Faith and Religion

Dear Eugene,

Last week my son told me when he was at his short-term mission trip, he wrote a rap song with friends to tell about the Gospel, in which there was a line "You gotta know your religion," and a friend corrected him by saying Christianity is not a religion but a faith.

My son protested, "How can Christianity not be a religion?  We all know it is one of the big religions."

I said to him, "You might be right if you are a sociologist trying to find ways to categorize things, which is often an elusive and thankless task to begin with.  But your friend was onto something, that Christianity really is not a religion, if your definition of religion is a systematized way to access God or The Higher Power or whatever you call it, for whatever purpose you might have in mind."

Then I continued, "What's more.  The Christian God hates religion--Oh, more than anything!  You've been reading your Bible; I am sure you can't miss that."

This past Sunday I heard in a sermon something like this: "Sometimes our theology takes us only to the foot of the cross, but it really shouldn't stay there..."  How I wanted to hold up my hand and yell, "Sir, Mr. Preacher, you said it right.  But would you please not move on just yet, would you please just stay there for a moment and invite us to ask ourselves: Why?  Why does our theology take us only to the foot of the cross and we often just stay right there?  And if our theology does that (or has the tendency to do that), then is it still good theology?"

Good theology should be all of one piece, that "sanctification" or "living a missional life" shouldn't be secondary, subsequent, or even--God forbid--optional steps to "take things up a notch" after "saying Yes to Jesus" and receiving our "justification".

How we live our lives reveals what we truly believe in.  Personally I think if we only stay at the foot of the cross, then we've never been at the foot of the cross.  If we are so sure about our doctrine of "substitutionary atonement", then why is it that one of the most common questions I get from seasoned believers is still: "How do I know I am truly saved?"--a question about how a "religion" works, how to cash a promissory note, how to access God to get what I want.  Whereas the question itself is perfectly legitimate, it nevertheless reveals the heart condition of the doubter.

Believers who asked this question was usually experiencing a moment of rare honesty when looking at their own lives.

This past weekend my son's cousin come to our home for a couple of nights of sleepover.  My son made fun (not in front of him) and said to me, "Haha, he'll be sleeping on the hard ground but I on my comfy bed!"  I answered, "To invite him to your place and let him sleep beside you on the ground is religion; to give him your comfy bed and you sleep on the ground is faith."

You know how my son answered?

"I should have never told you my rap song story!"

LOL, Alex


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One World, This

Image
Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua
Keep reading

He Walks Our Line

Image
Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of
Keep reading

A Word for the Caveman

Image
Dear Eugene, We could imagine when a caveman was chased by a T-Rex, the nature man would naturally cry for help. His shriek would have been a plead no less earnest than ours when we lost control of our vehicle to an evil sheet of ice.  If after years of high education we could in our final moment at least wrap our spinning head around the physics of skating in a ball of metal into our death, the caveman wouldn't have the luxury of comparable enlightenment to come to terms with his demise under the chicken-feet of a leviathan. Who was the caveman crying to?  In whose name was his prayer going to be answered, if at all?  And if he could not even utter an intelligible syllable comprehensible to himself, who was going to speak on his behalf when he was most in need to be spoken for? Now these are the questions I would ask a Christian if I am not one. Not too long ago a pastor tried to warn me about N. T. Wright by saying he's cool with the dude and all, but make sure I
Keep reading