Among the current theological fads is that of “religionless” Christianity. The “religionless” Christian takes his cue from Barth’s significant utterance that “in religion man bolts and bars himself against revelation by providing a substitute, by taking away in advance the very thing which has to be given by God” (Church Dogmatics, I, The Doctrine of the Word of God, Pt. 2, Edinburgh, 1956, p. 303). He then concludes with Bonhoeffer that religion is incompatible with true Christianity and that “he must therefore plunge himself into the life of a godless world, without attempting to gloss over its ungodliness with a veneer of religion or trying to transfigure it” (from Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers From Prison, Macmillan, 1953, p. 222).
Now Christianity, however understood or misunderstood, has indeed posed obstacles to God’s will for man, and orthodoxy should be reminded of its need to repent of its idolatries and of its distortions of the Gospel. No sincere Christian is justified in believing that he or his church is free from fault. On the contrary, he should stand ready to be chastened by Barth or Bonhoeffer or anyone else for having allowed the love of God that was in Christ to go out of his life and the life of his church. Indeed he ought to realize that the church itself is sometimes its-own worst enemy. He should admit that the truth is open to misrepresentation and abuse by its proponents.
But the “religionless” Christian does not just remind the evangelical of this. He lays claim to a new revelation, a revelation that nowhere says exactly what Christianity would mean, or could mean, or how a church or belief open to the new revelation could properly be called Christian at all. How could we know, asks Leon Morris, “whether this is in line with the mind of Christ, or whether it is another form of man’s perennial self-sufficiency” (The Abolition of Religion, Inter-Varsity Press, 1964, p. 29). One could hardly call upon the Holy Spirit to bear witness on behalf of the new religionless revelation, for the idea of the Spirit’s witness seems to have no part of religionless Christianity.
Christians are not orthodox and evangelical simply because they are stubborn. They are orthodox and evangelical because that is what being Christians means to them. It is one thing for the new “religionless” Christian to remind the old “evangelical” Christian of his moral and spiritual shortcomings, such as his failure to make his convictions relevant to the world or his reluctance to be open to new understanding of God’s will. Indeed, the evangelical Christian is painfully aware of his failures. But to urge upon him the notion that Christianity is really religionless is simply to engage in a loaded use of words that changes the cognitive meaning of “being Christian” but seeks to keep for its own purpose the emotive force of the term “Christian.”
Religion can be made objectionable by definition. This is what Bonhoeffer does when he defines it as that activity which is isolated from everyday life, morbidly persona]—a belief in a God who runs to our aid at our beck and call. Few evangelicals ever really saw it in just that way. And because some people are mistaken about their Christian religion, it does not follow that what they are mistaken about is itself an objectionable thing or an obstacle to truth, even though their mistaken beliefs and behavior most certainly are both.
The problem, we are told, is that men have distinguished religion from everyday life in a way that has distorted and impoverished that life. The answer, however, is not to abandon necessary distinctions like “religious” or “secular.” It is to acknowledge this idolatrous tendency and to try sincerely to cope with it.
The evangelical does not seek to escape from the common life as the “religionless” Christian accuses him of doing. He seeks rather to transform it. It is the “religionless” Christian who is seeking escape from the religious part of life. He wants to find God in all of life by not finding him in the religious part of it. But abandonment of the Church, of personal piety, and even of personal salvation happens to be the abandonment of the very substance of the beliefs and practices of most Christians past and present. We must ask: Is their religion so defiled that nothing short of seeking God in the streets and slums will do? “Religionless” Christianity unhappily identifies openness to the Holy Spirit with abandonment of that very Spirit. It identifies acceptance of the world with acquiescence to it. “God is teaching us,” Bonhoeffer says, “that we must live as men who can get along very well without him” (Letters, p. 219).
Rather strangely, “religionless” Christianity argues that it is not the secular man who has come of age who obstructs God’s new revelation but the pietistic patron of traditional personal religion. How is it that biblical doctrine should be so interpreted that the man who openly denies his need of God turns out to be God’s special instrument of revelation, while the man who acknowledges God as the author of that which God is supposed to be doing through the nonbeliever turns out to be the chief obstacle? The Bible clearly shows that God uses those who are not his obedient servants. But surely the biblical idea is that any or all men may be used by God for his purposes. Perhaps the evangelical needs to be reminded of his pride and waywardness, though of all people he is most likely to be aware of this. Indeed, his critics find him to be not only aware but neurotically aware of it. They find him clinging to the God of his fathers, a God who in Bonhoeffer’s words needs to be “edged out of the world,” so that men can “live a ‘worldly’ life and so participate in the sufferings of God at the hands of a godless world” (Letters, pp. 219, 222).
“Religionless” Christianity holds, not only that evangelical Christianity is no longer relevant, but also that evangelical Christianity can no longer be relevant. But even if it were true that evangelical Christianity is irrelevant, it would by no means follow that this is necessarily so. From the fact that some evangelicals may no longer be the instruments of God’s will, it cannot be concluded that evangelical Christianity as a whole is not or could not be the instrument of God’s will. Historically, evangelical Christians have led the way in most of the great movements of the Spirit of God, including social reforms, and it is by no means true that the new breed of Christian holds a monopoly of social concern. Indeed, his theological confusion lessens his effectiveness, and his political involvement may seriously reduce his overall influence.
One suspects that the non-evangelical would like to shed old-fashioned evangelical responsibility for personal evangelism but preserve the appearance of as much biblical justification for his position as he can marshal. Bonhoeffer makes this clear when he asks: “Is it not true to say that individualistic concern for personal salvation has almost completely left us all?” He then goes on to ask reassuringly: “Is [this] not, at bottom, even biblical? Is there any concern in the Old Testament about saving one’s soul at all? Is not righteousness and the kingdom of God on earth the focus of everything, and is not Romans 3:14 ff., too, the culmination of the view that in God alone is righteousness, and not in an individualistic doctrine of salvation?” (Letters, p. 168). But on the very next page he makes the revealing statement that he is “thinking over the problem at present how we may reinterpret in the manner ‘of the world’—in the sense of the Old Testament and of John 1:14—the concepts of repentance, faith, justification, rebirth, sanctification and so on” (ibid., p. 169, italics mine). Of course, all this is just one theologian’s position. Yet what Bonhoeffer wrote under the understandable stresses of life in a Nazi prison has become the rallying cry for a wholesale defection from New Testament fundamentals in ecclesiastical high places where the interest has become not so much the interpretation of the Gospel as its reinterpretation. And one of the most characteristic reinterpretations has been this very effort to abolish religion in virtually all its most familiar expressions—the Church, personal piety, holy living, evangelism, and substantive Bible beliefs.
One of the weapons in the arsenal of the “new” Christianity is the assertion that evangelical Christianity is both fragmented in its witness and demented in its otherworldliness. This weapon turns out to be a Freudian-like projection, because those who believe that “religionless” Christianity is a unified witness or that its ideas are firmly attached to this world are victims of their own wishful thinking. Bishop Robinson takes the liberty of lumping Bonhoeffer and Tillich together in the same paragraph for strategic reasons, but these two are poles apart in their understanding of “religion” and its desirability. For Tillich, contemporary man is very much the homo religiosus who has not come of age and who desperately needs God. Bonhoeffer, however, says that “the Christian is not a homo religiosus” (Letters, p. 225). “Tillich,” he says, “set out to interpret the evolution of the world … in a religious sense … but it felt entirely misunderstood, and rejected the interpretation” (ibid., p. 198). Is Bonhoeffer with Bultmann? Hardly. Bultmann, he says, “goes off into a typical liberal reduction process” (p. 199). Nor is there agreement between Bultmann and Tillich, for whom “demythologizing” is only a “remythologizing.”
Any careful observer of the current theological scene will note the incredible incompatibility with historic Christianity of what is supposed to be a new revelation. It is singularly lacking in any regard for what ordinary believers experience, or believe, or find in their Bibles. One is tempted to observe that it hardly seems possible that a God who really cared for his people would confront them with a Gospel couched in such tormented thought and language.
The theology of “religionless” Christianity makes persuasive use of language by capitalizing on the current fad of dislike for religion of any kind and particularly of certain sectarian and obscurantist kinds. It does this by saying that the new view is not a religious one. The process is verbal rather than substantive. It does not even allow religion in some new sense to replace religion in some old sense, unless, of course, “religionless” Christianity is religion in this new sense—in which case it turns out to be religion after all.
The situation is something like this. If being religious, and particularly being Christian, is culturally approved, then it will be appropriate for good people to be religious, and religious in a Christian way. If it is Christianity that is out of vogue but being religious that is not, then it will be the thing to be religious in an “open-minded,” non-Christian, sort of way, recognizing the great truth that after all it is being religious that really counts and not being Christian, since all religion is at bottom the expression of the same virtue. But if all religion is viewed as bad or out of date or irrelevant, then any form of religion, including Christianity, is likely to be viewed as undesirable.
The current mood among non-believers, erstwhile believers, and would-be-but-can’t-be believers is that this is so. It is the “new” truth that Christianity was never intended to be religious, at least not when it came of age. To be Christian is really to be secular, in the best sense of the word. This, we are told, is what people really wanted all along—that is, to be unfettered by otherworldly religion, salvation myths, or even moral law. And this is what God has wanted for us all along, too, so far as it is possible for a “ground of being,” so called, to “want” anything at all. This comforting but frankly sentimental apotheosis of the ideals of freedom of love is the Gospel, we are told. The hosts of Christian saints past and present were and are mistaken. Now we can relax and really enjoy life in the assurance that our former yearning for righteousness and all that Christians have desired of a religious nature was a childish and immature effort to avoid the sufferings of the common life of the world.
Of course, it may be argued that all a man like Bonhoeffer meant was that we must learn to live so as not to expect God to intervene on our behalf whenever we want him to. Yet if Bonhoeffer has anything to say that has not already been said by historical orthodox Christianity, it is that God in the old sense has no part of life in the new sense. Indeed, that is the way we must understand Bonhoeffer when he says: “Now that it has come of age, the world is more godless, and perhaps it is for that very reason nearer to God than ever before” (Letters, p. 124). But we find ourselves asking questions like these: Why should the term “Christian” be kept at all? Is there in it some desirable emotive force that these “new” Christians want to retain?
Moreover, how does one learn to use a term like “Christian”? Are we not referred to clear-cut examples of Christians that both non-Christians and Christians—including Bonhoeffer—would accept as paradigms of the use of the term? And where are these to be found? They are to be found in the lives and deaths of the loyal followers of Christ. Every informed person knows, or ought to know, who they are. They are what the contemporary philosopher would call the paradigm cases of “being Christian.” And if these will not do, surely the lives and teachings of the apostles themselves will.
“Religionless” Christianity is not, I believe, greatly different in spirit from the Gnostic reinterpretations of the first few centuries. With arguments remarkably similar to those advanced today, the early Gnostics tried to make the Christian Gospel more intelligible and intellectually satisfying to those who sought philosophical props for their faith. It was not that Christian writers did not also try to do many of these same things. It is simply that their primary concern was the Gospel per se and not accommodation or reinterpretation. In an informative book entitled The Language of Faith (Abingdon, 1962), Samuel Laeuchli calls attention to the fact that the term (Father) occurs over four hundred times in the New Testament. He stresses that language about “God the Father” is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Christian as contrasted with Gnostic language (p. 33). But Gnosticism, as he clearly shows, finds it necessary to reinterpret the ideas of God by lifting it above fatherhood. “Father” satisfies the Gnostic no more than it does the “new” Christian today as “the ultimate designation for the Christian God; he is in reality a deity above fatherhood … the God beyond” (p. 34).
So it also is with “religionless” Christianity. It wants to put God beyond the relations of individual persons and their God and then bring him back by speaking, as does Bonhoeffer, of the “beyond in our midst.” What it winds up saying is that God is in all of life but not in the religious part of it. It speaks of “depths,” “beyonds,” “grounds,” as if these were persons who do what persons do. But the Christian’s God is not just a “ground of being,” a “beyond in our midst,” or even a “depth of relationships”—whatever that means. He is the Divine Person, the New Testament God the Father, who speaks to those who have receptive hearts—to use the biblical insight. What the evangelical says is that God in this sense should be in all of life, including the religious part of it. If God is to transform all of life, he must also transform the religious part of it. But this is something quite different from the elimination of the religious part of life.
The problem is not one of liquidating the religiousness of men who cannot quite come of age but of getting God into that very religiousness and transforming it so that it is no longer all the things that make the “religionless” Christian want so badly to get rid of it. And here is where the evangelical can concur with Tillich’s biblical belief that man’s desperate need is to overcome his estrangement from God and his fellow man.
