According to Keller, counterfeit gods, namely idols, are “any things so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living. An idol has such a controlling position in your heart that you can spend most of your passion and energy, your emotional and financial resources, on it without a second thought. It can be family and children, or career and making money, or achievement and critical acclaim, or saving “face” and social standing. It can be a romantic relationship, peer approval, competence and skill, secure and comfortable circumstances, your beauty or your brains, a great political or social cause, your morality and virtue, or even success in the Christian ministry”(xviii). Throughout the book, Keller repeatedly emphasizes that all idolatries enslave. In other words, the meaning of something becoming an idol in one’s life is that it has become an overwhelming desire and passion for one so much, that it controls everything in one’s life.
What is ironic is that even when one gets to possess what one has dearly wanted, the desire for which one expected to fulfill by having the object of such desire always remains unfulfilled. This realization has proven true in history many times. For Buddhism, this teaching has become one of its foundational principles that its practitioners and students practice distancing themselves from such desires and whatever pursuits deriving from them. At least in this regard Buddhism and Christianity are in mutual agreement with each other. If I were to frame this in the format of the famous fairy tale called the Sleeping Beauty, it would go as follows. After the sleeping beauty got tricked into the manipulative stratagem of the evil witch, the prince has had to overcome every single struggle and trouble so that he could reach back to the sleeping beauty, who by the way was one sole object of all his desires and hopes. Finally the prince got to marry the beauty who has now woken up from her long slumber, and the conclusion is supposed to be something like, and they lived together happily ever after… Yet Keller is saying that for both Buddhism (Keller doesn’t actually talk about Buddhism) and Christianity no matter what the object of one’s desire was, having that in one’s possession is not going to lead one to live happily ever after. In fact, there is no such thing as living happily ever after in actual life, unless the object of desire that we long to get has become changed. What Keller hopes to show his readers in this book is that how this repeatedly propounded axiom of all idolatries enslaving their worshippers could be concretely and confirmatively substantiated in the lives of moderns living in the 21st century. And at the same time, unlike the Buddhist teaching that commands to empty oneself, Keller argues that the Christian teaching is that first one needs to be filled with the love of God, through which one can attempt to put God as one’s priority in life
and accept the gospel of Jesus Christ, by which one could get a godly handle on resolving those issues of idols and idolatry.
Anna and Sally, Abraham and Jacob, and Jesus Christ
The reason that Keller was able to effectively communicate his broad claim is that he juxtaposes actual persons and their problems regarding idolatry to the biblical figures and narratives. (Doubtless the actual persons are given pseudonyms and Keller must have consulted every one of them before giving narratives about their problems.) Composed of seven chapters in total, this book unfolds its arguments this way in order to show persuasively that our stories are biblical stories, and biblical stories our stories. Due to the lack of space, I will discuss the four characters in the first two chapters, namely, Anna and Sally, whom Keller met through his ministry, and Abraham and Jacob, whom we are mostly familiar with through the Bible.
In chapter one, Keller talks about a woman named Anna, a mother whose burning desire was to have children. According to Keller, her dear wish came true, and she gave birth to two lovely children. Even so, owing to her perfectionistic desire for her children, she followed the dictation of her desire saying that her children should obey whatever her program for raising them is. Therefore, Anna means to carry out her desire of putting her children under complete control, as a result of which one of her children suffered from serious emotional problem, while the other was filled with anger toward indefinite number of people and even the world itself. This is a sad yet perfect example of how one person’s long held dream is turned into nightmare, i.e., idols and idolatry on her part.
In chapter two, Keller brings up a story of a woman named Sally, whose physical beauty was so stunning that she always drew men wherever she went. Because of her attractive appearance, she has learned to manipulate many men in the way she wanted them to be, yet at the same time, she enjoyed living that way so much that she almost got addicted to getting men’s praise and adoration. This has led her to put her worth and identity in having such relationships, which eventually she could not stand even one moment which she did not have any man to fall in love with her. Keller says, Sally’s worst nightmare became her being alone at any moment in her life that sometimes she even didn’t mind enduring through abusive relationships with men, as long as those guys soon after turned back to apologize to her and admired her once again, which is usually the first step of the vicious circle of any abusive relationship. Again, as with Anna’s example, this is how a romantic relationship could function as one’s idol in someone’s actual life story.
What Keller means to convey is how the definition of an idol given a brief description in the preface to the book could be actualized in our lives with all its destructive effects. And Keller goes on to say that the fountain of healing and restoration for all such idols and idolatries is to be found in accepting and relishing in the full and unconditional love of God revealed through Jesus Christ, that is, the gospel. For Anna, her frenetic and mad attachment to her children, after all, could be re-ordered through knowing the love of God who didn’t mind giving up on his one and only son Jesus Christ, prefigured in Abraham’s abandoning Isaac as a sacrificial object. For Sally, Keller says that her heart of finding who she is through love and acceptance of men was very similar to Leah’s heart whose longing for approval from Jacob she hoped to be fulfilled from giving birth to children, and such desire for obtaining one’s identity through romantic relationships could be reordered once Sally deeply experiences the love of Jesus Christ, who is her (and our) first and foremost bridegroom, which Sally then will be able to learn to see men as men, and nothing more.
Overall, what this book says is much more enriching and profound, so if any one of you finds this review intriguing in any way, the reviewer highly recommends that you sit down to read the book itself. You will be able to see the profound transforming power of the gospel as well as how each idol functions to destroy our lives, including yours.
LIKEELLUL