Polytheism and Pluralism
There have been many times when I’ve struggled to figure out what bearing many Old Testament passages have on my life today, in a radically different cultural setting. Israel was born into a nation of many gods, and called to a radical monotheism. Christians in most of the western world today are born into a culture that is largely devoid of a real concept of God. Alan Hirsch, however, points out in his book Forgotten Ways that perhaps this difference is less than we might think. Early Christians, Hirsch writes, proclaimed that Jesus is Lord not only for the sheer truthfulness of the statement, but also in opposition to the desire of the current government to have “lordship” over their lives.