Several people, many of them new readers of Another Voice, have asked me to explain the relationship between faith and religion. I have touched on this before but have added some new elements and suggestions.

 

Faith is an Experience:  In the Faith Experience people do have an experience of the Divine, often described under various names: God, Creator, Father, Mother, Allah, the Ground of Being, etc. To be open to the faith experience, we need quiet and reflective time. We are often so busy that we neglect simply being ourselves.

These days I resonate more and more with the words of Karl Rahner (1904-1984), the German Jesuit priest and theologian who was one of the most influential Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century: “I must confess to you in all honesty that for me God is and has always been absolute mystery. I do not understand what God is. No one can. We have intimations, and inklings. We make faltering attempts to put mystery into words. But there is no word for it, no sentence for it.”   

I also liked the U.S. feminist theologian, Rosemary Radford Ruether (1936-2022), who stressed that God is not an external cosmic monarch, but the underlyin matrix of existence that grounds life, connection, and transformative renewal. She argued that traditional concepts of God have been distorted by patriarchy into an oppressive, male ruler separate from creation. Ruether was professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C. and later at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Although she remained a Catholic, her first book, The Church Against Itself (1967), criticized the doctrine of the church and the church’s views of sexuality and reproduction, and it got her rejected by Catholic institutions.

I like especially the current theological reflections of Ilia Delio (born 1955), a Franciscan sister and theologian in Washington DC, who views God not as an old man in the sky or an external ruler, but as the dynamic, absolute power of love and the evolving “sacred Whole” of the universe. God is the core energy driving cosmic evolution and is deeply intertwined with matter and human consciousness. Ilia Delio currently serves as Executive Director of the World Institute for Science, Religion and Culture (formerly the Center for Christogenesis) which she founded as an online educational resource, building upon the vision of Teilhard de Chardin and the integration of science, religion and technology today.

Some clarifications:

Belief is the attempt to put into words the meaning of our Faith Experience. Belief is really theology which is “faith seeking understanding.”

Religion is an attempt to interpret and systematize Belief. Any religion is a system of beliefs and practices that helps people understand and live their faith experience. Religion therefore gives people: rituals, ritual places, ritual leaders, sacred books, sacred places, sacred days and seasons, codes of morality and creedal statements of belief. Religion provides helpful aids – MEANS – that point people to the Divine. That is good and proper. But religion is not Faith. Sometimes religion gets distorted and very religious people can be very ungodly. And all religions go through a four-stage life cycle.

 

The Religion Life Cycle

 

• All religions begin with the charismatic foundational stage – for example, the primitive Christian community. Here men and women had such a vivid lived awareness of the Faith Experience that they had little need for institutional structure. They relied on do-it-self and charismatic ways of praying, speaking, and celebrating. Men and women, who were local leaders, presided at Eucharist. It all seemed so very natural and normal.
• Then when people started thinking and asking: “how do we safeguard what we have and how do we pass this on to the next generation?” the religion entered stage two. This is the stage of institutionalization: important statements like the Gospels are written down, set ways of praying like official sacramental rituals and gestures are established, and properly authorized leaders are established. Ordination was then created as a kind of quality control mechanism to make certain that the Christian leaders were competent and reliable. Ordination, please note, was not originally about power over people and not about sacramental power! Important to remember.
• After some time, the religion enters stage three. I call it the stage of self-focused short-sightedness. The institutional religion becomes so self-centered and so self-protective that it becomes less a means and path to the Divine and more and more the OBJECT itself of religious devotion. This stage comes close to idolatry. In stage three the religious institution and certain institutional leaders, become religious objects and are treated like IDOLS. People get so involved in acts of religious veneration that they miss or distort the Divine.
• When stage three happens, the only solution is reformation, which demands a serious effort to regain the vision and focus on the Divine – the spirit and life of stages one and two. We need to recapture the vigor and creative enthusiasm of stages one and two and create new structures and theological explanations to guide contemporary believers.

In the post-stage-three-reformation, we need to change our Christian environment.

We are there right now. I suggest six ways to change, improve, and move ahead.

(1) We must move from living in the past to engaging with the present and thinking creatively about tomorrow. This means moving well beyond, for example, antiquated understandings of human sexuality and gender, prejudice against women, and distorted biblical and historical understandings.

(2) We need ongoing education that moves people from boxed-in perspectives to open and developing theology. All doctrinal statements are provisional understandings. We are all learners. No one has all the truth. There is still much to learn and discover.

(3) We need to shift from self-protective bureaucratic hierarchies, whose vision is to protect and save the institution, to being supportive communities of faith. People forget that Jesus did not exercise power over people. He empowered people to take responsibility in living, learning, and caring for one another. Jesus did not control people through authoritarian decrees.

(4) We need to abandon religious arrogance and move into humble inter-church collaboration. No Christian and no Christian tradition can be regarded as superior to others and therefore act in a haughty or snobbish manner. Some Catholics still think they have all the truth. Some evangelicals think that way as well.

(5) We need to stop being energetic and proud temple-builders and start being traveling pilgrims. What do people today really need? An impressive and bigger cathedral or a roof overhead, a meal, health care, childcare, compassionate understanding, and a more secure and hopeful life. It is a values question.

(6) We must not focus on just schooling professionals but mentoring spiritual leaders. When it comes to Christian ministry, the mentality of the professional is often not enough. We need pastoral leaders and ministers who are much more than professionals. We need leaders who are men and women anchored in deep faith and who, as our fellow travelers, understand us and support our own faith development as compassionate and genuine spiritual guides.

And so, we can move ahead!

 

Jack

Dr. John A. Dick – Historical Theologian

Email: jadleuven@gmail.com