The central idea of Christianity is whether or not you love your neighbor and it is not whether or not you subscribe to a particular notion of God. The cross is the revelation of the love of God for us. Many religious persons have it reversed. For the religious person bound inextricably to dogmatic assertions about God the test is first to agree to propositions about God, then to love. But should not love come before dogma? If your neighbor is anyone regardless of proximity, socio-cultural status, race, etc. then you must love everyone. For when Christ was Crucified he did not save those who professed correct dogma, but came first to save those who were cast out because they did not have any dogmatic understanding of God at all and were excluded from the society inside the gates of the city who were revered for their knowledge of God and the Law. Christ included the excluded. The Cross includes and does not exclude, it is the radical essence of God's love. "For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly" (Rom. 5:6). As Barth says, "He died for us whilst 'we' – all that we are and have and do – were weak and godless. How then can this relation between Him and us – between Him, risen from the dead, and us, still involved in all questionable possibilities of a life which has not yet been illuminated by the light of his death – be fundamentally altered?" (The Epistle to the Romans, Oxford 6th Ed., 1968, p. 160). Placing dogmatic propositions about the love of God before the love of God itself is dogmatic idolatry. Excluding anyone from the Kingdom of God you profess based on dogmatic requirements alone is therefore an evil since it excludes God in order to exclude others who do not conform to the propositions about God.
Idolatry is why religion causes problems, harms people, and intensifies a negative response to it. Idolatry is still seen in a primeval view of something physical like the golden calf or a statue of Mary. But the religious have been lulled to sleep in not understanding that they can idolize their own ideas. When that happens, you must exclude and therefore harm others because persecution or disagreement of your ideas is a test for truth. Opposition and truth therefore co-terminate and become the essence of self-idolatry. If no one really opposes your idea, then it will become as one pinch of salt in 20 gallon vat of sauce – imperceptible and insignificant. But to turn your idea into a totem that all can see and then demanding that this is the way to know sacred reality apart from all other means; the consequence for not bowing before it, an extrication from any notion of what is right or good, is like tossing 10 pounds of raw meat into that vat and serving it to a life long vegetarian while convincing them in the midst of abdominal discomfort that it is the only thing good for them anymore. Religion becomes a means of status – of celebrity; a means of vanity; a means of replacing the imperceptible image of God with a structure of ideas that suit you – and in fact are you as a copy of yourself as an idealized image of what you look like perfected and in God's Kingdom for eternity. Dogmatic idolatry becomes a form of wicked self-idolatry posing as the revelation of God when it is the revelation of an idea of a notion of self.
Religion and the entire structure of belief in God so conceived as dogmatic idolatry can more subtly and more powerfully block one from knowledge of God for the end of this knowledge is knowledge of an idealized self. Not the true self; but a re-imagined self cast in the image of God. Imagining one's self in relation to God this way paradoxically eliminates the relationship between self and God for it eclipses the image of God with the image of the self. The relationship with God calls one's self into question; it fuels one's very existence. When the relationship between self and God collapses through dogmatic ideology, one's very existence is called into question. But here not by that which gives life, but that which gives nothing. As the serpent would eat its own tail dogmatic idolatry leads to death. Doctrine that demands an immutable and therefore eternal status replaces the eternal Word to which it is designed to give witness. As an imperfect witness divined by imperfect and fundamentally limited and contingent beings it must change as people change. This is the nature of ideas and how human notions about this or that reality reveal there contingency on reality as a whole. To ignore this fundament of human evolution is to deny humanity of its very being and therefore to deny human being from its access to God.
The contingency of human being and the realization of the very limitation of human knowing in relation to God who is an eternal an infinite limit to any knowledge of God in God's own self is paradoxically a knowledge that gives life. Relating to God through a knowledge of God that is understood to be contingent in itself is therefore sacramental – it is an icon. As with Christ, to know the limit of human being which is death, is to know the source of life who conquers death by calling the very essence of human being into question. Life therefore meets us in our death. And relating to our death as a possibility and necessity of our contingency is a source of life. It is that which gives life, for by relating to the necessity of death we understand what it means to be human and how temporary, limited, and contingent our ideas about the eternal must be. And it is only in the midst of this limit that God meets us and pierces through contingency to give a momentary glimpse of the eternal and infinite; a boundary only the person of the risen Christ has crossed.
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