“The essence of human sin is the refusal to honor the Creator-creature distinction.”
Peter Jones
The God of Sex — pg. 143
Fallen mankind can find several ways to deny the Creator-creature distinction (hereinafter referred to as C-c/d) and upon first encounter and upon initial examination those different ways look remarkably different. However, when these different ways to deny the C-c/d are looked at closely the differences that putatively mark them off as being radically different begin to evaporate to the point that these different ways of denying the C-c/d begins to look overwhelmingly the same.
One thing we need to note here before we begin to examine the different ways that the C-c/d can be denied we must understand that this denial is a denial that is limited to the religious component of a people but rather the way any given culture denies the C-c/d ends up shaping the whole life expression of the people who are participating in any one given specific denial of the C-c/d.
The first way that the C-c/d can be denied is found in classical animism where we have a kind of hyper divine immanentism. In pagan religion and societies that are animistic what happens is that C-c/d is denied by folding the Creator into the creature with the effect that all of nature becomes divinized. In animistic cultures you find streams, trees, animals, bugs, sun, stars, and people all seen as being alive w/ divinity. Often in these cultures the more status one has the more divine being it is thought that they contain. As in all the genres of the denial of the C-c/d that we shall be looking at what this leaves is a monism where all of reality is thought of and seen to be one.
In religions and cultures that are animistic the way that this C-c/d denial manifests itself typically by the presence of rigid caste systems. As mentioned earlier the belief typically is that the more status that some group has the more divinity that group therefore has. As such their status is locked into place so that the wealthy and highborn are seen as gods while the impoverished and the lowborn are perpetually locked into that status. Very little concern is evidenced for the lowborn since it is believed that they are in that position rightly due to the fact that they have so little divinity in them. This leads to a political system that is tyrannically pyramided with those castes w/ the most ontological being at the top and being in despotic control while the rest of the castes who have less divine being serving the purposes of their overlords.
Animistic cultures also are supercharged with the supernatural since everything is divine. Typically, this leads to lives spent consumed with placating the sundry gods and as such central figures in animistic cultures is the shaman or witch-doctor who is seen as being a kind of figure who has special control over the supernatural forces that everywhere are pressing in on people.
The second way that C-c/d can be denied is found in what appears to be the polar opposite of animism w/ its hyper divine immanentism. Instead of a hyper divine immanentism what this religious expression offers is hyper divine transcendence. Religious and culture expressions where we find this are those such as Islam and Neo-orthodoxy. Indeed, Islam came to the fore as a severe reaction against the animism that was prevalent in times of Mohammad the Prophet and Neo-orthodoxy found its footing in the early 20th century as a reaction against the hyper-immanentism of 18th and 19th century liberalism.
Now on first blush it wouldn’t seem that hyper transcendence would be a denial of the C-c/d since there is such emphasis on the Transcendence of God. However the denial of the C-c/d comes in due to the reality that the Creator becomes so transcendent from the creature that there is no longer any contact between Creator and creature. When the Creator is made so transcendent that there is no contact w/ the creature what happens is, as in animism, the creature is the one who becomes the Creator and the C-c/d is once again lost. So, even though these two worldview concepts of God are seemingly radically different (and they do present themselves differently to the discerning eye) in the end they come out to a very similar place, functionally speaking.
This functional similarity is seen in the kind of political structures that cultures build who deny the C-c/d via the hyper-transcendent. These cultures, not having a God concept will inevitably build political structures like animistic cultures that are tyrannical. With the loss of the Creator and his sovereignty, denizens of cultures that are hyper-transcendent will typically turn the State into God and the god-State will have the responsibility for creating reality, along with the necessary distinctions that reality requires to exist.
A third way that the C-c/d is denied was established by modernity. Modernity has been the approximately 225 year attempt to pretend that God does not exist. With the advent of the enlightenment man gave God his divorce papers and being at war w/ God man has closed down God’s embassy on earth. Putatively, God is neither hyper immanent nor hyper transcendent. God simply isn’t, or is irrational or God is dead.
However, in such a profession, god or some god concept does not go away. Like the other C-c/d denials we have looked at this C-c/d ends up en-goding man. Modernity is the age that has given us the great formal totalitarianisms of Robespierre, Marx, Lenin, Mao, Hitler, Gramsci, and a host of other. So, the common thread that we have thus far seen as evidence of the denial of the C-c/d is upheld. Religions and cultures that deny the C-c/d by pretending as if God doesn’t exist typically simply transfers the sovereignty and Creator status of God to the State.
Now one common strand we’ve seen between these three different ways to deny the C-c/d is the the political top down structures they each tend to build. However the similarities do not end there. Remember the effect of denying the C-c/d is the denial of the most fundamental of reality distinctions. When this most basic of distinctions is denied the effect of this macro-denial, when teased out to its logical and inevitable conclusion, is the micro-denial of all other distinctions. When the distinction between the C-c is denied then all other God ordained distinctions can be and often are denied as well.
When the C-c/d is denied then obviously God has been locked out of his creation and the consequence of that will be the increasingly widespread denial of all other divinely imposed and sanctioned distinctions. Concretely this means that in a culture that is working out the implications of its C-c/d denial is the most aberrant of embraces. In these kind of C-c/d denial cultures (quite regardless of just exactly how the C-c/d is manifesting itself) what happens is distinction like male and female begin to disappear and homosexuality becomes an increasingly familiar phenomenon. Distinctions like the uniqueness of marriage as being monogamous vs. polymorphous, polygamous, or polyandrous begin to be increasingly denied. Similarly, when the C-c/d is denied the distinctions between men and women as it relates to the God designed distinctions in terms of their physical, psychological, emotional distinctions are denied so that men and women begin to be seen as interchangeable parts in a monistic machine. This of course leads to feministic oriented cultures where women are seen as being perfectly capable of being head over men. Distinctions like the qualitative distinction between man and animal are denied w/ the result that organizations that advocate that animals have human rights begin to proliferate. When the C-c/d is denied then all bets are off for all other distinctions being maintained because when the C-c/d is denied the basis for all other distinctions lose their credibility.
Finally, another key distinction that become a casualty of the C-c/d denial is the distinction that distinguishes one religion from another religion. Biblical Christianity especially becomes the victim of this denial since Christianity alone teaches a hard exclusivity. (Indeed, I would suggest where hard exclusivity is sacrificed in Christianity it is a sign that the eroding drip of the C-c/d is doing its work.) This denial of the distinctions between religions thus allows room for a multi-culturalism that gives just a bare lip service on differences between faiths that create cultures and allows one mono-culture to be created by the defacto faith created from the assumed unity of many faiths.
In brief the denial of the C-c/d leads to an inescapable monism that leads to the autonomous imposition of reality distinctions by human agents who have been en-godded. Naturally, it is the consistent outworking of this C-c/d denial that has the West where it currently is, with its rampant Statism, Homosexuality, Gender confusion, Animal rights, multi-culturalism, etc.
In the next entry on this subject we will look at other ways in which the C-c/d can be played with and the implications that often follow from that.