the Reformation insistence that true faith begets (as well as modesty) the courage to work for change. His name was Jacques Ellul, and this is how he described faith:
Faith is a terribly caustic substance, a burning acid. It puts to the test every element of my life and society; it spares nothing. It leads me ineluctably to question my certitudes, all my moralities, beliefs and policies. It forbids me to attach ultimate significance to any expression of human activity. It detaches and delivers me from money and the family, from my job and my knowledge. It‘s the surest road to realizing that ‘the only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.’13
Such faith, and not religion, is the prerequisite for dialogue between the religions today; and such dialogue is the prerequisite for civilization’s survival.
Culture-Religion and Prophetic Faith
This distinction between faith and religion, which (as I’ve noted) was one of the most important insights of the neo-orthodox school, always prevents me from saying straightforwardly, as people do in ordinary discourse, that Christianity is a religion. In its essence, at its kerygmatic heart—that is, as gospel—it is not. As Barth, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and many others have insisted, Jesus did not come to add yet another religion to the world’s already exhaustive and exhausting religious agenda!
But of course in its historical pilgrimage Christianity has been, is universally described as being, and still even thinks of itself as . . . a religion: a religion that may be compared with other religions; a religion that itself bears all the earmarks of the religions grasping that the Bible and the most faithful theology call in question. As I have already suggested, it is in fact doubtful that one could find any instance or exemplification of Christianity, now or in the past, that did not combine in subtle and confusing ways Pentecost and Babel, faith and religion; and in all likelihood most of what has been called Christianity and continues to be designated such has more of Babel than of Pentecost in it! All the same, it is necessary for serious Christians to keep the distinction between faith and religion always in mind, and to apply it in very concrete and practical ways in the daily life of the church. Empirically speaking, Christianity may never be found apart from a combination of these two antithetical movements of the human spirit—grasping and being grasped, reaching after the absolute and being encountered by the unreachable absolute. But the Christian community that has lost the capacity intellectually and spiritually to distinguish the two at the level of thought and language will be a community in danger of losing its soul.
An important way in which theological scholars during the past century have tried to preserve this distinction is by contrasting two types of religion: culture-religion and prophetic religion. If we are to use the term religion at all to describe Christianity, I believe that something like that type of contrast must be maintained. It may be too daring—and for many too confusing—to say straightforwardly that Christianity is not a religion. But at least contemporary Christians should try to comprehend what it means when theologians insist that at its revelatory core, Christianity is not and ought not to be practiced as a ‘culture-religion.’
The term culture-religion came into prominence in North America in the 1960s, though its antecedents—particularly in German theologies—are much earlier. The term has a particular usefulness in our New World setting, where (as I claimed at the beginning of this chapter) there is a continuing tendency to merge ‘Christ and Culture’ (to use the well-known categories of H. Richard Niebuhr).14
Christianity in the United States and Canada was never established legally, as it was in the European motherlands, though attempts at legal establishment were made here too; but, instead, what occurred on this continent—more as a matter of habit and association than as anything planned—was the gradual but effective identification of our culture or way of life with the Christian faith. We learned to consider ourselves Christian societies and Christian nations, and to equate Christianity more or less with what we have built here—our way of governing ourselves, our moral codes, our values.
For reasons that many of us are still trying to decipher, this tendency to equate religion and culture was always more prevalent in US-American experience than in the northern country of the continent, Canada. There has always been, I think, a stubborn streak of skepticism in the Canadian spirit, as there is in the spirit of most northern peoples (the Scandinavians and the Scots, for example): it’s hard to believe in God and all that when it’s so cold, and you’re living on a rock like the Canadian (Precambrian) Shield! The United States inherited not only a more hospitable terrain but a much heavier dose of Modern optimism, and its Christianity evolved accordingly. I think what surprises many Canadians and Europeans about church life in the United States (sometimes it charms them, sometimes they just find it excessive) is the combination of rather simplistic theology and rather stringent morality with enthusiastic and exaggerated displays of happiness, or what passes for happiness. There is a celebratory ring in most worship in US-American settings that neither Canadians nor Europeans can duplicate. When we try to do so, the results are usually quite laughable. The celebratory spirit of US religion cannot be imitated in other social contexts because its secret is its combination of religious piety and cultural complacency. It is a celebration of the culture, including its economic success and political preeminence, at least as much as it is a celebration of the religion that contributed so much to the shaping of the culture.
Peter L. Berger, whose book The Noise of Solemn Assemblies was a kind of milestone in the Anglo-Saxon deployment of the term culture-religion, explained this type of equation in the following way:
American society possesses a cultural religion that is vaguely derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition and that contains values generally held by most Americans. The cultural religion gives solemn ratification to these values. The cultural religion is politically established on all levels of government, receiving from the state both moral and economic support. The religious denominations, whatever else they may believe or practice, are carriers of this cultural religion. Affiliation with a religious denomination thus becomes ipso facto an act of allegiance to the common political creed. Disaffiliation, in turn, renders an individual not only religiously but also politically suspect.15
Why is such an identification of Christianity and culture theologically problematic? What price does the Christian movement pay for this kind of proximity to the dominant culture? As a way into my answer to that question, I want to quote a sentence of Reinhold Niebuhr—it is in fact the very first sentence of Niebuhr’s 1935 book, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics: “Protestant Christianity in America,” it runs, “is, unfortunately, unduly dependent upon the very culture of modernity, the disintegration of which would offer a more independent religion a unique opportunity.”16
In this one sentence, Niebuhr puts his finger precisely on the consequences of practicing Christianity as a culture-religion. By allowing itself to be absorbed by the evolving culture, the Christian faith loses its potentiality for being responsible in and to and for that culture—for being, in biblical terms, salt, yeast, and light in its social context. It forfeits this prophetic calling for the sake of the shallow kind of acceptance and popularity and quantitative success that it may acquire through its accommodation of itself to the governing spirit of its host society. It has little or nothing beyond rhetoric to bring to that society distinguishable from the society’s existing assumptions and experiences; and this is particularly conspicuous and unfortunate when, in situations of social crisis, the society needs precisely some light from beyond its own resources—needs to hear, precisely, a voice that does not simply echo its own tired and failed ambitions, its Babel confusion. The ending of modernity, of which (in this perceptive sentence) Reinhold Niebuhr spoke decades before anyone heard the word postmodern—the end and crisis of modernity creates for prophetic faith an “opportunity” that faith communities rarely have when societies are in their heyday: an opportunity (one must say in Niebuhr’s behalf), not to enhance their membership roles and social standing, but to speak truthfully, to act out of genuine hope and not just social optimism, to enhance and preserve the life—the life not of the church but of the world
