Much of our external circumstances differ from how they were 2,000 years ago — largely, to our benefit. However, our internal lives are surprisingly similar. Our desires for money, sex, and war — and the extreme lengths we’re willing to go to get them — remain.
In this episode, you’ll hear from best-selling author and New Testament Scholar, N.T. Wright (Oxford). He suggests that the sacrifices we make for a “ideal” life are, in a way, worship. Our sacrifices may not be the burnt incense of ancient times, but, he says, our hearts are captivated by money, sex, and war just the same.
This Forum was held at Northwestern University in 2012 and originally titled “What Gods Do We Believe in Now?” Since then, it’s earned over 100,000 views on YouTube. Watch the full Forum — featuring great discussion with Dr. Gary Morson of Northwestern — here.
Aphrodite, Mammon, and Mars. These ancient and well-known gods have not gone away. They've not been banished upstairs. They are present and powerful, and all the more so for being unnamed and so unrecognized.
The very objectivity or neutrality of scientific knowledge as commonly conceived has played into the hands of the gods we secretly worship. The Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Jonathan Sacks, says it like this: “Science takes things to bits to see how they work. Religion puts them together to see what they mean. And they need each other.”
The great claim made by the early Christians was not so much that in and through Jesus they had a secret knowledge. Some people tried to go that route, but Paul dismissed it and said that was just the route of pride. The great claim was that in Jesus they had discovered a larger reality within which their own partial knowledge would make sense.
We mistake God for a distant, faceless bureaucrat. We've forgotten that, when the Scripture talks about the fear of the Lord, it doesn't mean a cringing, nervous, slavish state, but the reverence and awe properly due to the creator and sustainer of all things.
