nothing is yet in its true form

As I have been reading and thinking lately, I have begun to notice a pattern in the way people view and worship God. I suppose it would be more appropriate to say that a majority of people do not worship one God, but many different individual gods. Anyone who studies history is aware that most of the religions in human history have been polytheistic, that is having more than one god. When we study Egyptian, Greek or Roman mythologies, we see deities which all usually represent something different. When I think about some hypothetical reality where there are many gods each with their own sphere of control, unique personality, and level of affinity for humans, I must admit that I am not particularly comforted by divinity. Who wants to live in such a paranoid, inconsistent world? But nonetheless people embrace polytheism (in many different ways), and the reasoning behind this fact is what I intend to examine.

I would like to propose that people embrace polytheism for three major reasons. They are comprehension, comfort, and compatibility. People want to be able to fully comprehend our deities. We want to be able to understand and explain them. We also want to feel comfortable with whatever sort of divinity we are going to encounter. We don’t want any sort of surprises to shift the current paradigm. Lastly, we want to be compatible with our gods. One god gives us a much smaller chance of compatibility than many gods with their own variations.

In C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, the George MacDonald character says to the Lewis character, “You cannot understand eternal reality by definition.” We like to think that we have God figured out and thus we try to define Him. The problem with this goes to the very nature of definition. When we define something, we describe it by its purpose and its limitations. However, when we are speaking of an infinite being we have trouble narrowing down a concise purpose or establishing any limitation. I would propose that this is one problem that people use polytheism to try to solve. When we have many gods we can understand them better because we generally have them each serve a specific purpose that we can clearly identify. In ancient cultures nature was a great mystery and thus they created many gods to help them understand the goings on (i.e. Poseidon controls the seas, Zeus controls thunder). We create our own little systems with their own hierarchies of gods who understandable and explainable.

Stemming from the idea of comprehension, comfort is another reason people create their own gods to rule the world. We desperately want to feel good about this place we are in. When we comprehend our nice, neat deities with their beginnings and ends, we can be a lot more comfortable with ourselves. If I keep my gods in my proverbially pocket, I don’t have to worry about the unknown. In ancient Greek mythology the gods were concerned very little with human welfare and when they were it was a concern of wrath or anger. By being able to clearly identify what gods are responsible for what men are able to navigate their own world while stepping on as few of the gods’ toes as possible.

Completing the idea, men are attracted to polytheism because they have a better chance of finding compatibility with the divine. One god with a concrete attributes presents a problem to a person who likes to have things their own way. One god has implications, whereas many gods offer choice. If I don’t like god x, I will simply turn to god y to have my needs fulfilled. However, if god x is my only option, then perhaps the change is not required in the creator, but in the creature. One god might ask something of us rather than us asking of it.

I hope I have been able to offer some insight into the nature and reasoning behind man’s creation of many gods. But it would be easy to simply say, “Look how crazy the pagans are,” and completely miss the plank found in our own eye. We Christians (that is, followers of Christ) are equally guilty of the same crime. Though we profess to believe in one God eternally existent in three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we rarely worship Him and Him alone. First, we Christians have a difficult time serving our true master. John Calvin wrote in his Institutions of Christian Religion, that our hearts are idol factories. We will look to anything and everything before we will look to God. Anything can become God to us: money, sex, sports, fame, relationships, children, and the list goes on and on. This is the obvious instance of serving multiple gods in the Christian life, but there is another that has infiltrated the spirituality of following Christ.

What I am referring to can be best described as essence worship. Christians will fall victim to this trap, but surrender to it is not an acceptable option. Essence worship is when we take different attributes of God or the Christian life and we make them the god of our lives. For instance, I once had a conversation with a street preacher who goes out and preaches “the Gospel” on Friday nights near some local bars near my college. In our chat the man told me how God had called him to preach a specific message: a warning of God’s wrath on the sinners of the world. However, what he publicly declared did not speak of God’s plan for the redemption of mankind. What he claimed that God told him to preach is a half gospel, which is no gospel at all.

If we intend to follow Christ, we must be ever vigilant that we present Christ in His entirety. It would be easy to be caught up in one aspect of Christ, but that one aspect is not Christ himself. It could happen with anything-the Bible, the Spiritual Gifts, theology, particular ministries-and we are at constant risk of making something else our God. It is understandable that we struggle with this; the God of the universe is infinitely complex and there is always more to find of Him. In 1 Timothy Paul wrote, “Great is the mystery of godliness.” We will never be able to fully comprehend the greatness of God, but settling for just one part of Him is not only idolatry, it is also unacceptable.