Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters

by Timothy J. Keller

What happened? Idolatry. When love of one’s people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life.

One of the signs that an object is functioning as an idol is that fear becomes one of the chief characteristics of life.

Wow!

Another sign of idolatry in our politics is that opponents are not considered to be simply mistaken, but to be evil.

Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolters taught that in the biblical view of things, the main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace. The alternative to this view is to identify something besides sin as the main problem with the world and something besides God as the main remedy. That demonizes something that is not completely bad, and makes an idol out of something that cannot be the ultimate good.

Wolters writes: The great danger is to single out some aspect or phenomenon of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain in the drama of human life. . . . This “something” has been variously identified as . . . the body and its passions (Plato and much of Greek philosophy), culture in distinction from nature (Rousseau and Romanticism), institutional authority, especially in the state and the family (much of depth psychology), technology and management techniques (Heidegger and Ellul). . . . The Bible is unique in its uncompromising rejection of all attempts to . . . identify part of creation as either the villain or the savior.66

Reinhold Niebuhr answered that, in political idolatry, we make a god out of having power.

Reinhold Niebuhr was a prominent American theologian of the mid-twentieth century. He believed all humans struggle with a sense of being dependent and powerless. The original temptation in the Garden of Eden was to resent the limits God had put on us (“You shall not eat of the tree. . . .”; Genesis 2:17) and to seek to be “as God” by taking power over our own destiny. We gave in to this temptation and now it is part of our nature. Rather than accept our finitude and dependence on God, we desperately seek ways to assure ourselves that we still have power over our own lives. But this is an illusion. Niebuhr believed this cosmic insecurity creates a “will to power” that dominates our social and political relationships.67 He observed two ways this works itself out.

when the power and prosperity of the nation become unconditioned absolutes that veto all other concerns, then violence and injustice can be perpetrated without question.68 When this happens, Dutch scholar Bob Goudzwaard writes: ... the end indiscriminately justifies every means. .

Niebuhr believed that entire nations had corporate “egos,” and just as individuals, national cultures could have both superiority and inferiority complexes.

It is not easy to draw an exact line between ascribing value to something and assigning it absolute value. There is likewise no precise way to define when patriotism has crossed over into racism, oppression, and imperialism.

As we have seen all along, idols are good and necessary things that are turned into gods. C. S. Lewis wrote wisely about this: It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses—say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. . . . There are situations in which it is the duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier to encourage the fighting instinct. There are also occasions on which a mother’s love for her own children or a man’s love for his own country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards other people’s children or countries.71

An ideology, like an idol, is a limited, partial account of reality that is raised to the level of the final word on things. Ideologues believe that their school or party has the real and complete answer to society’s problems. Above all, ideologies hide from their adherents their dependence on God.72

C. E. M. Joad was a leading British agnostic philosopher who turned back to Christianity after World War II. In his book The Recovery of Belief he wrote: The view of evil implied by Marxism, expressed by Shaw and maintained by modern psychotherapy, a view which regards evil as the by-product of circumstances, which circumstances can, therefore, alter and even eliminate, has come to seem [in light of World War II and atrocities by both Nazis and Stalinists] intolerably shallow. . . . It was because we rejected the doctrine of original sin that we on the Left were always being disappointed, disappointed . . . by the failure of true socialism to arrive, by the behavior of nations and politicians . . . above all, by the recurrent fact of war.73 One of the key volumes that came out of this time was a book by several disillusioned communists and socialists, including Arthur Koestler and André Gide, entitled The God that Failed.74 The title says it all, describing how a political ideology can make absolute promises and demand total life commitment.

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Speculation

Niebuhr argued that human thinking always elevates some finite value or object to be The Answer.81 That way we feel that we are the people who can fix things, that everyone opposing us is a fool or evil. But as with all idolatries, this too blinds us.

In any culture in which God is largely absent, sex, money, and politics will fill the vacuum for different people.

Human beings have very little real power over their lives. Ninety-five percent of what sets the course of their lives is completely outside their control.

Idols of power, then, are not only for the powerful. You can pursue power in small, petty ways, by becoming a local neighborhood bully or a low-level bureaucrat who bosses around the few people in his field of authority. Power idolatry is all around us. What is the cure?

What we learn here is that theology matters, that much of our addiction to power and control is due to false conceptions of God. Gods of our own making may allow us to be “masters of our fate.” Sociologist Christian Smith gave the name “moralistic, therapeutic deism” to the dominant understanding of God he discovered among younger Americans.

God blesses and takes to heaven those who try to live good and decent lives (the “moralistic” belief). The central goal of life is not to sacrifice, or to deny oneself, but to be happy and feel good about yourself (the “therapeutic” belief). Though God exists and created the world, he does not need to be particularly involved in our lives except when there is a problem (that is “deism”).90

The tree would be cut down, but the stump would be left in the ground to grow back. God was not after retribution, vengeance, or destruction. This was discipline—pain inflicted with the motive of correction and redemption.

“The Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and gives them to anyone he wishes and sets over them the lowliest of men.” This means that anyone who is successful is simply a recipient of God’s unmerited favor. Even the people at the top of the world’s hierarchy of power, wealth, and influence are really “lowliest”—they are no better than anyone else. This is a rudimentary form of the gospel—that what we have is the result of grace, not of our “works” or efforts.

One of the great ironies of sin is that when human beings try to become more than human beings, to be as gods, they fall to become lower than human beings. To be your own God and live for your own glory and power leads to the most bestial and cruel kind of behavior. Pride makes you a predator, not a person.92 That is what happened to the king.

Any dominant cultural “Hope” that is not God himself is a counterfeit god. Idols, then, do not only take individual form, but can be corporate and systemic. When we are completely immersed in a society of people who consider a particular idolatrous attachment normal, it becomes almost impossible to discern it for what it is.

An idol is something that we look to for things that only God can give. Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to the position of a false god. This occurs when people rely on the rightness of their doctrine for their standing with God rather than on God himself and his grace. It is a subtle but deadly mistake. The sign that you have slipped into this form of self-justification is that you become what the book of Proverbs calls a “scoffer.”101 Scoffers always show contempt and disdain for opponents rather than graciousness. This is a sign that they do not see themselves as sinners saved by grace. Instead, their trust in the rightness of their views makes them feel superior.102