True religion

In the 2006 article in Past & Present I cited yesterday, Jonathan Sheehan traces the development of the “criterion of interiority” as a standard for judging true religion from false. One of the crucial developments were arguments like those of John Spencer’s 1685 On the Ritual Law of the Hebrews. The antiquarian Spencer, like Hobbes, blurred the distinction between idolatry and worship:

“In ‘Egypt and after they left Egypt’, Spencer insisted, the Israelites ‘were a people most dedicated to idols.’ Before captivity, the Jews had held ‘the lamp of divine wisdom’; afterwards they became an ‘Aegypticizing’ people. Seeing this transformation in his people, God gave the Jews the central objects of their ritual worship and instituted the ceremonial and moral laws that would control Jewish religious practice until the present day. These laws, Spencer argued, were neither inherently good (the Jewish view) nor evil (the Christian view). Instead, they were useful as tools to end idolatry among the Jews. They worked both as sticks to threaten Jews who fell into idolatry and as carrots to entice Israel, now addicted to Egyptian ways, to follow the ways of God. This double function generated the many parallels between Jewish and Egyptian ritual practice: the institution of the paschal lamb, for example, resuscitated a symbol familiar to the enslaved Hebrews — namely the ram of Ammon — but by sacrificing it, the Jews ‘reenact[ed] and reenforce[d] the separation from Egypt and from idolatry.’”

Not only were the rites of Jews and Egyptians the same. Their “sociological” function was similar:

The “chief function of these rites was the creation of distinctions. Nearly all of Spencer’s book thus focuses exactly on rites of distinction and the rhetoric of distinction suffuses his text: circumcision intends to ‘discriminate the sacred people of God from the idolaters’; the sabbath severs ‘the common cares and affairs of life from God and religion’; God provided dietary laws ‘to separate’ Jews and gentiles, and so on. Distinctions in time, place, between and among peoples: religion serves to mark the difference between all. But this tool of distinction was not unique to the Jews. For Jew and gentile alike, the ritual law was appropriate to the ‘primeval duties of man.’ Jews were not alone in performing circumcision: so did the ‘Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Colchi, the Ethiopians, [and] the Idumaeans’, among others. Although performed in the service of different gods, Jewish and Egyptian rituals were functionally congruent. Only this congruence made accommodation possible: the Hebrews were willing to accept the Mosaic Law precisely because it introduced no dissonance on the level of formal practice.”

From the outside, that is, from the stance of the anthropologist, the sociologist, or the scholar of religion, there was little difference between the two. Every religion had its “sacred” and its “profane”; “profane” was no longer reserved for false religion, and idolatry was incorporated into the larger, neutral category of “religion.” As Sheehan puts it, “the profane is shorn of its primally negative meaning, and that very ‘antithesis of religion’, idolatry, is transformed into a species of religion.”

Some of Spencer’s contemporaries saw what was happening, and objected: “The Calvinist John Edwards was particularly incensed, and his 1699 Compleat History: or, Survey of All the Dispensations and Methods of Religion railed against Spencer’s impiety on precisely this point. Spencer, declared Edwards, ‘makes the True God most diligently and precisely tread in the steps of the false Gods and Idols.’ Or, in a more thunderous tone: He labours to shew . . . that the most Holy and Tremendous things in our Religion are taken from the most prophane and impure practices of the worst of Heathens . . . God raked up all the Vain, Ludicrous, Superstitious, Impure, Obscene, Irreligious, Impious, Prophane, Idolatrous, Execrable, Magical, Devillish Customs which had been first invented, and afterwards constantly used by the most Barbarous Gentiles, the Scum of the World, the Dregs of Mankind, and out of all these patch’d up a great part of the Religion which he appointed his own People.’”

Others took Spencer’s work in stride, and even gave a quasi-Pauline stamp of approval to the their: “When the bishop of Oxford, Samuel Parker, praised Spencer for at last bringing ‘Wit, Sense, Reason, and Ingenuity into the Synagogue’, it was not his scholarship alone that was cherished. Rather, Parker embraced what he saw as the real implications of the argument, namely that ‘God permitted [the Jews] to retain several of their former Rites and Ceremonies in his new Worship’ and that these ceremonies were so common to all peoples that ‘they are call’d the Elements of the World.’”

All this set the conditions for the invention of an “‘intellectualist’ definition of true religion — usually meaning Christianity — in terms of interiority, belief and faith.” If true religion cannot be judged by the rites performed, then it can be distinguished from idolatry only by the attitude of the worshiper: The “criterion of interiority was summoned forth by anthropological analysis. Once the formal and ritual dimensions of Christianity were assimilated to those of the pagans, the interior life of faith served to distinguish Christianity from its spiritual competitors. Thus a Protestant theologian like Friedrich Schleiermacher, much later, was to decry all forms of ritual, even those prescribed by the Bible: ‘it is not the person who believes in a holy writing who has religion, but only the one who needs none and probably could make one for himself.’”

Modern notions of religion, conceptions of the relationship between religion and external forms, conceptions even of the relationship of religion and political life, all were forged in debates about idolatry, ritual, signs and sacraments. Sacramental theology is no backwater for antiquarians. It’s the cutting edge of the theology of culture and politics.