A few years ago, the Youtube video entitled “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus”, and generally caused a stir within the evangelical Protestant American Christian community. And it elicited a number of other responses from other Protestants, Roman Catholics, and atheist commentators. And, it is fairly evocative; presenting the comfortable distinction between Jesus and the Pharisees and Sadducees he so frequently disabused of their vaulted self-importance. This is not a new critique, clearly. Protestants, eager to apply justification by grace to the whole of Christianity, frequently have been the major movers and shakers of this particular protest: that Jesus abolishes religion, when religion is understood as any effort by humans to build up toward or work toward God’s favor. Otherwise put, it involves the “man-Godward” relation.
I want to suggest that, while the critique holds, it does not hold as completely as many Protestants might want it to hold. Free-floating from a wider theological network, the rejection of religion herein is ultimately a form of Docetism. It will force us to say that every work “from below” must be less real than the act by God “from above” in the Incarnation. Another way put, the ‘causal force’ of salvation is only “from above”–no action of humanity, individually or corporately, is sufficient. No, not even the flesh and blood of Jesus, qua flesh and blood. In the light of that possibility, we must admit a place for religion; after all, Jesus was a Jew of his own time.
Yet, sympathetic to the cause as I am, the theologic of the Resurrection/Ascension forces me to challenge a straightforward presentation of the rejection of religion. Insofar as the Resurrected Christ is a pledge by God to the affirmation of all that is and the processes which establish all that is, we are compelled to affirm that God takes religion far more seriously than we do. Jesus challenges not religion but the usurpers of religion; he came not only to uplift the disenfranchised but to disabuse the enfranchised of their swollen self-importance. But it remains insufficiently supported to say that there is no place in Christianity for religion.
God indeed acts toward creation before it could act toward God; and this is creation ex nihilo, but God also enters into creation. A real and genuine theology of the Incarnation must affirm, with God, God’s affirmation of the goodness of creation from within. Yes, this belongs within the orbit of justification by faith. But it is not a straightforward elimination of religion. Rather, it is a reclamation of religion. Following this, one may see the religious or cultic aspects of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy as an expression of lex credendi lex orandi ; those who are asleep in the Lord have voted and left divots and channels which have been found to be trustworthy methods of spiritual development.[2] As such, and to the extent to which any community which calls itself part of the Church of Christ subscribes to the canons of catholicity, apostolicity, and historicity, Christian ‘religion’ (read cultus or praxis) is not done away with by the Incarnation and justification by faith, but implied. Peter Harrrison’s excellent Territories of Science and Religion enters into this, offering a nice corrective to the implications and histories we bring to the terms “science” and “religion”.
Barth’s critique contested (as did Luther’s) against the false attribution of religion qua religion as operative agent for spiritual development and the incoming of the Kingdom of God, as if to say that by acts of the cultus alone one could atone for sin or progress toward righteousness. Yet, I want advance, the Incarnation does not imply the dereliction of religion, but its rechristening. The Christian affirmation of religion is an affirmation of the fullest possible Incarnation, and tracks with the ancient idea “that which is unassumed is unredeemed”. That God assumes the religion of the Jews in the Incarnation is an implicit affirmation of the cultus, both in correction of its faults and highlighting its successes. For this reason primally, it belongs wholly to the Christian to lay claim to ‘religion’ and recognize its proper place in the development of the individual and the community as well as a locus for the in-breaking of the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ motif and reality.
In the person of Christ, we must reckon with our ever present need for religio. Here below in spacetime, we cannot abstract out of our conditions to know God apart from God’s chosen mediation within those conditions. God has made Godself known in space and time, in the exigencies of history. And that means God has made Godself known in the mediation of the apostles, and the tradition of the Church. The great archive that is the tradition shows that a plurality of voices may speak and yet live in sacramental unity.
Before we hate religion, we must first love religion, as Jesus loved religion.
[1] “Spiritual development”, I should note, is an incredibly dense and compact term, typically read with much more baggage than need be.
The Musings of Fools 