My wife and I were laying down with my super, fantastic, aggressively cute, spirited, stubborn, manipulative, beautiful four year old first-born son Alexander. He had found a leftover sheet of six little Spiderman valentine's cards and pulled them apart. After examining each one carefully (when you tilt them Spiderman moves so it's really cool) he then proceeded to reconstruct them as they were together in the sheet before he pulled them apart, but in different configurations.
Four year olds and a bit younger are very particular about creating structure. They find random events and objects and find some way that makes sense to them to create an order of their experience. When they create by organizing, they do so intentionally, but also haphazardly. The plan develops as it all happens until things seem right. Then it's off to the next thing.
Not only was I watching this cute little kid create order out of disorder, intelligibility our of chaos, I was watching him as he pulled the pieces together with a story. His vocalizations told us and his own self what was happening. There was depth to it all. There were reasons for why he was doing things and it was all governed by the little seemingly nonsensical story he was telling himself as he put those little cards into an order, then pulled them apart, then handed out to my wife and I, and then he would instruct us to put in different locations. The kicker is that if what we did did not conform to the image he was trying to make, he would re-instruct us like a mildly annoyed teacher telling a student the same instruction for the second or third time.
My son was doing something very human – he was creating a world. He was developing an order of random things to make his life a little more satisfying. Without order and structure where we can predict what is going to happen next, everything is unintelligible and a mess. It is why human suffering as a reality is a problem for us becuase suffering is a sign of disorder, of something that does not make sense with out innate desire to have a sense of well-being and comfort with the environments that we inhabit. However, as Robert Jay Lifton has argued in his fantastic book The Protean Self the resilience in the human mind and self is to construct order in the midst of even the most awful disorder.
This is what theology is at its very root: theology is world construction. Theology is the mental projection of trying to make sense of a world in which there is a sacred and sublime presence that continually tosses everything comfortable and predictable asunder and into disarray. It is a human construction to control that which is utterly alien to what we can fully grasp in our daily experience. But because it is a fact of human living that makes sense, of a human experience that is intelligible to create order and create a world that feels like home, it is natural to rely on theological systems to make us feel "at home" with God.
The heart of idolatry is when we confuse the world we create with out theology with the God that these worlds exist only to serve and love. Theology is a medium for our world creation to meet the world that God is trying to create with us. the goal is for the worlds that we must create if we are humans trying to know God to conform to that same world that God is trying to create with people as the media for that world to taek shape among all of the people of the world.
Orthodoxy or, "right teaching", tends to boil the elements of faith down to a fine set of human created propositions that were constructed in order for one social group to make a world in which they felt "at home" with the world and God. The problem is when those structures of orthodoxy no longer feel like a world worth living in or that they actually interfere with the experience that persists between humanity and God. Now orthodoxy as "right teaching" should not be confused with "liberal" or "conservative" for every group of people will contruct its own version of orthodoxy at some point.
The question is, to borrow from Marshall McLuhan's aphorism, is the medium of the world that you have constructed in whole or in part viewed as a tentative medium for God to communicate and commune with you and others, or has that structure become the message itself? If we truly invite God into our presence in earnest, we must be willing to give up the worlds we have constructed and be willing to allow God to deconstruct our worlds as God wishes to do. Yet it is human nature to resist such disruption and deconstruction. However, this is what God demands of all of us if we are to say that we are faithful. Orthodoxy is useful, but it is faulty. Until those of us who hold to orthodox "non-negotiables" allow God to deconstruct what is comfortable and normal in the worlds we have constructed, we will only worship a hipper, sexier version of what we want to be; and that, is the heart of idolatry.
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