May 10 2020
IS RELIGION STILL RELEVANT?
God’s peace be unto you.
On March 10 1965 I bought Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, new, for $1.45. It’s now a tattered copy, held together with black tape.
That was 55 years ago!
Buying that book then shows my thinking and my reading habits way back when I was a young 37 years of age, married for 12 years, a father of 5 young children, living in a newly constructed multi-leveled home, with a built-in office, chairing the steering committee charged with organizing a four day convention for some 3,000 CRC – Christian Reformed Church – young people from all over North America – a special train came from Chicago-land with 1,000 teenagers – an elder in a large CRC church, operating my insurance agency, and being brand-new real estate broker.
That huge church, seating 700 people, then full twice on Sundays, is now closed!
Is Religion still relevant?
Yes, it’s an altogether a-religious age now. Then young people still went to church and attended societies; then church attendance and weekly church-related activities were part of daily life. Now?
Now?
“You are the salt of the earth”, Jesus stated in the Sermon On the Mount.
Re-reading Bonhoeffer’s book last week I was struck by his statement, “That salt sustains the earth: the world exists for the sake of the disciples”.
That needs some explanation.
When Jesus said this, the 12 disciples constituted the entire church. They were then ‘the salt of the earth’. That humble flock of fishermen kept the earth intact. Bonhoeffer again, “In casting out the disciples the earth is destroying its very life.”
In other words, once the salt loses its ‘saltiness’, the earth implodes.
Is that the case today? Has the church failed in its essence?
Bonhoeffer thinks so.
Bonhoeffer, when in prison, awaited a trial that never came. Without any jurisdictional preliminaries he was hanged 75 years ago, his grave never found.
While in the Gestapo prison he had lots of time to ponder the fate of the church and the state of religion. In 1944-5 his isolation resembled our isolation, unable to gather with fellow believers. Now our only ‘Christian Community’ contact is through telephone or Zoom or Skype or Internet. Then Bonhoeffer’s only link with the outside world was through letters with a believer-guard facilitating that process.
In these letters Bonhoeffer explored the state of the church. He gave as example something then current: in his days his (and my) parents and grandparents had a ‘best room’ that had nothing to do with work, everyday life and normality. That’s how he saw the church, a sugar-coated faith for Sunday services that turned Jesus into some moralistic figure – if he is mentioned at all. He wrote, “Christ has been banned completely from the house of life and confined to the temple and the church.”
And then this key statement,
“Christ does not call us to a new religion but to life…….Religious trappings go very much against my grain, often to the point of instinctive revulsion, and that is certainly not good.”
We do well to bond with Bonhoeffer here, because he was a visionary, a person who in prison found not a grain of religion among his fellow detainees, detected not a trace of faith in God there. That made him to write, “God is either 100 percent real in the world or not at all: there is no third possibility. God’s reality cannot be divided into religion on the one hand and reality on the other……It is impossible to experience the reality of God without the reality of the world, or the reality of the world without the reality of God…..Worldly existence and Christian existence are not simply two sides of a coin but they are at one and the same time the whole coin. If this is not the case the church degenerates into a ‘religious society’ (or, as my church calls itself, ‘a religious organization’), fighting for its own existence, and thus automatically no longer God’s church in the world……Without God, without humanity we lose the earth: God, humanity and the earth belong together”.
Yes, a religious organization stands on its own, apart from God and apart from the world: a mere human movement. A church should be a God-fearing, Earth-enhancing Community, because God, Humanity and the Earth belong together. J. H. Bavinck affirms this when he writes that redemption of humanity and redemption of creation – the world – go hand in hand.
That brings me back to The Salt of the Earth. That salt has now become defunct, and with it the earth ceases to be, something we experience today.
As I see it from my limited perspective: All churches, all ‘religions’, separate faith from day-to-day LIFE. And now it is no longer possible to live so that God, Humanity and Life are united. The church, seen as a ‘religious’ organization’ stands apart from life and thus separated from God: the church is there for itself, in spite of its pious utterances.
The VIRUS
The VIRUS we are experiencing is the result of a humanity living without God, without regard for John 3: 16, love for the cosmos. Loving the cosmos has become impossible, even though we must persist.
The Virus is the direct result of us forgetting that the earth must remain inviolate, that we, humanity, the earth and God belong together. By cutting down the forests everywhere, we disturb nature’s balance, and the animals’ viruses become ours. Even though we may find some sort of vaccine today, tomorrow an even more dangerous disease will emerge, because our ‘religion’ prevails, ‘the SALT’ has lost its flavor, sealing our doom. But ‘religion’ still lives on!
The optimism, the youthful enthusiasm of the 1960’s, is gone, and with it our future. But ‘religion’ lives.
May 1, 2020
We know that our alteration of the atmosphere is leading us into a mass-extinction event, but we don’t want to change our habits: we are addicted and our lack of faith accelerates the disintegration, even though this disease can kill anyone on the planet: it’s invisible; it spreads because of the way we move and congregate. It now looks that in the choice between economic activity and health protection, the drive for the dollar has priority: we always choose death over LIFE.
Be assured that this is the first of many calamities that will unfold throughout the coming years. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel. This is just a dress rehearsal. Wait till Global Heating fires up: bound to come. Wait till the world runs out of potable water: bound to come. Wait till crops fail and famine stalks: bound to come. Wait till electricity ceases and the Internet is interrupted: bound to come.
All these are baked into the situation we’ve already created, in part by ignoring warnings that scientists have been issuing since the nineteen-sixties. Some shocks will be local, others regional, but many will be global, because, as this crisis shows, we are interconnected as a biosphere and a civilization.
The Salt has lost its favor: irrelevant religion is still alive but LIFE is dead, because we have separated God from creation and creation from LIFE.
Christ did not come to bring religion: that’s a manmade affair. Irrelevant. Christ came to bring us LIFE, Eternal Life, Life to the FULL.
Postscript.
On May 10 2020 it is exactly 80 years that the German army entered the Netherlands and for Five Full Years I lived under the cruel German Occupation.