Transferring Our Hope

Idols are dangerous when a worshiper, having lost patience in God, transfers his hope and joy into a deity represented by a handmade thing and cries to it: “Awake and arise!” In this move, human anticipation and expectation animate the dead idol into a deceptive liar.

Whittled things become replacements for a seemingly far-off god the moment we implicitly expect our spectacles to arise and…