Systematic Theology

Lesson #6

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject:

Genre: Speech

Track: 6

Dictation Name: RR10??

Location/Venue: ________

Year: 1960’s-1970’s.

Idolatry. Calvin in his institutes of the Christian religion devotes considerable space to the subject of idolatry. He declares that idolatry means all images of God, whether material or immaterial, whether carved by a woodcutter or sculptor, or fashioned by a philosopher or theologian. Calvin declares that only God can describe himself. Now, idolatry has very often received intellectual justification from more than a few people.

For example, I recall reading one justification of Hindu idolatry. The writer pointed out that many images, for example in Hindu temples, will have not two but eight or six hands. Supposedly this means that God is omnipotent, and it is a way of conveying that to the simple believers. Again others will show God with not only two eyes but perhaps a third eye or more. Again these rationalizers will say that this is designed to teach the simple person that God is unseen. Well, this type of justification is absurd. First of all, Hinduism has no concept of an omnipotent or an all seeing God; and second, even if one has in a particular religion that doctrine, God forbids any such representation of himself.

When the scripture declares in the Ten Commandments, ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images’, this is case law. Now case law gives us a minimal principle in order to establish a minimal case in order to establish a general principle. ‘Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn’, says that very ox, the animal that works for us, deserves something from what he works to produce. The (follows?) in this scripture tells us that the labor is worthy of his hire. It follows even more, then, that those who labor worthily for the Lord are worthy of double honor or double pay. This is case law.

So the simplest, crudest example of graven image is taken by the law, God declares it is forbidden. If such a simple and primitive thing is forbidden, it means the more elaborate things, the constructs of the human mind, of theology and philosophy, are forbidden. God, in other words, forbids idolatry in it’s every form. The presupposition behind idolatry is exactly what we’ve been talking about in the previous section. That man can know God exhaustively, so that he can take God and describe him fully in an image, which is neither carved by man or set forth by the logic of his mind, and he says, ‘Here is God defined.’

But when we began this series on the doctrine of God, remember, we dealt with Moses as God confronted him in the Sinai desert and he asked of God, “what is your name?” Names were definitions in Bible times. He asked God to define himself and God refused. He said, ‘I am that I am, I am He who Is. All things are defined by me, in other words, but I cannot be defined for to define is to set limitations and fences’. When I define a tree I define it in contradistinction to everything around it, when I define myself I am saying I am definable, there are limits to my being. But there are no limits to God. God went on to describe myself in his revelation, “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

Now, idolatry declares that God can be defined, either in a graven image or an intellectual or a theological image; but all we can do is to describe God as He himself reveals himself in his Word. Anything other than that is idolatry. How do we know God? Not as an object like a tree or a book. I can know you, and you can know me, by observing me, by studying me. But God is infinite, eternal, far beyond the ability of our mind - he is the ground of all knowledge. In Thy light shall we see light, David said. He is not an object, but the ground of all knowledge. We were all made by him. We know him inescapably because he reveals himself, but we can never know him exhaustively. We can never define him, put limits around him and say ‘thus far goes God and no further’.

When you define me, you put a name on me: R. J. Rushdoony. This means I am not John Jones, or Mike McGonny! I am limited. But how can you put a limit around God and say, ‘with this name, with this definition, with this logical analysis, with this image I have defined God. Here he is.’ That’s impossible. The very words whereby God declares himself in scripture, “the eternal one”, “I am the Lord, I change not, the same yesterday, today, and forever. All seeing, all wise.” Who from all eternity decrees all things that come to pass, Who knows the beginning and the end. How can you put a definition around him? A fence?

This is why idolatry is so radically anti-Biblical, anti-God. It tries to put a fence around God - a definition.

Man cannot know God exhaustively. But idolatry presupposes man’s ability to know God exhaustively and definitively. But God declares that he alone can declare his own council. In Isaiah we are told, in Isaiah 40:13-14, as God attacks the idolatry of the day he declares: “Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being his counsellor hath taught him? With whom took he counsel, and who instructed him, and taught him in the path of judgment, and taught him knowledge, and shewed to him the way of understanding?” No man, in other words, can enter into the council of the Lord. How can any man define him?

Well let us go further into the subject of idolatry: sophisticated idolatry. Men can go to the Bible and use the Bible to create idols. How so? If you take certain portions of the Bible and emphasize them to the exclusion of the rest then you are using material out of the Bible, apart from the whole of the Bible, to the exclusion of the rest.Then you are using material out of the Bible apart from the whole of the Bible to build an intellectual idol. Thus, the Arminians with their doctrine of God have created an idol. Some hyper-Calvinists have created idols. Why? They take one thing and they stress it to the exclusion of all else! That leads to an idol.

God is more than any one aspect of him, and if we take the Bible partially we use that to create an idol. All heresies result, by and large, from partial uses of the word of God to create idolatries. But furthermore, a false emphasis even on the whole word of God can lead to idolatry. Systematics distinguishes between the ontological Trinity and the economical Trinity. Now what does that mean? The ontological Trinity is God in himself, the economic Trinity is God in his revelation, in his manifestation. We can never see God in himself, but we can see the economical aspects of the Trinity, the work of the Trinity in relationship to us.

Now, Arminianism stresses the economical aspects of the life of the Trinity. God the Son is our savior...what God does for us. What the Spirit does for us. And it winds up by seeing the Bible in terms of man, and in terms of what is being done for man by God. So it uses the material of the Bible to create a idol and it has the economical life of the Trinity alone emphasized. Some Calvinists will do the same for the ontological aspects of the Trinity. They’ll take his sovereignty, or his omnipotence, or his eternal counsel; and this is all they’ll talk about, so that they become historically irrelevant - they do nothing in history.

One man, a reformed pastor, wrote to me not too long ago of some hyper-Calvinists with whom he was talking who were totally disinterested in abortion. They considered it an irrelevant subject. Why? Because they wanted to concentrate on the doctrines of the ontological Trinity. They are idolaters. They take one aspect of the totality of God and they concentrate on it. True, the ontological Trinity, God himself, is prior to God and his revelation... But as we approach God we cannot neglect one for the other. The word of God manifests the totality of God. It does not permit us to concentrate on one, to emphasize one at the cost of another. And so we have, when we have such an emphasis, idolatry.

It is idolatry thus, to emphasize any aspect of either the ontological or the economical Trinity; Christ as redeemer, God as sovereign, or predestination rather than sanctification, or sanctification to the exclusion of much else. Now in the economical Trinity there are sometimes subordination. God the Son in his work of redemption works under the Father. The Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son. This means that in their activity one subordinates himself to the other, but in the ontological Trinity, in the being of God, there is no subordination in the Father and the Son and the Spirit. They are eternally one, and eternally equal. The Son is eternally the Son.

You see, God’s economy, God’s manifestation of himself in history, is not something that is a Johnny come lately in the life of God. God didn’t suddenly think, about six or seven thousand years ago, ‘Hmm, let’s create a world. Let’s work out a plan of salvation.’ God didn’t, two thousand years ago, decide maybe that ‘God the Son better go down there and be incarnate - we’ve got to do something about the mess down there.’ No. Scripture tells us from all eternity, God so decreed it. So that, if we are to temporalize the idea, which is really impossible, we would have to say billions and trillions of years ago (if such a concept could be applied to the life of the Trinity) God had from all eternity created what he would do. The ontology and the economy of God cannot be separated, and the activity of God is not an afterthought in the life of God.

Thus we cannot appreciate the one or the other, nor separate them. Thus we cannot know God in terms of his actions alone, nor in terms of His being alone, but in terms of His total self revelation in his word. Otherwise we falsify and we fall into idolatry. Idolatry is both a result and a cause; idolatry begins, of course, with self worship. When man says ‘I will be God’. Calvin made clear that idolatry was not derived from ancestor worship; it was a common opinion as far back as Calvin’s day that man began with ancestor worship and little by little fell into idolatry. But Calvin says, and I state, “The true state of the case is, that the mind of man being full of pride and (commerity?), dares to concede of God according to its own standard.” Unquote.

Man projects his self worship into some form of idolatry. I pointed out that idolatry can be a graven image or a picture, a painted picture, or an intellectual thing. It can also be an institution. It can be the church or the state, and too often the church has become an idol. In some branches of the church the church is spoken of as a continuation of the incarnation. Most Protestants speak of the church as the body of Christ and they think, ‘we are the scriptural ones’. Are they? Well the church is spoken of as the body of Christ in Ephesians 1:23 and in Colossians 1:18 - and of course in 1st Corinthians 12:27, let’s concentrate on that.

Because they tell us, it’s a particular congregation here that is spoken of as the body of Christ. Is it so? Is Paul dealing with the local congregation as an institution or a community? Now there’s a difference between a community and an institution; a community can be an institution, but an institution is not necessarily a community. Moreover, what is Paul’s concern in the passage? 1st Corinthians 12:27. His concern is that the covenant people recognize that they are members one of another, that’s what he said. And that they are a community in Christ. Their life in not in the institution, nor in themselves, but in Jesus Christ who is both the head and the body. As a result, the focus of Paul’s statement when he speaks of the body of Christ is not in the community even, certainly not in the institution, but in the fact that they are members of Christ.

Now to make that institution or the community itself the body of Christ is idolatry. Because the members are engrafted into the body, are they not? Paul tells us that we are members of Christ by the adoption of grace. We are like a wild branch that is taken and grafted into the tree. The life is in the tree! Christ is himself the body and the head, we are his possession because the body, Paul says, is of Christ. It is his body and we are members by adoption, by grace, not by nature. Our gifts he says in the same chapter, 1st Corinthians 12:4, our gifts as members of that body are from God the Spirit, not from ourselves. Thus we can speak of the church as the body of Christ, use the words of scripture, but we’ve fallen into idolatry if we identify that body with an institution. The language of scripture is precise, it doesn’t allow us to appropriate that language for our creation, our institutions, for ourselves. To do so is idolatry.

Calvin put it this way, and I quote, “Whatever belongs to the Deity should not be transferred to another.” He says in full, and I quote, “We said at the beginning that the knowledge of God consists not in frigid speculation, but is accompanied by the worship of him. We also cursorily touched on the right method of worshipping him. I now only repeat in a few words; that whenever the scripture asserts that there is one God, it contends not only for the bare name, but also teaches that whatever belongs to the deity should not be transferred to another. This shows how pure religion differs from idolatry.” Unquote.

The Lord is very clear in his word. “Thou shalt have no other god before me.” How can we have other gods before him? With graven images, with institutional images, with painted or with intellectual images. By taking his name in vain and applying it to the things that are of us. You cannot put either God or his name or anything that is of him to an idolatrous use. Idolatry, thus, is strictly forbidden.

Are there any questions, now? Yes?