July 22 2023
THE RISE OF RELIGION-LESS CHRISTIANITY
“I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them. (Amos 5: 21-22)
Religion kills.
The 9/11 episode involving the World Trade Center in New York, when 3,000 people died, was religion-motivated, influenced by the Crusades 1,000 years ago, a pure religious war.
The Bible, that collection of books, accumulated over a thousand years, written by a committee that never met, contains an extraordinary consistent and often an intense quarrel with religion, witness the above quote from Amos. Jesus’ slugfest with the scribes and pharisees, calling them hypocrites, blind guides, broods of vipers, (see Matthew 23), is basically a direct assault on religion, now degenerated into dogma and ritual and moral codes.
Karl Barth, the famous 20th Century theologian, wrote, “The message of the Bible is that God hates religion”. Another prominent Bible teacher, Paul Tillich, wrote in a similar vein: “We call Jesus the Christ not because he brought a new religion, but because he is the end of religion, above religion and irreligion, above Christianity and non-Christianity.”
And then, there is the real clincher: Revelation 21: 22 reports that in the New Creation, which I long for and which soon will come, ‘there is no temple there’. Since our current ‘trial run’ on earth, really is a proving ground for eternity, really is preparation for LIFE to come, in the New Creation, the lack of a temple, a church, synagogue, a mosque, indicates that ‘religion’ of any kind will cease to exist in eternity. This, to me, means that today, Anno 2023, when signs of the END have never been more pronounced, we must be ready for ‘religion-less Christianity.
The last days.
Yes, I repeat: There is no doubt in my mind that today we live in the last stage of the human-dominated world, what Bonhoeffer calls, “A world become of Age.” Also, a world without God. One hallmark of this is that ‘everything becomes what it is’, and religion is no exception.
So, where is religion today?
I just finished reading a Dutch book my brother Drewes sent me, with the engaging title, “Apocalypsofie’. In her 170 pages book, Lisa Doeland, a philosopher at 2 Dutch universities, one in Amsterdam, writes that the task of Philosophy is to learn how to die. In times of ecological catastrophe, we not only must discover how to deal with our mortality, but also how to handle our extinction. In her book she tries to answer how philosophy can teach us how to die.
It struck me that nowhere in this book is there a hint to Christianity. Indeed, ‘a world without God.’ It seems to me that ‘religion’ – and the Netherlands is saturated with it – has become taboo, a force of no consequence, even though, with proportional representation in parliament, there are several ‘Christian’ Political Parties, indicating a lively ‘religious’ segment, often ‘against’ something, not unlike the political situation in the USA.
The start of the Christian ‘religion’.
When Emperor Constantine presides over the first council of Nicea in 325 AD, organized religion replaced Christianity which had gained prominence through house churches and local initiatives. The building of churches, the introduction of professional clergy and religious orders were the direct consequence. ‘Religion’ became secular.
Now Christianity is a spent force. The world runs totally without God. We live in religion-less times, which calls for ‘religion-less Christianity, a Christianity without religion, but not a Christianity without God. The mystery of God becoming human, is at the heart of religion-less Christianity, thanks to Bonhoeffer’s musings.
This new Christianity, this religion-less Christianity, comes at the time when the world has come of age. We now discover that we have totally failed to acknowledge that God and creation are one. We now discover that life has its wellspring, its very source in God, and proceeds in turn from this world, this cosmos, back to God. Jesus did not start a new religion. He taught us ‘how to live in this world’, have a full life there. His first miracle was making WINE.
Wrote Bonhoeffer in his last days before he was martyred, “Our relationship to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship to the highest best being we can conceive of, but rather our relationship to God is that of a new life in being for others, in participation in the being of Jesus.”
Today there are 21,000 forest fires worldwide, a warning that: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. (2 Peter 3: 10).