Just Another Supplement
Many of you will not like what I have to say; but I believe it is the truth, and it needs to be said. Professors, administrators, and fellow students; even if we have never met, we all share in the friendship of God. But I agree with Aristotle when he said that we must honor the truth more highly than we do friends. So, here’s the truth as I see it.
We have a God problem. That is to say that we have a problem in the way that we relate to, talk about, and sell (yes, sell) God to each other and the world. More specifically, we have turned God into an idol, some thing we elevate to a place in our lives in the hope that it will provide us with ultimate satisfaction, happiness, fulfillment, comfort, peace, etc. An idol promises to give us life. It promises to satisfy our desires in an ultimate sense, in a way that nothing else can. Anything can be an idol; money, fame, prestige, health, beauty, a partner, and even God. When we treat God as a thing — as an object sought for gaining personal satisfaction in our search for meaning — God becomes an idol. For God is not a thing; there is no thinghood in God. Rather, God is that which calls us to relate to all things in a certain way. Put another way, God is the non-thing that organizes our relation to all things. But we have treated God as a thing — a product that will satisfy us — and this turns God into an idol.
At this point you are probably close to accusing me of being dramatic, nonsensical, and ridiculous. You want evidence; some “for instances” that explain just how we are committing this grave sin I speak of. I will offer two evidences of this idolatry of God. The first has to do with the way in which we have tried to sell God to each other. The second is what I will call a supplement, something we use when the God-product isn’t working the way we had hoped. For when this God-product fails to satisfy our desire and search for meaning by itself, we create supplements, or apps (if you will) as add-ons promised to complete the God-product experience. God is not enough, else we would have no need for these supplemental apps.
Several weeks ago we had a “church fair” in the Campus Center. Representatives from a dozen plus churches or faith groups set up tables filled with shiny flyers, pamphlets, posters, bagels, cookies, coffee, etc. One poster said:“What we can offer”. Let’s be honest: What is the point of a fair? Well, I participated in the Activities Fair, and the point was to present your club’s activity to interested parties, hoping to pique their interest with something you had to offer. In a sense, we were peddling a product, an activity, a form of entertainment. If fairs are events for advertising and selling products, what does this say about the church fair? What product were we selling to each other if not a God-product — a God-as-thing-to-be-peddled?
The thing with products is that they are never enough on their own. We need supplements. Any good salesperson knows this. An Apple product wouldn’t be an Apple product without the Apps. The iPhone would be a virtually useless, unsatisfying piece of metal and software if not for the infinite number of supplemental applications one can download and use. “Oh c’mon”, you say, “we don’t do this with God”! What, then, did people line up for hours a couple weekends ago to take part in? To worship God? Certainly not, for we could all do that in the privacy of our own homes or in our local churches. People lined up for a concert — a “Christian” concert — a supplement to the God-product unique to our modern, Western, would-be-relevant, form of Christianity.
Is the church fair fundamentally different than any other fair? No. Were the long, snaking, endless lines for TobyMac fundamentally different than what we see at the latest release of an Apple product? No. What are we selling? Why are we selling it? I fear that rather than approval, Jesus would have cause to invoke “den of thieves” language if he were to step foot on our campus. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.