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Something about Psalm 82 keeps returning and returning to my mind. It's the way it deals with "gods." Here's how it opens: "God takes his stand in the council of heaven; he gives judgment in the midst of the gods." This harks back to a time when the Hebrews could actually contemplate a pantheon of gods. It was just important that God be the head god, so to speak. This is reflected even in the words of the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." But even in this Psalm a second view is presented: "Now I say to you, You are gods, and all of you children of the Most High; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals and fall like any prince." Who's this talking about? Gods? Or human beings? The Eastern Church talks about Christians becoming gods--"deification"--but they clearly are speaking figuratively to a certain extent. They never forget the distinction between the Creator and the creatures. Is this what the psalmist means?

I know little about what the Hebrews thought of other "gods' once they became thoroughly monotheistic. I'm also no expert on early Christian thought, but as far as I know it was Augustine who first thought that the gods of other religions were actually demons. Many of today's evangelical Christians probably follow Augustine on this one. But Augustine himself departed from this when he decided that many pagans who were actually quite compassionate and decent were actually serving God even though they thought they were following Mars or Diana or some other god. It seems never to have occurred to Augustine that this view conflicted with his idea that these other gods were demons. Even a mind as great as Augustine's has its blind spots.


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TheGreatDialogue said…
Somewhere at home, I will have to look for it, I have a CD of a lecture by a Secular-Biblical Scholar who makes the case that the Hebrews only became monotheists as a result of the captivities they had endured, which somehow led to the adherence to monotheism.....he gives some complex proofs for this, but I think we need to at least consider that the bible already explains how this was: Jehovah sets things in motion to bring the Israelites out of egypt, where they very likely were not monotheists - they struggle to abandon the ways they worshipped in egypt, and later through the years after entering Canaan....As for broadly classifying all pagan gods as having been demons, I am not absolutely sure every god was--some may have merely had no exisitence.
July 16, 2013 at 11:02 AM
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