Jesus vs. Religion?

The video inserted below has been viewed nearly 16 million times on YouTube.  It features Jefferson Bethke, a 22-year-old evangelical Christian, reciting his own rap poem that maintains Jesus came to “abolish religion.”  Bethke reflects the antipathy toward organized religion that is shared by many (most?) young adults in America – including those raised in Christian homes.  

 

It’s easy to criticize Bethke for this video.  He’s an active member of the Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Washington, one of the nation’s premier megachurches.  He says he “loves the church,” but hates religion.  How is that possible?  Once you’ve organized a group of people who share the same basic belief system, you have religion – even if it’s “non-denominational.”  It’s also fair to ask, “If Jesus came to abolish religion, why was he an observant Jew?”  He attended synagogue services and participated in all the major festivals on the Jewish calendar.  In other words, he was religious. 

But I don’t want to dismiss Bethke’s provocative verse out of hand.  He’s got a point.  In fact, if you substitute the word “law” every time he uses the word

“religion,” he sounds a lot like the apostle Paul, who argued that law-based religion is incapable of justifying us.  It is undeniable that those who follow Christ have often practiced exactly the kind of religion that Jesus and Paul both rejected – religion that does more to condemn people than to share the love of God; religion that puts too much focus on maintaining moral standards and too little on God’s grace.

Bethke probably doesn’t realize this, but he is actually giving a youthful voice to a theology propounded by neo-orthodox theologians like Karl Barth and G.C. Berkouwer in the early and mid-20^th century.  They claimed that true Christianity is not religion, but transcends religion.  This idea was attractive to me when I was a seminarian, but I finally had to reject it.  I could never imagine what religionless Christianity would look like (especially since those who wrote about it were active members of one or another reformed Christian denomination).  Without any form of institution or degree of organization, wouldn’t Christianity inevitably devolve into a private spirituality incapable of making an impact on the world?  Wouldn’t the effort to avoid being “religious” just produce a different kind of legalism?  I became even less impressed with this theology when I noticed how conservative Christians at that time (and some still today) used it to claim that Roman Catholics and most Protestants were not truly Christian because they were practicing “man-made” religion that was unable to bring salvation.

Those neo-orthodox theologians, it seems to me, made the same mistake as their spiritual descendants like Jeff Bethke.  They misunderstood Paul’s rejection of law-based religion to be a rejection of religion altogether, as though all religion, by definition, is based on law instead of faith.  In 1 Corinthians, Paul spends four chapters addressing order in worship.  Given his very specific instructions on what is and isn’t appropriate when followers of Christ gather together, it is difficult to maintain that he opposed all religion.

So I can’t go as far as Bethke.  There is nothing wrong with religion per se.  Jesus practiced religion, and his earliest followers, even before the whole New Testament was written, had already organized themselves into communities led by bishops, elders, and deacons.  Customs for baptism, communion, and the basic elements of worship had already been established by the early second century, as is evidenced by The Didache, a manual on early Christian practice that dates to about A.D. 110. 

But I do affirm the central point that Bethke’s video makes.  Religion often gets in the way of spirituality instead of nurturing it.  Christianity often does more to obscure Christ than reveal him, especially when it becomes an excuse to judge those who do not conform to a strict interpretation of what is “orthodox” or “acceptable.”  

Communities that worship and serve in the name of Christ cannot help but be organized institutions.  Without the institution, there would be no collective memory.  We would not have a Bible or any traditions.  The ministry of Christ would have fizzled out within a generation of the resurrection had there been no effort to organize the movement and provide the structure that would allow it to be handed down from one generation to the next.  On the other hand, the institution is always in tension with the inspiration of the risen Christ.  If we are truly following Christ, we will be alert to the ways organized religion can divert us from the teachings of the Savior.  As those gathered in Christ’s name, we need to be careful that our religious practices and our communities bear witness to the living Christ and are not merely perpetuating themselves. 

This is the meaning of “sacrament.”  (Baptism and communion are sacraments, but in a broader sense, we are a sacramental community.)  Sacrament always points beyond itself.  Our ceremonies and rituals lose all meaning if they are repeated only out of obligation or habit.  Their whole purpose is to nurture an awareness of Christ in our midst.  In the same way, the Bible points beyond itself and must not be allowed to become an object of worship.   Like John the Baptist, we as members of Christ’s church are also called to point beyond ourselves to Christ.  “Sacramental” religion, rightly practiced, is all about maintaining visible, tangible ways to experience the invisible but powerful reality of God’s grace. 

So I don’t hate religion.  Nor do I believe I have to reject it in order to love Jesus.  Yes, religion can become so protective of itself that it loses its vision and turns God’s grace into law.  But that doesn’t have to happen.  I embrace religion as a means of practicing Christ-centered community and sharing Christ-centered worship.  I love Jesus with my religion – not in spite of it.

Copyright 2012 by J. Mark Lawson