Icons and Idols

Iconoclasm is not a virtue; it can be a useful tool. There’s nothing wrong with good statuary to help you focus your mind on the task of faith. There’s a problem when your faith is trapped by the icon.

Our culture seems trapped in a closed loop aimed at high efficiency, to include a sort of speed-reader reflex that isn’t always appropriate. To be honest, my writing isn’t good enough to speed-read. The subjects and things I attempt to say require you become aware of things speed-reading won’t allow. I’m trying to open a door to a level of moral awareness that won’t even fit into words, but does result in some fairly concrete choices. As noted often, what we do is less of religion and more about religion. I’m pastoring in the sense that I hope to awaken your own moral convictions, not to prescribe mine for you.

My claim that Radix Fidem is so named in part because of a measure of radicalism does not place us inside the ownership of radicalism itself. The radicalism begins with rejecting the model of directed religious activity versus encouraging your creativity. While I was in the hospital last week the VA chaplain came to visit. He’s a Unitarian and asked if I had considered their brand. I told him it was all too cerebral, something he didn’t quite grasp because — well, his religious orientation is cerebral. His Western background assumes that what isn’t fully logical is largely sentiment and they are okay with that kind religion.

Some of you grasp the anti-Western thing. Some of you can just jump right past all of that because it never really held you in the first place. The notion of an entirely different realm of existence, to which we naturally belong as well as this one, finds poor traction in our world. But if you weren’t pickled in Western epistemology — and most Westerners really don’t know what it means to be “Western” — you can skip that part of my blather and proceed directly with faith. My only iconoclasm is aimed at making folks less dependent on things that hold you back from faith.

Faith is a living and growing things and religion struggles to keep up. Just when you get things working smoothly, faith makes an entirely new demand. I’m trying to teach that as the norm. That means cutting out the idolatry of things that you can grasp with your intellect.

I once noted that my “Calvinism” isn’t actually Calvinism. It’s missing almost the entire background from which Calvin built his theology. My contention is that Calvin couldn’t escape the conviction of God as sovereign, but had to satisfy all his intellectual dependencies to put that to use. I end up using Calvinist language at times, but reject most of what he taught. I still have his Institutes on my shelf, but they are collecting dust. They were useful only in helping me ask enough questions to break out of the trap that held him. I end up saying that you’ll probably need to organize your religion to account for God’s authority and that the business of “sovereign will” is merely a way of expressing something none of us will ever understand. But if you worry too much about Calvin as a theological enemy, then you can’t avoid thinking I’m in his camp. I can’t help you with that.

And I’m not really sure how far I can escape the poison of the West myself. There comes a point when you really need to quit obsessing over it and get to work. I hold up the ANE (Ancient Near East) as a target even when I can’t promise I’ll hit myself consistently. Maybe I do know a little more about it than you, but I’m hardly the sole expert.

What I can do is remind you not to make an icon of me, either. I don’t really want you to absorb my religion, but absorb the way my religion works as an expression of the ineffable God we all must come to know and serve. We associate as a virtual parish on the grounds that we all tolerate the guy who runs the blog. Nothing keeps you from building your own thing outside my blog; you won’t even catch a hint of resentment from me because I encourage that explicitly.

Note in passing to regular readers: I take the position that my bike crash was God’s own epilogue to “Our Crazy Ancient New Religion” series. Wherever that path was taking me at that moment is cut off and I’m not in the same place any more. The experience itself changed me, in part because I made choices as soon as I sat up in the grassy sand bank and realized my right leg couldn’t pull itself up in a natural position. I had a mission to show people how a man of faith could reach out in power and love from the midst of disaster. Just the act of doing that stuff jerks you into a different world. For me, that actually is the best way to show what the series was about.

However, I think my faculties are coming back online. I’m irritated by this restriction to my netbook; I really should have tried harder to get a good Linux laptop, but ran out of money and time when other things took center stage. I’ll take this as divine provision and keep plugging away at it for now.

God bless you all. You prayers and efforts to help me are, I trust, blessing you as much as they are me. Otherwise, it’s a waste of resources.