Is religion relevant to the gospel?
Stephen Curkpatrick

Is religion relevant to God? Is it possible that religion is antithetical to everything announced by the gospel of God in Jesus Christ?

It is commonly assumed that religion enables people to know God. Yet what if religion invokes a presumed knowledge of God but scuttles the possibility of personal encounter with God? What if religion invariably counterfeits what it claims to achieve by selected disciplines, cultural values or customs in the name of a divinity?

By seeking to attain righteousness instead of receiving it as a gift, is not religion antithetical to the gospel? By inducting goodness through legalities, does not religion negate freedom in grace? By formalising its life in sacred rites, is not religion contrary to experiencing God in intimacy within all life?

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That anyone who approaches God must believe that God exists is not a general endorsement of any religious possibility. God as Creator calls forth a distinctive creation from nothing by the word.*

Spiritual pantheism—in which all things, including ourselves are divine—is not here a possibility for approaching God in grace and truth. The elimination of human uniqueness in a seamless cosmic soul is ultimately atheist. Belief in many gods or polytheism, as so many masks behind which God remains unknowable, is also not relevant to such an approach to God.

God, who calls to be by the word, is given to an unfolding story of relationship in a drama of vocative call and response in Israel. To approach God in faith is to anticipate a relational encounter—God who calls forth creation by a word, rewards those who seek in faith. This is a reward of joy in the intimacy of trust. God only can be desired not something else, such as death by violence and subsequent rewards for preserving the absolute name of God.

To approach God in the belief that God exists hardly endorses a general religious possibility. Religion can resist intimacy with God, either by thrusting God away or by eliminating God.

When religion depicts God only as transcendent with whom familiarity is inappropriate, God is viewed with awe but never in intimacy. When religion conflates God with all things, God is neither personal nor intimate but the life-force or divinity of all things within which, the dissolution of a unique self is also ultimately necessary. In these two ways of eliminating intimacy, God is absolute and recedes away from the personal or God is everything and disappears in anything from vitality to virus. God is eliminated either by distance or by lack of distinction.

Intimacy and distinction are essential to relationships in which another is known as colleague, friend, parent, child or spouse at various levels of familiarity, yet none is known to the degree that there is not also in uniqueness, that which is never wholly known, invoking our vulnerability and trust. The gospel articulates the intimacy and distinction of God in Jesus Christ, contrary to either fear of God as only transcendent or the conflation of God with phenomena to the point of disappearing. In Christian faith, God as sovereign is also addressed distinctly in intimacy as Abba Father.

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The gospel shows us that life is not divided into sacred and common as it is in religion. The cross and resurrection show us that God encounters humanity in its most common or profane experience—death. If religion demarcates sacred places and customs, it does so in belief that God is more present in these than elsewhere. Even death is framed by myth and ritual within religion to mask the natural dread that death represents for humans.

Jesus in Gethsemane shows us the true weight of pending death, even when death has no claim on his life. The gospel does not diminish the experience of this one death that is burdened with social rejection, religious disgrace and judicial cruelty. Degradation in death is not uncommon in human experience; most people experience physical pain in death and many die in loneliness. In the cross, God does not shy away from the raw face of death; God is here, even when seemingly absent, and therefore if here, anywhere in human experience.

Jesus endures the most profane experience—death—as a precursor to resurrection. Contrary to religion, the cross and resurrection show us that the gospel refuses to segregate God’s encounter with human life into “the sacred” as distinct from the most common and difficult experiences of human life.

Religion attempts to demarcate and secure sacred space in the world. The world reserves a place for religion somewhere between the centre of life and its periphery, depending on factors such as the flux of political power, intellectual trends and popular cultural sentiment. Religion engages with these in a quest to enlarge its scope of influence. Yet the gospel stands in antithesis to such religious anxiety and its quest to demarcate a place for God or the sacred among all the concerns of human existence.

The cross shows us how the world and religion combine forces to reject God from the world. While religion seeks a privileged place for God’s power and influence in the world, God relinquishes power according to religion and in the cross presents the paradox of power according to weakness and humility. The world cannot comprehend such paradox. Neither can religion.

Through faith, humans have to do with God as their source of life and possibility—the gospel of God in which humans see their compromises as to righteousness and possibilities for life in grace. This is not a quest for religious space in the world. In the cross, life is given in a paradox that calls us to relinquish ourselves to receive it as a gift beyond our assumed possibilities, even in religion. This is the meaning of resurrection and is proclaimed as the essence of gospel in Jesus’ simple imperatives of baptism and Lord’s Supper, which affirm the gospel’s unique possibilities for all humanity.

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Biblical testimony imposes a question: Is religion relevant to the gospel of God? Throughout Scripture there is sharp critique of a religious propensity to counterfeit faith in resistance to God.

Israel’s prophets denounced religious formalism as a talisman and potential idolatry. Cultic events were exceeded by learning the reality of a broken spirit and a contrite heart toward trust in the word of God. Holiness in Israel is distinction in witness to this word and anticipation of its promises in God’s righteousness.

Jesus’ most virulent opponents were religious—Scribes, Pharisees and ruling priests who stymied the reality of grace in the reign of God. With reference to the promises of God in Israel, Paul seeks to move his listeners from adherence to definitive religious symbols of righteous demarcation to embrace a new creation in grace that is disclosed in Jesus Christ. Hebrews presents a decisive critique of repetitious cultic practices. Revelation envisages the New Jerusalem without a temple—without sacred spaces.

In both testaments, the gospel of God calls people to trust wholly in the veracity of God who saves and liberates in grace and truth.

The gospel of Jesus Christ does not have to find its place among the variegated religious discourses of the world. Testimony to Jesus Christ as the accurate exposition of God is a word that Christians receive in grace, which is also a word otherwise than any human discourse seeking to adjudicate on its veracity and relevance. The issue is not where Christian faith fits into the plethora of religious discourses but whether people respond to Jesus Christ, the tangible exposition of God in intimacy and humanity in integrity.

Proclamation of the gospel is not arrogant conceit amid fawning religious relativity. In the gospel, Christians recognise that reality in the fullness of grace and truth—otherwise than any religious scheme—is a gift disclosed in Jesus Christ.

 

* Reference: Heb. 11:3, 6. Selected sources: Ebeling, Jenson.

Also see Christian faith and religion www.cctc.edu.au/religion.html; Religion, reiteration and God with us www.cctc.edu.au/reiteration.html