is true that Tillich, elsewhere, is able to use the term religion in a more neutral or sometimes even a positive way, namely, as human striving for meaning and deliverance to which the revelation in Christ comes as answer. But the answer—the gospel or (as he more often calls it) “the Christian message”—is at the same time an answer to the quest of religion and a critique of that quest. Like Barth and most others belonging to the great renewal of Protestant theology in the first half of the twentieth century that is called (not very instructively) neo-orthodoxy,8 Tillich finds religion at best ambiguous and at worst (as in this sermon) a terrible “burden” under which humankind labors.
Indeed, this kind of distinction between faith and religion became one of twentieth-century Protestantism’s most important insights. One wonders today, when in our many university departments of religion we have so much to say on the subject, whatever happened to this critique of the whole phenomenon! Dietrich Bonhoeffer was another who frequently drew upon this critique and the need to differentiate religion from faith. Bonhoeffer acknowledged that Karl Barth was “the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion—and that [he said] remains his really great merit.”9 Religion, Bonhoeffer believed, is not at all what Christianity at its kerygmatic core is about. “Jesus,” he writes, “does not call [people] to a new religion, but to life.”10 Following an exegetical tradition dating back to the early church, he contrasts the account of Pentecost in the second chapter of Acts with the myth of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. Babel is the Bible’s most dramatic symbolic depiction of the religious impulse—the impulse, as Barth called it, of “grasping” after the ultimate, the struggle for possession and securitas. In that myth, it will be remembered, human beings, terrified by the precariousness of their creaturehood (well, human creaturehood is precarious; the Bible does not make light of that!), reach up after divine transcendence in a pathetic yet futile effort to secure the future. Their absurd tower—the prototype of many towers!—is an attempt, as it were, to get hold of and control the Controller. What they get instead is a still greater consciousness of their finitude and vulnerability: intent upon possessing divinity, they end in an even greater failure of humanity. Their communality is destroyed, and they cannot communicate with one another any longer. By contrast, Bonhoeffer saw, Pentecost, the beginnings of the Christian movement, does not depict human beings grasping after the Absolute but the reverse: it depicts the Spirit of God grasping and transforming human beings. Babel, the religious quest, ends in greater human alienation; Pentecost, the birth of faith, effects reconciliation among those, even, who cannot fully understand one another.11
Why, we may ask, is it important for us today to revisit and reclaim this neo-orthodox critique of religion—not just of culture-religion, but of religion as such? In the first place, I would say, we should do so because the critique is not just a twentieth-century theological invention but a courageous attempt to recover a genuine and unavoidable biblical theme—a biblical theme marginalized and lost sight of, for the most part, as soon as the Christian religion took upon itself the role of religious establishment. A religion that wants to incorporate and commend itself to everyone cannot afford to be self-critical. It must be promotional, upbeat, positive! During the Christendom ages, whenever biblical texts arose critical of religion, such as those famous lines of Amos about God’s hatred of cultic worship, it could be (and was) explained that such denunciations applied not to the church but to the synagogue—that is, to the failed parental faith that Christianity was destined to displace and replace! The critique of religion is genuine, however, only when the community of faith knows that this critique applies to itself—that this is part of “the judgment [that] begins with the household of God” (1 Peter 4:17).
But there is an even more important reason why this biblical and neo-orthodox critique of religion needs to be studied and reflected upon today, as part of our attempt, as Christians, to discover a way of living responsibly in the midst of a religiously pluralistic civilization. If and insofar as religion is inherently a kind of grasping, as Barth insisted, it follows that the religious impulse will also be inherently competitive and conflictual. A spiritual struggle motivated by the desire for permanence, certitude, and the possession of ultimate power and verity is not likely to manifest much openness to other claims to truth. To the contrary, it will in all likelihood manifest the kind of exclusiveness that guards its spiritual treasures zealously, and, having as it thinks wrested them from eternity, claims sole ownership of them. Its attitude will be some version of a pronouncement I heard recently from a true-believing Christian reflecting upon Islam: “If I’m right, they’re wrong.” But who can say “I’m right” with that kind of unwavering certitude? Who, coram Deo—standing in the presence of the living God—can attribute such finality to his or her own religious claims?
In introducing this study, I suggested that in all religions there are vulnerable spots—ideas, attitudes, or emphases that under certain sociohistorical conditions are bound to become flash points of conflict. But what we must conclude on the basis of the above analysis is that, at bottom, it is religion itself and as such that constitutes the greatest and most permanent point of friction. Since it concerns that which a community regards as ultimate, the religion of one culture is bound to look upon the religions of other cultures with suspicion and mistrust. In a global village where religious disputation no longer limits itself to quarrels within Christendom but spills over increasingly into the unprecedented meeting of world religions, all of them made newly insecure by their new proximity to and consciousness of one another, the greatest flash point of all is inseparable from the religious impulse as such; with its grasping after security, its scramble for the absolute, and its incapacity for self-doubt and dialogue with others, religion in the global village seems destined for a history of violence. The newly popular atheism of today understands this and capitalizes on it. It argues, with a kind of dogged logic, that the only way humankind can avoid the great catastrophes to which this situation points is by dispensing altogether with “the God delusion.” But Christians are called to embrace a greater realism than that! No one—and certainly not a bevy of smugly atheistic intellectuals—is going to rid homo sapiens of the religious impulse. Contrary to Bonhoeffer’s late musings about the disappearance of homo religiosus,12 it seems likely that human beings will continue to build their towers of Babel, world without end. Sometimes, perhaps especially in times of great insecurity, the religious quest will be dominant; at other times it will be weak or even peripheral. Sometimes it will be religious in the traditional sense; at other times it will be some secular ideology dressed up in what are essentially religious pretentions to finality. But Christians who consider the biblical critique of religion and the role of the Christ in relation to it will be able at least to maintain a critical perspective on religion—especially their own Christian religion! They will be delivered a little, as Tillich says, from the “burden” of religion, which is religion’s perennial temptation to take heaven by storm, to imagine itself above mere creaturehood, and to award itself the place of ultimacy.
And this critical perspective, this distancing ourselves from true-believing religion, is not only the condition without which there can be no significant interfaith dialogue, it is the condition without which the peace of the world from now on will never be sustained. Certainly we must meet one another, in this great new parliament of global religions, as persons of faith; but faith is not synonymous with religion. Probably faith never will be found apart from religion, some religion; but the biblically and theologically informed Christian will nevertheless be able to distinguish between what comes of faith and what comes of religion. And the greatest distinction of all, in this contrast, lies in the readiness of faith, unlike religion, to confess its incompleteness and insufficiency. By definition, faith is a deficiency, a lack, a not seeing (1 Corinthians 13:12), a longing that is made even more poignant by the fact that it is—tentatively, expectantly—in touch with the Ultimate. Authentic faith can never rest content with itself; it can never extinguish its own existential antithesis, doubt; it can never feel that it has arrived at its destination—that now it sees face to face and no longer “through a glass darkly.”
Listen to the way faith speaks, in a statement by one of the great Christian activists and lay theologians of our epoch, a French Protestant who was part of the Resistance, and who was so committed to the possibility of the reign of God that he did
