Thread by @timkellernyc

🧵-The thread on the ‘Third Way’ has been good. A lot of the pushback from "the Left" seems confused on idolatry.

Idolatry is false consciousness. The idol projects the illusion that it can heal & fix life in a way that only God can. It also leads us to reductionistic 1/

solutions that are too simplistic to work. Niebuhr writes: “Every form of modern secularism [that denies God] contains an implicit or explicit self-glorification and deification…” He names four kinds of idolatry in the modern world. 2/

1) Liberalism deifies human reason and science. It doesn’t realize that science can only tell us what ‘is’ but not what ‘ought’ to be. It is a necessary but also an insufficient guide to life. Moderns often fail to see that science cannot give meaning or purpose or morality. 3/

2) Fascism deifies and idolizes the dominant race and its culture and then marginalizes and excludes all others, leading to rampant inequality and to violence.

3) Expressivism—a modern form of romanticism-- deifies the “unique and vital force in the individual." 4/

It makes inner desires definitive—I create and live my own truth. Those who stop me are toxic.

Cultures where this idol is strong find their communal fabric falling apart due to the lack of shared values. 5/

Sum: “Every culture which is not confronted with the one holy God, the creator and judge of the world…ends in the sin of self-glorification." (From R. Niebuhr, “The Christian Church in a Secular Age”, in “The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr.") That's idolatry and it's in us all. 6/

Niebuhr had a fourth- (4)The Left, he writes, deifies the proletariat, seeing sin mainly in the powerful classes, under-estimating the sinfulness in the downtrodden’s hearts as well.