RELIGION AND FAITH

Dear Friend,


You raise the issue of religion, saying that as a child you were taught that Christianity is the only true religion and superior to all others as well as being the only way to be saved. I’m sure that’s the case. I heard the same thing, but a funny thing happened to me on the way to my ordination. I went to college, theological seminary, and graduate school where I learned to separate the wheat from the chaff. Being exposed to sophisticated theological thought during those years enabled me to winnow out the nonsense and keep the heart of the matter, and I realized that a good bit of what I was taught in a fundamentalist church was, in fact, a distortion of the gospel.

In the first place, religion is not faith. Religion is the paraphernalia of faith, all the customs, ideologies, and organizations. For instance, the organizational chart of the Roman Catholic Church was taken from the Roman Empire, a quite natural adoption since it was the only organization anyone at the time had known. Such an organizational chart is religion and has little to do with faith. It was not directly received from heaven. It is really a top-down type of bureaucracy favored by most governments and corporations which, sadly, inevitably leads to ossification.

The petty moralisms and extravagant enthusiasms which seem to afflict a good bit of Protestantism really have little to do with faith and reflect an attempt to prove a moral superiority in small things and provide excitement for dull people. It is understandable, but it is not faith. So it is with the claims of superiority. Claims of that sort are stultifying and function only to protect people who wish to maintain themselves in a superior and thus safe position.

Religion is the chaff of faith and is not the heart of the matter. As a matter of fact, religion is often a substitute for faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous German theologian who was hanged by the Nazis in the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp
for his part in the plot to kill Hitler, wrote: “Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian 'conception' of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient.” In other words, the correct doctrine of religion is a substitute for faith.

In an intriguing dialogue in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray between Dorian Gray and the Duchess of Monmouth this kind of distinction was made as the Duchess tries to pin Dorian down.

'What of Art?' she asked.
'It is a malady.'
'Love?'
'An illusion.'
'Religion?'
'The fashionable substitute for Belief.'
'You are a sceptic.'
'Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.'
'What are you?'
'To define is to limit.'

Religion is “a fashionable substitute for Belief.” Religion is the trappings of piety, but one error pervades all religion. It reduces faith to codifications, rules, and customs, and regulations. Bonhoeffer makes the point that religion is a substitution for faith by an intellectual assent to a series of propositions. As you pointed out, many of those substitutions are ludicrous. The Gospels and the prophets make the same point time and time again, as when Jesus chased the money changers out of the temple.

Elton Trueblood, a famous Quaker theologian of a couple of generations past, often made the point that the trappings of religion are, in fact, umbrellas by which the religious attempt to shield themselves from the demands of faith.

In Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country, a black South African priest quotes Hebrew to 10:31: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” The
South African priest meant that faith in God puts demands on the faithful. For many those demands are too onerous, such as loving those who despise you, caring for the poor and suffering, and fostering justice for those you dislike, and they choose a substitute that has the trappings of faith, but not its substance. Being loved by God is not always an easy thing.

Part of the problem is the words themselves. In the New Testament the word for faith is pisteo (the verb “I believe”) and pistis (the noun “belief”). In English there is no verb form for faith with the result that often faith comes to mean a commodity, as in customs, ideas, doctrines, and manners.

Faith is essentially that to which a person has committed himself or herself. Christians are those folk who have committed themselves to God’s grace manifested in Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mean that they are superior. It means that they attempt to embody in their lives a grace they have experienced themselves. A graceful life is not always a bed of roses especially when the grace is applied to social concerns and is translated into social justice. As Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, it is an impossible ideal, but the only relevant ideals are the impossible ones.



In the second chapter of Genesis, when the Lord God encounters Adam and Eve in the garden, He asks them where they are standing, not who they are or what they believe, but where they are standing. Of course, they are hiding because they have chosen the false security of knowing everything. The Greek word is hubris, pride, the primal sin of claiming superiority. Christians are called to serve with grace, not claim to be better.

The real issue is not what religion is better. Debating whose chaff is better is a fool’s errand. It is what a person does with his or her life, that essential decision of grace. If we choose to believe in God’s grace, then the prophet Micah says it best: “”And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (6:8)”