Baal and Astarte
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Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome. Happy fertility goddess Ostara Day.
It is August, but we’re talking sort of about Easter today, which some people will not celebrate because it is obviously from the pagan ritual of celebrating the goddess Ishtar, the goddess of fertility.
That obviously means we can’t use the word. Even celebrating it is suspicious because the Bible never tells us to celebrate it.
I’ve always found it interesting too, where it’s like, “If you do this thing – you know it started out as this pagan ritual.”
It’s like, “Well, here’s the thing,” said in my best Monk impersonation voice. “You have to actually be aware that you’re worshiping a false deity to be guilty of worshiping a false deity,” which is another reason I don’t think the hyperdispensational “What is the mark of the beast going to be?” people don’t understand as well, is that you have to be aware that you’re taking on the mark of the beast for it to mean anything.
You mean if they slip it into my Social Security number or bank account that I’m okay?
So here’s the thing though. Even if you don’t recognize that the god you’re worshiping is false, if it’s a false god – you wouldn’t worship it if you thought it was false, right?
You still have to be aware that you are worshiping it, and you have to be purposefully doing so.
Oh, so the emphasis is on the worship here, that the worship is a knowing thing.
Yeah, the emphasis is upon the act of the will in being part of it. You can’t accidentally worship Eostre.
Right. I can do stretches and not accidentally do the Eastern yoga goddess Eostre?
We’re making our way through the book of Judges, and early on we are told that about every generation or every other generation God’s people, having been delivered in the past and having received God’s blessings for a generation, apostatized, and in their apostasy they would go after the local fertility gods, Baal and Ashtaroth.
And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the Lord and served Baalim, and they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, which brought them out of the land of Egypt, and followed other gods, of the gods of the people that were round about them, and bowed themselves unto them and provoked the Lord to anger. And they forsook the Lord, and served Baal and Ashtaroth.
And the anger of the Lord was hot against Israel, and he delivered them into the hands of spoilers that spoiled them, and he sold them into the hands of their enemies round about, so that they could not any longer stand before their enemies.
This is a pattern that Israel keeps going through, and the gods whose names come up most often – sometimes it’s just generic, the gods of the countries round about, or the gods of the Philistines and Assyrians and so on – but when any names are involved, the most common are Baal and Ashtaroth, or Baal and Asherah.
Asherah in the King James is usually rendered Grove because she was represented by a pole or a tree or something that we still don’t know a whole lot about, but the Hebrew word is Asherah and it’s in some sense a representation of the goddess who may or may not have been the consort of Baal or El or some other Canaanite deity.
We can file that under things that we can be glad we don’t know more about.
Yeah, we really don’t need to know a whole lot about Canaanite religion. Back in the ‘30s and ‘40s and maybe ‘50s, when Bible scholars or archeologists addressed Baal worship and Ashtaroth worship at all, they would generally go so far and then say, “And the rest is not fit for publication” or “not fit for polite speech” or “not fit to talk about in public” and just drop it.
I’m sure that left a lot of people puzzled, wondering “What was so evil you can’t even talk about it?” The point is you don’t need to know. Today the stuff that they did is like stuff that characters do on prime time TV, so it’s a little different.
So if we wanted to, could we go back to the sources that those authors in the ‘30s and ‘40s were using? What was it? How did they know it? And just because they didn’t tell us doesn’t mean that we can’t find out, right?
One assumes, but not all Bible commentators, for instance, footnote their work very well.
I’m reminded of a footnote that says, “This was once revealed to me in a dream.”
I’m actually not certain. Wherever I’ve seen it, it’s always been by itself without any reference to what book it’s in.
Isn’t that the chapter where she’s teaching you how to do footnotes and showing you how to reference everything?
She’s not only insisting that good writers footnote everything, she’s making fun of how overboard you can go with this, and that might be where that showed up. So we’ll throw that on the list of books referred to for the episode.
Some things about Baal worship. It is so vague, and the Bible deliberately does not give us a lot of information. For one, the Israelites didn’t need it. They already had way too much information. That was kind of the problem, or at least part of it. And what the Canaanites did was not significantly different from what other pagan nations did, so the gist of it, the main ideas are not hard to find.
We have a male side of the deity and we have a female side. They’re supposed to get together and be fertile, and their divine fertility is supposed to overflow into ours – the fertility of human bodies, of lands and the crops and the cattle and flocks and all that. So when the land is not producing, or women are not having children, or something like this, it becomes incumbent upon the individual worshiper or the king as the leader of his people to try to get the gods to get on with it, to present to the gods such an offering as will shake them up out of their cage and get them going, so that nature as we experience it will be fruitful again.
They’re nature deities – a male and female set. Male is the sunshine, the lightning, the thunder, all that is big and loud and violent, because obviously that’s male. And the female is the receptive quiet peaceful side, the fertility of Mother Earth, of the womb and of the fox and all of that. As we read through scripture, we do get a few cues here and there.
First things first, though. Baal is a title. It means lord. It’s like saying, “We have a god.”
So the question “which Baal?” is relevant, because every city had its own Baal, that is its lord of whatever, and its own Ashtaroth. They had multitudes of gods, but they were all more or less sorted out into male and female groups, so the titles Baal and Ashtaroth.
Having said that though – male and female, lord, and star I think is what Ashtaroth means, similar to Astarte, the Phoenician name for the female goddess – originally they weren’t gods like we think of. They weren’t like Loki as played by Tom Hiddleston. They weren’t charming, interesting individuals whose pictures you could draw and to whom you could send fan mail. These things were the forces of nature. Baal was the sunshine, was the rain, was the thunder. Ashtaroth was the fertility of man and beast and all of that.
That these things became personified is not surprising. It’s hard to get excited about, “Let’s go out and worship gravity!” It lacks something somehow.
But in time mythologies grew up around them, not nearly as interesting as the Greek myths, let alone the Norse myths, which are much more fascinating, but what the Canaanites were doing, in effect, was manipulating nature. They weren’t particularly creating relationships. “You need to have a relationship with Baal. Have you had a personal relationship with Astarte today?” It wasn’t that.
It wasn’t that they loved these beings or they loved these forces and in that sense worshiped them. The worship was the bribing, the begging, the threatening, the “Can’t we get something out of you if we do the right thing?”
One of the prize things that you in theory could do to get these forces’ attention was to yield up your firstborn child, especially your firstborn son, because anybody who would give up his firstborn son really means business. So child sacrifice was one of the more disgusting and horrific aspects of Baal worship, and particularly when Baal operates under the name Molech we see a good deal of it.
Modern archeologists are trying to backpedal on this and say, “Oh, no, no, no. That never really happened. Well, maybe now and then in rare cases, in extreme measures, but I mean who would really sacrifice their children? Nobody was that bad.”
G.K. Chesterton, on the other hand, has a chapter or two in The Everlasting Man where he contrasts Carthage and Rome. Now, being a good Roman Catholic he wants to kind of give some kudos to the Roman empire that preceded the Roman papacy. He knows that Rome was bad and pagan and all that, but it wasn’t that bad. So he has this whole chapter saying, “Yes, well, the Romans worshiped gods, but they were respectable gods. They were nice gods. I mean they were false gods but still they didn’t actually demand anything too terrible, and at the end of the day a man could go home to his farm and his gods, and we understand that and sympathize.
“Across the sea, however, was Carthage. These were Phoenicians. These were Canaanites. They sacrificed their children to Molech. Isn’t it a wonderful thing that Rome finally destroyed Carthage in a series of three wars, the Punic Wars, and removed this plague from the face of the planet? So we can give thanks to Rome, that its false gods got rid of the really demonic gods.”
Gilbert, I think your perspective here is just a little bit warped. It’s one thing to recognize that, yes indeed, there are degrees of evil. Some demons are worse than others. Jesus said so. The demon who gets kicked out and then eventually returns and finds its house swept and garnished, then goes out and gets seven devils more evil than himself – okay, so there are evil demons and there are yet more evil demons. They’re demons. You don’t need any of these things around.
Kind of skipping ahead, this is something important about Baal worship. First of all, it was atheistic because it denies the true God. It denies the creator God. It denies a single God. It emphasizes purely natural imminent forces. It’s an imminence religion in that regard, if you want to call that religion – ultimate concern. And yet it is magical because you use magic to control these things.
Magic being any method you use to try to influence and manipulate these forces, right?
Just a side note, that is one reason why the claims that things like Harry Potter or even Lord of the Rings, that some people admittedly consistently also deny – to say that those are witchcraft is absolutely nonsense.
Yeah, they don’t understand what witchcraft is. Side note – I was going someplace, but now that you pulled me aside – when Harry Potter first came out, I didn’t know a whole lot about it. I had people actually ask me and I was thinking, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But once I had read it – my wife and I as literature teachers thought this would probably be a good idea, since people would be asking my opinion – we actually enjoyed a lot of it. I thought she was a particularly good mystery writer. If she’d stop inventing adverbs randomly, she would have been a great mystery writer.
I read the magic, I read the fake Latin and said, “This is fake Latin. This bears no resemblance to much of anything,” but my concern was it’s amazing that people get all upset about, “They’re going to learn to practice witchcraft and they’re going to learn to chase demons.” Not that way. However, Harry Potter is a punk.
I had three very young girls at the time who were quite capable of reading, and I thought, “I do not want them hanging around with this punk. He’s a liar. He defies authority left and right. He’s got no respect for authority, and he’s not the guy I want them to hang around with. Now, when they get older they can read this on their own. That’s fine,” and we did that, and eventually they did read it and they liked it and that was that and they went on. It was no great influence on them. They appreciated it for what it was. We watched the movies and that was that and it’s gone. We’re not hanging up voodoo dolls or anything.
I think it was so ironic that so many people saw the fake magic as this great demonic threat, not realizing that who you hang out with is a much greater threat. To hang out with people who practice fake magic is one thing. To hang out with people who lie to the authority figures, their parents and teachers, that’s a real danger.
That kind of brings me to this, which was my original point. The Canaanite religion was atheistic. It was magical. It was secular in that it denied any transcendent meaning to life, and yet it was thoroughly demonic because demons took advantage of the situation and they did step in and they did make use of it.
We read later in the Psalms particularly, and I believe Deuteronomy, the children of Israel were told they sacrificed to demons, to devils, and not to God – to new gods lately came up. They gave their children to the devils, to the goat demons and such.
Yes, on the one hand this religion was utter nonsense. Sacrificing your child does not bring rain. And yet the demons saw an opening and they used it, and they used this religion and the limited amount to which God let them do magic in history to seduce and terrify and torment the whole planet for 1,000 years until Christ came, until the gospel came and shattered all that.
To read the pagan writings and take them seriously, to read for instance Socrates’ claims that, “The god who speaks in my head…” and all the philosophy majors blow it off like, “Oh, it’s a figure of speech. He’s talking about the voice of Christ.” He says he’s talking to a demon. Now, a demon didn’t mean to him what it means to us, but when Jesus and the New Testament writers wanted to say demon as in devil, they picked up the same Greek word and used it without hesitation. As far as they were concerned, these things that the Greeks called [Greek word 18;57] demons were fallen angels. They were dark angels. They were ministers of Satan. That was a reality, and until Christ came the world was basically occupied by terrorists, and Christ banished all that.
Here we can think of St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation of the Word, where one of his proofs that Jesus is really God is, “What shut down all your magic? What shut down all your oracles? Why can’t you find any oracles anymore? Why is Delphi silent? It’s because Christ came, because the gospel has come amongst you. Jesus won. They’re gone. They’re not doing much of anything anymore.”
We get all excited when we hear mission field stories of some little demonic manifestation. “Ooo, that’s cool. That’s scary!” The whole world used to be like that, and it’s not, and it’s not for a really good reason. It’s because Jesus won. Jesus died and he’s alive and these things are shut up.
That can take us to the primary Baal story in the Old Testament, which is Elijah on Mt. Carmel.
Before we get there can we talk about Gideon, because that’s a little bit closer chronologically. Gideon, after he obeyed the Lord and won the battle that he was initially called to fight, did he set up a calf? Am I remembering that correctly?
No, he set up an ephod, which has got to be one of the weirdest things. “You made a gold image of a robe or of a chest plate? What?”
His name, and the nickname his dad gave him, was Jerubbaal, which is “Let Baal plead” or “Here’s the guy who says let Baal defend himself, if he’s so great,” which is summing up what the name is supposed to be. One writer has called him “Baal fighter.” That’s not what it says, but it’s kind of the idea.
Gideon was an enemy, an opponent who brought down Baal. One of his first tasks was to bring down an Asherah pole and destroy an image of Baal in his father’s backyard, and he did. But unfortunately, at the end of things he does default a bit to the Canaanite religion in that after his last battle he says, “Can I have an earring of gold from all your captives?” and they do and he makes this image of an ephod.
The only ephod of any significance was the high priest’s, which contained the urim and the thummim, which were used to get yes and no answers from God. Basically he asks, “Can I make a gold Ouija board, please, so that I can be in contact with God better?”
But we do know that the people gave him the gold, and then he said, “Here, we’re going to worship Baal Berith,” right?
Yeah. There are hints of him wanting to establish dynasty. They asked him, “Will you be our king?”
“No, no, I will not be your king. My son will not be your king. God will be your king.”
He says all the right things. Then he names his son Abimelech, which means “My father is king,” and he goes and gets a bunch of concubines and has 70 kids. This is not good. One of them, Abimelech, does hang out with some of the local Canaanites who have taken the worship of Yahweh and merged it with Baal worship and they call their new version of God “Baal-Berith,” Baal of the covenant.
Which sounds really great if you translate it into English, “Lord of the covenant.” That sounds like God, but Yahweh or Jehovah – we have that as Lord in our Bibles, that was God’s name. That wasn’t just some stand-in word.
Right. We’ll be getting to Gideon before too long, but this is something that runs all the way through. The kings of Israel, the northern kingdom, deal with it. The kings of Judah deal with it. Even at what we would think would be high points in their history, it suddenly shows up again. They had a horrible time getting away from this.
As I was saying, the big influx of Baal worship comes when Ahab, the king of the north, marries Jezebel, who is the daughter of a man who was not only king of Tyre – I can’t remember if it was Tyre or Sidon, one of the two Phoenician cities – but he was also the high priest. We actually know him from secular history, and he’s connected historically to Dido, the Queen of Carthage that Aeneas runs into in his voyages, so we do have some historical context there.
This was a real guy, and Jezebel was a real woman who comes into Israel as queen through a political deal, and wants to fortify her position and her husband’s, and understands that Baal worship is a really good way to do that because Baal worship puts authority in the hands of royalty, because it’s the king’s job to make sure the land is prosperous and healthy and successful. Therefore, the king has to be an expert or be surrounded by experts – eggheads – on magic, on how to placate the Baals and their female counterparts.
How useful could they be? They didn’t even know what to do when the king liked Daniel more than them.
Yeah, they weren’t that good, but that was the theory, so Ahab buys into it. They get rid of all the prophets of God that they can. She sets out on a one-woman martyrdom team. Then Elijah by prayer calls for a famine, and after 3-1/2 years Ahab is ready to listen and to go along with his contest.
Elijah says, “Okay, we’re all going to get together at Mt. Carmel,” which is Phoenician territory, Canaanite territory. It’s a mountain, so it’s up high near the clouds and the thunderstorms. “You have all kinds of prophets of Baal. I’m the only one left on the other side, so you have home court advantage. We’re going to put some sacrifices there but not light them, and we’re going to call on the names of our gods, and whichever god answers by fire – we will let him be God.” The people think this is a great idea and Ahab goes along, because Ahab was very pliable, and we see a little touch of what Baal worship was like.
It’s not worship as we think of it, as giving thanks, expressing love and adoration to a person who we esteem as the greatest being possible. It’s “Okay Baal, we need something from you. Get with it, guy. We need this stuff. Our reputations are on the line. Our jobs are on the line. Our lives are probably on the line. We need some rain, so give us rain!”
From probably about 9 in the morning till noon they jump around and shout and call out, “Oh Baal, hear us! Oh Baal, hear us! Oh, hear us Baal! Oh, hear us Baal! Baal, Baal, hear us!”
It’s like that groundhog. Have you seen that groundhog that somebody gave a voice to, from a nature documentary? It’s like, “Allen! Allen! Allen!” It’s like that.
It’s like this, and they do it. They do it for a very long time. Then Elijah starts mocking them. “He’s a god. Surely he can pull this off. Maybe he’s sleeping and he needs to be awoken. Maybe he’s turned aside,” which means maybe he’s using the bathroom. “Maybe he’s gone out hunting. Yell louder!”
It’s also kind of humorous to imagine two potential realities behind the scene, which is either Baal going like, “All right, cool, we’re going to light…oops, it’s not working. Uhh, I can do this. I can do this! I’m Baal. I’m good. I’m cool. Something’s not working here today.”
The other one is just like God going, “Umm, uhh, what’s a really small angel? Can you go put him in a headlock for about four hours?”
Which is about what happens. The story goes on. The prophets, having failed and being mocked, start jumping and leaping at the altar. Then they pull out their little lancets and start cutting themselves and sprinkling their blood all over the place, figuring that sadomasochism, pain, shows of blood, and cutting oneself will get the attention of the gods. It gets people’s attention.
Yeah, it’s unnatural. The way to shake up nature is to do that which is unnatural. Ritual prostitution was a basic sacrament of Ashtaroth worship, but they were not beyond homosexual prostitution and bestiality, and of course child sacrifice, things that were anti-natural to shock nature into getting going. The Bible’s comment is, “There was none to hear, none to answer.”
I appreciate what you did, Bryan, because often people’s response is, “Well, of course not, because Baal is not real.” No, that’s not the point. There were demons there who wanted to intervene, who wanted to not lose this one, and God, as you say, basically sent little angels to put them into a headlock and shut them up. “No one’s talking here. No one’s saying a thing. Let them look like idiots until this is over, and then Elijah can deal with it.”
That in a nutshell is Baal worship. It is naturalistic. It is secular. It’s atheistic, and yet it’s magical. We can insert here all that Lewis wrote, both in Screwtape Letters and in That Hideous Strength about the materialist magician.
Yeah, but as a generic category in Screwtape. He says, “What happens when humans no longer believe in God, but do believe in demons?” They won’t call them demons. They’ll call them forces or power or natural energies, but they will in effect be seeking after demonic things. They think of parapsychology as a science, while denying the existence of God and the spirits.
Screwtape says, “When that comes, the end of the game is almost there. When we can shut the idea of God out of their minds and yet let them embrace demons, the game’s almost over.” Well, it’s not and we can see that, because that’s more or less what this was.
They’re dealing in natural forces. If you asked these guys, “Do you know you’re dealing with dark forces from hell?” they probably would say no.
Yeah. The more erudite would talk about etheric tensions and natural forces and gravitons and whatever, but in fact there were demons behind all of this, and God kept them on a short leash. Once Christ came he kept them on a much shorter leash. We don’t see this to any great extent anymore.
Before we get too far, can you finish the story of Elijah, because we didn’t finish.
Well, what happens is at the time of evening sacrifice Elijah blows the whistle and these bloody, battered, absolutely failed people have to leave the playing field, and he goes and finds the remnants of an old altar to Jehovah that had been torn down. He rebuilds it and whereas they were doing all this technique and all of this shouting and yelling and bloodletting and doing stuff, Elijah just comes and talks to God in what amounts to some very short sentences. He repeats himself only once. “Hear O Lord. Hear and send rain so that all these people will know that you are God, that I’m your prophet, and I’ve done all these things at your word,” beginning the covenant formula.
God is authority, he is the representative, the word of God is something they’re supposed to obey, and then he pleads forth the sanction, the blessing in this case of rain – that as his prayer had started this, now his prayer might end it.
In the meantime, he’s had them douse his sacrifice with all kinds of water and dug a trench around the altar to absorb it, so he’s really making it hard. And yet in response to that very simple personal prayer, God blasts the thing to pieces with fire from heaven, consumes the slain animal, the stones, the water in the trench, all of that, and all the people begin yelling, “The Lord, he is God. The Lord, he is God.”
Now, Elijah’s mistake was to think, “Oh, they’re all converted.” No, they were all impressed. They all like special effects. They would all be great candidates to go see Star Wars or a Marvel movie. Their team was disappointing.
This is not something that happens very often, but I’m sure it must. When you go to see a ball game like basketball, soccer or something, and your team is so absolutely lame and boring and doing nothing, you start rooting for the other team because they’re cool and showing sportsmanship and helping your guys get up off the field, and actually putting in their weaker players so you guys maybe have a chance of scoring something, you think, “Wow, what a cool team. I wish our guys were like that.”
The people of Israel were enthusiastic for the moment, and disappointed with their prophets, so when Elijah says, “Round them all up, I’m going to kill them,” they say okay, and he, in terms of biblical law, executes them as God’s own messenger.
And then comes the matter of rain. We’ve got a lightning strike here, but we need rain. He goes up on the mountain and he begins to pray, and after each little round of prayer he sends his servant, “Go look toward the ocean, toward the Mediterranean,” and nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. The seventh time he said, “There’s this little cloud like a man’s hand.” Elijah says, “That’s it. Go to the king and tell him, ‘You better get down fast before the rains make the roads impassable.’”
And as they’re collecting everything and everyone is fleeing the mountaintop, the thunderstorms come, the clouds dump their rain, and Elijah in the power of the Spirit runs before the chariots. He’s stoked. God is finally on the move.
Well, we’re going to have to wait a long time to hear the rest of the story and what comes in the next chapter, because Elijah has lessons to learn, which amounts to trying to force the hand of nature is not the same thing as knowing what God actually is planning on doing.
Yes, God lifted the curse. Yes, God sent rain because Elijah his friend asked him to, but it was not time for full-scale revival. God had other plans, and God was in complete control, and God was very present even in the rains, as he was in the drought. God’s hand was in all of these things. God rules nature. He rules it personally. It’s not something where it’s running on its own.
I think there are two points here. One has to do with how we understand science. One has to do with how we understand civil government. So help me remember those if I get lost.
With regard to science, we in the West have come to look upon nature as a construct of physical forces interacting with one another on the subatomic level, whether we’re talking electromagnetism or gravity or strong and weak forces or whatever, and these things are set in such a pattern, apparently since the Big Bang or, if you’re a Christian, you can say that God established this system which now runs more or less on autopilot, this whole thing of secondary causes that keeps going and keeps interacting. It’s sort of like God wrote a computer program, entered it into the system, punched Enter, and now it’s just running. This is called natural law.
Now, if you’re a Christian you say, “And God can interrupt the program, hit the Interrupt button, and do something different. That’s called a miracle. And then he can restart it again, but by and large he created the natural laws that run the universe.”
We’ve talked about this. This is deism, and Calvinism can fall into it if we do not balance our doctrine of predestination with a robust doctrine of providence.
Jezebel’s idea is that it’s the job of the State to ensure the health and safety and wellbeing of society through the technology at hand – in her case, magical technology, but technology nonetheless. In most lands of the ancient world, the kings and queens were gods and goddesses. They weren’t so much in Canaan. They weren’t divine persons, but they were divine agents. As long as they were in office, they were supposed to represent the powers of Baal and Ashtaroth, and they were supposed to do the magical rites that kept the world running, up to and including those rituals that spoke of the resurrection of the land each season.
So yes, the pagan world did have its cycle of death and resurrection. To what degree the modern notion of the dying and rising god was contemporary is something people debate, but let’s give it to them for a moment. Ezekiel speaks of women weeping for Tammuz, the lover of Ishtar who died and rose again, and his resurrection is celebrated in springtime.
Okay, wonderful, great. But the king and queen must keep that up and must do the rites or make sure that the rites are done, and they must enable their people to do these rites. So the king has his own spokesman. In Israel they were called prophets because Israel had a history of prophets. Elsewhere they were called priests because their job was to serve Baal.
Does this sound at all familiar, when the State takes to itself the job of using technology to maintain the health, welfare, and blessing of its people, even if it has to do horrific things to make that happen?
I think this is a good place to insert everything that Lewis says, and that Rushdoony says, for that matter, on sociology. Now, I believe there’s a place for Christian sociology. They basically didn’t. If you remember That Hideous Strength, there’s this one scene where Hingest confronts Mark Studdock, and Mark is kind of back on his heels. He says, “Well, I understand if you have qualms about what I do, but the sciences like sociology…” and Hingest says, “There are no sciences like sociology, and if I found that chemistry existed to take away from every Englishman his child and his land and his occupation and hand it to a bunch of professors and prigs, I’d give up chemistry and go raise flowers.” He calls out Mark. He says, “You think you can study man. I believe you can only get to know him, which is different.”
Lewis is very harsh on sociology, and he later was challenged by this. He said, “I’m not saying that sociology is a ticket to hell. I’m saying that any kind of invitation to hell in the 20th century will most certainly come dressed up as social planning by sociologists.”
And if we want to have a really spicy take in there, insert all the nation-building that the United States has been taking part in for the past 70 years.
As if the State by its technocracy and its military force can re-create nature and man and society in such a way that everybody can be well. We see this in our own country right now. You can argue from scripture that the State does have some responsibility. You really have to look between the lines, but I’ve written articles on this. It’s possible.
If you had a goring ox in their culture and people weren’t taking care of it properly, then the State could step in. Once it had done something that amounted to manslaughter, the State could step in and say kill the thing, or you should have been keeping it bound all this time. There’s that. And people could be quarantined for leprosy under certain circumstances. That’s about it.
There’s nothing about, “And King, go out and make sure everybody is healthy, wealthy, and wise. Provide for them education. Provide for them welfare.”
Yes. “All of these are rights, obviously. You have a right to not be afraid. You have a right to total health care, to total education.” None of this is what God ordains civil government for, and yet, like the pagan world, we expect everything from our gods and their servants, as long as they let us free to pursue our personal private vices, mostly in private, but if a few of us want to go out there and come out in the open and do them, well, ya know, let’s not be judgey.
“But as for me, just make sure my business won’t fail, I’ll have plenty of sales next year, no bad diseases will get to me, and then leave me alone in my sexual life and my drug habits and I’ll vote for you over and over and over again, because that’s freedom,” and that should be frightening to us.
And on a related note to that too, you used the word technocracy, where you have that with larger tech companies as well, essentially trying to steer the direction that culture goes in a not-so-light-handed way.
Yeah, the Terms of Service are almost more relevant to life than actual laws these days.
Exactly. There’s a Twitter account I love called “Crime-a-day” and every day they share a law that it would be a felony for you to commit, and it’s the most ridiculous things you could ever imagine that are considered felonies. It’s like soy milk has to have on its labeling a statement that it contains less than 5% of additives in order to be legally considered soymilk, and if you break that it’s a felony. Just really weird things.
Anyway, that was a side note. Basically, you have exactly that. You have social planning via State-sanctioned monopolies, not that the State is directly running them necessarily…
I think it’s more likely to be the other way around, given the nature of bureaucracy.
Basically they’ve set up laws that allow the existing players to maintain their hold and gain more of the market share essentially, so the State has directed it towards monopoly, and they’re the ones running the show.
That would be an interesting conversation by itself, and Lord willing someday we’ll get to it.
But Jesus reigns. There. We’ve ended on a very positive and very true note.
As opposed to the “out of time and space” resurrections of these mythical gods, Jesus came back to life in the real world, in time and history, having satisfied the penal demands of the law, and thus, yes, reigns. “All power is given to me in heaven and earth.” He sits at the right hand of the Father. And where we are inclined to trust humans, mere humans, lowly scummy humans to save us, Jesus bids us trust him to save us in all that this world was supposed to be.
That’s going to mean that the State has to stay and do its job and not try to take over everything. The book of Revelation shows us what happens when that goes on. We get this beast-like thing that wants to devour everything, starting with Christians. But when we yield to the Lamb, then governments shrink. The State doesn’t have to do everything, but it does have to enforce the law, and some of the very things you’re complaining about suddenly became a concern.
“Oh, you’re trying to bribe us. I think that is a felony. You’re trying to manipulate government. Yeah, I think maybe felony is in there someplace. Oh, you came up with drugs that actually kill people? Yeah, that’s probably murder. Let’s take that to trial and see.”
The State can go back to protecting us from bad guys, rather than trying to run our lives for us. But the scary thing for most people is that surrenders us to freedom. Now we have to feed ourselves, make our own medical decisions, pay for our own health insurance or however we’re going to go about it, or not have any. It becomes a question of what do you want? What are your choices? How do you want to serve God in the enormous fear of freedom that Jesus gives us? What’s he calling you to do?
Once we have the boundaries and it’s law, what’s his calling on your life? And what happens if you screw up? You start again, because he’s a God of second chances. He’s a God of resurrection. He’s a God of new life.
I don’t think I’ve recommended yet the show Yes, Minister and the sequel show, Yes, Prime Minister. Oh my goodness, I think it’s one of the best sitcoms ever written. James Cary, British sitcom writer and author of The Sacred Art of Joking, considers it the greatest sitcom ever. I’ll recommend his book some other time. It’s a fun one.
Yes, Minister stars Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne as the Minister for Administrative Affairs in England in the 1980s, I want to say early ‘80s or late ‘70s, and Nigel Hawthorne plays Sir Humphrey Appleby, his permanent secretary, sort of his assistant, the liaison between the Minister, who represents the government, and the Civil Service, who are all theoretically supposed to be following orders from the government. It is the most beautiful demonstration of the operation of bureaucracy that has ever been brought to light and it’s hilarious.
I like it because it kind of plays like a radio show almost. It’s a lot of dialogue, a lot of word play. There’s this character named Bernard, who is the Minister’s – we would call him a secretary. He manages his schedule and stuff, so he’s a little bit less involved in the Civil Service than Sir Humphrey, but he’s still a civil servant. That’s his employer.
You can kind of tell over the course of the show, Sir Humphrey went to Oxford and is very proud of it, and he looks down on the Minister because the Minister only went to the London School of Economics and doesn’t know any Greek. Then you get Bernard, who’s just fascinated by classics and it just bursts out at the oddest times and it’s delightful.
So that’s Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. There’s a particularly satisfying episode of Yes, Prime Minister called The Key, which I would recommend especially.
Yes. First a little bit of back story of why I’m recommending this. My fiancée had a friend come and visit us, and basically we made a reference to the item that I’m going to recommend. She’s from Africa originally and she does not know everything that is popular in American culture from the past 30 years, so I went into my room where I have this and I said, “You should just open up to the first page and just start reading this.”
The thing that I recommended to her and now to all of you is Calvin & Hobbes. We got to explain where Calvin & Hobbes got their respective names from as well, and it was very fun to introduce someone to that, so I’m going to do it again.
Well, this is bizarre and it’s kind of a tribute to some of Bryan’s remarks, a last-minute thing. There is a book by I believe he was a Libertarian in the 20th century. It’s called The Triumph of Conservatism. He may not have been a Libertarian. He may actually have been kind of a leftist, I don’t remember, but that doesn’t matter. By conservatism he meant not what we think of. He meant the Eastern establishment. The sub-title is A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916.
His argument is – rather than as we usually think it, the robber barons, the Carnegies and Rockefellers and Fords and such – it’s not that they used capitalism to crawl to the top and kick everyone off and, “Oh, aren’t we glad the civil government finally reined them in.” His argument is, “No, what they did when they realized that they were in danger of the free market of competition, they went to people within the government and said, ‘We will fund your next campaign if you will pass through these bills to regulate us.’”
I appreciated the way Bryan described it, which means “We just all got grandfathered in, but anybody new is going to have to jump through all of these hurdles before they can even begin to challenge us.” So the government creates the monopoly that it claims to be busting.
That’s The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History 1900-1916 by Gabriel Kolko. It’s been a long time since I’ve read him. He’s certainly readable for a history major or poli-sci major. I don’t know if everybody would enjoy him, but if you want to understand the shift out of the 19th century into the 20th century, and how Wall Street got to be Wall Street, and how our government came under the thumb of bankers and industrialists, this is worth your time, so there you go.
Right, okay. I do know this one. I have the book, I just didn’t recognize the author’s name. Yeah, very much.
Thank you, guys, so much. This has been a wonderful conversation about death and magic and all sorts of things, but also the resurrection of Christ.
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