“It may sound strange, but I've always thought of myself as an ‘agnostic’ on a lot of issues.” Those words are taken directly from an email response I recently made to someone who was commenting on my blogging in “Authenticity and the Decline of American Christianity.”
There are, I believe, some very definite absolutes, but they are fewer than is often assumed and they can only be clung to by faith. Yet even as items obtained by faith, they will hold up to a high degree of honest human reasonableness, being that human reasonableness even in its fallen state still has the Imago Dei impression, particularly when it is honest. Beyond that, a healthy dose of skepticism is the order of the day. “Agnostic” essentially means you don’t know, a rather honest admission.
Jesus spent as much time knocking down supposed absolutes as he did establishing the few key ones needed in this life. In one of my other blogs, “The Gatekeeper’s Key,” I am taking a slow and steady pace through the Gospel of Luke. At this point we are early in the book (chapters 5 & 6) where Jesus deals extensively with the assumed absolutes of the religious leaders of his day and knocks them off their feet one by one.
When a person (or organization) stops questioning his or her own "absolute" positions, he or she falls into idolatry, something that we humans are so inclined to do, it is put right up at Number Two on the Top Ten of God’s laws. Number Three (“Don’t take God’s name in vain”) is closely related. Something we generally fail to notice, profanity and Idolatry are two forms of the same deceit.
The deceit is that somehow we can either create our own gods or we can fashion the one true God into one of our own liking, thus becoming in ourselves Lord of the gods, or god for ourselves. In this, the second and third commandments follow the first, which states that we are not to have any other gods but THE God, the God Abraham worshipped.
Nowadays, whenever Believers talk about these first three commandments and the breaking of them, reference is usually made to the ways unbelievers disobey these commands. There was a day when idolatry was seemingly easier to spot – images, crude or elaborately crafted, pleasantly or grotesquely fashioned, the stuff of National Geographic photos and missionary slides. In today’s increasingly secular world, the imagery is harder to spot, less material.
Likewise, the 3rd commandment is reduced to simple, concrete substance, as in profanity, swearing by God’s name and the like. When I was a kid, my grandmother wouldn’t even let me say “Mercy”. Words had to have direct purpose to the context and they certainly couldn’t mimic obvious profanity or vulgarity, something to which I find ironic in the now commonly accepted use of the military slang “Snafu.” My daughter came home from school recently muttering “Holy Shoe” as she tried to avoid saying what she’d been hearing all day long. We advised her to drop the “holy” at least.
The greatest danger in dishonoring these Commandments is not in flagrantly violating them like some drunken sailor or a pagan witchdoctor. The clear and present danger is in trivializing them, something that we as Believers are ever so inclined to do. Idolatry is not just about tribal images made of wood or stone and profanity is not just about using the name of God as some casual verbal ejaculation.
It is wise to remember that the Ten Commandments were given first and foremost to those who already believed in God, to the spiritually faithful. At their most essential level these commands speak directly to the temptations of Believers in all ages. That somehow we will, in our own minds, ascend to the throne that God alone can inhabit.
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