Toward a religion-less religion?
There’s an interesting text in the Bible, one that especially intrigues me: it’s Romans 1:20. It is an important text because one of the Reformed Confessions explicitly refers to it as a proof text. It is article 2 of the Belgic Confession, the second oldest of the doctrinal standards of the Christian Reformed Church. It dates from 1567, thus almost 450 years old, and exactly 50 years after Martin Luther started what is known as the Reformation, the event when a body of people left the Roman Church to go their own way. This particular article explains The Means by which we know God. The first part of the answer is: First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.”
So what did the apostle Paul write in Romans 1: 20? He said that “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that men are without excuse.” In other words: anyone who has eyes to see, a brain to interpret and a mind open enough not to be blinded by science, must realize that behind the riddle of creation is God, the creator who speaks to us primarily through the world we inhabit.
Why does the church rely on such ancient documents? The Heidelberg Catechism dates from 1563. The Canons of Dordt are a bit newer: 1618-19, while the Westminster Confession, the standard of the Presbyterian Church is the most recent, dating from 1646. Why are there no recent confessions? I am pretty sure that the world- and the church – has changed in those four hundred years. I suspect the trouble is that even if a denomination would try, it could never agree on a new creed. Why is that? French law professor Jacques Ellul – his wife Yvette was Dutch – gives an answer. He writes in Hope in Time of Abandonment that “For centuries the Church has focused on the preaching of faith. That is no longer possible, both because man on the outside is no longer listening, and also because within the Church we are experiencing what I think is an insoluble confusion over what precisely is the content of faith…..The creeds can no longer be the core of preaching today.”
He goes on to say that the church must switch from preaching Faith –the word ‘creed’ comes from ‘credo’ which means “I have faith” – to Hope, hope in the coming of the new creation, hope that is accompanied with prayer. “When we engage in prayer” he says “then hope is born”. That’s why I think, Jesus included “Thy Kingdom Come” in the Lord’s Prayer.
Bonhoeffer says something similar. He starts his book Creation and Fall with these remarkable words: “The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”
J. H. Bavinck, in his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming – soon to be published by Eerdmans – also sings this tune. In Chapter Three, simply named “The Kingdom”, he makes a point that the church may well take to heart: “It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one overarching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal. (my emphasis). The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things (from Ants to Zebras) are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”
Church take note: “There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal”. If this is true, and I believe it to be, then the church needs to undertake a drastic revision of its modus operandi, a complete re-orientation: from religion being a private matter to seeing God in everything. I know this is a form of Panentheism, which says that God and the universe are coextensive, while claiming that God is greater than the universe and that the universe is contained within God. Not to be confused with Pantheism, which literally means that everything is god. This falls in line with Romans 1:20 which says that people are condemned by not seeing God behind creation. To me this also means that the corollary is true: anyone who looks at the miracle of creation and no longer sees it as a riddle, but a great work of Art devised by The Master Mind or Whatever is excused from judgement and declared righteous in God’s eyes.
If this is true then a person like Albert Einstein is saved. Though he called himself an atheist, he saw himself as a deeply religious man. Here’s what he said:
“To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.”
Einstein in essence affirms the words of a hymn: “O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder consider all the works thy hands have made, I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder, thy power throughout the universe displayed.”
This leads me to believe that there is salvation outside the church – outside formal religion. I sometimes wonder whether there is salvation within the church. Don’t get me wrong. By and large the people there are the converted: they don’t come to be converted. I know that church services are great instruments of affirming faith, of experiencing fellowship, of sharing the good and the bad and so enhance community, but I doubt whether they do make people see the light and suddenly cause a metanoia, a complete change from being outside the kingdom to being part of it.
We should not forget that the church of his day killed Jesus. It seems to me that the church of today this time is killing God – by killing his creation in the name of religion. Mega-churches seem to do that. They draw their clientele from a wide area, meaning that they can only be reached by the highly polluting car. They offer what I perceive as ‘biblio-tainment’. By that I mean that the Bible is introduced as entertainment, with loud music, overhead pictures and film scenes, an avalanche of words and bible texts, spoken mostly out of context: they are the Wal-Mart of the ecclesiastical scene, killing off the small churches within walking or biking distance of peoples’ homes. Jesus’ saying that ‘where two or three are together in my name there I will be also’ is totally contrary to this trend that “Big is Beautiful”. This mass “religious” entertainment could well result in more atheism, as it advocates that God’s creation is irrelevant. It is also completely the opposite of what Bavinck, Bonhoeffer and Ellul advocate. No wonder the church is in turmoil. What to do? Where to go? How to preach?
Some 60 years ago Bertrand Russell published his Why I Am Not a Christian. At that time his book caused quite a stir. Russell could not accept Christianity because he wondered how a benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient Deity would allow the emergence of Hitler and Stalin, the H bomb, and I may add, the more recent phenomena, such as Global Warming and World-Wide-Pollution. In his time Dr. Bertrand was so controversial that he was declared unfit to teach philosophy in a New York College.
Today questioning religion is all the rage: books, such as God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens are popular publishing success stories. Hitchens was outraged by the dogmatism of religion, yet he himself had moved from Marxism (he was a Trotskyist) to Greek Orthodox Christianity, then to American Neo-Conservatism, followed by an “antitheist” stance that blamed all of the world’s troubles on religion. Hitchens thus swung from the left to the right, from anti–Vietnam War to cheerleader of the Iraq War, and from pro to contra God. He ended up favoring Dick Cheney over Mother Teresa. Or take The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, also on the best-sellers list for weeks on end. If you want to make money today in publishing, become a religion – or God –basher. Richard Dawkins, for example, writes that “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty unjust control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniac”, and I could go on and on. I guess, from this quote, you can deduce that Dawkins doesn’t like God.
Egbert Ribberink and Dick Houtman, two Dutch sociologists, who classify themselves, respectively, as “too much of a believer to be an atheist” and “too much of a nonbeliever to be an atheist,” distinguish two kinds of atheists. Those in one group are uninterested in exploring their outlook and even less in defending it. These atheists think that both faith and its absence are private matters. They respect everyone’s choice, and feel no need to bother others with theirs. Those in the other group are vehemently opposed to religion and resent its privileges in society. These atheists don’t think that disbelief should be kept locked up in the closet. They speak of “coming out,” a terminology borrowed from the gay movement, as if their non-religiousness was a forbidden secret that they now want to share with the world. It seems that the stricter one’s religious background, the greater the need to go against it and to replace old securities with new ones.
Nevertheless, I think that Jesus would have approved of outspoken atheists. He once said that a person must be either totally in favor of him, or dead-set against him: it’s the lukewarm, the fence-sitters, he despises.
Non-church going people and perhaps a few within the churches themselves are looking for answers and are not finding them within the current ecclesiastical set-up. For many the church is no longer relevant. What is needed is new Reformation where the world we live in, the cosmos, plays a prominent role. More about that next week.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer again. He had a double doctorate in theology, professor in Berlin at the age of 25, hanged by Hitler because he opposed his godless actions, seeing the state of the church, paints an ironic picture of religion. My grandparents on a farm in the Netherlands, had one room, the most beautifully adorned room in the house, where nobody ever came. Bonhoeffer compares religion to such a room. He wrote: “Religion is often like ‘the best room,’ that has nothing to do with work, everyday life and normality. Then it becomes a sugar-coated faith for Sunday mornings that turns Jesus in to a moralizing figure head. The religion of Jesus Christ is not the dessert that comes after the meal, but is the entire meal, applies to all of life.”
He then describes how Jesus actually lived quite un-religiously, how he totally contradicted the customary views of religion of his days. He concluded that Jesus had no use for religion and wanted human beings to do what Jesus himself did, that is being fully engaged in the act of being human.
Bonhoeffer could be quite controversial. He said that just as Jesus abandoned the religion of his days – which cost him his life – Bonhoeffer wondered whether only in a world that is no longer religious, we, the people of this planet, can become aware of ourselves; that the reality of Christ can have a greater impact on a world come of age when we let go of the disguises of religion.
It is possible that I misunderstand Bonhoeffer. Let me think about that for a week so that I can re-read him and find some direct quotes from him regarding this. Bonhoeffer was really an eschatological thinker, no doubt also because he knew that he would die soon: he was executed by hanging on April 9 1945, less than a month before the war was over. He was 39 years old. After five years of enemy occupation, April 9 1945 was the exact day my hometown, Groningen, the Netherlands, was liberated from the Germans, after a fierce 4 day fight with the Canadian Army. Thank you Canada.
Next week some thinking on church reform and re-focus of worship.