JUNE 30 2018
HAS RELIGION BECOME A RELIC?
Last week my wife and I went to a community event sponsored by the Tweed and Area Art Council. The council a few years ago purchased a disused United Church building, just north of where we live, and fixed it up nicely, the interior that is, the exterior is pure marble – a locally mined product – and as such it is known as THE MARBLE CHURCH.
The program was quite varied, and completely carried out by local people, who had written the plays, directed and performed them. Apart from six people – including us two- who belonged to our Presbyterian church, I was quite sure that very few in the audience as well as of the actors, musicians and dancers ever attended a religious event. Oh yes, I recognized some Roman Catholic people, and probably there were others who would go to mass regularly. It was quite evident that the performers were really dedicated, perhaps more than many church people to their institution.
By the way: among the total audience, some 100 hundred people, there was not a single minority member, quite typical for small rural communities which also vote conservative.
While watching I wondered what religion meant to both church goers and the unaffiliated. I don’t want to sound judgemental because I cannot see into their hearts, but I am pretty sure that religion really plays no role in most people’s life at all, both church goers and non. Do they ever have questions about GOD and how things started, and now especially, how it all will end?
J.H. Bavinck, in his THE RIDDLE OF LIFE opened his book this way:
“When we for the first time are consciously aware of what really is going on in the world, and therefore suddenly look at the world with renewed eyes, that is the precise moment when we are overwhelmed with questions. Why? Because the problems that confront us today are so numerous and in the main so intractable that, while trying to solve them, we cannot escape the distinct notion that we have an impossible fight on our hands.”
Yes, questions abound. But do people still seek answers?
I am a weather freak, not quite obsessed by it, but I certainly have a more than passing interest in what happens in the atmosphere. Every day I look at the website of the National Hurricane Center and the Wunderground.com. Both keep me posted on the weather-related events especially in North America. When this blog is posted it is supposed to be 35 degrees Celsius. Pretty hot stuff.
Will people wake up? Will they change their ways, so that they will have a clearer conscience when, appearing before the Judgement Seat, they can plead a degree of resistance to the looming weather-related disaster known as Climate Change? The Judgement Seat, What’s that?
A new book.
Our oldest son gave me a book last week: “12 RULES FOR LIFE, an antidote to chaos,” by Jordan Peterson, Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. He is quite forthright, and quotes the Bible repeatedly. Example: Matthew 7: 14, “narrow is the way which leads to life, and few find it,” and Matthew 10:34: “Think not that I have come to send peace to earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword”. None of that cheap grace stuff for him.
Peterson is not a member of a church. Is that why he quotes Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky’s last book?
It’s called “The Grand Inquisitor”. It’s a story that Ivan, the atheist Karamazov brother, has composed and recounts to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring priest. In it Jesus returns to the earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Ivan says: “It is fifteen centuries since signs from heaven were seen. And now the deity appears once more among the people.” Everyone recognizes him, because a blind man sees and a dead child rises. But the old cardinal, in charge of the Inquisition, takes Jesus to prison and tells him that: “You have no right to add anything to what you have said…. Why have you come to hinder us?” Ivan explains that this is a fundamental feature of the Church that God cannot ‘meddle’ now because “all has been given by you to the Pope. The Church is the authority now.”
The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that he erred when he resisted the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness, where the devil offered him miracle, mystery and might, which the Church has accepted. Jesus, however, wanted them to have freedom of choice. But, says the clergyman, freedom is too difficult and frightful for the masses and so the Church has taken the three awesome gifts for them. The Inquisitor concludes: “We are not working with you, but with the devil– that is our mystery.” Jesus, still not speaking, kisses him on the lips. “That was all his answer.” The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door and says, “Go, and come no more, never, never.” And the divine visitor leaves.”
I repeat: “Freedom is too difficult for the masses” says the cardinal, but that is an important part of Jesus’ teaching: “The Truth shall set you free”. True, the church of his day and of today rather not give the people a free hand. I wonder, is the result of this the following?
“Whenever God erects a house of prayer
The Devil builds a chapel there;
And ‘twill be found upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.”
Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman
Dr. Peterson comments (page 191): “Dostoevsky saw that the great, corrupt edifice of Christianity still managed to make room for the spirit of its Founder………. With his great generosity of spirit, Dostoevsky granted to the church, corrupt as it might be, a certain element of mercy, a certain pragmatism. He admitted that the spirit of Christ, the world-engendering Logos, has historically and might still find its resting place – even its sovereignty – within that dogmatic structure.”
Peterson is not always that gracious. He takes the church to task in not following Christ’s example of total service, writing, “He not only demands sacrifice, but the sacrifice of precisely what is loved best”, and he then relates how Abraham was asked to sacrifice his son Isaac, something Abraham did not need to do after all, but which the Father God did when the Son Jesus died on the cross.
Wonders Peterson, “Why does God – why does life – impose such demands?” Bonhoeffer, in his The Cost of Discipleship, makes the same point.
Fact is that the church – in the vain hope that more people will join – usually compromises the message. I believe that only radical preaching, in the form of “Seek first the Kingdom, the welfare of Creation,” will save the church from extinction. The failure to do so has caused religion to be on the retreat. But, paradoxically it also may lead to what Bonhoeffer calls RELIGION-LESS RELIGION.
Yes, religion, which has long provided the institutional and social scaffolding for a life of meaning, is in steep decline. The entire Western world, especially young adults are unlikely to identify with a religious faith, attend church or engage in other religious practices. But the sense of meaningfulness provided by religion is not so easily replicated in nonreligious settings: When these white people abandon traditional houses of worship, they increasingly search for alternative religious-like experiences (including those involving ideas about ghosts or space aliens) in order to feel as if they are part of something larger and more meaningful than their brief mortal lives.
Thomas Homer-Dixon – a Waterloo professor – wonders whether there is a direct correlation between environmental degradation and the peoples’ minds. Does a healthy atmosphere make people choose healthier options, including religion, while foul air, foul water, foul soil influences people to become foul themselves: after all we are what we eat, breathe and drink? Fact is that today, right now, longevity is faltering and people are starting to die at younger ages.
In 1919 Prof. Dr. J Huizinga wrote HERFST-TIJ DER MIDDEL- EEUWEN. The English translation has as title THE WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
Today we witness THE WANING OF THE HUMAN AGE. We are managing – in total agreement with the purpose of the Lord – the total destruction of what took place in the first chapters of Genesis: the ever faster pace of environmental destruction of creation that God called `good` after each phase and `very good` when it was completed.
The curious part of this is that this final act of annihilation may well include the Waning of RELIGION.
That needs some elaboration. While in prison in 1944, and months before the Nazis killed him, here’s what Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter to a friend,
“What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience–and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving toward a completely religion-less time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as “religious” do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by “religious.”
Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the “religious a priori” of mankind. “Christianity” has always been a form–perhaps the true form–of “religion.” But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religion-less–and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war (1939-45), in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any “religious” reaction?)–what does that mean for “Christianity”? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our “Christianity,” and that there remain only a few “last survivors of the age of chivalry,” or a few intellectually dishonest people that we are to pounce in fervor, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them?
If we don’t want to do all that, if our final judgment must be that the Western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religion-less as well? Are there religion-less Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity–and even this garment has looked very different at different times–then what is a religion-less Christianity?
End of the Bonhoeffer quote.
I ask the same question: Why is Climate Change or the Trump Tragedy not calling forth any “religious” reaction? What does that mean for “Christianity”?
My struggle is, “What does a church, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religion-less world? How do we speak of God without religion? We are killing God’s creation. Are we killing God in the process? In what way are we “religion-less-secular” Christians? What does it mean, as Bonhoeffer elsewhere stated, that “God, Humanity and the Earth are one?”
Romans 1: 19-20 comes to mind, “What may be known about God is plain to them…..For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.”
In other words, Creation itself places us before God. Does this mean that those people are “Christians” who see creation as God’s, as Divine, and as such honor God as the creator and live accordingly?
If that is the case, where does this place the church? Does it spell the end of religion? Is attempting to live a creation-enhancing life sufficient to win favor with God? In other words, has Religion become a Relic?
Since living a completely non-polluting life has become impossible, even though we must aim for that, grace and prayer are our only refuge.