Monotheism

We talked about monotheism in class today and what it has historically been defined as. From my perspective, I have always known monotheism to be the belief that there is only one God, one divine being. I have never thought what the meaning is past that, but today in class I learned that there could be multiple interpretations of what monotheism could be and whether it is displayed or not in the Bible. A different interpretation would be putting all one’s faith in one God, but believing that there are multiple gods and the one God that someone puts their faith into is supreme compared to the rest of the gods, but this seems to look more like polytheism considering people who think this also think that there are multiple gods. A lot of people derive their belief from the first commandment in the Bible: one must love the Lord our God more than any other Gods, which has also derived many interpretations. Many people take this commandment literally, which gives them a polytheistic belief that there are multiple gods that are not as important as the supreme God. Others dive deeper into the meaning and interpret the ‘other gods’ as idols of the world, like money, fame, success, etc. and still believe that the supreme God in the first commandment is the only god. It is very interesting to see all these different viewpoints and interpretations of the monotheistic belief and how it can be determined in the first commandment.