Luke Ford

Greg Leake emails: Hi Luke,

I am always impressed by the intelligence and cogency of Marc Shapiro.

I do have a few clarifications. My time spent in philosophy was largely wasted on trying to figure out how to use up the GI Bill and pick up chicks. However, one of the important things i did learn is that one needs to define one’s terms if their ideas are to have any relevance at all. For example, what does one mean by “God”, “idols”, etc, ad infinitum. Dr. Johnson used to say, “Define your terms, gentlemen. It saves a lot of argument.”

In Hinduism we have the concept avataras, and in the Vedanta dictionary produced by Ernest Wood, he says that avataras are literally descenders, incarnations from above. “Men in general are moving upwards to higher intelligence, etc., in their series of births or incarnations, but some few in the course of history have been regarded as special descendents from the region of liberation for some beneficent purpose. Thus we find Shri Krishna — who is generally regarded as the fullest avatara (purna-avatara) –saying (Bhagavad Gita IV 7,8) that whenever there is a great collapse of dharma (q.v.) and an uprising of adharma, he emanates, or incarnates himself for the purpose of re-establishing dharma.”

For example, some Hindus regard Buddha as an avatar and revere him while rejecting the Buddhist religion. Would this incarnation be regarded as God or an incarnation of something else? Generally the incarnation is regarded as some aspect of Vishnu, but that takes us further afield than I plan to go at the moment.

Protestants who are not fundamentalists do not see “idol worship” in the way that Christian fundamentalists do. For example, someone who is driven by success would be seen as an idol worshiper, because his idea of financial achievement and his picture of himself surrounded by wealth would define the chief object of his aspiration, an idol between himself and God. To the non-fundamentalist this would be seen as idolotry. Many months ago you had this YouTube of a smoking-hot Orthodox Jewish girl who was a bombshell in every sense of the word saying publicly that she would toss Orthodox Judaism aside in a second if it meant she could model on Saturdays and live her life around a career of fame, money, sexiness, beauty, and success. From the Protestant view, this would be regarded as idolatry.

This is why famed theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said that people who were addicted to drugs or to sex or to some other compulsion were idolaters. Inasmuch as their addiction became the chief object of their intentions and completely obscured the larger part of their humanity that all was designed to be open freely to a relationship with God.

So you can see from these brief remarks that idolatry in non-fundamentalist Protestantism is theologically much more sophisticated than people griping about a statue.

And as far as Jesus being a idol is concerned, this also misinterprets Protestant theology. In A Handbook of Theological Terms by Van A. Harvey, he defines the well-known theological concept of the Protestant Principle:

“… The Protestant Principle may be negatively expressed as the protest against any absolute claim made for a finite reality, whether it be a church, a book, a symbol, a person, or an event. Positively, it may be expressed as the confession that grace is not bound to any finite form, that God is the inexhaustible power and ground of all being, and that the truest faith is just the one which has an element of self-negation in it, because it points beyond itself to that which is really ultimate. it is the embodiment of this Protestant Principle that makes the cross the center of true Christian faith … for Jesus is the Christ just because He ‘sacrificed himself as Jesus to himself as the Christ,’ because He did not draw men to himself, but pointed beyond himself to God.”

So as you can see, the Protestant Principle would not regard the human form of Jesus in absolute terms and see Jesus as someone who pointed beyond himself to God.

Also as you can see, any book would also be regarded as something of finite reality, whether it be the New Testament or the Torah.

It’s entirely possible that all these ideas could be reconciled with thoughtfulness and more refined definitions relative to the subject being critqued. However, on the surface of things other interpretations beyond what Mr. Shapiro has given would seem possible.

In his first lecture on R. Chaim Ozer Grodzinksi for Torah in Motion, history professor Marc B. Shapiro says: “He’s the only example of a Jewish pope. Not just a spiritual leader but a temporal leader. He was a leader not just religiously but politically, in a way that no other rabbi has been in history, certainly in the 20th century. He was important to the entire Orthodox community. You can’t compare him to Ovadiah Yosef or Rav Elyashiv because they only appeal to certain groups. The religious Zionists don’t care what Ovadiah Yosef or Rav Elyashiv say and these rabbis don’t care about the religious Zionists. Ovadiah Yosef comes closest to that, but even with him there are large segments of the population that don’t listen to him.”

“R. Chaim Ozer Grodzinksi was the first gadol Yisrael. He was the first universally recognized sage and leader.”

“He was viewed as the last word in halacha (Jewish law) in the 1920s and 1930s.”

“Rav Yitzchak Elchanan Spektor played this role [toward the end of the 19th century]. He was involved in politics.”

Rav Spektor did not have the influence of Rav Grodzinski for many reasons, including the lack of communication technology in Rav Spektor’s time and his lack of an organization to rival Agudath Yisrael (which got going in the 20th century).

“Rav Grodzinski was regarded as a leader by Jews of all sorts. He probably wrote 50 letters a day. They are not like the letters of any other gadolim… They have him as a political leader.”

“In one area, his great influence was negative in a way that no gadol Yisrael today would have that sort of influence. I refer to him squashing the plans to move the German Rabbinical Seminary to Israel. That was a terrible error that negatively affected Jewish life in Israel to this day.”

“When Rav Shach came out against moving a seminary to Jerusalem, nobody paid attention to him. If YU wants to open a branch, we’ll do what we want.”

In his first lecture on R. Chaim Ozer Grodzinksi for Torah in Motion, history professor Marc B. Shapiro says in 2010: “I canceled my New York Times subscription three years ago when on the day after the Israeli Day Parade [in New York], they had two pictures. One large picture in color on the front page of the Palestinian protesters, who maybe were 30, right next to the Neterei Karta. Underneath that was a small picture of the marchers (about 20,000 people in attendance). After that, I canceled my subscription except for Saturday and Sunday.

“I haven’t read Nicholas Kristof. Even when I was getting the New York Times, I decided a long time ago not to read the editorial page, certainly not the editorials on the left side.”