At one of The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity’s (CBHD) recent theological bioethics roundtable book discussions,[1] the book under consideration was a recent release within the New Studies in Biblical Theology series (ed. D. A. Carson), Richard Lints’s Identity and Idolatry: The Image of God and Its Inversion (2015). Lints’s credentials as a systematic theologian make him a somewhat unique contributor to the series (mostly dominated by biblical scholars), and so we went in with expectant curiosity: how would a systematician handle the comprehensive and complex themes of the imago Dei and idolatry as they work themselves out across the canon of Scripture? The discussion group (an array of students, professors, and CBHD research staff spanning the disciplines of biblical studies, church history, and theology) concluded that Lints was both strongest and weakest exactly where we expected him to be: brilliant in sustained reflection on how the content of Scripture develops through redemptive history and connects to our contemporary situation, lacking in more substantive engagement with the biblical texts themselves in their immediate historical and literary context.
On the whole, though, the project succeeds: Lints provides us with some very keen insights into the way that our being made in God’s image and our post-Fall propensity to make and worship idols are more related than we first thought. At the same time he demonstrates that a central aspect of Christ’s redemptive work involves what he calls “inverting the inversion:” by becoming human as the perfect image of God, the Son reverses the post-Fall distortion of the imago Dei and reestablishes the possibility of becoming proper image bearers in the image of the Image. The last two chapters are particularly worth the price of admission, as Lints leaves the terrain of the biblical narrative and seeks to explore some contemporary implications for Christian identity and ethics as reconstituted image bearers amidst the “idolatries of consumption” embedded within the “plastic narratives” (by which Lints primarily means artificial constructs from Facebook to Disney World which attempt to imitate and even improve upon the real world, but are ultimately found to be shallow and distortive of the human heart) that dominate our cultural moment. There is much wisdom to be gleaned here, guided by the foundational and countercultural point that “a relationship to God is that which secures our identity as humans.”[2] And, while the explicit connections to bioethics were generally left for another discussion, the volume explores a number of important reflections on the image of God of relevance to Christian bioethics.
Lints takes a somewhat circuitous route from the biblical storyline to our own day, making a prolonged pit stop in the nineteenth century to examine what he calls the rise of suspicion and the “secular prophets” of Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. He is particularly interested in these pronounced critics of Christianity because of the way that they employ idolatry (an inherently religious category) as a means of critiquing religion itself, exposing the various claims of religious communities (Christian communities especially) as ultimately ideological at root. Lints summarizes their collective project as
borrowing the most powerful form of criticism against false religion . . . [and turning] the tool on its head. . . . [supposing] religious belief of every kind was intrinsically idolatrous. . . .because it manifested the disposition of all religious people to create a god in their own image. Religion and idolatry went hand in hand because they were identical—or so the secular prophets hoped to prove.[3]
Here Lints compellingly makes the case that a full understanding of the relationship between our identity as humans made in God’s image, the inversion of that image in the practice of idolatry, and the inversion of this inversion in Christ must grapple with the claims leveled by Christianity’s harshest critics.
And while Lints’s recognition of this fact is to be commended, it seems to me that he missed a great opportunity to guide the church into more substantial reflection on our identity within an age of pervasive idolatry. This age of pervasive idolatry finds many of its most vivid manifestations in our medical, scientific, and technological pursuits, in the idolatries of the autonomous self, and in the medical and technological remaking of ourselves and what it means to be human. Ultimately, he commends the secular prophets of the nineteenth century only in terms of the general warning they provide, believing they offer us “a powerful reminder of the theological temptations that befall the human heart in all ages.”[4] Indeed, while arguing that the “greatest minds of the modern era” made powerful prophetic critiques of the established church of their day that paralleled the Old Testament prophets’ broadside against the idolatry manifesting in Israel in the seventh and eighth centuries BC, Lints dismisses their efforts by saying that their “form of criticism withered away almost as quickly as it arose.”[5] In the midst of his discussion he leverages (albeit only in footnotes) some of the insights that philosopher Merold Westphal offered in his illuminating work Suspicion & Faith. But by the end of the book it is clear that Lints has failed to fully grasp and employ Westphal’s work regarding the secular prophets, which not only provides us with a closer reading of these great modern minds,[6] but also has the potential to strengthen Lints’s project of calling the church to reflect on the relationship between identity and idolatry for our ethical being in the world and our bioethical engagement in the late modern era. As such, Westphal’s work deserves a closer look as we seek to address and assess, with Lints, the crisis and possibility of Christian identity and ethics in our time.
Westphal’s work comes in a less orthodox form; indeed, he frames his Suspicion & Faith as providing forty-six (if one counts the forward and preface) Lenten reflections, believing that sustained attention to Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche (who he refers to as “the great modern theologians of original sin”) is one of the best sources for spurring on critical self-reflection and repentance within the church.[7] This conviction stems from his belief that Christians too quickly dismiss these “prophets of suspicion” when actually they do some very important work of sounding out idols (to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche) that continually exist within the church.
In countering such premature dismissal, Westphal posits a claim which is both shocking and scandalous: “My central thesis is that from a religious point of view the atheism of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche should be taken seriously as a stimulus to self-examination rather than refuted as an error.”[8] In short, he argues that there are times when we must learn not to refute the secular prophets, but to learn from them, especially when it comes to revealing idolatries (ideologies covered with a religious veneer) that continually lurk within. For instance, Westphal encourages us to hear Marx’s blistering critique of bourgeois Christianity, which reassures the wealthy they have received God’s blessing even as their perpetuate unjust economic systems that oppress and exploit the poor, and to ask whether his critique appropriately sounds out the ways that Christian faith and practice can serve as a religious cloak for the idols of mammon, comfort, and self-interest. Westphal holds that if we are to faithfully follow Christ in our lives and with our believing communities, we must grow in the art of self-critique prompted by the criticisms of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, striving “to acknowledge that [the secular prophets’] critique is all too true all too much of the time.”[9] It does not take much imagination to extend such critiques to contemporary attitudes about and use of medicine and technology.
Now, let’s return to Lints. It appears on a second pass that he is guilty of precisely Westphal’s concern that we too quickly dismiss the secular prophets rather than really hear from them. While Lints provides excellent summaries of their work and shows the direct connection between their critiques of idolatry and those of ancient Israel’s prophets, the closing remark in each section is one that ultimately sets aside their insights rather than leveraging them for Christian self-reflection today.
Of course there is a proper place for responding to the prophets of suspicion and refuting their claims to have found Christianity ultimately wanting and worthy of dismissal. But Lints’s project would have benefitted much from sitting in the uncomfortable presence of these prophets a little longer and allowing them to help us see: idolatry is a pervasive problem of the fallen human heart, even for those who have been renewed in Christ and are being conformed more and more to the image of the Image. These idolatries are no less of a temptation in our current medical and technological milieu.
This is indeed the very assumption of verses like 1 John 5:21 (“Dear children, keep yourselves from idols,” NIV) and we would do well to utilize (rather than prematurely set aside) any resources which remind us that we are never finished (until glory, that is) sounding out the idols that prevent us from worshiping the Triune God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. If we are to pursue Lints’s vision of inverting the inversion by conforming to Christ’s image more and more, then recognition of the contemporary idolatries that still haunt us is absolutely vital. The appearance of such idolatries vary according to time, place, and culture, but the root remains the same. And if we are to live distinctive lives marked by our identity in Christ rather than bowing down to the prevalent idolatries of our day, such idolatries must be seen, repented of and purged through the power of the Spirit as both the biblical and secular prophets prompt, and we must not be naïve as to how difficult and prolonged of a process this can be.
Which is to say: we need to recognize how significant the ongoing struggle between our identity in Christ and our deep-seated idolatries is for our ethics. If the battle between identity and idolatry is ultimately the front line of how distinctively we will live Christian lives before a watching world, the truth is we cannot afford to cut ourselves off from any resources which will help us better understand the terrain and protractedness of this war and its inevitable effect on our ethical decision making. The Scriptures assure us: we are being renewed in the image of the Image, and this will manifest in lives that will shine like stars in the sky (Phil. 2:15). But the prophets of suspicion (especially through the clarifying lens provided by Westphal) remind us that we have a long way to go in that renewal and that we may not be as far along as we want to believe. And interestingly, there is good reason to think that our ethics is one of the first arenas we should examine in determining where persistent idolatries dead-set against our identity in Christ may be exerting more sway over our decision making than we care to admit. In short, ethics is an arena of our lives where our oft-veiled idols exercise tremendous influence; and this very profound influence provides us a unique opportunity to actually sound out (and potentially root up!) these entrenched false gods.
Let’s examine the arena of Christian bioethics as a particular case study of this phenomenon. We should note that neither Identity and Idolatry nor Suspicion & Faith directly addresses the issues and idolatries particular to the bioethical arena. But it is my contention that, as companion pieces, the work of Lints and Westphal can go a long way in helping us get on with the task of sounding out the idols that are actually preventing us from properly pursuing the Christian bioethics that we outwardly espouse. In short, I believe Christian ethics in general and Christian bioethics specifically have much to gain from the insights that Lints and Westphal provide.
As just one illustrative example, let’s consider Lints’s discussion of the “idolatries of consumption” embedded within the “plastic narratives” that dominate our cultural moment, one where many are much more likely to view themselves as autonomous individuals capable of being remade into the image of a celebrity, or perhaps just a younger version of themselves, rather than as people whose ultimate telos is to be remade into the image of God in Christ. This is no doubt the pervasive inclination because of all the medical technologies and unprecedented digital or otherwise virtual worlds at our disposal: never before has the temptation been so strong, or the promises so lofty, to be able to enhance physical appearance or capacity, to avoid sickness and our mortality, and to disconnect from the embodied world which the biblical narrative assumes.
Lints is right on target in drawing our attention to this alarming state of affairs and better enabling Christians to see that the struggle between identity and idolatry is one that has an undeniable effect on our ethics. But it is Westphal’s insight which is so vital: that this preoccupation with altering the physical image or escaping into a virtual world is not something that merely exists out there in some vague cultural vacuum; it is in here as well, a preoccupation which so many Christians today still share over and against a concern to be (re)formed in godliness (1 Tim 4:8). We too are tempted by our MedTech world; we too ogle over the alluring power of social media more than we often let on; we too are given to worship the gods which enable escape into virtual reality over facing the harsh realities of God’s creation “bruised and broken by the Fall.” And so, yes, we need the help of the secular prophets to see where we honor God with our lips but our hearts are far from him. For Christians called to some form of bioethical engagement, it is all the better that other secular prophets emerge within the discipline of bioethics itself, for they would be the ones uniquely positioned to bring a well-honed hermeneutic of suspicion to bear on the areas of bioethics today where the church’s proclamation does not align with the church’s actions because deep-rooted idols still remain.
It is only after we have heard from these voices in all of their sharp specificity and heartless honesty, only after having thoroughly grappled with the idols still within, that we are able to begin the long obedience in the same direction of casting down these idols and seeking to cultivate a world in which they have increasingly lost their allure, in our own hearts, in our families, within our church communities, and even in our broadest social imaginaries. It is only after we confess our temptation to bow the knee to physical enhancement or digital security that we become empowered to topple these idolatries of consumption, trusting that the ways we have been created in the image of God and recreated in the image of the Image are indeed more sure than anything the plastic narratives of Google and Humanity+ could provide. Indeed, we come to see that the struggle between identity and idolatry, while it involves “flesh and blood,” is not ultimately about that flesh and blood being enhanced or denied: it is about those made in the imago Dei being remade to reflect the Image of the invisible God (Col 1:15–20).
As Lints goes to great lengths to show, this is a primary emphasis of the biblical narrative which stands in such stark contrast to the flimsy plastic narratives of our time. Grasping and living in light of this narrative, while recognizing where we are still tempted to disbelieve it in favor of idolatrous alternatives, is what enables us to break the stranglehold of pervasive idolatry. Indeed, Lints closes the book by reminding us that there is a remedy to the bonds of our most deeply rooted idols, “found in God’s redemptive grace in Christ.”[10] The remedy comes amidst the story “of God’s redemption from Genesis to consummation,” which “ought to be the heart of the church’s identity. . . . [reawakening] us to the power of the mega-narrative of being images of the living God.”[11] Only when we embrace this remedy by faith and orient our identity around this story will we be a people who engage culture in a transformed manner, seeking, by God’s grace, to invert the inversion in every sphere of the created order until the consummation of all things. Until then, we ought to live and labor as a people who continually sound out the idols (still) within, whether they are haunting our hearts, pervading our church communities, or dominating the landscape of our disciplines. We must sound them out with the help of prophets of suspicion wherever they may be found, trusting that this too is how we will be made more and more into the image of the Image. This is true of bioethics as with every other discipline, and in this sense it seems that Lints and Westphal have together provided a very important directive for the practice of Christian bioethics: continually sound out the idols within in order to more faithfully embody the image of the Image before a watching world.
[1] Since 2012 CBHD has hosted a series of book discussions referred to as the Theological Bioethics Roundtable Discussions to foster dialogue about and examination of critical works and topics at the intersection of biblical studies, theology, philosophy, and bioethics. CBHD research staff are joined by masters and doctoral students from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and Trinity Graduate School for these gatherings, which occur once or twice each semester.
[2] Richard Lints, Identity and Idolatry: The Image of God and Its Inversion (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2015), 153.
[3] Ibid., 133.
[4] Ibid., 129.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Westphal deals explicitly with Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, but does not provide direct treatment of Feuerbach. He does, however, note Feuerbach’s enduring significance and influence on all three of these figures.
[7] Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New York: Fordham University, 1998), 3.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 16, italics original.
[10] Lints, Identity and Idolatry, 171..
[11] Ibid., 172.
C. Ryan Fields, “Sounding Out the Idols (Still) Within: A Conversation with Richard Lints and Merold Westphal on Identity and Ethics,” Dignitas 25, no. 2 (2018): 10–13.
