| Christian faith and religion
Stephen Curkpatrick
What
gives impetus to religion is the mystery of human life as finite yet intersected
by the eternal. Humans are an enigma to themselves—at once mortal but also yearning
for that which is otherwise than the limits of living toward death. God
is the source of human desire for what is beyond or otherwise than our resources
and limits. God is the horizon of human existence. The
impetus for religion comes from the desire and search for God. This restless hunger
is also terminated as religion, whereby
the pilgrim desire for the city of In
their religious yearnings, humans express inklings for an ultimate reality. They
also ossify these inklings within rituals, texts and customs that become a primary
focus other than the yearnings that first generated them. These expressions of
religious life also become particular cultural or tribal affirmations of life
within the perennial struggle for survival before the terminal horizon of death.
Such expressions of religious life can be playful in celebration, reassuring in
their regular rhythms or even harmful as superstition. v Humans search for images that speak adequately
to the enigma of their existence amid the flux of phenomena. Not finding these,
they invent or synthesize incessantly from within phenomena. Each synthesis conjures
some inkling or clue as to their source of existence and in turn, can become an
idol. Humans read themselves in the mirror
of selected phenomena only to find that they are reading their existence from
a hall of mirrors amid endless phenomena that exceed their powers of assimilation.
Before this excess of phenomena, humans become enmeshed in the phenomena that
are close to hand. Spaces and artifacts, regional rhythms and past events become
the focus of human existence in culture at its most intense in religious identity. Humans look for affirmations of their
identity and a focus of this desire in the vast array of phenomena. They can read
their existence from a myriad of possible reflections within phenomena but by
culture or convention, selected reflections become definitive as social and religious
determinations, even as these reflections are given variously to others in other
times, places and cultures. When a particular aggregate or configuration
of phenomena becomes the primary focus of identity it also becomes distorted.
Desire for the good is always present and imperative, yet its focus within selected
phenomena, even as religiously designated, distorts this desire and can lead to
nothingness (nihil) instead of life.
The search for the good within phenomena—whether
textual or tactile, visible or virtual, cultural or social—appears plausible but
its focus is less than a source for the good. Assuming that a desire for the good
is itself the good that must be sustained within specific forms, humans fail to
recognise their true possibilities for existence. The prohibition of idolatry in v All
human cultures carry spiritual questions of life along with their fragmented articulation
in social inquiry, art, literature and religion. Cultures also sustain and exhibit
expressions of human dysfunction. These are more common to all cultures than the
uniqueness of any culture’s particular aspirations. Desire for the true and the
good is always apparent within these aspirations. The quest for the true and the
good is both expressed and compromised variously. In
Christian testimony, God is the source of existence without whom creation would
sink into nothingness from whence it was called. The Word
in the beginning with God and the Spirit
of God are the dynamic sources of equilibrium by which creation is summoned
and sustained, without which societies would collapse into a chaos of disorder.
The Word in creation is present in the world, even amid human dysfunction, as
the continual impetus toward equilibrium through human responsibility within societies.
Human
particularity is affirmed in Christian testimony. Through particularity, humans
experience the fruits of creation; these fruits are also diminished or compromised
within cultural particularity. In
the perennial restlessness for self-evident ideals, the particularity of culture,
even when expressed as religion, is never adequate in assuaging human desire. Within
the limits of time and region, humans attempt to nail down perspective, even as
they are exposed to time and the changing shape of relationships within society.
This occurs most comprehensively in religion as a quest to bind cultural values
to sovereign principles amid the flux of life. If focused in an absolute entity,
these principles also become absolute for cultural life. v Christian
testimony affirms human freedom, possibility, dignity and responsibility in the
context of community and creation. It also recognises the reality of perennial
human compromise that is unrelenting, mutually destructive and radically inscribed—as
the good we would do but do
not do and the evil we would not do
but do—in every time and region of human experience. Christian
testimony speaks into every culture and unlike idealism, honours its particularity;
yet it also articulates what is durable and otherwise than any particular culture
and its distinctive expressions of human life and foci of identity, religious
and civic. The
triune story of Jesus Christ is uniquely Christian; it is also a story of God
in creation. Yet without the Judeo-Christian story, the criteria of faithfulness
to the story of God in creation are only vaguely known. Humans can only grope
after and second-guess such criteria out of selected and fragmented phenomena
of the world, cultural or natural, religious and secular. The triune reality of
God gives the story that makes truthful engagement with creation possible—the
love of God in Christ that illuminates the ultimate nature of reality as relational
and self-giving, along with the story of creation in which the Spirit is also
present as creative source of life in all things, yet always beyond human grasp. Christian
faith is otherwise than religion, celebrating the gracious initiative and disclosure
of God to humans in transformative love. Paul’s
epistles, especially Romans and Galatians, suggest that religion ultimately fails,
for the canons of religion—law, ritual and tradition—are eventually compromised
in the potent mix of human hubris, anxiety and freedom in living with a horizon
of death. The gospels, especially John, depict within religion an ever-latent
antipathy to grace and truth, for humans pride their own traditions as sources
of integral identity and competence for the good. New
Testament testimony resists an impersonal perspective of God as absolute principle
without relationship; it therefore resists religious fatalism in which God is
sovereign but not intimate. Christian
faith is a response to the inadequacy of human groping for God as inevitably,
this quest becomes fixated either in
or as religion in its perennial capacity
for parochial, ethnic, tribal, legal, fatalist, superstitious and idolatrous expressions.
Selected
sources: Barth Creation CD III.1-3;
Heidegger Being and Time; Jüngel God as the Mystery of the World; Levinas
Totality and Infinity; Lossky Orthodox Theology; Kasper The God of Jesus Christ; Marion In Excess; Rahner Foundations of Christian Faith; Spinoza Ethics; von Balthasar Explorations
in Theology Vols. I & III. |
