their fulfillment not in another

4:03legend, but in the historical life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The New Testament itself records the beginning of paganism's collapse. In Acts 19, the silversmith, Demetrius, warned that Paul's preaching threatened the thriving industry built around the worship of Artemis because people were becoming convinced that gods made with hands are not gods. The gospel wasn't simply winning converts. It was dismantling an entire religious worldview. Early Christian leaders recognized exactly what was happening. Writing in the 4th century, Athanasius pointed out what everyone could see. The memory of the gods was fading. Christ had accomplished what neither mythology nor philosophy could. He had exposed the impotence of the false gods and revealed the one true God. Christianity did far more than change what people believed. It transformed how they understood reality itself.

5:04Because every human being bears God's image, infants were no longer disposable. Men possessed inherent dignity rather than treated as property. The sick became neighbors to be cared for rather than burdens to be discarded. Mercy became a virtue instead of a weakness. Forgiveness replaced vengeance. Humility became honorable in a culture that admired power above all else. These changes flowed naturally from a worldview that corresponded to reality. The Christian faith did not triumph because it was politically useful or culturally fashionable. It triumphed because it explained the world more truthfully than pagan mythology or philosophy ever could. That raises an unsettling question for our own age. If Christ exposed the bankruptcy of the ancient gods, why does every generation seem determined to create new ones? The human heart remains as religious as ever. We no longer bow before statues of Apollo or Artemis, but we have fashioned new gods.

6:10Less obvious, perhaps, but no less demanding. Those are the gods we must now learn to recognize. That was Michael Craven, vice president of the Colson Center and dean of the Colson Fellows program. He'll continue this series on idolatry in the days ahead. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download podcasts and for more resources or to share this with others, go to Breakpoint.org.