Those who know me may recall that I take a somewhat Barthian view of religion: that is that it is a prime manifestation of the fall and under God's judgement. Bruxy does a nice job of presenting the implications of this for Christian living in a popular and accessible way that nonetheless manages to keep hold of good theology and to manifest the spirituality of Jesus particularly in the graciousness it shows towards 'religionists'. and the lack of stridency towards religion whether Christian or otherwise.
Here are my favourinte quotes from it.
I am not talking about the Christian religion versus all other religions. Take one look at church history and you will see that Christianity needs to hear the message of Jesus as much as or more than most religions. No, I am talking about the person of Jesus, transcendent of any one religion and a light for all. If you are investigating spiritual truth, I believe Jesus can offer you the guidance you are looking for.
Religion can be tiring-a treadmill of legislated performance powered by guilt and fear. At the same time, generic spirituality can also be a tiring enterprise because it lacks a focal point. Many people who have rejected religion have turned to a kind of smorgasbord spirituality that allows them to pick and choose their belief system as they go along. Don't get me wrong, I love a good buffet (and I've got the body to prove it!), but what works for food does not necessarily work for faith. Many of these spiritual taste-testers are also weary of a search that has come to lack focus and foundation. They feel bloated but malnourished, fed up with empty spiritual calories.
Jesus is not pointing toward a different and better religion, but instead he invites us to himself as an alternative to the weary way of religion. This is a prominent theme in his teaching,
The Bible begins by painting a picture of the ideal world-a world without religion, a garden where God and people live in naked intimacy. This was God's original intention for humankind. In the Bible, it is only after people turn away from his ideal of mutual trust and intimacy that God gives them rules and routines, traditions and teachings-but this is not the end of the story. The rules and rituals of the Bible are like a map that leads to a great treasure, though they are not the treasure itself. I think this is what the revered Jewish poet and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel is driving at when he says, "Religion as an institution, the Temple as an ultimate end, or, in other words, religion for religion's sake, is idolatry."'
The Jesus described in the Bible is scandalous. He is not portrayed as the founder of a world religion, but the challenger of all religions. He is a subversive, anti-institutional revolutionary. Now, when I say "anti-institutional," I am not suggesting that Jesus opposes all forms of organization, but that he opposes dependence on any one organization for our connection with God.
Jesus did not have the wine served out of ordinary wine jars. He directed the servants to use the sacred containers set aside for a religious ritual. When I investigated further, I found that one of the traditions of some religious groups of that day (especially those of an influential group called the Pharisees) was regular ritual hand cleansing. They would dip their hands in sacred water as a way of symbolizing a desire to remain pure from the sin of the world (see Mark 7:1-4). But why would Jesus use these sacred stone jars for the water-turned-wine? There were undoubtedly other containers available that could have held the joy-juice. If they had just run out of wine at this party, there obviously would have been plenty of "empties" around to hold the miracle liquid. Wine jars, wine jugs, wine bottles, wine kegs, wine skins-whatever they had been using-were sitting right there, empty, waiting to be filled. So why the stone jars? Why the sacred icons of religious tradition? Why intentionally do something so potentially offensive? I was faced with an unexpected but undeniable fact: Through his first miracle, Jesus intentionally desecrates a religious icon. He purposely chooses these sacred jars to challenge the religious system by converting them from icons of personal purification into symbols of relational celebration. Jesus takes us from holy water to wedding wine. From legalism to life. From religion to relationship. Jesus seems to be saying that his message of love-a radically accepting love-is too great to be contained by the old ways of religious tradition. His new wine demands new wineskins (see Matthew 9:17).
Anyone who holds too tightly to his or her religious preconceptions will sooner or later become offended at Jesus. Unless, of course, they do what countless Christians have done and tame the historical Jesus through years of conservative tradition.
I do not believe all religions lead to God because no religion leads to God. Religion does not lead people to God any more than cups quench your thirst.
Today, many people use the term "spirituality" the same way Jesus used the word "faith"-to describe the relationship one has with Ultimate Reality directly, above and beyond the systems and institutions of religion. Some religious people feel threatened by this kind of talk. Personally, I am encouraged, because I think we are finally catching up to what Jesus has been saying for over two thousand years.
At the same time, Jesus never taught that people could experience true spirituality simply by stopping those same religious rituals. Please understand-and this is important-becoming a religion dropout does not by itself make you more spiritual.
Our world is full of people who say "I'm a spiritual person" as though spirituality is their goal, that thing they have been looking for all their lives. They are like people who describe themselves as "romantic" on Internet dating sites, but who never have anyone in their lives to be romantic with. Their "romance" is just a hollow ideal without a relationship within which to express it. Just because we cry when watching movies or reading novels doesn't mean we are romantic; it means we're sentimental. And just because we don't like religion doesn't mean we are spiritual. The question is, Who are you spiritual with?
The history of the church is not an example of Jesus' teaching bearing bad fruit, but of his teaching being completely ignored, rationalized, or trivialized-and that bearing bad fruit. Most people who are hostile toward Christianity realize that Jesus is not to blame. In fact, they rightly judge and condemn Christians in terms of what Jesus taught.
Church leaders missed the point of the Passion narratives, which serve as an indictment against the blind religious leaders, not the Jewish people as a whole. And that same rebuke is transferable to the church! The church leaders ignored the fact that the New Testament's prosecution of religious hypocrisy must be applied to Christian leaders as much as any Jewish leaders in Jesus' day.
Western Christians often pour their energies into national politics as a way of clamoring for the power they once had in society. But history bears this out: Whenever the church gets into bed with political powers, the church becomes the state's whore.
Fundamentalists believe moderates have arrived at their "soft" position, not because they have discovered it within their own sacred texts, but as a result of secular knowledge and selective scriptural neglect. This may result in a more articulate and gracious believer, but fundamentalists of the same faith will never take them seriously.
Rather than motivating people to partner with God to bring justice and mercy to this unfair world, karma allows people to believe that everything is just and fair now. Those who suffer are suffering because they are supposed to suffer; they deserve to suffer. It is their karma.
Buddhists can interpret the doctrine of karma as a law that invites holy people to partner with it. For instance, if a ruler is perceived as an enemy of the good, it is right to fight against him or her, in the name of karma. In fact, murdering someone who is living a life of bad karma becomes an act of mercy from this point of view, helping their souls move to a higher plane before they acquire more bad karma. Perhaps this was the thinking of the Buddhist monk who
William Temple, former Archbishop of Canterbury, insisted that if our concept of God is wrong, the more religious we get, the more dangerous we are to ourselves and others. But here is the strange thing about the Jesus faith (and I am not talking about the Christian religion in general, but those who follow the teachings and example of Jesus specifically): The more precisely someone commits to following his teachings as modeled by his example-in other words, the more of a fundamentalist someone becomes about the teachings of Jesus-the more loving, forgiving, and gracious that person should become
Many Christian fundamentalists do not follow Christ, but have replaced his teachings with the prevailing conservative ethos of the day masquerading as religious dogma.
Other Christian fundamentalists replace following Jesus with following the Bible. These kinds of fundamentalists are often good-hearted people who are completely sincere, but sincerely wrong. I am thinking of those Christians who love God and are very dedicated to following the Bible, but fail to realize how the Bible is meant to be read.
The One who is before and beyond all things-that is, the Grand Context for all of life-entered our human context. He lived a particular life, as a particular gender, in a particular place, at a particular time, as part of a particular people. I do not know why male and not female, why Jewish and not Irish, why first-century Israel and not twenty-first-century Canada. I have my theories, and perhaps you have yours. What I do know is that the particularity of Jesus-that is, being one thing and not being another thing-is the price of being human. Through Jesus, God paid that price and fully entered our human experience in a particular way.
"The Bible says it. That settles it. I believe it. Let's do it." But according to Jesus, that is not enough. Following the letter of the law is dangerous, as witch-burning, war-fighting, pagan-killing Christianity attests. Jesus calls us to use Scripture to get to know God's heart, to see God's love expressed through Jesus, and to follow him.
leaders of Jesus' day focused on obeying the rules and often forgot to put love first. Jesus came to recalibrate the whole system.
good news, because it is easier, or at least clearer, to follow an example of a person than to try to translate into living action a collection of commandments that have no context.
This does not mean that traditions can never be helpful spiritual tools. The New Testament speaks positively of traditions on more than one occasion (see 1 Corinthians 11:2; 2 Thessalonians 2:15; 3:6).
These blind spots make it easy for hypocrisy to take root, which was Jesus' main grievance against religious leaders (see Matthew 23:28; Luke 12:1, etc.).
Wherever faith in God is strong, our human predisposition for using violence to enforce what we believe is right will only increase. This was as true for the medieval church as it is for many contemporary Muslims. This is why theistic faith must be partnered with a clear commitment to peace as a way of life if our faith is to be constructive rather than destructive. Jesus couldn't be clearer on this topic.
when Jesus taught his followers to pray for God's kingdom to come upon the earth (see Matthew 6:10) this could have been considered a code for rebellion against the current power structures. In fact, this is exactly what it was, but not in the ways people expected. Instead of teaching his followers how to fight against the Romans, Jesus taught them how to love their enemies. He said that if a Roman soldier commanded them to carry his gear one mile, they should obey the command, and then offer to carry it a second mile (see Matthew 5:38-47; Luke 6:27-36). The first mile is slavery. The second mile is freedom. That is the liberating power of enemy-love.
"an ambulatory parable."'
Therefore, when Jesus would say to people "your sins are forgiven" (see Matthew 9:2; Luke 7:36-50), he was not just being a source of encouragement to hurting people. He was making a decidedly irreligious statement to his culture. He was completely bypassing the religious system of his day and helping people connect with God's grace, mercy, and forgiveness directly.
God speaks, not out of a holy building or through the lips of a special class of religious leader-he speaks out of a cloud that refuses to be captured by architecture or geography.
Jesus claims to have successfully replaced religion with himself. Not with a new system of priests and sacrifices. 'this is important. 'Ihe symbolic meal to which Jesus invites us repeatedly points to Jesus himself as the way to God, not a new institution (the church) that replaces the old institution (the temple), not a new system of priests that replaces the old system of priests. Through Jesus, God replaces religion with himself.
Religion killed Christ. Or, I might add, religion partnered with politics. History shows that when religious and political establishments come together for a cause, it often involves violence, war, and death.
Yes, the Bible says that Jesus died for our sins.' But it also says he died for our religion. In Christ, God crucified the whole mess once and for all. In fact, by repeatedly emphasizing that Jesus died for our sins, the biblical writers were emphasizing the end of religion as a way to God.
When God opens his mouth to communicate his heart to humanity, a person comes out. His ultimate revelation of truth to humankind does not take the form of argument and assertion, page and print, chapter and verse, but personhood
The Qur'an calls Christians, like Jews, "People of the Book" (see 3:64; 9:29; 29:46). Many Christians would agree with that label, but it is born out of a misunderstanding. Christ-followers are not actually people of the Book, but people of the Person. We follow Jesus, not a book that Jesus wrote.
of whether or not we take the story of Adam and Eve as history or metaphor, the absence of religious rituals and routines in their story is key to understanding the rest of the Bible.'
A garden is a meeting place between nature and human culture. It reflects both divine and human creativity, as opposed to the extremes of a city on the one hand and a forest (or jungle, depending on how tropical you like your analogies) on the other. Genesis shows us that God's original design for humanity was an intimate, purposeful relationship between himself and humanity, expressed through a cocreative partnership. Like John Lennon, God imagined a place with no religion. He called it Eden and spoke it into existence.
If I have faith in Jesus, this means that I trust him enough to follow him, to embrace his teachings for my life. Dallas Willard states it simply, "Remember, to believe something is to act as if it is so."
Jesus-followers will not try to separate who is "saved" and who is not, who is in and who is out. Policing the perimeter is what religious people do, but not Christ-followers-
With nothing to fill the void, the result of doing away with religion would hardly be an improvement. History bears this out. For every violent religious fundamentalist there is a violent secular fundamentalist. For every Osama bin Laden there is a Stalin.
Christ-followers participate in spiritual practices (like prayer, Bible study, and meditation), not in order to achieve something, but in order to better experience what they already know to be true
When Jesus talks about spiritual practices like prayer, giving to charity, and fasting, he never prescribes any one religious routine to follow. Instead he gives guidelines to keep these practices focused on relationship with God rather than on appearance. He assumes that once we have a right view of God and a right desire to connect with God, then we'll pray and dialogue with God because we want to, not because our religion mandates it
So here is the great irony-Jesus is happy to see his followers get organized in order to help spread the message that organizations are not the answer.
1:26-27, NLT) What you have just read is the only clearly positive use of the word religion in the Bible. James does not place the emphasis on ritual and tradition, and not even on doctrinal or theological purity, but rather on practical, other-centered behavior. In summary, he says we should be: • constructive rather than destructive in our words, • compassionate in practical ways toward people in distress, • countercultural in our daily life, refusing to simply follow the accepted norms of the majority (the "world") when those norms do not lead to a loving lifestyle. The only "religion" that God accepts is faith (a trusting relationship with the person of God) expressing itself in practical loving action, as James goes on to explain fervently in his writing. For people who want to follow Jesus, the priority of rituals is replaced with other-centered relationship. And that's it. That's all. That's good religion in a nutshell,
I understand that some people use the word "religion" to refer to a healthy outward expression of their inner faith,
what I most often see in the name of religion is a ritualized return to bondage. The concept of religion has been closely associated with the repetitious tying of oneself to inherited beliefs and behaviors, traditions and theologies. Too often this leaves people mindlessly committed to the institution or clan that stewards the traditions, rather than the God who surrounds each of us with his love. Religion ties us down. Jesus came to set us free.
when someone tells me they are religious, I listen for the meaning and spirit behind their words rather than argue about the words themselves. You would miss the intention of this book if you used The End of Religion to fuel harsh judgment toward anyone who called himself or herself "religious." All of us must listen to the meaning behind the words people use, and I hope you are doing the same with this hook. Every conversation demands a certain amount of translation, because of the simple fact that people use words differently.
Religious people like to hear certain words used in particular ways to make them feel secure and at home. Often, religious people emotionally bond with words as though they were the reality they label.
Unfortunately, only a small minority of Christians thinks through the implications of the fact that Jesus likely spoke Aramaic, but his followers wrote down his teaching in Greek. We don't have the words of Jesus; we have the Word of Jesus.; In other words, we have Christ's message, preserved in his teaching and example, but we don't have the specific words he used to communicate that message.
