Planning on putting the wraps on Greg Boyd's "Repenting of Religion" today, so there's no time like the present to clip a few segments out for appreciation. As dumb luck would have it, Boyd's latest sermon was "Don't be Like the Pharisees" [mp3], which touched on some of the major elements of this book ... and this clip in particular.
Predictably, I'm enjoying this book far more than I thought I might at the outset. It definitely strikes me as a different read than "Myth of a Christian Nation" in that the language is designed more for those who are a bit more comfortable with church-laden language. Even though I comfortably reside in that niche, I tend to not read a lot of lit that's written that way. In this case, it just meant I had to warm up to the book a little once I got going with it. But like a lot of material that Boyd writes or speaks, it's rewarding as all get-out.
The Emptiness of Religious Idolatry (pg 89-90)
As said earlier, striving to get life from religious idols is just as spiritually pathological as is striving to get life from secular idols. If anything, Jesus suggested that those who strive to get life from religious idols are actually further from the true source of life precisely because religious idols don't appear to be idols to those who get life from them. Those who know they are sick are more likely to receive a physician, while those who mistakenly think they are healthy ignore him (Matt. 9:12). How it must have shocked the religious establishment of his day to hear Jesus proclaim that the prostitutes and tax collectors would enter the kingdom of God before the Pharisees (Matt. 21:31).
The real issue is not what kind of idols people embrace but whether they are trying to fill the void in their souls with an idol at all. So long as people strive to get life from an idol of any sort, they block themselves off from their true source of life.
Since the religious idol usually requires that their sense of worth is associated with their religious performance, they usually look good. Indeed, in all likelihood, they will look better than those who have a genuine relationship with God for the same reason the above-mentioned sociopathic husband would look better than most truly loving husbands. Looking good is the religious idolators' way of life. Like the sociopathic husband, they are vigilant about their own beliefs and behavior as well as those of other people. The Pharisees looked better than Jesus' disciples, and the Pharisees knew it.
In fact, however, this hypervigilance is evidence not of genuine spiritual health but of an inner emptiness and sickness. It is evidence of a spiritual pathology. The very attempt to fill the emptiness of their lives by their beliefs and behaviors rather than God prevents them from ever getting their emptiness really filled.
Not that the emptiness cannot be placated for periods of time; it can. If people's idolatrous religious strategies for getting life are successful, as they were with the Pharisees, these people will derive some surrogate life by believing they do all the right things, embrace all the right interpretations of Scripture, hold to all the right doctrines, engage in all the right rituals, and display the right spirituality. They will get even more surrogate-life by looking down on those who don't do and believe all the right things as they do. Indeed, they may experience even more surrogate life by entertaining a "holy anger" toward those who do not conform to their way of thinking and behaving (a fact that perhaps explains the remarkable divisiveness within Christianity). But the positive feelings offered by religious idols are fleeting. The emptiness returns, driving religious idolaters to further futile attempts to get life by their religion.
