How to Be a Christian Without Being Religious

If there’s anything that makes me sick, it’s religious people.  I have surprised a lot of people when I’ve made this statement, especially considering I’m a pastor.  But so many of the things that turn off skeptics to Christianity stem from people trying to be religious.  And it’s just garbage.

In 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to make something of oneself (e.g., a sinner, a penitent, or a saint) on the basis of some method or other, but to be a man—not a type of man, but the man that Christ creates in us.” (Letters and Papers From Prison, p. 190)

Today it is common parlance among evangelists to declare that Christianity is not a religion because religion is “what you do to get to God,” while Christianity is “what God did to get to you.”  And while this is basically true, it is somewhat misleading.  God does require certain things from believers, and though good works will never get you to God, they are an indication that an inward change has taken place, and that God has “gotten to you.”

In fact, the need for some sort of religion is biblical.  James 1.26-27 says, “If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless.  Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”

The word religion in this passage is the Greek Θρησκεια (threskeia), which BDAG defines as “expression of devotion to transcendent beings, esp. as it expresses itself in cultic rites, worship.” So for James, the proper way to express Θρησκεια towards God, the proper rite or ritual, is not putting on robes, lighting candles. burning incense, or chanting; it is helping the less fortunate and living in purity.  In other words, love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself.

The fact is that Christianity requires a measure of religion, of outward actions.  The very fact that we must function together as a community demands it.  The problem is that our natural inclination is to pull religion away from right living and to put the emphasis on empty ritual or dead theology.

Jesus had all kinds of things to say about it.  Matthew 6.1 is representative, though the entire passage is relevant.  He says, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven.”  The key that makes true religion work is relationship with God.  As soon as you forget God but keep going through the motions, you have become religious in the worst sense.

God help us if we become so comfortable with religion that we no longer need Him as we go through the motions.

The Return of Alhaj

Welcome back to Alhaj!  I had interactedwith him for a few months back in 2007.  Then one day his blog disappeared and I didn’t hear from him again.  Having turned into a pseudo-blogger myself, I only pop back in every so often to see what’s up.  Today I see that Alhaj has left me a number of comments.  While I don’t have time right now to respond, I want to at least leave a quick note.  Alhaj, I will be happy to converse with you again.  Thank you for stopping back.

The Value of an Apple a Day

I have been reading The Sales Bible: The Ultimate Sales Resource in order to become better at my day job.  The author, Jeffrey Gitomer, gives lots of little tidbits and ideas to get you thinking.  I came across a quote today that got me thinking.  I thought it worth sharing with my readers.  He writes, “An hour of learning a day will make you a world class expert at anything in five years.“  Now of course there’s some hyperbole here.  You can’t be a world-class expert in literally anything, but I’d bet you can become quite close to expert in quite a lot of things.  I read a Rick Warren quote that said that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year and underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years.

The hard part is to pick just one thing to focus in on.  I want to be an expert in about a dozen different things, and every one seems like the most important thing while I am thinking about it.  I am challenged to narrow it down to one.  How about you?  What would you like to become an expert in?  Are you willing to make it a priority?

I Gave Up the Liturgical Calendar for Lent

Why is it that all the Bible and theology blogs — whether on the right or on the left – insist on being so dang tied to the liturgical calendar. I grew up in a liturgical church. I hated every single stupid minute of it.  Liturgy is an easy way for a pastor to get away with not thinking — after all, we know what we do in each part of the year; no point in seeking God on it or anything.  And all through the blogosphere, happy easter, blah blah blah.  Like I care.  As my friends at church say every year at Christmastime, Constantine is the reason for the Season. 

Happy Thursday!

Hope you’re not feeling too Maundy today.

Nooma Nooma

We have a small home group that meets weekly.  Actually we haven’t gotten together since well before Christmas, but now that things are settling down we are looking to start up again.  We have been talking about what we want to do and we talked about the possibility of watching Rob Bell’s Nooma videos and then talking about them.  To be honest, I know very little about Rob Bell other than the fact that when his church was a new church plant he preached through Leviticus for over a year I think.  I find that interesting in and of itself.  Otherwise I read a few pages in one of his books on Amazon.  I wasn’t too impressed one way or the other.

Apparently Nooma is an Anglicization of the Greek Pneuma(though I would pronounce the ‘P’ sound, and I was taught to say ‘eu’ as ‘ew’, as if you’re trying to say “yellow” but it comes out “yew-ow”).  So the Nooma series is about the Spirit/spirit/wind/breath.  Okay.  But I just can’t help thinking about this video every time I say the name of the series:

Today I got a call from one of the other guys in the group.  He asked me if I’d heard the English version, which of course I hadn’t.  He said I really ought to check it out.  The video is hokey (and doubly so when you consider the fact that they have to compete with the Numa guy above).  The singer is singing about a girl, but if you think about it as a worship song, it’s actually very powerful.  A few of the words don’t quite fit.  But there’s power behind it.

Deep within us we are yearning for God, and apart from Him all our colors turn to gray.  I want my world to be vibrantly colored with His Holy Pneuma.

Working For My Parents

I haven’t been around the past week-and-a-half.  I have been two-and-a-half hours away from home working for my parents in order to bring in some quick cash.  Things have been crazy.  I really could still find time to blog if I was really committed, but alas I think I just might be a fair-weather blogger.

Plus, I am yielding to the fact that I blog best in streaks, but once that streak is done I loose steam for a little while.  I think it goes with being a question-asker: I keep coming back to the same issues over and over, but not all of them all the time.  The kinds of things I blog about work best when they are consuming me.  Right now figuring out how to make sales is what is consuming me, and the kinds of things I usually blog about are taking the backseat.

Maybe you regular bloggers will have ideas on how to keep going through a dry streak.  Any ideas?

I Can’t Believe They Pay Me to Do This

I can’t believe it because they’re not.  Every now and then I hear about someone who has the absolutely perfect job.  They’re so excited and they so love what they’re doing that they can honestly say they would do it even if they weren’t getting paid for it.  I mostly believe that’s what life should be like.  But now I am selling websites.  That’s not to say that I don’t like what I do.  I like the internet, I like technology.  It’s something I can get excited about.  But I can’t say I can’t believe they pay me to do it.  It’s still work.  And actually they don’t pay me until I make a sale.  (So if you or anyone you know is looking for a professionally done website that you can make your own updates to, let me know.)  And tonight I started delievering pizzas so that I can bring some income in.  It’s shattering my whole worldview that I should be able to do what I like and they should pay me.  I guess I’m just a Gen Xer who’s having difficulty learning that some people actually have to work for a living.

Insufficient views of the Trinity

I showed yesterday that Christians are not monotheists because we are trinitarians; we are trinitarians because we are monotheists.  If we cease to be monotheists, we cease to be Christians.  The doctrine of the Trinity is merely a way to remain monotheists while also including Jesus and the Holy Spirit in the godhead while retaining their distinctions.  In other words, the Trinity is important because it helps us be Biblical.

Unfortunately most people aren’t biblical when they think about the Trinity.  That’s why a lot of bad analogies are floating around out there in Christian circles.  Here are a few that are insufficient for talking about the Trinity:

1. Water can take on three states: solid (ice), liquid (water), and gas (steam); thus, water, it is said, is three-in-one.  The problem with this analogy is that it is a modalistic explanation.  It is the same water in each case.  Modalists believe that Jesus actually is the Father; it was the Father Himself who became incarnate in the person of Jesus.

2. I am a single person, yet I am a father, a husband, and a son.  Thus I am three-in-one.  But again, this is just another version of modalism.  Jesus is not the Father in a different role; He is actually a different person.

3.   A shamrock has three leaves but is a single shamrock.  VeggieTales used this one in their retelling of the St. Patrick story.  Actually, this is probably the best of the three analogies.  It preserves the distinctions between the persons while making it clear that they are the same substance.  But it does not maintain their unity.  Jesus said, “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.”  But seeing one leaf of a shamrock is not the same as seeing another.  The Father, Son, and Spirit somehow mutually indwell one another.

Trinity Debate on the Trinity

I’m not on the Trinity campus this year, so I didn’t realize it until tonight, but there was a debate on the nature of the Trinity at the Trinity campus tonight.  (HT: Phil Gons)  I only caught the last half hour, which was just questions from the audience.  It was done in streaming video here.  I hope they will post the entire video, but I can’t seem to find where it will be if it is.

The debate was between, on one side, Keith Yandell (whom I’ve had as a visiting prof at Trinity) and Tom McCall (a Trinity prof I’ve not had yet, but hope to get before I leave); and on the other side was Wayne Grudem (who taught at Trinity several years ago) and Bruce Ware.  The topic was, “Do relations of authority and submission exist eternally among the Persons of the Godhead?”  Grudem and Ware argued that they do; Yandell and McCall argued that they don’t.  In other words, Grudem and Ware argued that the Father has authority over the Son and the Spirit eternally; Yandell and McCall argued that the authority of the Father is only in the economy of salvation, but not in eternity.  Ware pointed out that Yandell and McCall run the risk of becoming functional modalists – that is, they don’t really acknowledge the differences between the persons of the Trinity.  (In reality, I think most Evangelicals are functional modalists, but that’s beside the point.)  Ware and Grudem, on the other hand, are on the verge of slipping into subordinationism, where Jesus and the Spirit are not quite God in the same way as the Father.

Yandel ended by saying that his colleagues in the philosophy department at Madison would view the whole debate as foolishness, the modern equivalent of debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  His point was to say that the two positions are not really that far apart.  I tend to agree.  Here I am trying to figure out why a belief in the Trinity is even important.  I just flash back to the forth and fifth centuries when guys were duking it out about these things in order to score political points with the Emperor.

All in all, this was a very different debate than the one last Spring between Harold Netland and Paul Knitter.  That debate was between an Evangelical and a theological Liberal over the question of whether Christians can believe that non-Christian religions can be salvific.  In that debate, Knitter clearly appeared uncomfortable in with an audience that he knew agreed with his opponent.  He qualified almost every statement he made and back-peddled on every point that mattered.  It was a very different kind of event.  Tonight in contrast was an ‘in house’ debate.  The trade off, it seems, was that it was dramatically more lacking in relevance.

I don’t care.  I love this stuff.  I just reminds me how much it sucks not having money to take classes this semester.