Mortal Remains
The Trouble with Religion
by S. M. Hutchens
I was sent an article in which the Evangelical author pointed out a number of warning signs she had noticed in the discourse of Evangelicals that point toward their departure from biblical faith to religious liberalism. It was well-observed, well-written, and on point.
Right in One Sense, Wrong in Another
The one place I would quibble a bit with her is in the blame she places on the common tendency one finds in this degenerating group to separate faith in Jesus—i.e., true faith—from "religion," for which they hold no brief at all. There is a sense in which this outlook, though I doubt they understand it very well, is defensible. Kierkegaard, in his continual struggle with the Danish state church, treated the problem of debased religion better, I suppose, than any other writer aside from Isaiah, St. John, and St. Paul. There is indeed a point, impossible to detect with precision (for a point has no dimensions) at which faith dies and passes over into its antithesis—in which its form is maintained, but it has lost its essence; the Spirit has departed, but the Temple remains.
Biblical examples of this descensus are provided in the first few chapters of Revelation and in many other places where a corporate departure from the Lord and his precepts are spoken of. St. Paul asks, in 1 Corinthians 10, why, if it could happen among so great and elect a people as the Jews, Christians should view themselves as immune. I would not be surprised if this were the most resisted passage in Scripture:
I would not have you be ignorant, dear brethren, that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ. But with many of them God was not well-pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness. . . . All these things happened to them as examples, and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come, so let whoever thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. (1 Cor. 10:1–5,11–12)
So, rejection of "religion" operates equally in different spheres, one of which (the one this article's author speaks of) tends toward, let us call it dysincarnation, an aversion to true manifestations of the living hand of God active in the material world, including manifestations of true religion found in the worship of the faithful. In this sphere, suspicion of any religion rejected by God, even if it was once acceptable to and ordained by him, is entirely justified, and that rejection is an exercise in holiness.
Rejection of religion in the opposing sphere assigns all corporate exercises of faith to ambiguity, justifying a departure from the worship of God's people which, in the end, is damnation. We are not free to reject the Church in Jesus' name—something the original Evangelicals knew very well.
No True Believer Thinks Himself "Religious"
One should add here that no convinced believer, of whatever faith, regards his persuasion as "religion," as though it were a quantitively greater one-among-others. "Religion," while a handy term to avoid insult, or to identify some piety, is fundamentally the belief of the errorist and the deluded, all religions being equally false simulations of the Way, substitutes for true submission to the true God. The perverse illusions of the merely religious cannot be compared to this submission, being, as they are, of a wholly different genus.
When the committed believer refers objectively to his own faith as "religion," his subjective understanding of it as the unique and divinely ordained Way of Life surrounds and underlies it, and this is how he speaks of it among his fellows. When a Muslim or a Christian identifies a religious non-believer as an infidel, this is at base a mere statement of fact, as though it were being noted that he was a bricklayer or an accountant. It becomes an insult only at a subsequent level of meaning.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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