Psalm 96
Psalm 96 engages a world that may strike us as quite foreign from ours. Of course, ancient Israel is distant in time and space, but its proneness to idolatry is not. Admittedly, the globalized, Westernized early 21st century has the reputation of being “secularized.” It is labeled neither as polytheistic nor as monotheistic. “Gods” seem largely irrelevant to the daily affairs of world technocratic capitalism. Of course, for example, businesspersons who negotiate with each other across polished conference tables would, by and large, never think of marking “none” on a survey of “religious affiliations.” They would mark “Christian” or “Muslim” or “Hindu” or “Jew” or another standard category. And yet, when children are taught how to make their way into and through the world of socio-economic interaction, “gods” seem not to figure concretely. Perhaps, however, that is only because we have so compartmentalized the term “gods” that we are blind to the actual “religious affiliation” of the globalized, Westernized early 21st century.
Psalm 96 helps illuminate this point, indirectly. Yahweh is declared there to be the savior, the holy one, the one whose mighty works make Yahweh’s holiness manifest. Yahweh is the God who in creating the lofty heavens, so far beyond our reach, has called us all to enter Yahweh’s holy temple and abide in holy tremulous joy and terror before the holy might and beauty of Yahweh there. “Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; / let the sea roar, and all that fills it; / let the field exult, and everything in it.”
In contrast are the “idols” (or more literally the “nothings”), the no-gods, the vain-gods, the empty “gods.” There is nothing there, where the gods are said to be, except a confidence that they are there, that they are something, that they have power and must be respected. They draw their strength from the readiness of their devotees to imagine a future that is achieved by adhering to an imagination in which they are in control—and then acting on that imagination. When children are taught how to make their way into and through the world of socio-economic interaction, they are taught to lean daily and concretely on the imagination that shapes everything done in this world of vain-gods. Yahweh, on the other hand, “is coming . . . .” The future is not built on our imagination, on our no-gods. The future rather comes, other than our presumed power and the presumed power of the no-gods who inhabit our dreams and entice us to join them in a dream world.
Is there anything comparable to no-gods in the globalized, Westernized world of the early 21st century? Indeed there is. It is so pervasive and so fills our dreams and so feeds our anxieties that we can hardly even begin to awaken to recognize that it is nothing apart from our belief that it is something, apart from the credence we give it, apart from credit. That no-god is . . . money (!) and the globalized, Westernized world of the early 21st century is utterly monetized. Of course, trusting in wealth is often said to be foolish or shortsighted, but trusting in money is not the same as trusting in wealth. Money is an utterly abstract unit of exchange, a number, an image on a coin or on paper, or an electronically encoded datum in a computer program. Money is what an alliance of public and private officials with force decree it is. Thus we surrender our children to this present evil age, when we teach them that the way to journey into and through the world of socio-economic interaction is by trusting in the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound. Money is nothing other than the imagination that says it is something. That, of course, is an imagination backed up by the threat of nationally and internationally authorized violence and thus the threat of the loss of goods, goods that have only an imposed relationship to money. And so, it is no “mere imagination.” Nonetheless, it is a no-god radically other than the Yahweh who “is coming.”
There is perhaps no greater challenge and no more urgent task in our time than to teach our children that money is a false god. The way to the future is not money. Indeed, the future is not ours to build. It is coming and it is coming for you and for me. It is a future that doesn’t need us to believe in it, that isn’t confined in our dreams. It is rather a future that is coming to judge us all, with grace and mercy, but without a price. Unless our children understand that, as Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “God has absolutely no understanding of money,” they will never understand the gospel.