Kowting to Succulent Gods

Over the weekend, Daniel Ang and I dropped our second episode of season 4 of our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians, this time on the issue of idolatry.

In this episode we only briefly touched on the all too familiar idea of idolatry as simply the worship of false gods, an injunction one sees running right through the Torah or the first five books of the Old Testament. Important as that definition is, however, we explored how such a definition sidestepped the way otherwise faithful Christians can nonetheless fall into casual idolatry. 

I say casual, not simply because the examples are banal (we may or may not have looked at pickles as one example). Because they are banal, and because they are ubiquitous, we looked at how they might otherwise shape our hearts to treat these otherwise material things as simply more than material things (a thread that led us to talk about how logos have come to encapsulate the heavenward thrust of our material surrounds).

As such, our hearts would come to find a rest in these material things that we can only find in God. The only qualifier is that, as James K.A. Smith once commented, advertisers know this, and sometimes far better than most theologians. 

If I had it all over again, I would have included another facet of this resting, and that is that these material things are idols because they will end up becoming failed messiahs (a thread that I explored in A Theological Engagement with Pornography).

“Kowtowing to Succulent Gods” can be listened to in full on Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Podcasts.