Keller on discerning idols

In the epilogue of Counterfeit Gods Keller addresses the question "How can we discern our idols?"

Four ways to discern one's idols:

1. Consider your imagination. "...the true god of your heart is what your thoughts effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding your attention. What do you enjoy daydreaming about? What occupies your mind when you have nothing else to think about?...what do you habitually think about to get joy and comfort in the privacy of your heart?" (168)
2. Consider how you spend money. "Your money flows most effortlessly toward your heart's greatest love. In fact, the mark of am idol is that you spend too much money on it, and you must try to exercise self-control constantly...Our patterns of spending reveal our idols." (168)
3. Consider your daily functional salvation. "What are you really living for, what is your real-not your professed-god? A good way to discern this is how you respond to unanswered prayers and frustrated hopes...when you pray and work for something and you don't get it and you respond with explosive anger or deep despair, then you may have found your real god." (169)
4. Consider your most uncontrollable emotions. "Just as a fisherman looking for fish knows to go where the water is roiling, look for your idols at the bottom of your most painful emotions, especially those that never seem to lift and that drive you to do things you know are wrong." (169)

Andrew Naselli reviews Counterfeit Gods

Here is a book review of Timothy Keller's most recent book Counterfeit Gods. I found it at The Gospel Coalition website here.

This is Tim Keller’s third book published by Dutton. His first two were The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (2008)—a New York Times bestseller—and The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (2008). Counterfeit Gods is about our idols, namely, what they are, how to discern them, and how to remove and replace them.

Keller defines idols from multiple angles. “The human heart” is an “idol factory” that takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them. (p. xiv)

An idol is something we cannot live without. (p. xv)
We think that idols are bad things, but that is almost never the case. . . . Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life. (p. xvii)

[An idol is] anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give. A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living. . . . If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning in life, and identity, then it is an idol. (pp. xvii–xix)

Idolatry is always the reason we ever do anything wrong. . . . [Martin Luther argued that] the fundamental reason behind lawbreaking is idolatry. We never break the other commandments without breaking the first one. (pp. 165–66, emphasis in original)

Idolatry is not just a failure to obey God, it is a setting of the whole heart on something besides God. (p. 171)

Keller gives more than one typology of idolatry. Idols are personal, cultural, and intellectual (pp. xix–xx). Identifying our idols is complicated because they are complexly interwoven: theological, sexual, magic/ritual, political/economic, racial/national, relational, religious, philosophical, cultural, and deep (pp. 203–4n119). “Deep idols” are motivational drives and temperaments—such as power, approval, comfort, and control—that we make absolutes, and they seek fulfillment through “surface idols” like money, family, or careers (pp. 64–66). Counterfeit Gods focuses most on four idols: love, money, success, and power.

Diagnostic questions help us discern our idols (pp. xxi–xxii, 168–70). (1) What do you characteristically daydream about? (2) What do you most fear? What could you lose that would make life not worth living? (3) What fills you with irrational anger, anxiety, despondency, or guilt? (4) What do you effortlessly spend too much money on?

Keller illustrates his analysis of idolatry with stories about Bible characters: Abraham, Jacob, Leah, Zacchaeus, Naaman, Nebuchadnezzar, and Jonah. It occasionally seems like Keller turns to these stories to support his conclusions about idolatry rather than starting with the Bible to reach his conclusions, but perhaps that is a misperception stemming from the way he arranges the material.

Understanding, identifying, and even removing idols is not enough. They must be replaced, and Col 3:1–5 explains how: uproot idols by repentance, and replace them with rejoicing in Christ (pp. 171–73). But “be patient,” Keller warns, because “this process will take our entire lives” (p. 175).

Keller, who first pastored in Virginia and then planted Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan in 1989, writes with a mature pastoral warmth and insight. He offers an unusual blend of pastoral experience, theological acumen, penetrating cultural analysis, disarming explanations of views he rejects, clear prose, and compelling arguments. Counterfeit Gods is an incisive, accessible, and convicting exposé of our deeply rooted, widespread idolatry and what we should do about it.

From Counterfeit Gods

Jesus warns people more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it. Therefore we should all begin with a working hypothesis that "this could easily be a problem for me." If greed hides itself so deeply, no one should be confident that it is not a problem for them. (Keller, Timothy. Counterfeit Gods. Dutton: New York. 2009. p52)

The idol of success cannot be expelled, it must be replaced. The human heart's desire for a particular valuable object may be conquered, but its need to have some object is unconquerable. How can we fix our heart's fixation on doing "some great thing" in order to heal ourselves of our sense of inadequacy, in order to give our lives meaning? Only when we see what Jesus, our great Suffering Servant, has done for us will we finally understand why God's salvation does not require us to do "some great thing." We don't have to do it, because Jesus has. (93)

Our own "Isaacs"

The process of changing from a football player to a 'regular' civilian has been a difficult process; much more difficult than I had expected. Despite our best intentions, it seems we humans have a proclivity to making idols out of just about anything and everything in our lives. I know I do.

I found this excerpt from Counterfeit Gods by Timothy Keller both insightful and helpful.

Think of the many disappointments and troubles that beset us. Look at the more closely, and you will realize that most of the agonizing of them have to do with our own "Isaacs." In our lives there are always some things that we invest in to get a level of joy and fulfillment that only God can give. The most painful times in our lives are times in which our Isaacs, our idols, are being threatened or removed. When that happens we can respond in two ways. We can opt for bitterness and despair. We will feel entitled to wallow in those feelings, saying, "I've worked all my life to get to this place in my career, and now it's all gone!" or "I've slaved my whole life to give that girl a good life, and this is how she repays me!" We may feel at liberty to lie, cheat, take revenge, or throw away our principles in order to get some relief. Or we may simply live in permanent despondency.

Or else, like Abraham, you could take a walk up into the mountains. You could say, "I see that you may be calling me to live my life without something I never thought I could live without. But if you have, I have the only wealth, health, love honor, and security I really need and cannot lose." As many have learned and later taught, you don't realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have. (Keller, Timothy. Counterfeit Gods. Dutton: New York. 2009. p18-9)