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In his own way, then, HRN would presumably take my point that what, negatively considered, is distrust in God and disloyalty to God's cause, is not absolutely negative because it is also to be considered positively as idolatry. On the other hand, I have no reason not to take his point that the idols that human beings naturally erect alongside God are typically either merely some social one, in the case of henotheism, or simply some individual many, in the case of pluralism.

Wiki MarkupI also fill.d it significant, by the way, that HRN speaks of the first as "our natural henotheism," even though he appears to use "natural" elsewhere as qualifying pluralism as well (as in the passage quoted above from 40). This he does, presumably, because "\[t\]he historically and biographically primitive form of faith seems to be the henotheistic, or social, type" (25), whereas polytheism is spoken of as "our despairing polytheism" (48), presumably because it typically emerges when the prevailing form of social faith breaks presumably because it typically emerges when the prevailing form of social faith breaks down.

The one point where HRN's analysis still seems to me to differ from my own is in not making clear that and why idolatry cannot mean "the diversion of faith wholly away from God ... to some merely nondivine thing falsely identified as divine" (RG: 23 f.).

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