Rich Bledsoe agreed with my analysis of 1-2 Kings and the divided church, and offers these further reflections on Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism. The remainder of this post is from Rich.

Van Leeuwen in his magisterial CHRISTIANITY IN WORLD HISTORY: The Meeting of the Faiths of East and West. , points out that 70 AD is the definitive end of all temples. Both Rome and Orthodoxy (Christendom and Byzantium) were still attempts at least partially to hold on to the earthly temple. But we don’t need a Temple now, we don’t need a Vatican, or some form of “world headquarters” for the church, because “world headquarters” is the New Jerusalem, which has now “come down from Heaven.” It is literally Corporate Headquarters, and every local church now functions as a “local office” with all of the legal rights and responsibilities that Headquarters has. Corporate law is nothing more than a transcription of this reality. This of course, raises the question as to whether the local office of the church is now ruled by a Text, a Book, or not, and whether that is possible (Protestants say “Yes,” Rome and Orthodoxy say, “No.”)

“High places” belonged to the childhood of the human race (cf. Galatians 4). The idolatries practiced by Rome and Orthodoxy, are childish practices.

When such childishness is taken up again in adulthood, the guilt is multiplied. (Evil is practicing what is immature in adulthood—it ceases to be immature and becomes evil, the evacuating something of goodness, and practicing it with fervor.)

But I think the real crisis for Rome and Orthodoxy is not being played out in tribal and original participation Africa, but in final participation Western Europe and United States. I am not sure we are psychically capable of believing what Frankish tribesmen, or even Irish peasants of 150 years ago, were capable of believing. I know we are not capable of believing what New Dehli taxi drivers are capable of believing about the idols on their dashboards.

Modern ideology is of course, what modern and sophisticated idolatry really is. It is a series of mental constructs, not golden, or silver, or brass, or wooden, or painted images that can be seen and felt. Hence, what I wonder is, is Romanism and Orthodoxy, while keeping the outward accoutrements of childish idolatry, really transformed into something that is an ideology? Is there now in the West an ideology of Romanism, and of Orthodoxy? I doubt the sophisticated American convert really reverts to the real practices of Russian peasants of 200 years ago, and I suspect he really transforms icons, etc. into a kind of ideology and that this theology functions that way just as much as the worship of the Westminster Confession among Protestants.

Ideological idols are much more serious than the “high places” of I-II Kings. It is much more like Jesus condemnations of the Pharisaical view of the Temple and Temple theology (Matthew 23:16-36). Judaism at that time was one of the first transformations to final participation in the world (the Greeks, who surely could never have made that same leap, without cross fertilization with the Jews, were the other). The Temple had become an excuse for an ideology, and idolatry had by leaps and bounds, grown in sophistication from the time of Jeremiah (Luke 11:24-26—a parable about Israel since the Babylonian captivity).

Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy seem to be in the same soup as Presbyterians and Lutherans and Baptists in terms of the kind of idolatry that we are really struggling with. Converts to earlier forms of the church have simply complicated things by making ideologies of childhood toys.