Polytheism

For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many “gods” and many “lords,” yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.

— 1 Corinthians 8:5-6

Polytheism (from the Greek poly, “many,” and theos, “god”) is the belief that many gods exist, typically arranged in a pantheon with distinct powers and spheres of authority, several or all of whom are proper objects of worship.¹ It differs from henotheism, which worships one god without denying that others exist, and stands opposed to monotheism, which holds that only Yahweh, the transcendent Creator, truly exists as God and alone is worthy of worship.² Scripture confronts it as the ordinary religion of the nations surrounding Israel and the early church, not as a live dispute within the Christian faith.

Historical Origin

Polytheism was not, on the scriptural and historical account, humanity’s starting point. Hodge argues that “monotheism was the original religion of our race,” pointing to the earliest strata of the Vedas themselves as monotheistic hymns and treating the historical record as running from one God toward many rather than the reverse.¹ On this account, the departure from monotheism began with nature worship: “as men lost the knowledge of God as creator, they were led to reverence the physical elements with which they were in conflict, whose power they witnessed, and whose beneficent influence they constantly experienced,” so that the sun, moon, stars, fire, air, and water became objects of popular devotion.¹ These natural powers were then personified, each assigned a presiding deity, and popular worship crystallized around the resulting figures.¹

Hodge traces how this pattern then took different shapes in different cultures. Among the Aryan peoples entering India, roughly fifteen hundred to two thousand years before Christ, an established pantheism (the infinite Being manifest as Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva) gave rise to “the endless polytheism of the Hindus,” in which any remarkable person or event could be received as a further avatar, or incarnation, of the one divine reality in one or another of its modes.¹ Among the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, polytheism instead “assumed a form determined by the character of the people”: the Greeks rendered it “bright, beautiful, and sensual,” the Romans “more decorous and sedate.”¹ Oswalt makes the same point about Egypt specifically: the brief episode of the Pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheism in the fourteenth century BC was “an aberration, a bubble on an otherwise untroubled sea of polytheism in Egypt before and after him.”³ Hodge concludes that polytheism’s persistence across so many unrelated cultures, despite having, apart from its pantheistic root, no real philosophical basis, shows “a strong affinity with fallen human nature.”¹

Core Tenets

Carter’s taxonomy of theological positions locates polytheism as the view that “there are many gods and even sometimes a ‘high god,’ but all reality is not identified with God in an abstract manner,” distinct from pantheism, which identifies God with the totality of what exists.² In many of the mythological cultures of the ancient Near East that surrounded Israel, Carter notes, “the human, nature, and the divine all connect and interact with each other,” which brings this form of polytheism close to what he calls “pantheistic monotheism with polytheism”: a single divine reality personified and distributed across many named gods, as in Hodge’s account of the Hindu system.²

Carter distinguishes polytheism proper from elective monolatry, the view, common in the Roman Empire of the New Testament period, that many gods exist but that each people or tribe owes worship to its own; he calls this arrangement “really a subset of polytheism” rather than a separate category, since it still affirms that the other peoples’ gods are real and rightly worshiped by them.²

Confessional and Biblical Response

The Second London Baptist Confession states the position Scripture holds against polytheism in its opening article: “The Lord our God is but one only living and true God; whose subsistence is in and of himself, infinite in being and perfection.”⁴ The Shema states the same claim as Israel’s own confession: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4), and Paul restates it as the settled Christian position over against the many gods and lords of the Greco-Roman world: “there is no God but one… for us there is one God, the Father… and one Lord, Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 8:4-6).

Scripture does not treat the gods of the nations as genuine rivals to the LORD’s own being. It calls them “vanity” and “nothing,” powerless either to help or to harm (Jer. 2:28; Isa. 41:29; 42:17; Ps. 106:28), and Paul identifies what lies behind pagan sacrifice not as real deity but as δαιμόνια, translated “demons”: “what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God” (1 Cor. 10:20). Writing to former polytheists, Paul describes their prior condition as enslavement “to those that by nature are not gods” (Gal. 4:8). Hodge reads this consistently across the Old and New Testaments: the objects of pagan worship are real enough to be dangerous, since Scripture identifies them with evil spiritual powers, but they possess no divine nature and no rightful claim to worship.¹

Modern Forms

Carter argues that modern secularism is a transitional phase rather than an endpoint: “the philosophical naturalism that has characterized the modern period is merely a temporary phase between the fall of Christendom and the rise of neopaganism.” He expects this neopaganism to include “a philosophical pantheism for the intellectual elites” and “polytheism for the masses,” often accompanied by “a fascination with magic, the occult, and the demonic.”⁵ Movements that openly revive the worship of many gods, and the wider modern interest in paganism and the occult, fall under this same prediction.

Related Doctrines

References

Charles Hodge, “Chapter III. Anti-Theistic Theories,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 241-335. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Craig A. Carter, “God as the One Who Alone Is to Be Worshiped (Isa. 41-48),” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 6. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?, Ancient Context, Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009), chap. 5, “The Bible versus Myth.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
Craig A. Carter, “Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Rejection of Mythology,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 8. ↩