Biblical Politics?
Thus says the Lord, “Do not learn the way of the nations, and do not be terrified by the signs of the heavens although the nations are terrified by them;” Jeremiah 10:2 NASB
Nations – Have you considered “the way of the nations”? I’m sure we’ve all assumed we know what Jeremiah meant. He must have meant all those things that we find reprehensible in our world. Things like political corruption, bribes, godless education, abortion, fiscal oppression, racial inequity, the Roman Catholic Church (if you were a Fundamentalist); you can add more to your list, I’m sure. But is that what Jeremiah intended?
Jeremiah is the prophet who told the people to surrender and go to Babylon. That hardly sounds like resisting the way of the nations. When he elaborates what the people are to do when they are in exile, virtually every one of the actions requires some kind of cooperation or assimilation. But he was clear about one critical factor—idolatry. “. . . the idea [that] idolatry is counted as a sin for which the nations will be punished appears. . . For the first time, idolatry is given as a motive for punishing a gentile nation.”[1] For Jeremiah, exile is a necessary step in the fulfillment of Israel’s primary mission. “Jeremiah here adumbrates the idea of Israel’s mission among the nations; he is the father of the missionary idea. Isaiah had heralded the end of idolatry in an eschatological act of God; Jeremiah charges Israel with the task of carrying this message to the nations and thus take part in bringing them back to God.”[2]
“The way of the nations” isn’t about all the political, economic, ethnic, and religious issues we face (well, maybe some of them). It’s about not becoming pagan. Idolatry is the punishment for forgetting God, and this is what must be avoided at all costs.
What does it mean to be pagan? Kauffman fills in the definition:
“The pagan conceives of the gods as powers embodied in nature, or as separate beings connected with nature in some fashion. Deification of cosmic forces provides the soil for the growth of mythology.”[3]
The pagan world is filled with demons and spirits who bring evil against men and God, as if they had independent existence. The pagan believes in the power of the demonic. “ . . . one idea which is the distinguishing mark of pagan thought: the idea that there exists a realm of being prior to the gods and above them, upon which the gods depend, and whose decrees they must obey. Deity belongs to, and is derived from, a primordial realm.”[4]
The pagan world is a world of magic.
The pagan world believes in cosmic fate, astrological fortunes, and signs.
“The continuity of the divine and human realm is the basis of the pagan belief in apotheosis, in the possibility of man’s attaining godhood.”[5]
The pagan believes in predictive prophecy and seeks it in order to take advantage of his secret knowledge.
Paganism believes that man is capable of saving himself—in whatever forms this might be expressed.
Paganism believes that men are “destined” to sin by being born men. “The pagan view which links sin with a metaphysical evil principle views its harmful consequences as a natural, inevitable outcome. Sin is itself baleful, polluting; the sinner is automatically its victim.”[6]
The pagan believes he must appease God or be subject to God’s wrath.
The pagan imagines that he can worship God in any way he chooses.
The pagan believes that religious rites and rituals have spiritual efficacy.
The pagan allows religious syncretism, even if it involves only “divine” persons. “For genuine syncretism presupposes an essential parity between the deities to be amalgamated. Only so can they be integrated into a single divine order or an enlarged divine family. But when, as in Israel, there is a belief that only one being is supreme, that he is alone of his kind, and that all other cult objects are magical or lesser beings, no genuine syncretism is possible.”[7]
The pagan believes in charismatic prophets. “ . . . paganism does not know of a continuous, generations-long succession of prophets. Paganism created a mantic science that had permanence and fixity. But the pagan prophet, legislator, or founder of a religion was conceived of as endowed with a charism which was his alone. He incorporated a unique, self-contained divine power; therefore his ‘mission’ ended with him.”[8]
“Paganism knows of expiation, confession, and atonement, but is ignorant of repentance in the biblical sense.”[9]
“Pagan sanctity is rooted in nature and may therefore be found everywhere. Israelite sanctity is a creation of the will of God’s word.”[10]
The pagan practices funerary rites, believing that the dead have some kind of interaction with the living. “To paganism death was an introduction to the divine or demonic realm. The kingdom of the dead is an autonomous divine-demonic realm with its own laws and its own ruling god. Entering this kingdom, the soul becomes ‘divine’—a good or evil spirit empowered to work good and evil and fit to become an object of religious activity, to be propitiated or warded off. The higher pagan religions link redemption from death with the death of a god or his descent into the underworld; by ritual the god is delivered from death and resuscitated, and these same rituals open the way for men, too, to escape death’s clutches. When Israelite religion concentrated all divinity in YHWH, the spirits of the dead ceased being ‘gods’.”[11]
Enough? Do you see that our typical assumptions about the ways of the nations might be just that—assumptions, based entirely on reading Jeremiah as if he wrote yesterday’s Op Ed column? But when it comes to resisting the paganism that Jeremiah really meant, well, we’ve done our fair share of incorporating these ideas and practices into our religious worlds, haven’t we?
Topical Index: nations, paganism, Jeremiah 10:2
[1] Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, p. 424.
[2] Ibid., p. 425.
[3] Ibid., p. 8.
[4] Ibid., p. 21.
[5] Ibid., p. 36.
[6] Ibid., p. 76.
[7] Ibid., p. 146.
[8] Ibid., p. 213.
[9] Ibid., p. 284.
[10] Ibid., p. 29
[11] Ibid., p. 315.
