By Harold W. Anderson, Ph.D., M.A., M.Div.
I have to admit, I enjoy TikTok, and I am a little concerned that on my feed at least, there are so many expressing their dismay about religion in general and Christianity in particular. Now, before the chorus of loud “Amens!” begin to ring out, let me also say that while I am a Christian minister, I am no longer active in a church. I no longer preach sermons, although I have posted some on this blog. I no longer associate with churchgoers, at least not within the walls of a church. And I no longer believe that religion, not even the Christian religion, owns an exclusive right to the pathway to heaven. So, does this mean that I am now an atheist? Absolutely not. Does it mean that I no longer find value in the pages of scripture the Christians call the “Bible”? It doesn’t mean that either. In fact, I feel that my faith is stronger now than it was when I was active in a local church. Why? The answer is the subject of this essay.
I have four degrees in religion, theology, philosophy, and the ministry. I’m not saying this to brag. Rather, I wish to illustrate a point. I have dedicated more years to graduate work in religion than it takes most people to graduate from high school, and this does not include the work I did as an undergraduate. When you add to this more than 23 years in the ministry, I think I can say that I know something of religion, philosophy, and theology, and I know something of the local and administrative functions of the Church. True, academics demanded a great deal of my time as both a student and an instructor at colleges and universities, but the whole time I was involved in school, I was also involved in the Church. I guess I was always impressed by Karl Barth’s idea that the informed minister is one who has a Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other. Academics provided a wider, more informed perspective on religion’s interface with the world, while the local church provided me insight into how the rubber meets the road. So, what about all of this makes me want to define faith apart from the worship of the Church and convinces me that church attendance is not necessary?
When one studies the history of just about any religion, there seems to be a disconnect between the religion’s founding personage and the religious structure that follows. I suppose this is somewhat inevitable because as Augustine pointed out, faith is always seeking understanding. When the way we understand faith is codified into dogma and belief, however, the latter supplants the former. Dogmas and statements of belief represent human beings’ attempt to understand that which surpasses understanding. So, when intelligent people believe their words about God in a categorical way, something has gone awry. For example, the Judeo-Christian notion of God is one that cannot be expressed in words. Whatever God is, God is other than that which we name God to be. Or, to use Anselm’s famous quote, God is “a being than which nothing greater can be conceived” (see his Proslogium). Or, as Rudolf Otto noted, God is the being that evokes a tremendous awe, the source of which is an absolute mystery (see his Idea of the Holy).
But how do people worship something they don’t understand? How do they claim to follow a being they don’t really know? Indeed, what kind of God is this “absolute mystery” that human beings want to concern themselves with it? People want to know. They want answers. They want to know what they are getting themselves into. This is no less true of religious leaders than it is those who warm the pews of a church, synagogue, mosque or whatever their gathering place might be called. As curious beings, we want to know that what we preach, teach, and proclaim is indeed true. I will take Christianity as an example.
The person whose teachings formed the trajectory to what is now known as Christianity was a man named Jesus. His earliest followers believed that In Jesus’ words one found the “Logos” (Word). The term logos has a long theological, philosophical and political history all of which found focus in the message of Jesus. The Logos was found in the way Jesus referred to himself. Jesus called himself the “Son of God,” a term reserved in Rome for Ceasar. Ceasar, as the son of god, spoke to human beings the message of the gods. But as a Jew, Jesus had grave doubts about this. Ceasar did not speak on behalf of Yahweh, who Jesus called his “father,” and so Jesus’ message was a constant reminder that politicians were not divine messengers and political structures were not God’s reign, nor the citizens necessarily God’s people. The Logos was revealed in Jesus’ attitude towards the religious leaders of his time. Jesus’ criticism of these people was harsh. These leaders tended to substitute their dogmas and laws for God with the result that people worshipped words rather than God. In other words, they were idolatrous. The Logos was revealed in Jesus’ thoughts about how he and his followers should treat people. We act divinely, Jesus told his followers, with actions of love not codified words. A person acts with wisdom when they embody acts of love.
Jesus’ message suggested that whatever God was, God birthed into people the wisdom of a life defined by love. As such, this message was as prophetic as it was soothing. It cut through the human trappings of life to reveal a type of relationality that transcends national and religious loyalty. If people truly wanted to be loving, Jesus taught them, they must first deny these trappings and love others. Or, as the words of the Johannine author(s) warned, if we say that we love others but hate our brothers and sisters, we are liars and truth does not live in us. If we are to have faith, Jesus taught, then we must love our neighbors.
Following his death, however, Jesus’ followers were left with only his words. What do these words mean? How do we understand Jesus’ message of love and how does love change the way we live with each other? When words are embedded in cultural and religious values that may be foreign to those who read them, what are they to make of them? Take, for example, the philosophical, religious and political divide between the Greco-Roman world and the world of the diasporic Jew. The Romans understood the words of Jesus through a Latin lens, while the Greeks understood them through the lens of the Greek spoken by the common person. The Jews read them through an Aramaic and Hebrew lens, and all heard them say something that was sometimes strikingly different. What does it mean for faith to seek understanding in this wash of cultural relativism? This is not an easy question to answer, and the task of the theologian and ecclesiastical leaders was to provide an answer for the Jesus followers. The result was a dizzying array of differing groups, each claiming to have figured it out.
As they went about their work, something interesting happened. The Empire of Rome began to collapse and during the resulting turmoil, Christianity became the official religion of Rome. Not only did this lend tremendous power to the Roman Church, but the words and practices of its theologians and religious leaders also began to don the authority of law while the lines between citizenship and church membership were blurred. In all of this, there is one thing that Romans like. They like laws. And there is one thing they don’t like. They don’t like chaos. To define laws and quiet discontent, church leaders came together to define who and what God is. Do you remember I said that people tended to hear and read the words of Jesus through the lens of their respective languages? Well, the dominant languages here were two: Greek and Latin. In the West, Latin won the day, and the leaders of the Greek Church were excommunicated, kicked out of the Roman Church leaving them to form their own, now called the Greek Orthodox Church.
I will not get into the complexities of this dispute. Suffice it to say that in the West, Rome was now the Church, and the Church was Rome. The words of the Roman Church, their dogmas and creeds, were now law, laws that formed the core beliefs of Church and State. To believe was to believe these words, which is a far cry from the message of love lived and taught by Jesus. Now people could know with greater certainty. The words definitively revealed who God was, what God intended, and who Jesus was in relationship to God. To believe was to believe these words. One’s salvation was dependent upon it.
I have crammed a lot of church history into a short space, and there is much yet to be told. I will not do that here.[i] What I have said, however, is sufficient to note a tragic but perhaps inevitable turn taken by the Church. Instead of debating what it means to love one’s neighbor, the Church debated what it means to dedicate oneself to the Trinitarian God, the truth of which is located within the teachings of a particular group. Those inside this group were saved because of what they believed. Those outside were not. This in and out logic has become the core of the Church’s message and defines lines of demarcation responsible for sewing deep divides between those calling themselves “Christians.” The end is not peace; it is war as evidenced in the history of the West. We love our neighbor if our neighbor is us.
I guess I have always rebelled against this in and out logic even when I thought it was the path to salvation. Is it fair to say that a person is in and that person is out based only upon the words they believe? What if the “out-person” is more ethical than the “in-person”? Traditionally, all religions have wrestled with this issue. If we were to study Jewish, Islam, Buddhist, Shinto, Christian or any other religion, we discover that to “have faith” is to commit oneself to the words or dogma of that religion. It means, in other words, accepting as authoritative the words ordained by a religious body to be words that defined and represent that which is sacred. This means that it is dogma, not the person of the religion’s founder, that forms the core of the religion and may or may not faithfully represent who the founder was and how the founder lived among the people of their time. Here, however, is the catch. Those who perpetuate the tradition started by the founder cannot truly claim to be one with the presence of the founder who has long ago passed away. All they have are the founder’s words. They are dependent upon the dogma that has been written and taught over the course of time, so with religions, there can be no acceptance of those who think and teach different words, different dogmas. To accept another is to deny one’s own. There can be no tolerance of those who are different, for to do so might mean that one is not committed to the distinctiveness and hence, authority of one’s own words. In such a situation, there is no peace except through dominance, through the elimination of all differences if not by conversion, then by force. The history of the world is testimony to this scenario.
If you have ever wondered why society is so divided, look to religion for an explanation. Religion is the beginning and perpetuator of these divisions. When the words of religion are imbued with the “sins” of time—i.e., socio-economic class, slavery, xenophobia, pride, hunger for power, etc.—then these differences become a threat to the world. Or as theologian Hans Küng argues, there can “be no world peace without peace among religions, no peace among religions without dialogue between religions, and no dialogue between the religions without accurate knowledge of one another…. Today, no religions can live in splendid isolation” (Cf. “Christianity and World Religions: Dialogue with Islam,” in Toward a Universal Theology of Religion, p. 194). While Küng’s point is well taken, I would take it a step further and suggest that we must look past religion to something like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity” (Cf. his Letters and Papers from Prison, pp. 371ff.), except I would say religionless faith. It is for that reason that I have chosen to live outside the Church, outside the words of religion, and practice my faith in a religionless way. But what does this mean?
Bonhoeffer did not live long enough to explain what he meant by “religionless Christianity,” but the phrase is provocative. For Bonhoeffer, Christianity remained revelatory and so he included it in his phrase, but as I said above, I prefer religionless faith to religionless Christianity. I find the man Jesus inspirational, but as I used to preach in my sermons, while we may define our faith by trying to walk in the footsteps of Jesus, this does not mean that we walk in the shadow of the Church. While the man Jesus may inspire my faith, the Christ of Christianity defines a belief system made up of propositions immune to the everydayness of life and therefore devoid of faith. Faith is not found in words; it is found in behaviors, in acts of love.
This needs to be fleshed out, so to speak, with greater specificity. A father who beats his children may think he is doing the loving thing, but is he? How would he know? The man who abuses his wife proclaims his love for her and too often she may believe him, but how can she know? People may hate others because they believe God has told them to do so, so in their hatred they feel as if they are performing acts of love. Is this love? I’ve heard it said, love the person but hate the sin. Is this possible? I’ve heard others say that they “love God.” What does this mean? How has this “love” manifest itself in their relationship with others? It is easy to love those who sit with us in the pews singing the songs we love to sing and espousing the articles of faith we love to believe, but is this enough? Is this what Jesus meant when he admonished us to love our neighbor, or is there more to it than this? What authority helps us discern whether we love or just believe more words? What teaches us how to love others that we might live in our world redemptively?
Just as religionless faith cannot reside in religion, neither can it be found in one’s sense of self. I am not the author of my faith; it is always authored by something outside myself. It is always Other. For millennia, otherness has been attributed to God. God is the other, but from the perspective of religionless faith, such metaphysical claims are just more words. God becomes an object upon whom people project their own sense of self writ large, but to believe in this God is simply to believe in themself. These words, then, lack faith. But the otherness of faith is always other than what we are and powerfully reveals to us that we are not God nor are our ways necessarily loving. Martin Buber wrote that whatever the divine may be, it is revealed from within human relationality not outside of it (See his Ich und Du, and his Between Man and Man). That is to say, the “Thou” (Du) of my neighbor is the place where I (Ich) meet the divine. The divine is revealed, as Emmanuel Levinas put it, in the face of the Other, but the “Other,” while sacred, is not the metaphysical God of religion and dogma. It is the one who from the margins of society utters the words “you have no right to kill me” (See his Basic Philosophical Writings). The Other of religionless faith is the dynamic fabric of relationality where those who are vulnerable define my responsibility and my accountability. If we are to have faith, if we are to truly act in loving ways, we must stand before the face of the Other without pretense and in humility so that in the face, Otherness reveals to us how we might live in a loving way. And if we focus on the vulnerable in society, if we stand in the presence of “the least of these,” as the man Jesus put it, then we will realize what it means to have faith. In the words of the Jesus narrative, love is standing in the shadow of the cross realizing that the strength of our love is found in a willingness to sacrifice all we have including our life to the face of the Other.
The life of faith is not an easy one. Love, as anyone who has been in love will testify, is something that will challenge us to our very core and often call upon us to put our own self-interests aside for those we love. However, the reward for doing so is heavenly. If we love others based upon the revelation that comes in the face of the Other, we will know the zenith of human achievement and risk the gloomy depths of loss. But in that lies the miracle of religionless faith, for sewn in the fabric of this relationality is the reality of our redemption and the redemption of our world.
[i] To read a more detailed account, see Litonjua, M. D. (2016). Spiritual, but not religious: Untangling a seeming paradox. International Review of Modern Sociology, 42(1), 21-55. Litonjua quotes Robin Meyers who writes: “Consider this: there is not a single word in th[e] Sermon [on the Mount] about what to believe, only words about what to do. It is a behavioral manifesto, not a propositional one. Yet three centuries later, when the Nicene Creed became the official oath of Christendom, there was not a single word in it about what to do, only words about what to believe!”