Ancient Idols Revived

N.Y. Wright on modern idolatry::

These other gods are not strangers. The ancient world knew them well. Just to name the three most obvious: there are Mars, the god of war, Mammon, the god of money, and Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love.Today’s Western world hardly needs reminding about the place of Mammon, the worship of money, in our society. Britain, or rather London, has prided itself on being the financial capital of the world, and the major financial scandals and banking crises that have shaken our system over the last decade have done nothing to damage our faith in this ancient and yet very modern god. We still assume that though something has gone wrong, the only thing to do is to shore up the system and get it going again—despite the gross inequities, the countries still suffering from unpayable debt, the rising tide of poverty even in our affluent Western world, and so on. Perhaps it wouldn’t be straining the point to say that many students now hope, rightly or wrongly, that a degree will be a passport to a good job and a good salary, and that is justification enough. You can recognize the worship of Mammon precisely at the point when someone asks you to do a job for which you will be paid considerably less than you are at present. What would you say?

….These ancient and well-known gods have not gone away, have not been banished upstairs, but are present and powerful—all the more so for being unrecognized. In what sense are they divine? The ancients would have no trouble answering that. First, those who worship gods become like them; their characters are formed as they imitate the object of worship and imbibe its inner essence. Second, worshipping them demands sacrifices, and those sacrifices are often human. You hardly need me to spell out the point. How many million children, born or indeed unborn, have been sacrificed on the altar of Aphrodite, denied a secure upbringing because the demands of erotic desire keep one or both parents on the move? How many million lives have been blighted by money, whether by not having it or, worse, by having too much of it? (And if you think you can’t have too much of it, that just shows how deeply Mammon worship has soaked into us.)

And how many are being torn apart, as we speak, by the incessant demands of power, violence, and war? Now, please note: I am not saying sex is evil. I am not saying money is bad in itself. I am not even saying that there is never a place for force in defending the weak against violent evil or unjust tyranny. I am neither a killjoy, a Marxist, nor a pacifist. My point is that our society, claiming to have got rid of God upstairs so that we can live our own lives the way we want, corporately and individually, has in fact fallen back into the clutches of forces and energies that are bigger than ourselves, more powerful than the sum total of people who give them allegiance—forces we might as well recognize as gods.
Perhaps the convulsions we have gone through—the disasters that come from worshiping Mars, Mammon, and Aphrodite—are signs that the theological vacuum caused by separating god from the world is at last imploding. But do we know what to do under such circumstances? Have we got a road map to help us navigate such dangerous and complex territory?

N.T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture,, "Idolatry 2.0",, quoted at BibleGatewayBlog