Читать книгу Salvation Story - David R. Froemming - Страница 12

4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Eric Fromm argues that moving from idols to the nameless God of becoming is our being moved from alienation of our self into freedom. It marks an evolution from gods that are material or human to the presence of being engaged in justice, love, and forgiveness. Idols also often represent the authoritarian leaders we cling to out of fear and anxiety. The God that is becoming empowers us to be free from the slavery of idolatry and the power of fear.31

Working in close conjunction with Fromm, Paul Tillich sees much of religion as a place of escape from fear and anxiety. Tillich argues that the presence of God is the presence of “the courage to be” despite the threat of non-being and death.32 It is my wager that it is our human mimetic rivalry over objects that is tied in with the creation of our idols of power, our fearful obedience to their authoritarian power, and the violence and death that this produces. The biblical salvation story is the encounter with a God who is the source of our courage to live for others, life, and world. This courage is indeed faith, no longer the blind power of human rivalry, but the ability to love, forgive, and stand for social justice.

Fromm concludes that the problem with idolatry is that all our self goes into things, instead of into other people. The self that is free from the idols of power and anxiety, the self that is sane, is the self that is set free from conformity to fear and can now love others.33 It is this God that is being revealed to Moses in the burning bush. It is this God that frees the Israelites from slavery in Pharaoh’s Egypt. Like the God we find in the prophet Isaiah, this God in the book of Exodus “who is becoming” is found in the powers of nature.

31. Fromm, You Shall be as Gods, 17–51.

32. Tillich, The Courage to Be, 49–89.

33. Fromm, The Sane Society, 112–84.