DAY 153
CHALLENGE
“Why should we reject the gods and goddesses that are worshipped by many cultures? Why should the Christian God be the only one?”
DEFENSE
Divine revelation makes clear there is a single God who created the world.
God is infinite and uncreated, but there are also finite, created spirits known as angels (CCC 328–29). They are God’s servants and messengers (the word “angel”—Hebrew, mal’akh, Greek, angelos—means “messenger”). Some serve God but others have fallen and oppose him (CCC 391–93).
The Christian faith thus envisions a heavenly hierarchy with the in-finite, uncreated God at the top and created, finite spirits under him— some of whom have become evil. The good angels may be venerated as such, but they are merely servants of God and so are not to be given the worship owed to God (Col. 2:18; Rev. 19:10, 22:8–9).
By contrast, many in the Greco-Roman world acknowledged the existence of a single, supreme God but did not worship him. Instead, they worshipped lesser, created beings, such as Zeus (Jupiter) and Apollo. They also acknowledged the existence of inferior spirits, which could be good or evil and which were not worshipped (Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire, 12–13). In Greek, the term “god” (theos) applied to both the great God and the created ones, while the term “demon” (daimonion) applied to the inferior, potentially evil spirits.
Christians agreed there is a great God and that there are lesser spirits who could be called demons. The main issue was how to treat the middle category of finite “gods.”
Divine revelation made it clear only the true God is to be worshipped (Exod. 20:2–6; Deut. 5:6–10), and there are no other beings equal to him (Isa. 43:10, 44:6, 8). Therefore, Christians reasoned, the term “god” (theos) should not be applied to the pagan deities. To the extent they even exist, they would be inferior spirits or “demons” (daimoniōn; cf. 1 Cor. 10:20, MacMullen, 17–19).
The Christian critique of pagan deities thus is not that there aren’t finite, created spirits, but that they are fundamentally different from and inferior to God and not worthy of worship.