The Gospel of Water (as preached by an orthodox rebel)

"Harken unto Me, ye stouthearted that are far from righteousness: I bring near My righteousness; it shall not be far off, and My salvation shall not tarry...." Is. 46:12-13

This chapter of Isaiah devotes itself to two common themes of the whole book. The first is God's absolute uncategoricalness (vs, 5, 9) and the second is the idiocy and irony of idol worship (vs. 6-7). The former necessarily leads to the latter. God alone is the holy one, the one who is fundamentally other than and different from us. That is significant because of the contrast with our inherent weakness: we are naturally transgressors (vs. 8) and children of iniquity (Is. 53:6). That contrast leads straight to an unavoidable truth: we are incapable of saving ourselves, either individually or as a race.

That we cannot save ourselves is what creates the farce of idol worship. We worship things that we bought with our own money (from the vendor who made it), and we have to take care of it (moving it, cleaning it, maintaining it). The whole imbecilic display is still true today: we still worship at the altar of our own weakness, our own creations of money and sex and power and our best-life-now. Yet we are not our own salvation; even worse, we are our own damnation. If we are to be saved, then it must come from outside of ourselves, from One who is not like us, not weak like us. One who is strong and mighty to save.

God's omnipotence and our impotence are what make damnation so sad. We think we have found our salvation, our liberation from drudgery, despair, and guilt. We think we found it in that man, this woman, that cause, this movement, that career, this calling, that vice, this virtue. It is all folly, horribly sad folly. We think that we are drawing near to salvation, but we are far from it. We think we have found what will fix our souls, make us right, and give us peace. But behind all our idols and substitutions for God, there is only the same old gnawing self, never filled, always hungry, drinking up worlds of water and never quenching its thirst. How can it? In God alone is living water, the well that never runs dry. Our impotence means that we could never acquire so great a salvation on our own, but by His omnipotence He has come near, bringing His salvation with Him, and any one who listens can hear His call coming over the hills and cutting deep into your heart:

Ho! Everyone who thirsts,

come to the waters;

and he who has no money,

come, buy, and eat!

Come, buy wine and milk

without money and without price.

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,

and your labor for that which does not satisfy?

Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good,

and delight yourself in rich food.

Incline your ear, and come to me;

hear, that your soul may live....

(Isaiah 55:1-3a)

 

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013

 

The New Idolatry (A Philosophy of Potatoes, Part IV)

"They have not known nor understood...and none considers in his heart...[that] he feeds on ashes...." Is. 44:18-20

All things their Creator bless. All things signify and point back to their Origin. Their beauties suggest His Beauty. Their wonders speak to His Wonder. The summation of their good and incredible qualities serve as hints and clues to His Fountainhead of Incredible Goodness. Of course, this signification between creature and Creator has been damaged by the Fall, but it has not been utterly disconnected. The visible world still manifests His invisible attributes (Rom. 1:20). The heavens still declare the glory of God (Ps. 19:1-4), still sing their songs to Him, even if they're currently singing off key. One day, harmonization will be restored, and the music will be mended and made new. Until then, all the strained signification of creature and creation have the charm of an amateur orchestra: imperfect and thus finally dissatisfying, yet delightful in its own way and while it last. On this side of final redemption (Rom. 8:19-21), we must condescend a little to Sister Earth. She is trying the best that she can.

Now, idolatry is simply to confuse the creature for the Creator, the sign for the Origin. To put it another way, we believe that the buck stops "here" rather than "there". In ancient times, it was a matter of taking physical objects and making gods our of them (a contradictory process, as Is. 44:13-17 demonstrates). Today, however, idolatry has gotten more sophisticated. God has been dissolved and dismembered in the inherent polytheistic nature of postmodernism: every man and woman is his or her own god and can declare God to be anything they want. Rather than believing in special revelation (God's personal disclosure of Himself to us), we believe in special relativism (our personal disclosure of our self onto God). It is classic idolatry because of its circuitous nature: the individual makes the god, which technically makes them god, so they worship themselves when worshiping their own creation (effectively making them both the idolater and the idol!).

What makes this new idolatry unique to today, however, is that the centripetal force of idolatry has maximized (or rather, minimized) itself, collapsing into an absolute narcissism. In other words, we have cut out the middleman. Our ancestors worshiped themselves through carved chunks of wood and stone and metal. We, on the other hand, being far more efficient, dispense entirely with the chunks and get right to worshiping ourselves, recognizing ourselves alone as God. Of course, we don't call it "idolatry". We call it "standing for my rights," "self-realization," "expressing myself," etc. Regardless of what newspeak we use to justify it, it is still nothing more than idolatry brought to its logical conclusion: we are God, and we will have no other gods before us.

The new idolatry is the very pulse of our culture, of our generation. You do not need to find it in ivory towers or art house cinemas. Turn on the news and listen to the stories and pundits. Read the threads and metas of the whole of social media: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. Watch any sitcom, drama, or commercial on TV. The message is the same: we shall have no other gods before us. We shall do as we please, marry whom we please, have sex with whom we please, kill the inconvenient unborn as we please, do church as we please, do government as we please, and create a "God" who will unquestionably endorse all that we please. The pagans of antiquity will be our judges in the last day, for though they worshiped idols, they worshiped out of ignorance, truly believing that those idols they made with their own hands represented things bigger and greater than themselves. But for us, there is nothing bigger or greater than ourselves. The ancients made idols, but we are our own idols. They worshiped Moloch; we are Moloch, the ravenous, diabolical hunger, the living mouth and bottomless stomach that consumes all for itself alone, even to the point of consuming itself alone.

Naturally, we will starve in the end, for God alone is Substance and Fullness. All else besides Him is shadows and dust without Him. To feed on His bread and taste His wine is to find the true sustenance of the soul. To reject His feast is to feed on ashes, and can anything truer be said of our culture and generation than that it has glut itself on Nothingness?

-Jon Vowell (c) 2013