heritage, or for a way of articulating the apostolic tradition today, or whatever else, theology—certainly theology in the Christian mode—must constantly attempt to say what belongs to this faith centrally and profoundly, what is peripheral, and what is simply wrongheaded and misleading. The whole task of theology, Christianly conceived, is precisely about that. Without it, Christian intellectual discourse is reduced to history and sociology.
1 / Not a Culture-Religion
“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and to God the things that are God’s”1
Christianity is not a culture-religion. By that I mean that Christianity is not a religion so inextricably bound up with the history, art, lifestyle, and shared values (culture) of a particular people that it is virtually inseparable from these, and therefore accessible to other cultures only as a total package—e.g., Christianity plus Western culture.2 I propose that this should be first in our reflections on what Christianity is not, because in this Euro-American context of ours there is a very strong temptation to merge Christianity and our way of life, our culture. All around us there are Christian groupings and Christian voices that regard Christianity as being virtually inseparable from the mores, pursuits, and values that we have come to associate with America. Many of these same voices herald America as the great beacon of Christianity in a dangerously diverse and darkening world. Even those of us who try to convey a more nuanced view of the relation between Christianity and our particular culture are tempted often to gauge the course of Christianity in the world by its status within own society, to the point of our being—in our churches—constantly at work amassing statistics and number crunching.
This tendency of North American Christians to meld Christianity and our culture is not new. Sidney Mead, who was widely regarded as the dean of American church historians, wrote of the Americanization of Christianity—especially Protestantism. He maintained that from the middle of the nineteenth century the practice of using the terms Protestantism and Americanism almost synonymously became very common.3 In some circles, one might argue, this practice is still more pronounced today, or at least it is pursued more aggressively. For with the advent of widespread multiculturalism and religious pluralism, as well as our society’s post-9/11 apprehension of militant Islam, the mindset that finds an indelible association between the Christian religion and America has become increasingly insistent and defensive. A narrative has emerged in which the actual variety of religious influences that characterized America’s beginnings, including not only Unitarianism and Deism but also secular humanism, tends to be forgotten, and is replaced by an ultra-evangelicalism and biblicism that would hardly have been applauded by Jefferson, Franklin, John A. MacDonald (the first prime minister of Canada), and other architects of this society.
Now, obviously enough, Christianity can never be extricated entirely from its social and historical matrix; and undoubtedly it will happen that the more quantitatively successful and politically influential a religion becomes, the more transparently will its host society reflect that religion, or at least its more prominent public aspects. But even in a highly Christianized society—hypothetically, even in a monolithically Christian society—should it not remain possible for thoughtful Christians to distinguish between their faith and its cultural environs, its social wrappings? Ancient Israel could and often did boast that it was unshakably loyal to the monotheistic principles of the Mosaic faith: “We have Abraham as our father,” cried John the Baptist’s Pharisaic and other critics (e.g., Luke 3:8). But this claim prevented neither the Baptist nor Jesus nor the prophets before them from engaging in a relentless and often brutally critical denunciation of Israel’s presumption and virtual apostasy. It is in fact this ancient paradigm of the distinction between religion and prophetic faith on which I shall draw for the main substance of this chapter and, indeed, this study as a whole.
But first we must pause long enough to pay attention to a point—a biblical point much neglected today—even more radical than the insistence that Christianity is not a culture-religion. And that is that Christianity is not a religion, period.
Not a Religion!
If we take the Bible to be the primary witness to the heart and core of this faith (and in the tradition of classical Protestantism that is certainly what we should do), we must realize that this collection of writings, accumulated over a period of a thousand years, contains an extraordinarily consistent and often intense quarrel with religion. The prophets of the older Testament waged a continuing struggle against religion, both outside and (even more vehemently) inside their own religious community.
I hate, I despise your festivals
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . .
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice role down like waters . . . (Amos 5:21–22, RSV)
The bitterest opponents of Jesus, and the ones he himself frequently singled out for censor, were those regarded by his society as being the most religious of all. Jesus’s quarrel with the scribes and Pharisees has nothing to do with their being Jewish—that is a vicious fiction of later interpreters, perhaps already beginning with certain strains in the New Testament itself. Jesus himself was Jewish (Christians cannot say that too often!). His criticism of these superreligious ones (criticism strictly in line with the whole prophetic tradition of Israel) rather is at base a criticism of the characteristic tendencies of religion as such, especially when it has hardened into dogma and ritual and moral codes and is made the acid test of human worth and belonging.
“The message of the Bible,” the young Karl Barth was moved to say (because, as minister in a Swiss village that loved to think itself impeccably religious, he knew all about Protestant smugness!) “is that God hates religion.” What we must say about religion, Barth writes, is “that it is the one great concern of godless man.”4 Barth included in his voluminous Church Dogmatics a whole section (about thirty long pages of small print!) titled “Religion as Unbelief”5—a piece of theological reflection comparable to Kierkegaard’s Attack upon Christendom. Religion, Barth wrote—
is a grasping . . . [M]an [sic!] tries to grasp at truth [by] himself . . . But in that case he does not do what he has to do when the truth comes to him. He does not believe. If he did, he would listen; but in religion he talks. If he did, he would accept a gift; but in religion he takes something for himself. If he did, he would let God Himself intercede for God; but in religion he ventures to grasp at God.6
Paul Tillich, though he often disagreed with Barth, was very close to the Swiss theologian in this warning about the wiles of religion. In a sermon titled “The Yoke of Religion,” based on the Scripture text, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden . . . take my yoke upon you,” (Matthew 11:28, KJV), Tillich argues that the burden Jesus wants to take from us is “the burden of religion.” He continues:
We are all permanently in danger of abusing Jesus by stating that He is the founder of a new religion, and the bringer of another, more refined, and more enslaving law. And so we see in all Christian Churches the toiling and labouring of people who are called Christians, serious Christians, under innumerable laws which they cannot fulfill, from which they flee, to which they return, or which they replace by other laws. This is the yoke from which Jesus wants to liberate us. He is more than a priest or a prophet or a religious genius. These all subject us to religion. He frees us from religion. They make new religious laws; He overcomes the religious law . . .
We call Jesus the Christ not because He brought a new religion, but because He is the end of religion, above religion and irreligion, above Christianity and non-Christianity. We spread his call because it is the call to every [person] in every period to receive the New Being, that hidden saving power in our
