Was ancient Israel, the place where that “morality was once revealed,” any different? Archaeology may be the closest we can get to Christian Smith-style sociological analysis of the Ancient Near East, offering evidence for actual religious practices as oppose to official theological belief. What do recent excavations tell us about ancient Israelite religion on the ground? Archaeologist William Dever (an authority on such matters) drives home the lessons of the dirt:
In ancient Israel, until the Exile, Asherah and Ba’al were not shadowy numina, dead and discredited gods of old Canaan. Rather the pair were potent rivals of [God] himself, and for the masses their cult, with its promise of integration with the very life-giving forces of Nature, remained an attractive alternative to the more austere religion and ethical demands of [official Israelite religion] (164).
Dever is frustrated by attempts to verify the Bible with the spade. “Nothing could be clearer evidence of the modern lack of faith than our… demands for archaeological ‘proof.’” Nevertheless, he suggests that pagan statuary discovered in Israelite sites “merely confirms what the Bible suggests – but downplays… In short, it demonstrates that the prophets knew what they were talking about” (166).
Like those prophets, we should lament that young adults today are marked not by catechized commitment, but by Moralistic (and Snycretistic) Therapeutic Deism. But there’s no reason to be surprised. Less demanding cultural defaults like MTD are ancient religion, not newfangled faith.
October 4th, 2011 | 8:47 am
I do not quite see that the worship of Asherah and Baal is a form of deism, morally therapeutic or otherwise!
October 4th, 2011 | 10:11 am
Yeah, Shmuel, apparently there’s “Christianity” and “Everything Else”, with no important distinctions whatsoever amongst the heathen.
October 4th, 2011 | 10:30 am
Being 2500 years apart, there are evident differences, but the similarity is this: They are both the less demanding default “religions” of the broader culture.
October 4th, 2011 | 10:45 am
[...] NEW UNDER THE SUN: “An Old Enemy.” Like those prophets, we should lament that young adults today are marked not by catechized [...]
October 4th, 2011 | 10:46 am
Verifying the Bible with the spade is not all that necessary for true believers, but it is very useful for non-believers who are considering Christianity’s plausibility, and for Christians who have come to doubt the plausibility of its
historicity due to their being “catechized” by those taking modern Scripture scholarship far more seriously than it deserves to be taken.
A noteworthy exception to this contemporary trend in Biblical scholarship is Professor K. A. Kitchen, “personal and Brunner Professor Emeritus of Egyptology and Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Archaeology, Classics, and Oriental Studies, University of Liverpool, England.”
That Kitchen’s demonstration of the plausibility of the Bible’s historicity is indeed a noteworthy exception is further discussed in a previous post appearing here:
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2011/08/25/first-links-08-25-11/
The Bible is definitely not something like Aesop’s Fables. It is not very useful fiction in that there is a moral to the story — a story inspired by God Himself — but fiction nonetheless. It is not that at all. This is because Christ is the “Lord of History,” and those portions of the Bible unanimously considered historical by the Church Fathers are just that. The Scriptures themselves allude Christ being the Lord of History:
The omnipotent and omniscient God has and continually “writes” history through His Word, not in symbols on some material medium, but in real events and real people who live and move and have their very being in Him, His providence always taking into consideration the very real effects of our free will upon that history. The portion of that history commonly referred to as “salvation history” has been recorded by divinely inspired humans in what we call “the Bible.” It is silly to think the omnipotent God, through His Son, the Lord of History, needed to inspire those humans to make up fictional stories. He inspired them to record on a material medium the history He wrote the way He alone “writes” history — in real events and real people, its veracity being such that it is rightly called “God’s Word.”
October 4th, 2011 | 11:06 am
Thanks for the link. Please notice how I followed up that quote with Dever’s suggestion that archaeology does in fact “demonstrate that the prophets knew what they were talking about.”
While it’s a complicated issue, another fine demonstration was when, at the crescendo of the Maximalist/Minimalist archaeological debates in the 1990s, this was discovered.
October 4th, 2011 | 11:54 am
Might we not stay a little longer in this much needed discussion? Too little is said about the ancient Canaanite religious practices, even in the Bible. This, despite The Lord’s admonition for his People to “dwell not among them”. We know that by dwelling among them, the Chosen Ones abandoned the Revealed One God to worship afar. Thus the necessity for the Prophets. I think there is much comparison to today, up to and including the need of the prevailing culture for child sacrifice.
October 4th, 2011 | 12:51 pm
Hello, John Hinshaw,
Continuing with your thought, I submit the following for consideration:
If those are the kinds of practices that brought down the wrath of God upon people who did not have the benefit of two thousand years of Christianity as we do, believers should not be at all surprised if God’s providence has major calamities in store for us who have no such excuse, since it seems that is what it will take to get our attention.
We even have our own contemporary version of copulation with animals. See:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0125_050125_chimeras.html
And of course, routinely taking the life of the innocent child in the womb would be the modern version of giving “thy seed to be consecrated to the idol Moloch.”
God’s inevitable judgment of us will really be His mercy far more than His wrath, His chastisements being the only thing that will get the attention of many who will otherwise be eternally lost.
October 4th, 2011 | 2:33 pm
After reading Brooks column, and how he seems to tie morality to religion, authority and costume, I guess that he and his fellow conservatives as are lost about “thinking moral issues” as is the American youth who link it with emotions and turn it into a subjective and merely private issue…
October 4th, 2011 | 5:44 pm
I appreciate Mr. Milliner’s response but I think it is important to use words like deism correctly. Think of how a word like fascism has become almost unusable in any serious sense because it has been used so sloppily and indiscriminately. The Stoics were actually much closer to deists than worshippers of Baal were, and the Stoics cannot, I think, be rightly accused of morally lax thinking. I would also add that deism has never been, it seems to me, the default religion of American culture where the overwhelming majority has always identified as Christian.
October 4th, 2011 | 9:48 pm
“I would also add that deism has never been, it seems to me, the default religion of American culture where the overwhelming majority has always identified as Christian.”
Not strict deism. But I do wonder when Christianity turns into a generic moralizing creed, it’s basically a deism that presents itself as “Christianity.” It could be argued this IS and arguably has always been the default religion of most “Christians.” The MTDs don’t self identify as “deists,” but rather as “Christians.”
October 5th, 2011 | 4:15 am
Perhaps not strictly Deism, but uncomfortably like the “rational piety” so caustically described by Mgr Ronald Knox:
“A religion without ” enthusiasm ” in the old sense, reserved in its self-expression, calculated to reinforce morality, chivalry, and the sense of truth, providing comfort in times of distress and a glow of contentment in declining years; supernatural in its nominal doctrines, yet on the whole rationalistic in its mode of approaching God: tolerant of other people’s tenets, yet sincere about its own, regular in church-going, generous to charities, ready to put up with the defects of the local clergyman.”
Making, in Mi ton’s words “a broad, easy, inoffensive Passage down to Hell.”
October 5th, 2011 | 5:13 pm
I agree idolatry and immorality are old enemies, but the form they take today is significant and new, and the form partly shapes appropriate responses.
C. S. Lewis notes in his Abolition of Man that there are at least three differences characterizing the modern period that are unprecedented in history. These are: 1) modern people generally do not fear the judgment of some divine being; 2) modern society is the first to deny that there was some sort of “Golden Age” (e.g. Garden of Eden) in the past from which we have fallen, believing instead a myth of Progress such that the past is deemed with suspicion by default and its inheritance regarded as worthless or even oppressive rather than treasured; 3) modern society is unprecedented in its abandonment of the quest to conform the self to an objective, normative order inherent in reality in favor of the drive to conform what is now believed to be an essentially meaningless reality of “raw material” to the desires of the autonomous self.
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