HistoricalChristian.Faith

The house of Rimmon: does Elisha license outward conformity?

Type: moral-theology / casuistry argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak as a general licence for accommodation — the reading that 2 Kings 5:18–19 sanctions a believer’s outward false worship (so long as the heart stays true) does not hold on its best case: the strongest exegesis makes “Go in peace” a non-committal farewell that rules on nothing, the Hebrew is the ordinary send-off to a living man, the bow may not even be an act of worship (the aide bending under his master’s weight), and the two traditions that most carefully worked the text either confined it narrowly (the rabbis: a coerced, private bow only) or refuted the plea outright (the Reformers, against “Nicodemism”). What survives is only the narrow reading — that the prophet tolerates, without endorsing, a raw convert’s coerced compromise · advanced as the founding proof-text of religious dissimulation and, in a limited form, by the rabbinic tradition

The claim

In this thing the LORD pardon thy servant, that when my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon: when I bow down myself in the house of Rimmon, the LORD pardon thy servant in this thing. And he said unto him, Go in peace.

— 2 Kings 5:18–19 (KJV).¹ The healed and newly-converted Syrian general, who has just confessed “there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel” and forsworn sacrifice to any other god, names the one compromise his office will still force on him — that he must bow at his master’s side in a pagan temple — and asks pardon for it in advance; and Elisha answers only “Go in peace.” The interpretation adjudicated here is the one that made this the classic proof-text of the ethic of accommodation: that a believer may perform, or outwardly conform to, an act of false worship under duress while worshipping the true God inwardly — and that the prophet’s reply licenses it.

Who advances it

The reading has a long and serious career precisely because the case is so sharply drawn. In Jewish law it becomes a fixed locus: the Babylonian Talmud classes Naaman as a ger toshav — a resident who took on the Noahide commandments but not the whole Law — and, in the tractate on martyrdom, adduces his Rimmon bow and Elisha’s “Go in peace” as the proof that a son of Noah need not give his life over a coerced, private act of idolatry.² Among the Fathers the seed of the moral reading is Theodoret of Cyrus, who glosses Naaman’s plea into the very frame the later casuists would use — compelled outwardly, faithful inwardly, asking pardon: “when I go in, I will worship the true God; beseeching to receive pardon, because I am compelled by royal necessity to go in to the falsely-named god” (though Theodoret offers no verdict on Elisha’s reply).³ The reading reached its widest use in the Reformation: Naaman became the founding proof-text of “Nicodemism,” the outward conformity of crypto-Protestants who attended the Catholic Mass while holding the reformed faith inwardly. The Strasbourg reformer Otto Brunfels first pressed it into a theory of dissimulation (1527), glossing the case with an interiority the text does not carry — “God weighs the heart” — so that one might, like Naaman, bow to an idol provided the heart prayed to the true God; and the conformists’ stock argument ran: if a prophet sent a temple-bowing convert away in peace, why may we not worship God in churches dedicated to His name while seeming to do otherwise?⁴ It is worth noting what did not carry the case: the two great systematic manuals of moral theology one would expect to enshrine it — Aquinas’s Summa and Jeremy Taylor’s Ductor Dubitantium — do not make Naaman a proof-text at all. The Rimmon case lived in exegesis and in the Reformation conformity controversy, not in the systematic casuistry it is often assumed to anchor.⁵ A soft, pastoral form of the reading — “Go in peace” as a word of forgiveness to a weak new believer — persists in the commentators and in C. S. Lewis, who turned the case inside-out into a confession of his own.⁶

The evidence for

Taken at the surface, the accommodation reading is not fanciful; several features of the scene genuinely pull toward it. (1) Naaman names the compromise exactly — the temple, the god, the bow, the recurring act (“when my master goeth… and I bow myself”) — so there is no ambiguity about what he is asking leave to keep doing. (2) He asks pardon before the fact, for a continuing future practice, not merely for a past sin; the plain grammar of “the LORD pardon thy servant in this thing” reads as a request for standing indulgence. (3) Elisha, a prophet with every authority to forbid, does not forbid: he does not tell Naaman to resign his post, to refuse the bow and accept the consequences, or to prefer death to the temple — the very demands the tradition would later press on confessors. (4) His actual word is a benediction, “Go in peace,” the send-off of a satisfied prophet, not a rebuke. (5) Two ancient and authoritative readers took it in just this sense. The rabbinic tradition: the bow was “forced… out of fear of his master,” and “Go in peace” shows “that Elisha did not criticize him for acting in this manner.”² And Theodoret, glossing the plea so that Naaman all but says it outright — that even inside the temple he will “worship the true God” — treats the case as exactly a compelled outward presence joined to an inward true worship, for which pardon is fitly asked.³ On this telling the passage does what the accommodationists say: it registers an outward act of false worship under compulsion, and does not condemn it.

Adversarial assessment

What holds — but only narrowly. There is a defensible core here, and it should be conceded plainly: the text does not condemn Naaman, and it plainly declines to demand martyrdom of him. A raw convert, days out of paganism, is sent away “in peace” with his one coerced reservation unrebuked. To that extent the passage tolerates — it does not anathematize — a compelled outward compromise by a new and imperfectly-instructed believer. The rabbinic reading builds on exactly this, and it is a serious reading. But notice how tightly the rabbis draw it: the exemption is for a ben Noah (not an Israelite under the full Law), for a coerced act (“out of fear of his master”), done privately (not before the public whose apostasy would profane the Name) — and it sits inside a discussion whose governing rule is the opposite: that public coerced idolatry must be resisted to the death.² The case is the narrow exception that shows how demanding the rule is. It is a very long way from there to a general licence for believers to dissemble their religion.

Why the maximal reading fails. Three defeaters, each independently strong, cut against the claim that 5:19 sanctions accommodation as a principle.

First, “Go in peace” sanctions nothing. The dominant line in the commentaries reads it as a bare formula of dismissal, not a ruling. Keil and Delitzsch: Elisha was “wishing the departing Syrian the peace of God upon the road, without thereby either approving or disapproving the religious conviction which he had expressed.” The Pulpit Commentary presses that Naaman “had not put a question, but had only expressed a wish,” so Elisha “declared neither that God would nor that he would not forgive Naaman.” Matthew Poole calls it “only a farewell salutation… without any further answer to his requests,” and the Geneva note is blunt: “The prophet did not approve his act, but… bids him farewell.” The Reformation exegetes made the same point against the Nicodemites at the source — Bugenhagen, whose 1524 commentary on Kings the conformists drew on, had already insisted that Elisha’s “go in peace” “does not signify approval.” A benediction of parting is the thinnest possible basis for a doctrine of permitted false worship.⁷ The Hebrew reinforces it: Elisha says lēkh lə-shālôm, “go to peace,” precisely the idiom the later tradition identifies as the ordinary, correct farewell to a living man — the everyday send-off, not a verdict on his soul.⁸

Second, there may be no act of worship to license. A strong exegetical strand denies that Naaman is asking leave to worship Rimmon at all — and its most formidable proponent is Calvin, precisely while refuting the Nicodemites. “He leaneth on my hand,” on this reading, denotes Naaman’s office: he is the king’s aide, on whose arm the monarch supports himself, so that when the king prostrates himself the attendant bends under his master’s weight. Calvin: Naaman “asked permission for no other kind of worship than simply that of accommodating himself to the bending posture of the king, whom he was supporting and holding up. This was not to feign worship to an idol, but to perform duty and service to his Sovereign.” The older divines put the same distinction in Latin — the king’s incurvatio… voluntaria et religiosa against Naaman’s servilis et coacta… politica et civilis (recorded in Keil and Delitzsch’s footnote) — while Gill takes the pardon to be for Naaman’s past idolatry and Clarke re-points the verbs to the past tense, warning that the future-permission reading would “admit… the doctrine of indulgences.” This reading is not itself uncontested — the Pulpit Commentary and Matthew Henry both take the bow to be a real compromise, tolerated rather than dissolved — but if any version of it holds, the accommodation reading rests on a worship-act that is not in the text.⁹ (These are folded in here as defeaters of the accommodation thesis, not as a rival doctrine: no one adduces 5:19 as a proof-text for anything; the mechanical and past-tense readings exist only to dissolve the supposed licence.)

Third, the tradition that most carefully weighed the plea rejected it. When the Nicodemites pleaded Naaman, Calvin met the argument head-on and refused it on three grounds: that it is unsafe to rest a rule — above all a Confession of Faith — on a “singular example” done by God’s “special permission”; that Naaman had first openly forsworn every other god, which the temporizing conformist had not; and that Naaman had “only a small glimmer of truth,” whereas those who have heard the preached gospel walk by “the whole word of God like a great and well-traveled road” — just as the prophet did not require the Syrian to be circumcised, yet that is no excuse for a Christian to refuse baptism. The reformers’ model for the instructed believer under pressure was not Naaman but Josiah, who tore down the high places (2 Kings 23). The verdict of the moral mainstream, Catholic and Protestant, was the same: outward participation in idolatry is not sanctified by inward reservation, and “Go in peace” licenses no general rule of dissimulation.¹⁰ Even Matthew Henry, who reads the reply as a tender pastoral leave-taking of a hopeful young convert, is explicit that the thing itself is not thereby approved: “Naaman’s dissembling his religion cannot be approved… Young converts must be tenderly dealt with.”¹¹

Assessment

Weak as a general licence for accommodation; a narrow toleration is the defensible residue. The interpretation that 2 Kings 5:18–19 sanctions outward false worship whenever the heart stays true does not survive its own best case. Its whole weight rests on an inference from a farewell formula — “Go in peace” — that the strongest exegesis says rules on nothing (K&D: “without either approving or disapproving”; Bugenhagen: it “does not signify approval”), that the Hebrew marks as the ordinary send-off to a living man, and that may not even be answering an act of worship at all — Calvin, the case’s most careful early-modern judge, reads the bow as the aide’s civil support of his leaning king, “not to feign worship to an idol.” And the two traditions that seriously worked the passage confined or refuted it: the rabbis licensed only a coerced, private bow by a ben Noah, as the exception inside a rule that commands martyrdom for public idolatry; the Reformers refused it to the Nicodemite outright, sending him to Josiah instead of Naaman. Even the case’s reputation as a great casuistical chestnut outruns the record — the systematic manuals (Aquinas, Taylor) do not in fact make it a proof-text. What honestly remains is the modest, pastoral point the text does make: a prophet does not break a bruised reed, and declines to demand of a raw convert under duress the martyrdom he would later require of the instructed — a toleration of weakness, not a charter for dissimulation. Read as the latter, the argument overreaches its slender base; read as the former, it says something true but far smaller than its proponents wanted.

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Sources