Category: Religion

Got Religion?

On March 31, 2014

In Biblical Interpretation, Christian Life, Religion

Originally published in The Banner, January 2010.

I’m about to say something just a bit shocking. It’s highly controversial.

Here it is: We Reformed people are religious. The Christian faith is a religion. There, I said it.

Why is that so controversial?

It’s because “religion” has become a bad word in Christian circles. People outside the church want to be spiritual but not religious; and people inside the church want to have a relationship but not religion. In his wildly popular book The Shack, William Young has Jesus say, “I’m not too big on religion, and not very fond of politics or economics either.” It has become common for Christian leaders to claim that the good news of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with religion.

But it’s a mistake to talk about religion like that, a big mistake, with big consequences. Religion refers to the universal human characteristic of making something, or someone, ultimate in our lives, and pursuing the object of our devotion as the ultimate good. Every person, then, is religious. God made all people with a religious receptacle at our core.

Because we are designed to be in relationship to God, designed for worship and reverence, people are inescapably religious. But because of our sin, our rebellion against God, we seek to replace God with something or someone else. We direct our religion, our devotion and reverence, toward created things rather than the Creator. We create self-serving spiritualities because sin has tainted our religious longings, just as it has tainted our politics and economics and sexuality. We create alternate stories to explain the world and our place in it.

But that doesn’t mean religion is a bad word. We are religiously broken, but God’s good news in Jesus Christ enables us to experience religious wholeness. The gospel is not the enemy of religion but its true form. The gospel is the answer—a surprising and radically unique answer—to our deepest spiritual longings.

If I say that I am spiritual but not religious, what I really mean is that my homemade religious opinions are better than yours. If I say that I am rational, not religious, I mean that my faith in science is much more respectable than your belief in a God who has never made an appearance in any photos from the Hubble telescope. If I say I prefer a personal relationship with Jesus to “organized religion,” I likely mean that I have a self-centered, private kind of religion and have little use for the messiness of living in a community of worship and discipleship.

Even though all people are religious, many people deny that aspect of their humanity with an almost evangelical passion. All people have a “seed of religion” buried in their hearts, John Calvin said. Left to grow wild that seed ends up yielding nothing but weeds. But watered with the gospel and cultivated by God’s Spirit, it grows into devotion to God, blooms into discipleship, and bears fruit in service to the least and the lost of the world.

It’s extremely important for our witness to the world that we reclaim the word religion. Why? Because the gospel calls people to find the answer to their deepest longings, their religious longings, in Jesus Christ.

When Paul brought the good news to the sophisticated people of Athens, he grabbed their attention by saying, “I notice that you are very religious” (Acts 17:22). Paul used the universal human longing for relationship with the Creator—our desire for a story that makes sense of the world and history and human life—as an entry for the story of Jesus. Then he introduced the Athenians to the one God, the “unknown God,” who created them, loved them, and sent his own Son to die for them.

Rather than a human effort to obtain salvation, the Christian faith is the one religion in which God seeks us out and finds us. It is the one religion in which God comes to broken people and makes them whole again. It is the one true story about the meaning of life in this world, and it turns out to be a love story.

FOR DISCUSSION:

1. What does the word “religion” mean to you? Why does it have a negative effect on some people?

2. What does it mean to be “spiritual”?

3. How is the word “religion” tied to our Christian identity?

4. How can we reclaim this word?

5. How can we best cultivate the “seed of religion” buried in people’s hearts?

On Religion, to its Uncultured Pomo Despisers

By Raymond Blacketer

On January 25, 2010

In John Calvin, Missional Church, Reformed Theology, Religion

Some people are wondering why I wrote that article in the January 2k10 issue of The Banner. Well, I wrote it because they asked me to write something, and they didn’t tell me what to write, which is a pain, because then I have to think of something.

So what I came up with was a defense and exposition of the term “religion.” Why? Because religious people who think they’re not religious say silly things about not being religious. And not only in popular stuff like The Shack, or in too-hip-for-my-haircut Emergent communities, but even among learned and respected persons. The one I have in mind is one of my favorite authors and pastors, Tim Keller. Love the guy. Wish I could have gone to his church when Sandy and I were in Manhattan. Love his book/DVD The Prodigal God, and used it for a teaching series in our church. Love his The Reason for God, and his YouTube defense of the Christian faith to the employees of Google. Love his new books that have come out that I haven’t read yet.

But he said something surprising on his website promoting The Prodigal God. And I quote:

“Religion operates on the principle: I obey, therefore I’m accepted. But the gospel operates on the principle: I’m accepted through what Jesus Christ has done, therefore I obey. So religion isn’t just a little bit different than the gospel; they are diametrically opposed. And unless you actually invite people into the gospel, in distinction from religion, if you just call them to give their lives to Christ in some general way, they’ll think you’re calling them into being a good person; they’ll think you’re calling them into being an elder brother. So you have to always distinguish the gospel from religion and irreligion and as you preach, because our churches are filled with elder brothers, and they don’t know they are. All they know is God isn’t very real to them, and their faith is a kind of a drudgery to them, and unless you preach to them the difference between religion and the gospel, they aren’t going to get renewed by the Holy Spirit; they’re not going to find the gospel beginning to transform their lives. One of the best ways to do that is by preaching the parable of the prodigal son. This parable will help us live out the implications of what it means to be gospel-transformed people. Not elder brothers, not younger brothers, but people living as images of our true elder brother, Jesus Christ.”
http://www.theprodigalgod.com/video.html accessed September 10, 2009, under the “Message for Pastors” link.

Surely, Tim knows better than that, since he must be pretty well acquainted with John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, and the concepts therein like the semen religionis and the sensus divinitatis. But I presume he uses this language for strategic purposes. I just don’t think it was a good strategic choice, because it’s not entirely honest, and it creates problems when one tries to explain Paul’s arguments in Romans 1 about how all people are religious, and his own evangelistic strategy in Acts 17:16ff., and the fact that religion pertains to the fact that humanity is created to relate to its Creator. I just wish he had specified that what he’s talking about is “works-centered religion”or “human-centered religion,” otherwise the statement can sound potentially shallow or misleading.

That’s why I love it that there’s a Facebook group called “I am religious but not spiritual.” And yes, I’m a fan.

The Seed of Religion, The Christian Religion, and Religion as a Ruse

By Raymond Blacketer

On July 21, 2009

In Church History, Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin, Religion

I’m reading Calvin’s Institutes, a new translation of the 1541 French edition, for a book review for Calvin Theological Journal. It’s a good opportunity to re-read the Institutes in a different form than the one I read in college a few decades ago. I just came across Calvin’s discussion, in the early pages of the first chapter, of the “seed of religion,” that sense of the divine that is in all people, no matter what their culture or civilization may be. All people are religious, Calvin says. And it’s a good reminder that “religion” is not a bad word, contrary to what we hear from many Christian writers, as well as many non-Christian writers. Religion really means: a person’s sense or perspective on the big picture. Religion has to do with what’s ultimately important in life, and in your life. Religion has to do with what drives you in life, what life is about, what life is for, what life means. For many, religion is about having a good life, avoiding pain, and trying to be as prosperous as possible, and trying not to hurt anyone in the process. For some, religion is about pretending you’re not religious, and claiming, instead, to be “spiritual.” For others, their religion is a profound faith in science and technology, together with the hope that humanity will evolve and progress and just get better and better. (It’s a good idea for those whose religion is scientific progress to avoid the reading of history, otherwise they might have a crisis of faith). I heard recently of a new science cult which adamantly denies that it is a religious movement, even as its followers zealously promote its utopian view of the future where humans and machines will merge. Sounds like evangelism to me. Sounds like a vision of heaven…or hell.

The Christian Religion, as Calvin rightly and boldly calls our faith, finds the meaning of human life in the story of God the Creator, who is also God the Savior in Jesus Christ, and God the Healer and Restorer, the Holy Spirit. This is the story of God who draws his broken and rebellious people, his runaway sons and daughters, back into relationship with him. “Religion” should never be contrasted with “relationship,” as popular Christian authors constantly do, pretending that they’ve actually solved some kind of problem, or said something profound. The catchphrase “personal relationship with Jesus” is too vague, too individualistic, to small to sustain the weight of what God is really doing in the world. He is transforming the whole creation in Christ. He is reconciling the world to himself. Of course he does this by transforming individual hearts and souls and lives, but he always does this in community. Richard Mouw of Fuller Seminary recently wrote an article for Christianity Today about the proper balance between the individual and the community in Christian consciousness. While liberal churches ignore individual conversion and transformation, Evangelical churches focus far too exclusively on the individual. He writes, “We evangelicals never downplay the importance of individuals—as individuals—coming to a saving faith in Jesus Christ. We never say that an individual’s very personal relationship to God is not important. What we do say is that individual salvation is not enough.”

Then Calvin says something that suprised me. I’m sure I read it many years ago, but I had forgotten. Calvin speaks of the universal sense of divinity, the awareness that there is a God in all people. Then he writes, “That is why it is false to say (as some do) that religion was long ago contrived by the art and clever ruse of a few people, in order to control the naive populace in decency even though the ones who were urging others to honor God had no idea of the divine. I certainly admit that some delicate and deceitful people among the pagans have forged many things in religion to make naive people afraid and cause them scruples, so that they would be more obedient and easier to order around; but they would not have succeeded in this if people’s spirits had not first been fixed on the firm persuasion that there is a God. From that source came the whole inclination to believe what was said about religion.” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1541 French Edition, tr. Elsie McKee, p. 26). Calvin wrote this 300 years before Karl Marx claimed that religion was just a tool used by the powerful to control the weak. Calvin, by contrast, says that while religion might be misused in this way, such abuse of religion does not explain the universal prevalence of religion. Marxism itself was a secularized religion, complete with its own world-view, values, and vision of a utopian socialist future. Its interesting that 500 years after Calvin’s birth, the same issues are being debated. Today we have Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins touting a new atheism, and a return to “reason,” without the slightest clue that their “new” atheism is really quite old, and–even more embarrasing–it is itself a religion, a view of how things should be, an argument about the meaning of life (or lack thereof). Not only that, but their arguments against belief in God can’t even hold enough water to spawn a newly-evolved life form. Disbelief takes just as much faith as belief; the atheist is just as religious as the believer.