The Christian doctrine of God derives from the service of Christian worship. In this worship Christians gather to distinguish publicly the true God from the false gods, to thank the true God and to defy and deride all other gods. Christians proclaim and chant in public, in every town centre that You alone are the holy one, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the most high, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father. They perform this service for the benefit of the surrounding community; all those who hear this worship may understand which gods are false and are owed nothing, and which God is true and truly for us.
There are a multitude of powers. When these powers act beyond their authority and remain out of control, they are gods – and demons – to whomever falls under their influence. To worship the God of Jesus Christ is simultaneously not to worship any other gods. It is to realise that there are other claimants and so there are plenty of powers making claims on us, and so claiming semi-divine status over us; when they do so they are false gods. But Christian theology that takes its mandate from the worship of the whole Christian people must distinguish the true God from false gods and the powers of our age. These gods exert a power over us, and so we have to concede that we are captive to them until we are free of them.
The Christianity of recent decades has ignored one central question. It asks whether we believe in God. It does not ask which God we believe in? Which gods are our gods? Which powers are we committed to? Of course we cannot remember surrendering to any gods, but this is only because it happens too slowly and subtly for us to notice that this is what is happening. Of course we may refer to them as powers, forces or fundamental principles rather than as gods. Christians assume that we do acknowledge and defer to gods, and we have to name them and question whether they are worth our worship. We do not agree that moderns are atheist as they claim. They have their own gods, but their cult conceals this from them. They tell themselves that they are the master, and that each self is the centre of the world; that all things exist to please them, and that they can be anything they want to be. But they live in a perpetual battlefield of the gods, in which every power and every spirit competes with every other, and they are competing for us. They want what we have. They want power over us. They want us to be theirs. It is up to us to learn from Christian worship how to identify, give names to and defend ourselves from these powers.
